"Well, probably being tortured in Hell is more like a cost deemed worthwhile to save more important god things, it's not like it's just because Asmodeus thinks it's fun. - that'd be Zon-Kuthon, god of suffering. I agree that Zon-Kuthon is kind of not worth making yourself an instrument of His will."

"That is logically possible, but - I am not very inclined to serve someone else's goal if I do not understand it at all and the parts I do see seem antithetical to my own goals. And - if I had a choice of gods, since presumably all of them have god-level-importance goals, I would much prefer a god who did not need to torture nearly everyone in order to get anything useful out of them. I would think someone was a very bad Healing-researcher if nearly all of their research required torturing the mice, usually it is a very small subset, and even for painful medical tests the mice can be anesthetized." 

"I thought when we first met you might like Abadar, the god of wealth and commerce. I don't think he tortures anyone in His afterlife. Asmodeus is going to win, though."

"- Really?" Leareth looks down for a moment before facing her. "I suppose I have two things to say to that. The first is - you are a follower of Asmodeus, from His country, and thus I have strong priors you are not an unbiased source - on what grounds do you believe this? Two," and he smiles again, brief and fierce, "not if I have anything to say about it. I suppose you think that is a pathetic quantity of hubris, but I have always been that way." 

That is information about how much mindreading there is here which she's going to process later. "All of the other gods tried to stop Asmodeus from making Cheliax His. Because it's the most powerful country in the Inner Sea, and eventually should be able to conquer the rest of it, and then almost all the resources of our world will be His to call on. They all failed. It's been this way for nearly a hundred years now. He started from a disadvantaged position, because of the devastation caused by Aroden's death, but things have been improving very quickly. We're much richer than in my parents' time. There are more than twenty million of us and nearly everyone goes to Hell and they're optimizing the education system all the time, to do better. Once we figure out something to do about the Worldwound and stop having most of our effort tied up in saving the world, we could easily conquer it. If the other gods could do anything about that, they would. They haven't, so I think they probably can't.

And you can't do anything about it, we're too far away." Though the reasoning doesn't necessarily hold if Nefreti could see that he could imprison her and still find her world.

"Fair enough, I suppose, though I am going to go on assuming there is much you do not know about the other gods' resources and plans. It would be in Asmodeus' interest for all of his people to believe He is certain to win, right, whether or not it is true. Though either way, I think He is not going to win here." 

"I'm not sure it would. We don't get told that the Worldwound's under control. You need people to know what the problems are if you want them thinking how to fix them. It's true that in other countries they think they're going to win, though.

I agree He isn't going to do things here and you should go on and build your god."

"Yes. Well, given that, and assuming you are still interested in helping so that we can create an afterlife or some other form of immortality here - do you have opinions about what shape of god one ought to create, if given the chance? Because I am curious how much the hypothetical god you would build, if you were alone and immortal in another world with no afterlife, and had full design freedom." 

" - it's not a question I've really thought about." And she suspects it of being some kind of trap, though she's not sure towards what end. "I - you want it to be able to use as much of people as is possible for a god, I guess. And probably to consider itself indebted to you personally and make you its herald or something? I'm not clear why you're doing this instead of ascending?"

"I do not personally desire to be a god, separate from wanting some Power to be on the side of mortal people, and I judged that I would actually have more control of the overall process and what sort of god results, if I do it this way. Human minds are not designed to - remain stable and retain their values through vast changes in how and how much they see of the world. I can built a mind from scratch that is designed for that." 

All of this is ridiculous but she doesn't know what ninth circle wizards or the local equivalent can and can't do. And she still doesn't want to think too carefully. 

"Well, I'll be honored to help you with that," she says.

Sigh. "I am - glad you are not feeling hostile about this, anyway. You are a very smart person who knows how to be strategic about your goals, and - I would value a genuine alliance significantly more than just - making use of your skills for my aims, but that may be too much to ask for. Also I am not, in fact, sure that I want to go ahead with the god-plan. The cost which I mentioned before is - ten million lives worth of blood-magic, that is a power source in this world. It does not destroy souls and probably I can get them back or get them an afterlife retroactively, but that is not certain. So it would be stupid of me to forge ahead when I could instead try to contact - Abadar, say, or another god who is not Asmodeus, and see if They can make more headway on figuring out why our gods here hate civilizational progress and also me personally. Really I would like your help in figuring out the answer to 'what makes sense to do', here, and not just in executing my answer, but..." Shrug. "I do not think your life has prepared you well for that kind of alliance-as-equals with a powerful person, and I am not going to judge you or punish you for being the shape you are." 

She's barely even able to parse that. 

She - tries to think about it anyway. Carefully enough.

"I think when people are allies, as equals, they don't usually imprison each other indefinitely."

"Keeping you imprisoned indefinitely would be inconvenient and I would rather not be on those kind of terms! I will do it, if I think you have a chance of discovering how to contact Asmodeus on your own and I cannot convince you to not do that, but - my hope is that this world has something better to offer you than a god who, while He does technically grant you an afterlife, also will torture you for a century in order to break you down into small enough pieces that He can use them. At the very least, I would find all of you valuable, and that is almost the entire point of this conversation, because having your obedience is not having all of you on my side." Shrug. "I cannot ask you to believe me at face value, of course, though -" 

He pauses. 

"- Do you want to read my mind, to see for yourself how I am thinking about this? It seems only fair and I do not object." 

"I don't know anything, right. I don't know - if you can produce something that seems real to me but that you set up yourself, I don't know if your gods really work the way you say they do, I don't know - I don't even have scry yet so I can't check, about whether there's a local afterlife. I'll cooperate. I will cast Detect Thoughts and try to read you, if you'd like. But if you want to convince me of things - these aren't conditions under which I can be convinced of things, I think. The paladins tried."

Nod. "I understand. I - will consider if and how I can give you better conditions than this." 

And he closes his eyes, takes off his Thoughtsensing shield-talisman, and lowers his personal shields for her; he's not sure if this matters for her kind of Detect Thoughts but it might.

It feels very vulnerable. That's...fine. 

She casts Detect Thoughts.

Leareth thinks very fast, though he's deliberately trying to slow it to be legible to her; he's clearly very intelligent, but even moreso, his thoughts are - densely packed, efficient, exactly what you'd expect for someone who's spent a thousand years refining the concepts he uses. 

He wasn't totally sure, before, but he was sure enough. A painful certainty, to be sure (he thinks about someone called Vanyel, a flash of snow, a man wearing white, but he nudges that away as not most-relevant now). Now everything is thrown into uncertainty and confusion and he's mostly relieved, but also he hates being confused, even if he's drawn to chase it. He has so little idea of the threats that this might present, that he has no way to see coming except through the tiny window that is Carissa. ...Probably none of the gods except Nethys have a way to get at them here, but what is Nethys doing, maybe it's just about spreading more magic but maybe it's something more and he hatehatehates being made a pawn of the gods... 

He's thinking about - a tower, for some reason, a huge tower silhouetted against a starry night sky, maybe a memory, maybe something else - it's pervaded with emotion, quiet but relentless, determination and driving hope, and also a fainter background grief/loss/resignation/tiredness. 

- never to give up - never to die - never to walk away - to stay in the world to fix it as long as it takes no matter the cost - 

He folds that away, too, and the emotions with it, except for the determination which is everywhere in his mind. 

Leareth is musing on how half of what made him uneasy about Asmodeus, from the very beginning, wasn't even the facts he was hearing recounted, or claimed at least - it was Carissa herself. The way her whole mind, her cleverness and drive and strength, have been twisted toward being small - and she thinks this is a good thing, thinks that humans having free will and their own goals and desires and hopes and dreams was a mistake...

Well, humans in Velgarth have never not had that, though who knows, probably the Star-Eyed would prefer they didn't, She sure likes binding people and all their descendants to Her will. Not that Leareth cares, and he cares even less what shape someone else's alien god thinks he ought to be. He knows what he wants. He knows what people in general want. He can, at the very least, infer that mice prefer not to be in pain and ants prefer not to be squished, and he doesn't go around squishing them anyway to make them more useful to him - and maybe the version of His goals that Asmodeus tells His followers is somehow one that's bizarrely incomplete and uncharitable toward Him. Still, it seems overdetermined based on this account that He is a god who can't interface with humans unless He breaks them first - maybe He really is doing something worth that, preventing the destruction of the entire universe would be worth that, but it would be surprising if Asmodeus alone out of a dozen gods were the only key player in that project. 

Leareth hasn't made a final determination on Asmodeus and he's going to keep trying to learn more. Ideally it will end up being feasible to find Golarion in less than five years and he can interview the followers of all the other gods too. A faster route would be to get Carissa to the point of questioning and sanity-checking all her knowledge along with him, but it's obvious and unsurprising that she can't do that mental motion from a position of captivity and helplessness. He isn't sure what to do about that. 

...He finds Carissa likable, and admires her, despite - or even especially thanks to - her attempts to scheme against him. She has so little to work with but she's clever with it, and determined, and that's in spite of spending her whole life being told that having goals and desires is a flaw in humanity that ought be corrected...

He doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't want Asmodeus to hurt her, which is what would happen if she managed to escape and get herself back, and of course the strategic considerations loom a lot larger, but it's still - not an outcome he prefers. 

(Leareth isn't afraid. None of the thoughts and emotions swirling around are about fear, not even the trains of thought oriented toward threats and security. Maybe that's just because he's in his secure underground bunker, but - it seems likely he isn't somehow who tends toward fear even in the middle of a battle.) 

She tries to keep track of it all.  It's a lot. She's not evaluating it for making sense yet and each bit isn't making the next bit less surprising but that's all right. She - flinches, when he's thinking about her scheming against him. It does make her stop reading. Process. He knows. They must have better mindreading, or he was just willing to throw an extraordinarily number of resources at it, reading her continuously from the minute she got here - stupid, not to predict that -

- he respects her for it and that feels worth clinging to, even if the punishment ends up being fairly terrible, he doesn't consider it to have been a pathetic attempt even though it obviously was in hindsight -

- I won't do it again, she thinks in his direction, vaguely, trying to think through the rest of the update even though she doesn't have that much longer with Detect Thoughts - no tricks, no trying to protect herself other than by being useful, and well-behaved, assume they're always always always listening -

- back to mindreading. 

The spell runs out, and she finds that she's shaking; this is pathetic, and she tells herself so very sternly until it stops. And looks at him, waiting to figure out what happens next.

Leareth stands up. "That was a very ungentle conversation, just now, and I owe you some time to rest and consider things." 

He wants to - promise not to read her thoughts so she can do her processing unobserved, even offer her his talisman, but she absolutely isn't going to believe him on either offer and that's not even unreasonable of her. (It's deeply frustrating, not being able to offer any actually-convincing evidence of his intentions; it's almost the exact same frustration he's felt with Vanyel, except worse because she's right here and if he had Vanyel somehow in the same room as him he's pretty sure they could already have sorted it out by now.) 

Instead he slips it back over his head, nods to her with his eyes as unreadable as always, and leaves. 

She sits there trembling.

He could have at least have clarified how he intends to punish her for plotting against him. She's not at all sure what he even considers a reasonable thing to do. In Cheliax someone who objected to hurting her personally might assassinate her younger sister or something, to make the point clear without damaging anything actually on the game board. 

She's so tired. 

She sits there for a while, trying to remember the things that she read in his mind so she won't just have forgotten them later, and the other things he said incidentally - he has to kill ten million people - but probably once there's a god who wants them something can be done about it -

- she doesn't want to be one of them.

She doesn't need to make things more complicated than that, does she. 

She goes back to her room and stares at the wall for a while and wants to start making the daggers magic but she doesn't have her spellsilver or her orders yet. 

Leareth's other staff give her space, just bringing meals; Lacie comes in with dinner and says apologetically that the cement lining on the swimming pool is still drying but they think it'll have water in it by tomorrow and she's really looking forward to it, also the expert mage they brought in is still figuring out how to refine spellsilver in the quantities she needs but it should be on hand by sometime tomorrow.

In the morning, shortly after breakfast, she gets a box with a quantity of spellsilver that will suffice to work on one of the daggers, and a note that says Leareth is interested in the one that teleports back to its bearer's hand. 

It's possible that if you just object to torture for stupid reasons then you don't punish people for plotting against you. That would be stupid, and Leareth doesn't seem stupid, though his intelligence wasn't as high as she'd have expected for a thousand-year-old wizard. Maybe Velgarth mages lean more on wisdom; it'd fit.

It's possible that he considers her adequately chastised already, since she's absolutely not going to do it again. Some extremely stupid rebellious voice in her says she should squirrel off a little spellsilver, just to force his hand, but she is obviously not going to do that. 

She starts working on the dagger that teleports to the bearer's hand. It requires laying Teleport, which she of course can't cast. She sets her armillary amulet spinning and starts laying out the spell she can't cast and takes the scaffolding shortcut that requires more precision but goes twice as quickly. Her concentration is not at her best, but - she's good at this. She's really good at this. 

She makes steady progress. Tells the person who brings her dinner that it'll be four days of work.

They thank her for the update and also want to let her know that the swimming pool is ready if she'd like to check it out, in which case does she need to borrow a swimming-costume to wear? 

If that's the custom here, yes! And she would like to check it out.