Gallipsiwhoop holds out a clawed hand.

She takes it, and prepares herself not to resist whatever is about to happen. (Will it matter? Maybe not? There's no advantage to even trying to resist this, though.)

Plane shift.

Tencednil floats alone in a void. A sea of twinkling stars surround her. She can't move. Not because she's frozen or paralyzed, there simply isn't any ground to move on.

Gallipsiwhoop has lost his golden horns and is now the size of a housecat.

She is no longer pale human-colored, and instead now looks like she normally does.

"...some sort of antimagic field?" The Doors of Scouring have a permanent one, but that's still a little absurd. Archmage indeed. "I guess that would be strong security. Sorry about the skin, I didn't want to be too obviously myself coming to the meeting. I don't know if anyone would have seen it, but there's no reason to take the chance."

"We're in a dead-magic plane! Similar to an antimagic field." Gallipsiwhoop flies perhaps a hundred feet and opens a trapdoor in the sky with a small key. He flies back down with a rope. "Climb up! It should be easy, there's no gravity in here."

"Oh! Wow." That's quite impressive! Also this seems quite fatal if she couldn't fly in a dead magic zone, which makes sense for a security measure.

She grabs the rope and... climbing is much easier with no gravity, isn't it. She pulls herself up and goes much further than expected, and it takes a bit for her to figure out how hard she should be pulling. Definitely better than trying this with normal gravity, though, given how good she isn't at climbing.

When she gets close to the opening in the sky, Gallipsiwhoop tells her a password. "The room beyond here is warded. Speak the password right before you cross the boundary."

"Okay..." She will do that right before passing through. Follow the archmage's instructions to the letter, they are probably important. (And that's probably just a Forbiddance, she's heard of that spell. Maybe not, though, there are probably other options.)

Climbing out of the trapdoor is very briefly like being under haste only much more dramatic. Then she's through and gravity returns and her skin returns to a magically altered tone.

The environment is a beautiful moonlit glade. Sparse trees are dotted around them. The grass is far softer than it should be.

Gallipsiwhoop says the password and flies through the trapdoor and suddenly is the size of a young dragon again. His golden horns gleam in the moonlight.

An elf is waiting for them. She seems to suck color from the world around her until, when the light finally reaches her, nothing is left but monochrome. Her hair starts pitch black on her head and by the time it ends by her chest is a brilliant glowing white.

"Hello."

What an appropriate thing to do with light. Tencednil can't actually tell if she's still visible to normal light at first — Morgethai (this must be Morgethai) looks exactly like she would in the dark. The anti-shadows cast by the ends of her hair eventually clarify that there's at least some actual glow, but not before Tencednil is incredibly impressed by the archmage who has appropriately decided she wants nothing to do with light and has solved this by casting herself and only herself a... constant darkness orb or something.

Unfortunately it seems that's not actually what happened. She's still very impressive.

Oh right, and Tencednil needs to actually open her mouth to talk. "Hello."

"It's nice to meet you, Tencednil. I would like to know how you came into possession of three wish diamonds."

Greater dispel magic. Tencednil's skin reverts to its natural tone. "I know of no method for a first circle sorcerer of no renown to acquire a fortune of this magnitude."

Oh right she forgot to dismiss that after it came back. Oops.

Alright. Deep breath. No point trying to hide information here, just tell her. "The short explanation is that there's a conspiracy which took over Korvosa to use most of the population as blood sacrifices, and I blackmailed it into paying you. The long answer will involve an explanation of why I know all of that. It's long, though, and I don't know if it's the most immediate thing you want to hear."

"How could a cult of Urgath— it's not a cult of Urgathoa, is it. A lich would be too mad to blackmail in such a way, even if they had hoarded the diamonds for centuries. Who do you think is involved in this conspiracy and how did you contact them without getting caught?"

"As far as I know, it isn't a cult at all. I'm reasonably confident Queen Ileosa — she is queen now, right? I last got actual news from the city on the fifth — and Togomor, the mage she's hired, are part of the conspiracy. I don't know very much about the details. It could be just the two of them, it could be any number of other people assisting them. I contacted them by warning late King Eodred of their first attempt to kill him, sent via the bank account I gave you the password to access after proving its credentials by betting accurately on the results of the Breaching at very steep odds. I then had some letters copied by the Bank and deposited under that account's name, so when the conspiracy broke into the Bank to try to find materials to hunt me down, they found my blackmail instead."

There must be a better order to do this in. She really doesn't know how best to explain it all, though, there is just so much. Morgethai is better at this than she is, she will just trust the archmage in the room to ask questions in whatever order she needs the answers in.

She pauses for a moment. "How did you know of the conspiracy's first attempt to kill Eodred?"

"So this is going to be the unbelievable part. ...the less believable part, I guess, this is all already pretty unbelievable. Can you be assured I'm not knowingly attempting to deceive you somehow? Or if you're already doing that do something so I can't tell you already were if you want, I know it's not perfect but it means fewer ways for this to fail."

Why is she babbling. Archmages are competent, she doesn't actually need the whole explanation of Tencednil's thought process at every point. No, deciding you're going to share information with someone freely because it's worth the price doesn't mean dumping everything on them with no direction at all — oh well, she will do what she will do.

"I will pull the information from your mind. This will take a minute." Felandriel pulls out a large black tome and begins preparing a spell.

That... works? Maybe? Oh, wait a moment—

"There's some chance that will act strangely. It's been odd under Detect Thoughts before. I don't know if it matters, but if it does you should know in advance probably?" Why is she still talking. She will shut up now.

"I am not going to use detect thoughts." She finishes preparing the spell and starts casting it. It's clearly a spell with a longer cast time than normal. "Do not resist."

She doesn't resist, whatever it is. (Not that she expects it would matter if she did. Archmages are known to be pretty scary.)

Mind probe.