She fixes novels, poems, short stories, a text on gardening, a book of sailing knots, and, yes, Make Your Helpmate Right.

How does she make her helpmate right.

The book advises her to go to someone good at portraiture, give a description, iterate on a few sketches, and have an image to contemplate so you don't wind up realizing that actually that combination of individually attractive features isn't nice all together, or something. It recommends taking lots of time, and writing down everything that comes to mind about how she'd like her helpmate to be, and pretending she has ALREADY MADE this person JUST AROUND THE CORNER and seeing if she has a last minute panic over forgetting to include something. It reminds her that people drift over time, but they especially do so if their initial specifications are not very well thought out, or are in tension with each other - it's hard to make someone both very tidy and completely unbothered by you being a slob and also have that person eager to do lots of things besides clean up after you which would compete with that for time, because inevitably they're going to have the thought "I'd have more time to paint if you weren't leaving your dishes everywhere" or "I guess you can't reasonably complain if I don't do the dishes either, it isn't like you do them", so you should pick at most two of those traits. Here is a list of disabilities that you should have in mind to not include because if you don't have that in mind they may be filled in at random; any space you don't specify will be filled in at random.

People liking singing and sex is technically optional but they are both free ways to pass the time so probably unless for some reason you can't abide them yourself you will want them included (though if you're part of a long line of people denied these harmless amusements you could take the opportunity to break the cycle). This, like all other things you mean them to spend their time on, you will want to trouble to make them good at. It is easier to make someone good at something if you understand how the skill works. You don't have to be good at it, but you should be able to distinguish good and bad results and have an idea of how you'd learn it if you were going to. Languages are pretty easy to add but if you're not making your person very smart they will soon get rusty at ones they don't use.

Your person will not by default start with fake memories - this is understood to be correct, it's bad to be delusional - but will also not by default start with any particular opinions about the situation they are in, or you, or being naked, and if you let those fill in at random you are likely to get "startled, embarrassed, possibly resentful", and you probably instead want "calm, delighted to meet you, kind of turned on" or something like that. You cannot copy a personality outright by reference to a person; you have to actually describe the personality, in your mind or on paper, and if you are wrong about exactly what traits underly what you like about yourself or whoever else you feel moved to copy, it won't turn out how you hope. You can sort of mentally prioritize, so if you think that your preexisting friend is polite because they care about people and actually they are polite because they fall back on having predetermined scripts for how to behave, you can kind of try harder on "polite" than on "cares about people" and get "polite" with a random but consonant-with-the-rest-of-the-personality-selectors underlying reason. Or the other way around, and possibly get someone brusque and awkward but caring.

There's an entire chapter about sexual compatibility and making sure your person isn't jealous of whoever else you're sleeping with. There's a bit about having compatible aesthetic tastes, which assumes you're going to be singing duets all day, and about how to make sure they have the repertoire you have in mind. There is a section on how much you can given current understandings successfully max out various desirable traits ranging from general strength and stamina (this doesn't seem to exceed what you'd expect from a swordfighter type of the caliber palling around with third- or fourth-level casters, though it does outdo random Golarion peasants) to how little sleep they need (this book pegs it at four hours; some people can manage on less but this must rely on some other factor that isn't yet understood).

Huh. Okay. 

- of course everybody mostly makes people to have sex with, how unsurprising. She feels substantially reassured, because probably if people can make people to have sex with then they're not particularly going to bother strangers about it.

She thinks that the ideal cleric of Asmodeus wouldn't want to have sex, here on this planet where it's not necessary to make more clerics of Asmodeus. They would also not enjoy singing. They would enjoy - research, probably, because they need to figure out agricultural productivity so they don't all have to spend most of their time farming, and prayer, and learning and obeying the will of Asmodeus. And growing in their own capabilities so as to be better be of service. And they'd be relatively easy to get along with, so long as that didn't contradict the will of Asmodeus - it doesn't do any good to have a group of people who are constantly having internal drama - 

She needs to buy a replacement notepad, so she can take notes on all this. 

She casts her second Tongues of the day and piles up all the books and carries them out to the proprietor. 

He looks them over, whistles, pays her for the work.

"Can you point me to a stationery store?"

"Letters to write? Down the way," he points, "next to the place with the pig on a spit out front."

That reminds her that she is hungry. Whatever. It won't kill her. Ink and paper first, and then she can look for a place that appears to be serving food.

The stationery store will sell her ink and paper. The place next door has a whole pig on a spit and carves bits of it off for the patrons to be formed into sandwiches.

Sure, sounds good. She wonders whether you can make animals or just people. ...also whether the people have to be humans. Maybe she should really be trying to make a devil, here?

She hurries back to the inn before the spell wears off and asks how much the smallest room will be if she can actually pay with money, she made a little today.

She can afford the room and all-she-can-eat bread and gruel and soup for a few days with that much.

She doesn't have a great way to earn more, and she might want to buy a book on person-making, she probably can't get away with sitting in the back room reading them if she's not mending them. She'll go with cleaning and mending like she promised she would, and buy food separately when she can afford it.  

She thinks about her person, while she cleans. They'll speak the language, so she won't have to burn all her spell slots on that. They'll be happy when they learn about Hell, instead of scared and sad and flinchy about it - and they can just start out knowing, actually - 

- it's probably reasonable to make them like her, since they'll have to work together, but it can be only-if-it-doesn't-contradict-anything-else, in case liking her makes it harder to serve Asmodeus since Asmodeus doesn't care about her, or something. She still doesn't quite understand how it all works. 

Maybe the thing you actually want to do is make someone better than you at making-people. But it seems hard to make people better than you at things you don't fully understand, so that's not much of a solution. 

When she has cleaned the place she retreats to her room and takes notes by her dancing lights until she's tired enough to sleep.

The curtains are good and thick so she can have darkness to sleep by even in the constant shifting day. (Actually, when she wakes up, it's sunless and dark for about twenty minutes.)

She should not hate this place, that's just incorrect, this place is better than home. 

Are there any other bookstores? Is there a temple to something other than the worship of gardens and rainstorms and birds?

There is only one bookstore in Windtower. There are two temples, one for the dominant gardens/rainstorms/birds thing (it's currently decorated for Fish Festival and some people have strings of paper fish trailing from their sleeves) and one small shrine for the minority non-Celebratory animists which is very severely architected and not decorated at all, fishily or otherwise.

Normally it is forbidden to go to a place of worship dedicated to a lesser god but, well, no one can punish her for it here, and she will presumably be punished for it when she dies but it has never seemed to her like there's a lot of point in trying to reduce punishment when you die, it will take however long it takes to find whatever bits of her are worthy and it's worth encouraging them to grow, of course, to constitute as much of her as possible, but it doesn't really matter how much cruft there is on top, or at least she can't see how it would. 

She casts Tongues and walks in.

The little shrine is being swept by an old woman in a gray robe. "Welcome," she says when Carissa walks in. There are some more people, mostly old, kneeling on the floor at various low tables. Most of the little tables are vacant.

She nods to the woman. Are there holy texts or anything? 

There are calligraphic scrolls on the walls. Nobody's reading a book and if there are any they're not prominently shelved.

She does Comprehend Languages, tries to read the scrolls.

They are hard to read but say things like The round under me and The suns above and The water of life and The warm hearth.

Okay. 

She leaves without even pretending to pray.

What kind of pathetic god recycles or maybe dissolves your soul when you die and doesn't grant anyone any spells. And can't have much competition, or it would be losing. 

She goes back to the bookstore, this time to browse. Are there any other books about making the perfect person?

There are! There are copies of Your Successor and Person Pitfalls! and Who? (Will Care For Me When I Am Old) and Person Preparatory Steps.

Can she afford Person Preparatory Steps.

She can!