Mhalir enjoys doing magic research with her so much. It's like finding a mountain stream after being thirsty for years and never realizing the feeling was thirst.

He appreciates seeing Carissa's slow, tentative steps toward having her own goals and ambition. Like a seedling plant after some huge paving-stone crushing it was lifted away, now growing hopefully toward the sun. He doesn't think it's productive to talk to her about it just yet, so he doesn't, but he's pleased. 

He's also so so so so tempted by the Tome of Clear Thought. <I think intelligence is one of those things where investment produces a very high payoff. If you think we can do it without significant suspicion, I approve of it. Though probably we should stop using that persona afterward.> 

That seems reasonable. She does think they should be paranoid, but - it's much less advisable to be paranoid to the point of not being able to acquire any resources. And even if they burn every bridge in Tian Xia, that's fine.

They figure out the artifact that can cast modify memory. It's hellishly complicated and obscenely expensive and separately it's going to take a bunch of practice to edit memories inconspicuously but hopefully some of Mhalir's people will let them practice on him.

The knit cap with osmium works fine. 

I think, she thinks at Mhalir, I should shave my head and get a wig that's made with osmium. Then it won't be conspicuous that it's what's blocking the divination, and also no one can get a hair to scry with. 

She has mixed feelings about this plan but only because she is vain and hasn't had sex in six months.

Mhalir's people will definitely volunteer to have memories modified, even knowing it might be risky. Probably the risk is just having conspicuously edited memories, not going insane or something. 

<That is an excellent idea!> Mhalir says about the wig. He's so impressed. <We can make it a very pretty wig, if that helps. I am sure the ship fabricator can manage that. ...Also it would help, you could ask if any of the other human hosts are interested in having sex with you?> 

They're not Chelish and other places have different cultural scripts that'd be hard to learn and she'll probably be tempted eventually but she isn't really yet. And also it's a nervewracking area to even have thoughts in because she has mostly been trying not to make it conspicuous to Mhalir how much he is entitled to be in charge of if he wants to, how many bizarre human frailties she has from which direction she can be punished quite effectively without injuring her at all. The honeymoon period still isn't over but Carissa is not an idiot and does not think ridiculous things like that he will get attached. Also getting attached doesn't even necessarily translate to having less opinions about her sex life, among humans.

Mhalir can't figure out whether or not he's attached to Carissa, and he has no idea how to explain that he values her being happy because she's a person.

<I prefer you not being miserable because then I would have to share a miserable person's head> he does say, later that day. <I do not have any incentives to punish you for being human. And, for what it is worth, there is nothing I am dissatisfied with about you.> 

He doesn't pursue the conversation further than that, and changes the subject, suggesting that they're probably ready for the first recruitment round as soon as she's perfected the inconspicuous memory modification. 

She gets it down. She has other ideas for even more paranoia - she could cast Undetectable Alignment on herself and then make intelligent magic items of various alignments, so that she reads as all different alignments, which people will interpret as strong evidence she's a different person - but they're all a bit excessive. 

They release their recruiting pitch, optimized to be bland and boring, in Quantium, because they haven't done anything there yet.

She shaves her head and puts on her wig of osmium and to her delight it works great. She Alters Self to a face she's never worn before. She waits for Mhalir to crawl out and wishes him well and heads off to her recruiting meetings.

Mhalir wishes her good luck in return before departing her head. He has a tiny camera and microphone hidden on her person, which won't show up as magic at all so should be undetectable to the locals, and he can watch how it's going. Well, he does need to be in a body for that. 

He doesn't feel like being yelled at by the cleric of Sarenrae for his recruiting practices, so he temporarily borrows an Earth-human host from one of his other staff who was scheduled for the Yeerk pool later today anyway, and he watches the footage, anxious and excited at the same time. 

Carissa smiles at a wizard who has at least three levels on her but probably doesn't suspect this since she has the world's fanciest headband and he doesn't. "I'll cut to the point. We have a difficult, complicated job; we want to train a team for it; we have confidentiality agreements and will enforce them. I can give you a full description of the situation if you understand that I'll modify your memory of this conversation if you end up deciding not to take the job."

"Understood."

"I'm working with people from another planet. They can make Gates in space and jump through them between suns. But they cannot themselves use arcane magic, because they are little slugs, about this big, with almost no senses. They can, however, sit in someone's brain and move their body. I don't have one now, though I've done it; it doesn't hurt. They're at war with the people of yet a different planet. They were planning to blow each other up in this mess that's wasteful on a truly astonishing scale, but now, instead, they're hoping they can use Golarion mages to bring the other side to the table sooner. With enchantments, probably."

"Do you have some way to prove - any of that -"

She sets a bucket of spellsilver on the desk. "They mined it from asteroids."

" - in that case, the pay should really be -"

"The pay is wildly more generous than listed. We couldn't've listed higher without attracting attention. We have access to every known spell. We have access to whatever artifacts our artifacts team can make, and it has some very gifted people on it. Their world knows things no one here has ever dreamed of. Resurrections are covered, but the work's not even that dangerous right now, mostly scrying. On aliens."

"You sure know how to pitch something. I have to decide right now?"

"You do. I'm sorry, but there are some gods the aliens don't want involved. You can get on a shuttle with me, or you can walk away. - you can absolutely have time to think, though my next appointment is in about thirty minutes."

"Will they want to - with the slugs -"

"Yep. You can swap 'em if you have a personality clash or something. Mostly you don't, I think being stuck as a slug unless people want you in their head tends to breed for really un-obnoxious personalities."

"Can I get a cleric to cast a truth spell -"

"No, because we're being picky about who knows things. If you know how to read divine spells off a scroll I have a scroll of it." She pushes it across the table. 

"Can I see your magic items?"

Even half of them is very impressive and she's happy to show off half of them. 

" - wow. 

Now I'm kind of nervous that - if the answer is no - I vanish or something -"

"This crossed my mind too. I swear to you, if you want to leave you can. Once I modify your memory."

By the end of the day she has three of them and is very pleased with herself. Another three decline, but that's how it goes sometimes.