"That seems fine."

<Thank you.> 

And Mhalir paces. He informs his staff on the shuttle that he's made the decision to strand Alloran in one of the afterlife planes and take a wizard host instead, probably Carissa and he'll find another if this doesn't work out. Wizards are more powerful and useful than Alloran, and probably smarter than him too with the headbands, and also it would be preferable to have a host who doesn't hate him, and to be doing one fewer thing that would upset the Good gods, give them less incentive to mess with his plans. He sends a fairly polished message back to the ship too. Probably his people are going to be very confused, even concerned, but they're all carefully vetted for this exploratory mission, he expects all of them to be loyal to him. 

He writes a letter for the cleric to take to Nirvana. Has it printed onto actual paper and sealed. 

He waits for the time they agreed to meet to arrive. 

The cleric of Abadar shows up. He has some friends with him, but they don't enter the room.

Before even taking the cloaked shuttle down to meet him, Mhalir asks his medic to sedate Alloran, like they do for the pool, and bring Mhalir to Carissa. He slips out of Alloran's head as soon as the Andalite is mostly out. Carrying him like this will be irritating, but they do have some equipment for it, and he can ask Carissa if she has a spell too. 

She does. She has a spell for everything because she has terrifying patrons from another planet. 

Carissa is scared, but she's decided that doesn't make a lot of sense. Mhalir has really low expectations because his slave has been his enemy who hates him for the last several decades. Even if she is really really defiant sometimes she is going to be better at this than Alloran. And Mhalir - isn't Asmodean, though maybe he will be when he's had time to think about it, and while he's not he has his weird alien opinions about things instead which seem to include that it's entertaining if your slaves are opinionated. With that set aside a lot of her feelings just amount to - wishing she was safe, and she can't be, and this is probably safer than not-this, because the more useful she is the more lengths he'll go to if anything happens. (He might have her raised if she died? It feels arrogant and ridiculous to hope for this, but, like, there is an important way in which 'slave' is not an accurate gloss which is that she is actually quite valuable to him.)

And then there's the thing where she feels disloyal and confused all the time, which she doesn't really want anyone to see but - if he decides to be Asmodean he can probably help her with it, and if he doesn't he won't regard it as an important failing, so - it seems worth a try. 

Also she totally thought he had a Yeerk in her secretly anyway so it's kind of nice of him that he didn't.

Mhalir says nothing to address any of Carissa's thoughts, now isn't the time. One of Mhalir's staff hands Carissa the letter for the cleric to convey.

Rather than taking over at all, Mhalir just asks her politely to move sedated Alloran out of the invisible shuttle and over to the meeting-point once they've landed. 

She casts Reduce Person and then floats him on a disc behind her over to the meeting point. 

I don't mind you puppeting me, she thinks vaguely. If I can't handle this it won't be that I like being allowed to walk (she does like being allowed to walk), it'd be that it is making me more defiant rather than less so. It's just sort of hard to predict which way that will go.

"Hey." He takes the letter, frowning. "Does he - want to be in Nirvana."

"It's complicated. We paid for no questions."

"You should have paid a cleric of a different god if you wanted them to commit crimes for you."

"I am pretty confident you aren't committing any crimes." Winning smile - no he's Osirian, he's probably going to misinterpret it in one direction or another.

He interprets it by stepping back and folding his arms firmly across his chest. 

"Look, he's evil, we didn't want to kill him, we talked to a cleric of Sarenrae who thought they could maybe hold onto him for us."

He casts a truth spell. 

She lets it land, repeats herself. 

"Did you kidnap him."

"No!" Mhalir's not piloting right now.

"To your knowledge is the law after you."

"I want a refund for half our fee for not asking a lot of questions. It is possible that the Chelish military mistakenly thinks I deserted but I didn't and this guy didn't have anything to do with it."

"- fine." And he Plane Shifts.

<Thank you for doing the talking, there, I thought he might use truth magic and it went much better this way. You are - very good at lying.> He hopes she takes that as a compliment, which it is, it's a skill he's not sure he has. <We should get back in the shuttle and get out of here as fast as possible.> 

That sounds good and she is on it. She is thinking vaguely that he does not have to compliment her, she is mostly not a vain child desperate for validation and to the extent that she is she's trying to make herself be less that. 

They get on the shuttle.

<I suppose we are not going to know if he was suspicious unless anything comes up in the taverns I have bugged. Oh well. That - went reasonably well, I think.> He's relieved about it, and a surprising amount less conflicted. <I think our next step is for you to work on the Glibness magic item, so we can do further recruiting? I am very curious to see what the process of your magic research is like, it sounds fascinating.> 

If he's suspicious he might scry her so they might want to make her room on the spaceship look more like a place that exists on Golarion. She's excited to get back to magic item research, too. Weapons enchanting is intensely satisfying; with most magic you just freeze the spell and then cast it, but with magic item making you're working on a permanent stabilization of the full spell within your materials and it's far more of a puzzle. Her very first magic item ever, which she wears on a chain around her neck tucked under her clothes so no one's ever tempted to steal it, is an armillary amulet, with a series of interlocking, turning rings you can use for spell topology visualization, and she loves it almost as much as her headband. 

Most people can't craft something that requires a spell you can't cast, but it's not actually impossible, it's just trickier, and she mostly uses her adeptness at crafting things to go much much faster than normal but you can also use it to go trickier.

While she's working she will actually practically forget that Mhalir is there.

Mhalir is very quiet and easy to forget because he's awed. It's beautiful and incredible and he's suddenly intensely jealous of Carissa's years of training. He wonders if he could master wizardry in his own right, or whether a Yeerk alone without a host isn't smart enough.

<I am wondering> he tells her, when she's taking a break, <whether a Yeerk working with a human could have a similar effect to the intelligence headband, and allow more people to be wizards even when their innate intelligence would not be enough. Also Yeerks on average tend to be much better than humans at - diligence, staying on-task and focused, that kind of thing. I am not sure how many humans fail to progress at wizardry because of boredom and insufficient conscientiousness, rather than lack of raw intelligence for it, but we are very good at that.>