“Indeed. And - whatever Nefreti’s aims were, I have my own agenda here, and information as groundbreaking as the existence of multiple other worlds calls for a thorough reevaluation of  how I can best accomplish my goals. I think - five years of research at least, on learning your magic and on studying the feasibility of contacting Golarion, should it turn out that I wish to do so.” 

His eyes rest on her, piercing, unreadable.

She nods.

Five years is a long time. You wouldn't need her for all of it, but - but you might keep her around for all of it if it didn't cost you much. 

"I would be delighted to help."

"I am glad to hear it." Leareth sighs, then stands. "For now, you have given me a great deal to think about, and I shall go do that. - Is there anything else we could get you, here, so that you will be more comfortable?" 

She needs to stop doing the thing where she has rock-bottom expectations, people pick up on that and are more than happy to treat you as poorly as you expect. "I'd like some different kinds of ink, I'll need to test if any of the inks you make here are the right kind for spellbooks, and high-quality paper, and some swords or daggers of good make if you want me to try enchanting them for you. They can be blunted on purpose so I can't use them to stab people but they can't be shabby and blunt on that account, the metal will be irregular in the middle and the spell won't stick. I'd like to occasionally go swimming, and probably prayer to Asmodeus doesn't reach him from here but if I can set up an altar I'll feel more at home. And if you have anything that's protective against magical explosions, it's possible in principle to rederive spells I don't have in my spellbook but it's risky and it'd be awfully silly to take risks with my life here, so I'll probably lean towards not doing that unless we can work out adequate precautions."

He nods. "We can certainly give you a variety of inks and good-quality paper, and a writing desk to make that easier. And I will have some quality daggers brought - I am not especially worried about you stabbing people, though I would prefer you not enchant them with spells that allow them to pierce magical shields. Swimming will be difficult since we are in a very cold climate, here, and there is no liquid water outdoors at this time of year, but if it is very important to you we can arrange to build an indoor swimming pool in the unused basement section, my staff would enjoy that as well. We do have Work Rooms with protective shielding, but I think I want to wait on that until we have the chance to further discuss plans for your spell research. What would you need for an altar?"

(Leareth is very sure that prayer won't do anything from here, and that if it did, the presence or absence of an altar (which it sounds like is not a divine magical object, since she could make one here at all) won't matter one way or another.)

"It just needs to be a clear stone space at least a few feet across that I can decorate and where I can light candles." If they build her an indoor swimming pool that'll be significant evidence of his thousand-year-old wizard claim; it could of course be someone else very rich and powerful, but it'd have to be someone very rich and powerful and they have the least reason to lie.

"Sure, all right, I will think of a place that could go." Building an indoor swimming pool is really not that hard if you have magical construction and already have a lot of empty underground basement space, and he's not sure why she thinks it's so impressive. "Do feel free to pass on requests for other things. I should have the paper and ink for you within a couple of candlemarks." He nods to her. "And, thank you for answering my questions." 

He leaves. 

...And finds a comfortable spot to sit on the other side of the shielded stone wall and read her mind through his shields. He has the impression that she's cautious about possible mindreading if there's someone right there, but not when she's alone in the room, and hopefully that will continue to be the case so he can take advantage of it. 

She indeed relaxes somewhat once he's left. You can read peoples' minds through a little bit of stone but not if it's thick, with her kind of magic, and also you have to keep casting the spell again and again; it lasts only a few minutes each time. Probably if the walls aren't too thick they'll try to mindread her sometimes but she doesn't expect it continuously, and probably if she'd been mindread last night she'd have been punished for it today, though she's going to be more careful about thinking anything adversarial now that she's met scary wizard. Non-wizard. Scary mage. 

The overall goal makes sense, even if the ambition of it is mind-boggling. None of the gods can use people, so you make your own, that can. And you could make it use all of the bits of humans that are even usable in principle, more bits than any existing god bothers to use. She half-expects he won't like the result, if he's gotten so accustomed to being an instrument only of his own will, but that doesn't make him wrong to do it.

And if he's telling the truth she wants him to succeed, obviously, so she gets an afterlife.

She does not know how to make progress on figuring out whether he's lying. She can learn more about the magic system and mindread the servants, but they won't know if he's thousands of years old or pretending at that. If she plays things really carefully she can eventually ask to go visit nearby cities, where people will indubitably have all kinds of stories about the immortal wizard, people have all kinds of stories about even mortal ninth-circle wizards. 

Does it matter if he's lying? If he instead wants to learn magic for some normal agenda, conquest and slavery, it's not as if she has an option of not teaching it. If he's lying, it's because he thinks she'll be easier to use while she believes him, and - she wants to be easier to use, at least insofar as that doesn't contradict with 'taking a long time to teach them anything so she has the chance to learn more magic herself and maybe have a shot at escape if it's needed'.

...she should be realistic. If the man is the equivalent of a ninth circle wizard -

- well, you can't escape a ninth circle wizard. You can Teleport off but they have Trace Teleport and better range than you, and if they are alerted too late to trace you they can scry you, and they can get a scry through Nondetection because they're just that powerful, and they can teleport from a scry, and -

If Nefreti Clepati wanted you, what would you do? 

Probably surrender. But if that wasn't an option - if she's running because she's pretty sure this Leareth is going to kill her -

- the Dome in Sothis is unscryable. Hard to get into but they say the pharaoh has hundreds of pretty slaves. Maybe you go for that. Maybe you go to the temple of a rival god and ask for shelter. Maybe you arrange a resurrection and then kill yourself. Maybe you arrange a temporary transformation into a rock, or a pool of mud, and hope that throws off the scrying and by the time you transform back Clepati has better priorities - okay several of these don't work not because she's ninth circle but specifically because her god is omniscient, that's not an operative constraint here, maybe she should be imagining that Morgethai, the elf wizard in Andoran, is the one trying to kill her for some reason...

- maybe you get a hat of disguise and hang out in a crowd and when they Teleport in they still have to do a lot of work to pick you out from a thousand people, when you're wearing a different face than they saw on the scry. Maybe you go to a wizard rival. 

She needs to learn more about the world, to learn who she'd run to if she needed to run. But she shouldn't assume that there's nowhere and no one. 

She uses dancing lights to check the room for invisible people again. It's almost relaxing.

She's not dead yet.

A new person brings her lunch, and at the same time another couple of staff carry in a desk for her, and put a box on it which proves to contain a huge variety of inks and several kinds of high-quality paper, including one that looks more like resin-impregnated cloth, and which one of Leareth's staff shows her is waterproof and nearly impossible to tear - that needs a wax pencil to write on, ink won't go in, but it's good for taking notes during messy magic experiments if she ends up doing that, and there's also a non-resined version that has the toughness but works with ink. 

Another couple of hours after that, Lacie is back. :We're getting a swimming pool!: She looks genuinely delighted about this. :I never would've thought to ask for it, but gods I miss swimming in the quarry back in my hometown. Anyway, you can come watch the mages build it if you'd like. Leareth was guessing you'd enjoy seeing more of how our magic works: 

:I would enjoy that!:

They lead her out of the room into a stone hallway - the floor thoughtfully has a rug on it - and down a narrow stone staircase to a long, totally unfinished basement room. Three people who are presumably the mages are just finishing measuring out a rectangle on the floor in chalk, it's about fifteen yards long and maybe eight wide - not huge, but enough to swim back and forth in. A gaggle of other staff have brought in stools to sit against one wall and observe; they all seem just as excited as Lacie about this development, and give Carissa curious and impressed looks. One of the young men offers her some of the snack he brought, a little bag of dried apple and nuts. 

No one looks very worried about keeping a close eye on her or anything. 

(Lacie, however, is absolutely reading Carissa's mind the whole time, while doing a very good job of keeping her eyes and apparent attention on the swimming-pool spectacle.) 

Carissa is tracking the extent to which the people seem to consider her a prisoner (obviously she is, but it matters how many people think of it that way), and wonders at the size, Stone Shape on Golarion is around twenty cubic feet - it's a fourth circle spell for wizards, third for clerics - and this will be...5400, if it's five feet deep...

The mages finish up their chalk outline and then arrange themselves like three sides of a square on one end of the area, glance at each other, close their eyes and raise their hands and breathe for a moment - 

- and if Carissa is watching with Detect Magic, she'll see them pulling energy into the air from - themselves, and from somewhere else, and forming the energy into sort of dense sharp vibrating blades, and in synchrony they bring these down on the stone. 

It's soft as bedrock goes, not limestone but some sort of sedimentary rock, and their energy-blades cut through it without huge difficulty. It makes a lot of noise, and rock dust starts to go everywhere; one of Carissa's neighbours amongst the watchers, apparently also a mage, makes a face and then casts some sort of bubble-like barrier around the work crew, which contains the dust. (The crew themselves have some sort of subtle shield or barrier around their faces and are untroubled.)

They get a cut down to a depth of about a foot within a minute, then switch to less directed chiselling and hacking at the centre; the stone is brittle enough that it cracks into large shards and fragments under this treatment, which are floated out and set to the opposite side. 

(Lacie is enjoying this, her eyes fixed raptly on it, but she's mostly curious about Carissa's reaction.) 

She has no idea how you'd do that with Golarion magic. They're not using more magic than she's ever seen thrown around, but it's not a pre-stabilized spell, and so they're pointing all the magic directly at the stone and they have such finesse with it - she tries to think how you'd design a spell for it and she thinks you just can't, magic won't cooperate -

- she's delighted and very very jealous and it is tragic that she cannot, herself, be a sorcerer and do that...

They spend a while doing this and forty-five minutes later, when the mages take a break to drink some water and have a snack - they're noticeably a bit tired-looking and out of breath - they've excavated half the surface area marked to a depth of about eighteen inches, which one of them measures with a stick. There's a large pile of crumbled stone up against the wall, which presumably someone else will cart out and dispose of. 

Lacie gets up from her stool. :The rest is just going to be more of the same, it gets repetitive and it'll take them the rest of today, so I reckon we can leave them to it: She's clearly expecting Carissa to accompany her. :Fun to watch, though, isn't it?: 

:Must I go? I'm sure it's old to you but I haven't seen magic used like this before and it's very interesting.:

Lacie thinks for a moment. :Oh, all right, I suppose so. If you're sure you aren't bored. You can find your way back to your room on your own later?:  

(Great, now she's got to park herself in a nearby office or something where she can supervise Carissa's thoughts and warn the mages if she's about to try anything; they're aware of Carissa's, well, status with Leareth, and it seems unlikely she will try anything given the givens, and of course they're wearing shield-talismans, but they'll be in trance for the project and not particularly keeping an eye on their surroundings.) 

Huh. :I'm sure I can. Thank you.: The gentlest of cages. It is a nice break from Lastwall though also it prickles a little, on the level where she appreciates Hell for straightforwardly setting you on fire. 

- not the time. Magic. Let's watch the mages with Detect Magic up, partially to learn things but mostly just for fun.

Lacie picks up on that particular thought and does NOT show any of her internal screaming about it at ALL. She heads out, gets herself some water, and then parks herself in an adjacent storage-room, with the door shut, and keeps half her attention on eavesdropping while also reaching - 

:Leareth?: 

:Yes?:

:Uh, confirmation that whatever else is up with 'Hell', it apparently involves people being set on fire: 

:Ah. Thank you: He is, at this point, not very surprised at all, but it's a relief to know. :Let me know anything else you manage to pick up on: 

The mages continue to wield energy directly at stone, very skillfully, for about thirty to forty-five minutes at a time until they take a break to catch their breath and drink water; apparently this is as tiring as physical labour, for them, though obviously they're making far faster progress than non-magical stonemasons would. It is repetitive from one angle, but since they're free-forming the magic rather than casting prepared spells, it's responsive to the exact behaviour of the stone they're cutting. They're impressively in tune with each other, too, cutting at the same speed to the same depth even when the stone is cracking more easily in some places than others.

Someone brings them afternoon tea with biscuits and offers Carissa some as well, and if she's still there several hours later, supper as well. 

Carissa is watching MAGIC and not thinking at all about Hell. She stays until they're done, absorbing everything.

They finish a couple of hours after suppertime; the entire space has been dug out to around five feet. They seem happy about the work. Maybe it's a fun break from whatever they usually do. 

No one else stays the whole time and the mages certainly don't appear to be supervising her, they're deeply focused. 

(Lacie is, of course. She eventually starts reading a book at the same time, paying just enough attention that she'll notice if Carissa's affect shifts.)

Her room, when she goes back to it, has clean sheets on the bed and a new box on the desk for her, which proves to contain a couple of daggers, plain-looking but of high quality metal.