Carissa flattens herself against the ceiling and listens in.

Leareth examines the stuck rope! That's fascinating! 

He receives the relayed-via-Nayoki update that Carissa is now back in the material plane, and has a strong suspicion as to why.

:Keep trying to narrow it down: he instructs, :she must be blocking it via spells that will not last forever. - I think she is in the complex, on reflection I doubt she evaded her compulsion at all, she is just - testing us: Playing games with them. Why is it so bizarrely delightful of her.

Carissa will be able to overhear Nayoki receiving this message, acknowledging it with fond exasperation, she can tell Leareth is having fun even if she's pretty sure he himself hasn't noticed. Well, it's clever and impressive and it seems like he was right that being given breathing space to plot meant that Carissa was motivated to, somehow, figure out multiple spells in secret in addition to the wholly reasonable quantity of research output that she's told Leareth about. Maybe he's right that it's worth it for the increased productivity, though she has a suspicion that the strategic value here isn't the only reason Leareth is enjoying himself so much.

She passes on the request to the mage who's got the search-spell still active. Just from Nayoki's thoughts, it's not totally obvious what this search-spell is, except that it seems like a separate thing from the tracking spells on her shield-talisman and in her dress.

Leareth moves his hands up the rope, trying to figure out where it goes.

Carissa wanders off in gas form to try to learn more about this 'search spell'.

The rope opens into a ...pocket dimension of some kind. It's small and featureless but perfectly livable. It has a dress and Carissa's invincibility artifact.

This is the most bizarrely specific spell he's ever seen! How is it only third circle! Golarion magic is so incredibly weird! 

He takes the dress and extremely overengineered artifact. Spots her headband as well and rescues that (it does not actually have a tracking spell on it, he wasn't sure if it would interfere with its intended purpose and besides why bother.)

Feeling around with his hands confirms that Carissa is almost certainly not here, unless she's found a way to make herself two-dimensional as well as invisible to ordinary senses, mage-sight, and Thoughtsensing, which at this point he is not ruling out.

:She hid in an extradimensional space and removed the items with tracking spells: he sends to Nayoki, slipping out. :I think she must then have gotten past me when I was distracted by the spell on the rope. I am still reasonably sure she cannot successfully leave the complex but I want her found as soon as possible:

The mage doing the search-spell is doing it from inside a shielded Work Room with the door shut; he's keyed to the Thoughtsensing shields in particular and can stay in Mindspeech contact through them, but Carissa cannot get in to bother him or read his mind herself.

Everyone is awake at this point, though, and the Thoughtsensers and mages and even Healers are all searching the whole facility; a flicker of thought she picks up indicates that there are more search parties outside.

The search spell is...based on using a sample of her hair?? One of the Mindspeakers searching is a Fetcher (a Gift that does short-range teleportation on objects) and is now grudgingly admitting that Leareth making him Fetch fresh hair from her brush every single night was apparently worth it, although if he's just kept the mindreading rotation stricter then maybe they would not be dealing with this at ass o'clock in the morning would they.

Good to know and ...probably possible to get around, though there'll be different spells in place next time....and Alter Self might foil it. She has it prepared, it's an obvious thing to prepare when one is attempting an escape, but she can't actually cast spells while she is a cloud of gas and unfortunately she can't stop being a cloud of gas at will. 

She follows a group searching Work Rooms so she can stay behind when they leave one and close the door.

She can do this. None of them seem to notice.

The mage doing the search-spell is still pretty sure she's within a ten-mile radius and absolutely cannot get the spell to give him any more precision than that, she's very effectively blocking that somehow.

She hangs out alone in the Work Room. Detect Thoughts and Invisibility and Nondetection all wear off; hopefully being alone in a Work Room will compensate for that. She is still a gas.

The mage (now getting rather tired) gets somewhat better resolution on the search; he's got it narrowed to within about a mile radius, now, centered on the complex. Which it was before, too.

Leareth paces up and down the hall. :Nayoki, I am nearly certain she is in here somewhere. ...I want a Farsight rotation to check every room in here once per ten seconds, it does not need to be a long check, just for a person visible:

It's a lot faster to divvy up rooms and have their two Farseers skim the building than to send physical search teams to do repeat checks, and - probably Carissa just turned herself invisible, but invisibility doesn't last forever and it might take her longer than ten seconds to either re-cast it or execute her next step.

:Turn the internal detection wards to the emergency setting: he adds. This is going to be a huge pain and everyone will be very frustrated with him, because any magic the search teams are doing will trigger alarms for the team watching the ward-station - the emergency mode is intended for a use case where there's active fighting inside the building. But maybe somewhere amidst all the false positives there'll be a real indication of Carissa's presence.

He paces. Waits.

Farseers scan the rooms, including the row of already-searched Work Rooms.

One of them has a gas floating around on the ceiling but it's really not very conspicuous, especially with the very limited lighting.

Another minute passes. Still nothing.

...Leareth is so confused. And impressed. And confused. Did she somehow figure out how to walk through stone? Is she in the walls? What is she doing?

:I want every door open except the Work Room in use: he orders Nayoki. :Organize a Thoughtsensing scan as well: She can probably block Thoughtsensing too, or he'd have noticed her slip past him, but just Invisibility won't do it and there HAS to be a limit to how many spells she can cast, right...?

He's not the strongest Thoughtsenser around but he is one of the most experienced, and the entire building is within his range. He scans.

And he finds her, without Thoughtsensing blocked at the moment, waiting for Gaseous Form to wear off, contemplating her next move. If she were escaping for real she'd try Dispel Magic on the compulsion and Alter Self to temporarily confound the search spell and use the needle to Teleport to the mountains and then do a Rope Trick there, but she doesn't have an endgame, there. (If he were going to kill her she'd probably keep it up with continuous Rope Tricks twice a day, with Alter Self and Invisibility and Nondetection for the brief interval swapping between them, hoping they can't search the whole mountains in the space of the two weeks it'd take to turn all this spellsilver into a not-just-one-use artifact of Teleport and hop by visual range distances south from there. But a) she'd probably starve and b) right now he's not going to kill her, and getting him to the point where he's tempted does not serve her interests. 

The way that's most tempting to gracefully exit this is to Alter Self into Calib and go walk to the pool and go for a swim and be discovered there; it'd be funny.

The smartest way to gracefully exit this is probably whatever lets Leareth feel clever. Which...might be the exact same plan, except make sure to get discovered on the way.

She's scared, now. She did not expect this to result in an opening to Teleport out for Valdemar (though she was going to take it, if it looked like she could actually succeed), and she was very confident in her assessment that he wouldn't kill her for it. But suddenly that confidence feels like not enough confidence at all to have risked this, not really -

- regrets can go the fuck away and come back if they're useful for begging for mercy, later, and she bets they won't be, she bets the best attitude here is that she did nothing wrong and hopes he had fun. Thousand-year-old mages have lots of people scared of them. Nayoki thinks he's enjoying this. Making him expend resources is not automatically the same thing as making herself that-many-resources less valuable, not if she's something he can't have elsewhere at any price...

Gaseous Form ends and she falls, rolls, casts Alter Self, steps out of the Work Room as Calib.

When she reaches the pool, Leareth is there, already swimming; he's a perfectly adequate swimmer but not particularly graceful at it. He puts his feet down on the bottom and stands up and smiles at her. "Came to join me for a swim?"

- what -

She doesn't need to resolve any of her confusion to figure out the smartest next move, which is clearly to play along. She raises an eyebrow at him. "We never see you in here," she says innocently, and dives in.

He switches to Mindspeech when both of their heads are in the water. :That is because I am a mediocre swimmer and it would hardly suit my dignified image. I like it, though: He's in such a good mood right now. (Also there are several additional compulsions he snuck onto Carissa at a distance while he was waiting for her to walk over, which she'll notice if she tries to do any more magic right now, but he figures she has to be just about out of spells.)

He swims for a while. Stops when he's out of breath, holding onto the edge of the pool. :I am wondering what I would need to do to earn your loyalty enough that all of your exceptional cleverness could be directed toward our shared goals instead of only a fraction of it. I suppose what I mean is, you have been holding out on me: His mindvoice is teasing, with admiration in it, no anger or displeasure at all, and more warmth than is ever present in his spoken voice even when he's talking to his longtime staff.

(This was only part of his original justification for leaving the matter alone, but by far the most valuable thing he's gotten out of this little adventure, Leareth is thinking, is that now he knows what Carissa is actually capable of. Which, it turns out, is a lot.)

It could be deceptive, of course, but it's definitely reassuring on the same gut level as panicking about being punished is happening, and since the panicking is probably excessive she lets the plausibly-deceptive warmth soothe it. 

:I don't know anything about you that you haven't told me: she says. She is thinking that it's very odd, to not punish lack of loyalty very harshly and then say you wonder what you'd need to do to get loyalty. Presumably he knows the answer? If she were going to be lit on fire for not being loyal she'd be very loyal; it feels like the single most fundamental fact about her, that she can be won by giving her no alternatives.

:Well, if there are particular questions that are cruxes for you, I am probably willing to answer them. I - think we may be thinking of loyalty differently, though. Or perhaps we just have an empirical disagreement about what strategies will work to get people's best work. I am not a leader who works in the way Asmodeus does, and - mostly this is because I think it would have results that I would be less pleased with, if I obtained my staff's obedience by backing them into a corner and threatening them with torture, rather than by offering them opportunities that they want to pursue:

Well, ideally you do both. 

Though if what he wanted was this, that he couldn't have gotten by having her terrified of him. A little bit afraid, yes, you don't level from situations that don't have your heart pounding and part of you screaming that something terrible will happen if you fail, but.

The things she still wonders about don't seem like things he could possibly answer. She wants to know if he's lying about the local gods, and what their clerics have to say for them. She wants to know what Valdemar is like. She wants to know what people say about him, about how his ambitious projects tend to go, about whether the bold things he says really do come true. There's no answer from him that'd mean anything, on any of those points. 

Leareth is quiet for a long time, watching her from the side of the pool.

:You could visit Valdemar: he offers finally. :I would want to place a compulsion for you not to tell anyone anything about me or my plans, in addition to not attempting to contact Asmodeus, but - as I am sure you know by now, all of my staff working on sensitive projects volunteer for that. And if you were willing to, in exchange for the opportunity to see for yourself, I would be satisfied with that. ...I am less happy at the idea of having you speak with the priests of our local gods, but as much for your safety as for my own operational security. Last time I tried to interview a priest of Vkandis I got set on fire for my trouble:

Carissa will concede that this is strong motivation not to talk to them, though also a convenient thing to claim. 

It is discomfiting having Leareth's eyes on her but in a different way than earlier. She has the impulse to go over and hug him, which she ignores because that'd be very stupid; if he wants her (her radar for that, which is very finely tuned, is leaning 'yes', which it doesn't usually do for Leareth) he can come get her himself. She is aware that she's in her underclothes, having taken the dress off as suspicious, and then decides to be less aware of that, and is aware instead of his eyes, which isn't better, and then gets herself over to being aware of the topic of conversation.

Going to Valdemar...might be a good idea. She is tempted by it.

:Well, think about it. Also you are welcome to speak to my staff and read my books to learn about me and my past, but I am aware those are also sources I am providing. It is - somewhat difficult to prove things about my past because I have lived under many different names and have generally not been open about my immortality, so I suppose you need to take my word for it that I am the author of all the books in question and that they are as old as the publication dates claim. ...Incidentally there is a statue in Valdemar that I had altered, at their Founding, in case I ever wanted moderately costly proof of my age, but I do not think you are really in doubt about the immortality part specifically: