"Please feel free to ask if you need any additional supplies for the spellbooks." Leareth gets up, nods to her again, and he and Nayoki leave. 

She is only trembling a little bit. 

She gets to copying spellbooks.

Nayoki arrives to collect them after she lets someone know she's done. "Thank you. Leareth and I saw enough of your demonstration, we will try at it and come ask if we cannot figure it out." She ducks her head briefly. "- I do not expect you to believe us, but we are not going to keep reading your mind all the time, it is not that costly with our magic but it is inconvenient and ties up person-hours and there is not much reason to. And - Leareth is not going to punish you for the occasional odd thought about escaping. He is a bit funny about that, he - seems to consider it perfectly reasonable of you to plot it, and to be entirely on him to be good enough that you cannot pull it off. For whatever that is worth." 

She takes the spellbooks and leaves. 

Part of being good enough that people can't pull off escaping is making it unwise for them to attempt it unless they're very sure of success. But maybe when you're thousands of years old you sometimes handicap yourself for fun, because you like a challenge. Maybe Leareth is very bored and if she did escape he would be delighted just because tracking her down would break the monotony of whatever he does all day.

She's not sure what to do with that but after a week of headband research she acquires a sewing needle and sometimes when she has finished her work for the day a little early and isn't thoroughly exhausted yet she enchants it to be an extremely fancy sewing needle. Not dangerous, that would surely be punished, but she can try laying an Unseen Servant in it so it can do sewing by itself and then she'll have the spellsilver, later, if she wants it for something.

(Leareth is aware of this, not because he's reading her mind but because sometimes Nayoki or other mages visit her room and incidentally check it thoroughly with mage-sight. He's not worried, and is vaguely pleased that she's doing something interesting. He leaves it alone.) 

He figures out cantrips within the first half-candlemark of examining the spellbook made for him. Nayoki struggles more and he sends her to ask Carissa for advice rather than helping her himself. Once they've both had a while to play around with it, he asks Carissa to add a simple first-level spell to his, and to make another couple of spellbooks with just cantrips that his other staff can train with. 

Carissa very diligently does all of these things. She continues to eat breakfast and dinner with people and try to make friends, for a very Chelish understanding of making friends where you don't share any personal information and you don't express much fondness and you are constantly testing each other for usefulness. Once she no longer feels flinchy at the prospect of being taken up on it she also cautiously starts flirting, in the same fashion.

Leareth’s staff are initially kind of nonplussed about this, but - well, she’s hot, and clever and otherwise the sort of person that top magical scholars recruited for a secret project would get along with, and spending most of one’s time at a secure research base in the far north can leave one pretty eager for hookup opportunities if one isn’t already partnered. And Leareth, when asked, shrugs and says it seems fine. She can get a couple of people tentatively returning the flirting - though in a culturally-mismatched fashion - and the casual interest more broadly.

Then she will make some friends, in a manner of speaking - she doesn't expect any of them to be at the stage of friendship where they'd care if she died yet, but maybe she can get there with time - and pick someone easy to read who's working on something that's not very secret, she assumes those are selected for being more loyal and more careful about what they say to outsiders, and get less plausibly deniable with the flirting. She would not say that she's attracted to any of these people, really, they keep doing strange incomprehensible things and they don't feel safe and predictable, but - she feels safer anyway.

Then she'll end up flirting with Calib, one of the Healers on-site. He's sort of cute in a puppydog way and is clearly unused to being flirted with and is sort of helpless about it.

Lacie is friendly with her in an arms' length way - it's becoming clear as Carissa gets more oriented to the local dynamics that Lacie is working on more sensitive something-or-other, which she never ever talks about, she keeps their conversations on the innocuous topics of her relatives and books she's read and whether the food at the dining hall is especially good today, and invites Carissa to come swimming with her most days. The pool is seeing a good bit of use.

About a week after the meeting with Leareth, one of his staff comes to her and asks if she can make herself available later that day to watch Leareth and another Adept mage test the new shield-talisman he designed for her research precautions, and say how powerful the magic it can hold off appears to Detect Magic.

Certainly.

Leareth, as unreadable as always, shows her the magic artifact briefly; the spell is set in a quartz crystal the size of her thumb, and it contains a lot of intricate magic plus some sort of reservoir of power, which he explains needs a mage to refill it after it's been spent.

He puts it on and stands against the absurdly-thoroughly-shielded stone wall of the Work Room they're using.

Nayoki is grinning delightedly and seems to be looking forward to this test. "Full power, yes?"

"One moment." Leareth puts up some sort of transparent shield over the doorway, presumably to protect Carissa just in case Nayoki misses or something explodes. It's visible to Detect Magic but uniform and translucent enough not to be too distracting. "Carissa, are you ready to watch?" He seems completely unconcerned about the safety of the test.

At ninth circle, if you've also invested in your health, her understanding is that Power Word Kill doesn't kill you on account of there being too much of you to kill, like a dragon. Of course he's not concerned. He's also probably not going to get her killed by accident so she tries not to be nervous about it. Casts Detect Magic. "I'm watching."

"Full power, then," Leareth says to Nayoki, smiling very slightly.

Nayoki looks absolutely delighted (she NEVER gets a good excuse to do this) and she raises her hands, centers herself - the entire aura of mage-energies in her body shifts - and then she throws SO MUCH LIGHTNING at Leareth. It makes the entire room brighter than the brightest noon day. It's more than enough energy to overpower a shield of Protection From Energy and then some, and then she KEEPS GOING for another five seconds before she drops her hands and staggers against the wall, breathing hard.

Both Leareth and the shielded wall behind him seem totally fine. He looks very amused. "I am glad you are having so much fun, Nayoki. ...Carissa, is that enough, do you think? The shield-talisman ought be able to take three times that much, I - may have gotten a little carried away seeing just how hard I could overengineer it - but I do not have a straightforward way of demonstrating a higher-energy mage-attack than that for you."

Carissa is awed and trying very hard for this to be enthusiasm and not terror. She already knew they could kill her and it doesn't matter if they could duke it out with a dragon because she's never going home.

"I - don't think an explosion from trying to make a fifth-circle spell could do that much damage. I still think I should start with weaker spells but - I bet it'd be safe to try to develop fifth, sixth circle ones, that way."

"Excellent!" He steps away from the wall and heads over, removing the crystal from around his neck and offering it to her. "Here - you might as well just have this."

"He really does not need any more of them," Nayoki says, smirking. She's still a bit out of breath.

"I would still like you to alert someone when you plan to use this room," Leareth says, "so they can check on you every so often just in case, and this is the best-shielded Work Room so there might sometimes be conflicts when other people want to use it - there is a schedule up on the wall in the dining hall - but other than that, it is all yours to play with."

She reaches for the shield-artifact and again has a lot of feelings and decides excitement is the safest of them. "Thank you. I'll get to work on deriving some spells for you, then."

“Let us know if you need anything else, then, including someone to get up to speed enough you can bounce ideas off them, I know how valuable that can be for planning research. - Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to ask if you could add a few more first level spells to my spellbook and maybe one second-level in case I can manage that too.” 

(Arguably learning arcane magic is not the best use of Leareth’s limited time, but he can pick it up twice as fast as anyone else thanks to millennia of honed intuitions for magic and for learning skills more generally, and it’s fun, and - well, he doesn’t know what there is to discover there, yet, that could be relevant for his work here, but it’s a vast, rich new area to explore and there might be something that he can see but Carissa won’t. ...Also it’s fun.) 

"I can do that, I can give you Endure Elements and Minor Image and True Strike and then that's all the first-level ones I know and then I can copy Owl's WIsdom, or Fox's Cunning, or Detect Thoughts." Probably it would be good if someone got up to speed so she could bounce ideas off them but also it'd be bad if she were replaceable and she doesn't feel quite safe courting it, not yet. She does not think there's anything odd about wanting to learn a new magic system when you've already got a perfectly good one, obviously you'd want to learn a new magic system when you've already got a perfectly good one. It's too bad Nethys is mad, otherwise she thinks she'd absolutely want to be His...

“Hmm. Can you explain the difference between Owl’s Wisdom and Fox’s Cunning, here? In this world the connotational differences between those words are at least somewhat blurred and overlapping.”