<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.> 

<Oooh. I think a lot of them do. If you could get them just through the study to have first, second circle spells they'd be much better off.> Though also most people even with a headband as good as this one aren't as smart as Carissa is without one. They'd probably be able to be little wizards but they wouldn't be able to see how incredible magic is. 

She's being positively wasteful of materials, trying to get her pin of Glibness; usually she wouldn't attempt a spell-laying at all if there were any chance she could mess it up badly enough to burn the materials, since that's wasting months of salary, but now she's happily trying things that only might work, because she is richrichrichrich and can do whatever she wants. She doesn't quite have the pin by the end of the day but she thinks she's close. 

Mhalir is delighted to let her experiment wildly if it'll help her get it faster, which seems plausible; mining more of her spellsilver is cheap, for them, it's time they're short of. He wonders, vaguely, what's going on back home. 

He's mostly pretty unobtrusive while she's working, gradually absorbing more and more of the concepts behind her magic. Occasionally he comments on how interesting or beautiful something is. Eventually he starts making suggestions. Some of them are off-base but some are reasonably insightful. 

She will explain; presumably he'll get better at suggesting things over time, and it's possible to do even harder spellcraft with an assistant, they'd do that sometimes in school to get people over the hump, she hasn't benefitted from it for ages. Maybe she can with someone in her head. 

Presumably at some point he will get pushier about controlling her body but she will enjoy it while it lasts.

Mhalir wants to control her body when he uses it to go check in with his people, mostly because it's disorienting not to, though he tells her that if it bothers her a lot he won't stop her from fidgeting or something. He uses her body differently than she does, holding very still by default, his movements efficient and precise and decidedly unfeminine.

He also wants to spend some time going over the recruiting script, but for the most part their bottleneck is her Glibness artifact, and he lets her work on that as much as she wants. 

<...I am concerned that there are now two of us in this brain and this would be conspicuous to Detect Thoughts> he says eventually. <But a lead helmet or obtaining a magic item to block it would also be conspicuous. Maybe we can purchase such an item elsewhere. Are there places you would suggest other than Absalom?> 

If she casts Nondetection on them then she thinks it'll depend whose spell is more powerful and maybe she can make something that boosts her caster level, and she suspects they'd have to make two caster level checks to notice both of them and otherwise it'll look like there's only one of them (or like they have Nondetection up, if she wins both checks). She should ideally verify with another wizard that it works that way. Maybe the priest of Sarenrae will consent to detect alignment on them, that'd do it. 

Maybe they can spend thirty thousand gold on an orange prism ioun stone she saw in a magic shop in Absalom even though objectively this is a insane use of money for an increase of one in her caster level. Probably for thirty thousand gold they could instead get an amulet of nondetection custom-made heightened.

They should probably check out the big cities on the other side of the world, for the next while, just on the off chance they've attracted attention in Absalom. 

<We should go elsewhere for a while> Mhalir agrees. <You have translation magic, right, so that is not even a problem? Thirty thousand gold is really not very insane, though, the ship is not being used for much else right now and can mine gold in the asteroid belt while we do other things. I am more worried that making a major purchase is conspicuous, and I think your judgement will be better than mine on which precautions are least conspicuous. Anyway, while we are also looking at magic items, I would like to obtain a scroll for Scry. So I can check on Alloran and see what he is up to.> 

<Sure. Also a big fancy scrying mirror. I think big purchases are moderately conspicuous but they're not likely to provoke much action beyond trying to scry us themselves which will be hard if I had Alter Self on for the interaction.> 

<All right, we can do that.> 

He pulls up the big detailed surveillance-map and they can plan a shuttle trip to a big city very far away from Absalom, with Tongues and Nondetection and Alter Self up, and an absurd quantity of local money copied from a handful of stolen coins. 

Mhalir likes working with Carissa, he decides. She's smart and careful and she thinks ahead. He doesn't have to like the country and ideology that made her this paranoid in order to appreciate the trait now. 

Carissa is expecting the honeymoon period to wear off eventually but Mhalir is, so far, being really nice to work with? Presumably at some point he will get calibrated about how well he needs to treat Carissa for this to be something she agrees to on net but it's convenient how he's erring on the side of being nice while he gets calibrated about that. 

They can go visit big cities in Tian Xia, she's always wanted to see those, and it'll take longer to understand the local magic items and scrolls but they do still do at least some scroll-magic and some item-making and she can scrounge up everything a wizard with a ridiculous budget could ever dream of. 

She scries Alloran. 

Alloran is in a big field with a waterfall and a herd of caribou, grazing.

<He - looks all right?> Mhalir says. Very uncertainly. <I want to keep watching for a while. If you do not mind.> 

They get seven minutes. She's not sure how they can tell if he's betraying them this way and she's not sure why Mhalir would care if he's all right. 

Well, there are things he could have been doing that would have confirmed he was betraying them, even if this isn't confirmation that he isn't. 

<...I do care if he is all right> Mhalir says. <I am not sure if I can explain why. It is hard to explain some of my feelings, in ways that - work within your philosophical framework. I care because he is a person, even though he is my enemy and for strategic reasons I chose to enslave him until now.> 

That sounds kind of stressful and exhausting compared to not caring about your enemies. He does seem like a decent sort of enemy to have, if you have to have one. She doesn't think Asmodeus would have much use for him, for the same reason he was an exhausting host for Mhalir, but he seems to have been genuinely trying to achieve his goals and pretty capable of reasoning about how to do that and had goals that were bizarre and wrong but not ridiculous or sadistic.

<I suppose it is exhausting. I - often decide not to actually feel emotions about it, when I need to focus. But I do still care.> 

He doesn't say anything else, lets her go back to her magic research. 

She gets the Glibness pin! She's so pleased with herself. She makes an amulet of nondetection and she starts working on something for detecting scrying. In Tian Xia at various magic shops they buy more magic, in more disguises, and she upgrades her headband to the fanciest kind of headband, which will technically help her not be scried on by a little but mostly it's just a really wonderful thing to have. They don't seem to sell ioun stones in Tian Xia, which makes sense because she thinks they're an Azlant thing, but they have a kind of tattoo magic she can use to get something similar.

She runs more scries for Mhalir. Alloran seems to be not doing very much. It occurs to her eventually that lead is the only metal wizards know block divinations but if there are apparently more than a hundred elements they could see if any of the other ones can do it while being even thinner than lead.

Mhalir gets better and better at offering magic suggestions, as he wraps his head around it. He can't do it by himself but that's as much because he...can't hold and look at a spellbook in Yeerk form...as anything else.

He can extrapolate a bit from the ratings of lead versus steel or wood, which suggests they want a very dense metal, and can arrange for the ship to mine those from asteroids while he and Carissa are down in Tian Xia exploring the local magic. 

<What do you think about recruiting wizards here?> he asks Carissa, eventually. He's been oddly reluctant to move on that part of the plan, but at this point he can tell he's stalling. For some reason. He doesn't understand why. <I would want to do several stages of vetting, and - hmm. Is there magic that can remove memories? Because I may want to ask them how they feel about working with alien slugs who mind-control people but also make you smarter and perhaps more capable at wizardry, but if they wish to decline, I do not want to leave many people around who know about us.> 

There is that! Like Glibness it's arcane magic that can't be stabilized and which, accordingly, wizards can't cast, but she can see if she make something that does it or they can get a lot of scrolls of it (but it's hard enough to find in scroll form that's not ideal.)

It occurs to her eventually that maybe Mhalir shouldn't come down to the surface with her; it is unlikely that anyone will beat her nondetection and read both their minds but it's not impossible and there's no real reason to risk it. She's much likelier to be rescued or resurrected if he's alive elsewhere to direct response if anything happens. 

They should also coat her quarters in a dense metal, lead should be fine for that use case, to make her harder to scry on. She has already imported tapestries and things and hung the walls with them so it looks like it could be someplace in Golarion.

<I am glad I saw the magic shops here, but for any actual recruiting I should not risk coming with you. I unfortunately do not have arcane magic on my own, but I can send you with a tiny concealed recording device, so that I will know immediately if anything happens.> 

Mhalir would be delighted to work with her on making a magic item that does the memory-blocking spell, it sounds like the most fascinating kind of research. He arranges dense-metal coating for her quarters, and works out scripts for the various stages of vetting their recruits. Carissa has quite a lot of practice talking to people in various places, now, plus Glibness, so he's hopeful about her ability to do this, and he's, at this point, basically not worried at all that she'll run away. 

Where would she run to? It feels very unfair, how belonging to a person who wants you to be ambitious and interesting apparently chips away at the only bits of you that Hell can preserve, instead of just giving her experience of it being rewarding to be obedient or something useful like that, but that is quite evidently what it has done and now she doesn't want to go back. Maybe she can steal morph from the Andalites and live forever with it. (This is laughably arrogant and she mostly tries to stay focused on what's in front of her.)

Osmium blocks divinations even with just the thinnest possible layer. She thinks they should explore whether it can be worked into a knit cap or a hood and still work.

They work on the magic item. It's challenging and she's very very happy. 

They could maybe place an order for the most powerful kind of Tome of Clear Thought. This is admittedly ridiculous but it'll make them even smarter, and she could do it under a Tian persona known to be a reserved wizard in his forties who spends a lot of gold but not an amount it'd be absurd for him to have.