"Wisdom is - trained habits, instincts, ways of noticing the world and your own mind. Cunning is, hmm, being able to think eight steps ahead and be right, doing math in your head, working memory..."

"- And your world's magic can neatly separate out those categories of mental ability, and increase one or the other separately? Fascinating! I would like Fox's Cunning to start, then, I think that is more my current bottleneck." His lips twitch. "One more easily accumulates wisdom with age, I suppose. Are there other mental abilities or traits that your magic can change directly?"

"There's also Eagles' Splendour which is - compellingness, presence, and skill with words and body language, but I don't have that one. I might try to rederive it pretty early, just for practice, it's second-circle and I have two similar spells so I ought to be able to figure it out if I have as much ink as I need and cannot explode myself trying."

"Oh. Yes, I would be very curious about that one, if you are able to re-derive it. In any case, thank you for your ongoing efforts here. I will have someone drop off my spellbook at your room later today."

Leareth nods to her and then heads off with Nayoki.

As usual she needs a couple of minutes to calm down. But then she can get back to work. On magic research.

Her life is objectively very nice. She copies Leareth's spells for him and then starts on spell research and in her spare time works on the dagger also making him invisible at will, the weak kind of invisibility that won't survive the use of the dagger to strike but she could, in principle, go from there to reinvent the nicer kind. She tries to talk Calib into bed so she can make casual conversation about where he's from and how he ended up here and what other places there are. She's not in a hurry, she can be subtle about it, consider one tidbit very satisfying for a week.

She practices SPELLS. They explode. Constantly. She has no idea how anyone without this artifact of practically-invulnerability does it, but probably they've gotten proper instruction and are not having to rederive every element of the problem at once.

She gives her sewing needle invisibility and Unseen Servant and is in the back of her mind aware that if she also gave it Slaying then it'd be a very good assassin sewing needle. Not that she has the slightest reason to do that.

Calib can be talked into bed after a few weeks, though he's moderately confused-puppydog about the entire process; it turns out he's somehow only twenty-one, two years younger than her, he was something of a prodigy in his Healing class - at some famous well-known school in a country called Rethwellan, he doesn't specify its relative location to where they are now but seems content to tell her things about it and its culture. He's very nice to her. Almost painfully nice, especially for someone used to Chelish boys. He's...shy, in bed, evidently not that experienced, but he's trying so hard to please her and he learns quickly.

Leareth comes by every so often to watch her test spells and have them explode constantly. As usual, it's nearly impossible to tell what he's thinking by looking at his face or body language, but to the extent he lets anything slip, he seems pleased and occasionally amused.

Carissa is not totally sure that she finds niceness in boys a plus. Calib would probably be sad if she died but he doesn't seem to have the intrigue instincts to do anything about it. Probably the people who do are the more secret ones who keep the conversation carefully superficial. Maybe he's teachable. She asks about which fruits and vegetables remind him of home and tries to start putting together a map from that.

She makes so many spells explode and gets Splendour eventually and then insists Calib check if it makes her better in bed and copies it out for Leareth and then starts fiddling with sticking it on a sword. She's working on wondrous items, too. It's easier than arms and armor, everyone agrees on that, it shouldn't take her several months, that would be very unreasonable. 

She gives him back his dagger with invisibility built into it and tries not to be too interested in whether her kind of Invisibility shows up to their mage-sight.

Calib is confused about what hse's even trying to teach him and why but he's diligent and smart, you don't end up working in one of Leareth's secret facilities without being very clever even if your job is just to be one of the Healers on-call to treat magical injuries the mage-researchers give themselves, and he pays attention.

He thinks that Splendour does make her better in bed but also wants to disclaim that this is very subjective and it could just be an effect from his expectations because she asked him?

Leareth is quite impressed by her kind of Invisibility, because it's also invisible to mage-sight - you can make illusions that way but it's an incredibly rare and challenging skill. He doesn't make a huge deal about it, though, just smiles and agrees that this seems very valuable and he appreciates her hard work.

She makes her sewing needle invisible too. She has it follow her around.  

She figures out headbands that are actually hairpins that are actually swords, and starts on intelligence headbands for both of them.

She wonders aloud if they're ever allowed to get any fresh air.

Lacie says apologetically that for security reasons they rarely go directly outside - this applies to everyone in the facility, Leareth isn't that careful about most facilities in the god-free region he chose to stage his operations, but the location of this base in particular is very secret and Leareth is very very paranoid. The mages can do illusions to cover themselves and sometimes go on walks that way, and every so often people organize an expedition by Gate to one of the other less-secret bases for it, Carissa is welcome to join on either of those if she's desperate for some fresh air. Though it's winter right now and pretty horrible outside, Lacie herself is content to get her exercise indoors until spring.

She would like to breathe some fresh air and see the sky, she thinks, and could make herself invisible for it so she doesn't interfere with the very very secrecy. Also soon she'll have Fly and it's just tragic to have Fly and be stuck in an underground research facility.

...Oh, if she’s about to be capable of FLYING in addition to invisibility that meets Leareth’s paranoid security requirements for not giving away their location, that’s a different story, half of the staff on-site including Leareth himself will turn out to see that! Flying with Velgarth magic is - not impossible, but very very hard and generally not prioritized.

Lacie also wants to know if she can make other people invisible too, in addition to herself, and whether she had any magic to make the cold weather less miserable, she thinks she remembers Leareth mentioning that for Golarion wizards that was a personal rather than area-effect technique.

Yes, Endure Elements was what she used all her first-level spell slots for at the Worldwound and she will do that here. She can't fly yet but the anticipation is making the underground bunker just a little stifling. (Actually most of what's going on is that she just wants to pace out the bounds of her imprisonment, not particularly because she's planning to do anything about it but because she's incredibly curious at what point Leareth would stop her.)

Lacie and Calib and various others in the dining hall seem genuinely enthused about her otherworldly magic, and Leareth is apparently not inclined to intervene. Lacie says that Carissa should tell her whoever she does figure out Fly so they can plan a group expedition to watch. (It’ll need planning since half a dozen people are already excited to watch and Lacie is assuming that Carissa can’t invisible all of them and also fly, so they’ll want a mage, and also Leareth will be disappointed to miss out so someone ought to tell him.)

Of course. 

She works on Fly. When she's run out of spells to try every day, which doesn't take long because she only has three third-circle slots, she works on making Leareth a fancier headband.

Sometimes she mindreads her boyfriend, to help with figuring out the local geography.

This takes a while because geography isn’t among his five favourite topics to think about, but:

Valdemar is the country directly south. Leareth intends to invade them. Probably? Calib has no content to the uncertainty here, but it predates Carissa’s arrival.

Rethwellan, his homeland, is southwest of that. Karse, somewhere south and bordering with Rethwellan, and Iftel, somewhere vaguely east, belong to the god Vkandis  Sunlord. Calib has little sense of Him, at least according to his thoughts, just general antipathy and a vague association that Vkandis likes showing off with miracles more than other gods, though when he has those thoughts it’s tagged with the dry dusty uncertainty of something he read in a book once.

Valdemar. Leareth intends to invade them. 

So that's a probable place to run, if she decides to run, which she's profoundly disinclined to right now because it'd be incredibly risky and she's being very well kept in spellsilver and equipment for magic experimentation. But if she realizes it's not safe here....

Maybe once she can scry he'll have her scrying Valdemar and then she'll have some Teleport locations.

She masters Fly. She floats gleefully out of the Work Room and races down the halls, giggling.

Nayoki is either less busy or more easily attracted by cool magic than Leareth, and comes out to watch. "How do you do that?"

"It's - third circle. Can cast it on you too. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then!" Nayoki is so excited!

She lands. "I should - be able to do items of it - too. Fly's a notoriously tricky one, but." Shrug. "I want to go outside." 

"Then we should plan a trip to do that tomorrow! How long does the flying spell last, sorry, I did not catch the beginning..."

"Just a couple of minutes."