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kings and queens all
is this responsible? no! but no one can stop us
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" - while we're here requesting your help," Isavel says, hesitantly, because the woman makes her nervous, but for all she knows maybe the temple of Nethys has eight handcuffs like hers, or Nefreti knows a permanent geas, or - well, something -

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"Huh," she says before Isavel actually asks the question. "I can fix that. With another Gate, I think, so not today. But - tomorrow."

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"You can send her somewhere where they'll - be able to contain her, and they won't let her kill herself, and -"

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"That would be very easy."

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This does not 100% sound like a rock solid reassurance that is what she plans to do, but Isavel has the Chelish wizard brought anyway, the next day. Unconscious and gagged and blindfolded just in case Nefreti changes her mind or does something that is actually a terrible idea. 

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She waves her hand and whisks the body through a Gate that closes almost instantly. "Tea?"

 

 

 Isavel is speechless.

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And somewhere else a very long way away, a man in an underground bunker north of some icebound mountains is woken by a panicked mage and a very loud alarm. 

:Coming. What is it: 

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:Master Leareth, we don't know - some sort of very powerful magic, it didn't last long -:

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:Where: 

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:We don't know! It's one of your obfuscated locations, we just watch the ward-crystals...: 

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Five minutes later Leareth has looked up the relevant information and solved the puzzle of which out of several dozen warded records locations is the one where mysterious powerful magic happened very briefly and then stopped, and now he's scrying it. Is anything unusual going on there. 

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There is a person! They look pretty thoroughly restrained and like they're either dead or just not very optimistic that moving would be a good idea.

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...Well, if they're dead they've been that way for at least five minutes, probably, in which case it's too late for a Healer to do anything. 

Leareth takes another two minutes, still holding the scry, to review the notes-log on what his wards picked up. Definitely not a Gate. Not Fetching. Not just no known transport magic - he doesn't recognize it at all - all of his intuitions are saying that magic shouldn't and can't look like that...

This situation is intensely frustrating. 

He casts a mage-light at a distance, to see if very bright light wakes the restrained person. 

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Person shifts a bit and then reconsiders this and goes back to not doing anything.

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Sigh. Gating in there seems - definitely not entirely safe, but having an unknown person brought by unknown magic to one of his personal records locations is, one, an alarmingly hostile and also very baffling act by someone - or something, or some Power - and, two, not a situation he wants to let continue. 

He calls one of his mages over. :If I share my scry with you, can you Gate there: 

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Dubious look. :Maybe: 

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Leareth sighs. :If I give you the location on a map as well?: 

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:...Probably: 

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Getting this arranged, and arranging for Leareth to be elsewhere and on the other side of many shields from the mage he's volunteered for this task, takes another few minutes. 

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And then there's a glowing doorway that looks sort of but not really like a Golarion Gate, and some people rush through and pick up the woman - gently - and carry her through and then the bound woman is in a different underground stone room, and instead of the floor she's being set down on a cot. 

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This is not surprising enough to warrant a change to her policy of not doing things except vaguely praying that someone will make a mistake somewhere and she'll go to Hell when she dies.

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They are not going to untie her just yet, but a Healer rests a hand on her forehead - is she injured? 

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No! She is in good health. Shockingly good health, actually, there's something going on like she has significantly more life force than normal people.

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...That's weird. 

Some Mindspeech goes back and forth with Leareth, and then the strongest Thoughtsenser on site tries to read her mind to figure out what, in all hells, is going on. 

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She has something a little but not precisely like the thoughtsensing shield perfectly ordinary people get if they're mindread a ton, so much their mind starts to instinctively react to it. It's possible to sort of go around that, though. 

 

She is trying to figure out what is going on. The paladins said that they'd asked Nefreti Clepati in Sothis for a Gate to Outer Sohaibek and that she was able to do something about Carissa, too, though she hadn't said what. She knows...almost nothing about Nefreti Clepati except that she's literally insane. So this is, presumably, an insane person's solution to the problem of Carissa. It involves being conscious, apparently, so she likes it so far, and she should stop panicking and trying to figure out what's going on. (The paladins probably have a rule about how bad it could get? No, they were fine with maybe marrying her off, and it doesn't get much worse than that...)

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This...does not actually, especially, answer the question of what in all hells is going on! In fact, Leareth has about fifty more questions now. 

:Check if she is Gifted: he sends. 

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A mage is summoned who knows how to do this, and she checks. 

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She is not Gifted at all.

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This...does not actually case Leareth to relax very much at all. 

:See if she can understand any of the languages we speak here: he instructs. Guessing the answer is no, because he's never heard of any of the people or places she was thinking about. 

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The Healer, who's the widest-traveled of Leareth's staff currently dealing with this situation, sits and - pauses and asks permission to remove the woman's blindfold, it won't make her much less helpless but she would hate to be blindfolded on top of everything else while strangers talk at her. She gets Leareth's go-ahead after a moment of thought, does so, makes eye contact with the woman and tries variants on 'do you understand me?' in six different languages (three of which she is really not fluent in at all, but it'd be better than nothing). 

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Where could Nefreti possibly have dumped her. Maybe this is Outer Sohaibek and if she dies here she won't go to Hell and she doesn't have scrying or Sending so that's adequate. Though in that case why tie her up.

 

She shakes her head at all the languages. 

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Sigh. Establishing the ability to ask her questions seems pretty important even if it reveals more of their capabilities and interests. 

:Try Mindspeech: 

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:Do you understand me?: the Mindspeaker attempts. 

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Oh, great, they have telepathy. She hasn't interacted with it before but she has seen it cast; the woman didn't cast it, of course, but maybe she has it permanent, or is a weird kind of sorcerer born with it. :Yes, I understand you.: 

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It doesn't actually seem like starting this on a hostile note will help in any way. :My name is Lacie. We're not going to harm you. What's your name?: 

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It's a promising sort of lie to bother to start out with. :Sevar. Did Nefreti not tell you she was sending me.:

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:No. In fact, one of the many questions we have for you is who this Nefreti Clepati person is, and where 'Sothis' is. We also don't recognize 'Outer Sohaibek', so I'm pretty sure you aren't there unless it's a foreign word for our region: Which, for now, she's going to leave entirely unspecified. 

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:It's a planet. Not the one I'm from. The one I'm from is Golarion. I don't know if we're still there or not but I'd guess not.:

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There is a pause while this is relayed to Leareth. 

:I - would also guess not: Lacie says slowly. :The world you are in now is called Velgarth. Some countries in it are, hmm - Rethwellan, Seejay, Velvar, the Eastern Empire, Acabarrin, Ruvan, Hardorn...: (She is semi-deliberately leaving out Valdemar and other regions of particular interest to Leareth's plans.) :You don't recognize any of those, I'm guessing: 

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:You'd have to be from Arcadia or Tian Xia which are separate continents, but you don't look Arcadian or Tian and a wizard with Telepathy would probably have at least heard of Nefreti Clepati.:

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:...I am not sure if 'wizard' refers to what we mean by mage-gift, and - also I am not a mage at all, just a Mindspeaker. Can you explain what wizards do?: 

(Lacie is continuing to carefully read Sevar's mind.) 

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She translates this to herself as 'a psion', and is suddenly more interested, she has never met one and was not entirely sure the adventurers who told her about them weren't making things up. :If you're not a wizard I'm less sure you'd have definitely heard of Nefreti Clepati. Wizards have to be very powerful to do a telepathy-spell, powerful enough they'd also have Sending and Teleport and they'd want to learn from other powerful wizards and they'd have books from the Inner Sea - where I'm from - even if they hadn't travelled there. Ps-mindspeakers might not. 

Wizards ...learn how to use arcane magic to do things they want to do. It takes years of study. I am a wizard.:

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...Well, that could be a foreign term for Mindspeakers - odd that an entire continent might have never heard of Mindspeakers, maybe Leareth would know more about the plausibility of that...

:What is arcane magic, and how does studying it work?:

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:That's what we call all magic that doesn't come directly from the gods. I think other places use different classifications, I know Azlant did. You learn how spells stabilize and how to design and construct them efficiently and you get a spellbook with guides to the spellforms you can cast. The standard curriculum in my country is six years, starting when you're fourteen, and you're supposed to pick up simple spells right away and have second-circle ones, which are more complicated, by the time you graduate.:

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That sounds nothing like how mage-gift is trained, except that fourteen is about the right starting age. 

:Leareth, should we explain...?:

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Sigh. :I - do not love it, but I think we are unlikely to clarify the confusion here unless we reveal somewhat more about ourselves: 

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:The mages we have here: Lacie says seriously to Sevar, :have an innate Gift that awakens around adolescence, usually between twelve and fourteen, and mages can train in a wide variety of schools and techniques, but - none that especially resemble what you just described. I am not sure any Gift we know of resembles this 'arcane magic' actually, unless it is a very odd foreign way of training mages. ...What is Azlant?:

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:Ancient kingdom destroyed more than eight thousand years ago. If your thing is inborn then it's not wizardry and we'd classify it as sorcery. Anyone who's smart enough can be a wizard. My country screens every child and gives free wizard schooling to all the ones who are smart enough to pick it up.: Pride, and homesickness, and a whole bundle of complicated feelings on top of that -

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:Eight - thousand years...: 

A long pause. Some back and forth with Leareth. 

:Have you ever heard of a catastrophic magical event that happened about eighteen hundred years ago. It affected our continent most but everywhere in the world would have noticed it, I am fairly sure, so if you have never heard any mention then you are almsot certainly from elsewhere: 

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:Eighteen hundred years ago?: 47 minus 18 is 29, in 2900 A.R....what happened in 2900 A.R...she thinks nothing at all of note. It's about when the god of drunks ascended. :I have never heard any mention.:

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:Huh: 

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It's not hard to determine that the strange woman is being truthful, Leareth thinks, when half of the information they're collecting is straight from her mind and she's just as confused as them, far too short of context to be planning an elaborate deception even if she somehow could make that stick in her thoughts as well as her words. (Most people cannot do this at all.) 

:Ask about Nefreti Clepati: he sends. :And - the background of why this Nefreti was called in to send her somewhere: 

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:So you think you were sent here using powerful magic by someone called Nefreti Clepati: Lacie says. :Can you explain who she is, and her background and goals?:

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:She's a mystic theurge of Nethys, our god of magic. She's one of the most powerful spellcasters in the Inner Sea. It would not be very surprising for it to be another world because they specifically went to Clepati because she knows how to Gate to other worlds, and then they asked her to do something about me, so I imagine she sent me somewhere far enough away I couldn't cause trouble, and probably somewhere where people don't themselves know how to travel between worlds.: She wants to be mad about the sending her tied up, which could've gone horribly, but probably Clepati also arranged specifically for her to land in the custody of these people who now know enough to probably not murder her unprovoked.

:I don't know anything about her goals. They call Nethys the mad god because he's omniscient and he tends to drive his followers mad too. I know she's ...Osirian? And at least a hundred years old, and I know she gives advice and does True Resurrections for pay but the temple makes most of its money off intelligence-enhancing wine.: She had occasionally contemplated how to finagle permission to go to Osirion and try it.

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:Intelligence-enhancing wine? ...Nevermind, come back to it. Ask who the 'they' is who went to Clepati, and why she needed to be sent somewhere she could not cause trouble: 

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Lacie, who is starting to feel quite overwhelmed and out of her depth, asks this question almost word for word. 

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:A man from another world arrived in ours in a magical accident and ran into me. This was discovered by an order of paladins who serve Iomedae, the god of the war on Hell, and apparently it's very valuable strategic information so they kidnapped me so I couldn't report it to anybody, only wizards are hard to safely hold prisoner, and if they just executed me I would go to Hell and could warn them, so they were looking into - ways to execute me so I didn't get an afterlife - or other options - and I guess they did this.:

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This is relayed, along with a faint pleading note of 'Leareth help???'. 

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:All right, that was the correct thread to pull on and now I think we need to back up several steps again. Who is Iomedae, what is Hell - they have afterlives?? Why is there a war on between Hell and Iomedae, who is Iomedae anyway, what is the historical context here?:

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Lacie takes a deep breath. :We - haven't heard of this god 'Iomedae' or this war - or of...afterlives in that sense in general, really, as - polities that can be at war with other polities, is that right? Can you give us some background: 

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:The Outer Planes are planes where people live, and where gods have the seats of their power. There are nine of them. Hell is one. Heaven is another one. They're at war. My understanding of the war is that it's because Heaven finds Hell's treatment of its inhabitants objectionable and thinks murdering them is a good thing to do about this but I am sure their explanation would be different. I don't think our world always had afterlives and it's - possible that yours doesn't -: Now she's terrified. At least if they'd turned her into a statue the statue would eventually in however many thousands of years probably have gotten destroyed enough to kill her and then she'd have eventually made it to Hell but if this world has no afterlives at all -

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What a fascinatingly different solution to the problem of people dying than the ones he's been considering! Leareth doesn't voice that right now, though, it doesn't seem like the time yet. 

:You can reassure her that souls continue to exist after death, here, if not - fully - and that we do not intend to kill her, which ought be believable because she is obviously very useful. Ask what treatment, exactly, she thinks Heaven finds objectionable: Pause. :- Also if people in Hell who are murdered go somewhere else, or...disappear...: 

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:People here don't just vanish when they die: Lacie clarifies, trying to push in as much reassurance as she can - which is tricky given how alarmed she feels right now. :They don't - go keep being people elsewhere, exactly - but the gods can reincarnate them, including sometimes with a lot of their memories, though usually it's as babies and they don't remember. And it would be very stupid of us to kill you anytime soon, obviously, when you're bringing over such incredibly valuable intelligence on other worlds. So...we've got a long time to figure something out, we hope:

Sigh. :I understand you only have one side of things, yourself, but - what exactly about Hell's treatment of its people do you think Heaven objects to?:

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It would be stupid of them to kill her anytime soon. She's scared anyway but probably that's just because she's - scared as a habit, at this point - she wants to go home - she wants to have reported Kyeo the second she met him - she wants to have screamed, when they came to kidnap her -

:In Hell you are reshaped and improved and it's painful. Humans - aren't very good at thinking about that, right, because in our world things being painful is aversive and scary, but when you're just a soul and not a mortal being who might die of it, the way you relate to it can be very different, and also - the timescales are very different, something can hurt for a thousand years and that's still worth it if it makes you better for the rest of eternity. People who've been through it don't tend to regret it as far as I know, and I've talked to some, though not about this topic in particular.:

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:I see: She doesn't at all, but she relays it to Leareth anyway. 

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He's also dubious but now seems like not the time to dig into it. :Move on. Ask about Kyeo - not by name, that makes it obvious we are reading her mind, ask about the man from another world:

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:Can you tell me about the man who came from another world in a magical accident?: How many worlds ARE there anyway, aaaaaaah. :What's that world like?: 

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:They abolished money and I don't think it worked very well for them. They have planet-melting weapons and I think that's what Heaven's interested in: though she's not going to think the implications through in too much depth because that will just make her miserable and scared - though at least there's no longer the additional constraint that her life might depend on converting - :I think they've invented things we haven't but not things Kyeo knows anything about.:

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:Huh, they abolished money? Why?: That seems like such an inexplicably weird thing to do! 

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:They claimed to have thought that there wouldn't be poor people if you just didn't have any money. I don't know what was really going on, Kyeo wants to go back so it would've been rude to make him think about it. There was talk about bringing in a cleric of Abadar - the god of money - but they ended up going to Nefreti instead.:

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:You...have a god of money? What does that even mean, what does He do - give people gold when they pray to Him?: 

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:...no. That is not how gods work. But he makes merchant ventures go well and his priests have a better truth spell, because law is so important to commerce.:

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:Hmm. I don't know how your gods work, I think, ours - do things, but they don't directly lead wars or give people magic consistently or do anything as legible as 'make merchant ventures go well'. ...Also can you tell me what you mean by 'law' being important to commerce, it...sounds like you don't just mean countries having smart policies around taxation and trade, or good enforcement of punishment for breaking contracts and theft and such: 

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:Law is one of the forces of the universe that the gods see the world in. For humans the parts of it we can understand mostly cash out to good rule of law and punishment for breaking contracts and there not being bandits on the roads, things like that. But I think that's just a fraction of what Law is.:

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:...Law is - a force of the universe? I'm guessing you don't mean physical or natural law, like how objects fall downward and, uh, how water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes, things like that...: 

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:I think that's pretty much what I mean. Or, well, temperature is a property of objects and Law is a property of actions and of people.:

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:And one that matters a lot to the gods. I guess that's - coherent, anyway. Abadar cares about Law because it's important for commerce... Do all the gods care about it, or only if it happens to be important for their main thing?: 

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:Gods sort Lawful or Neutral or Chaotic. Asmodeus, Lord of Hell, is Lawful. So is Iomedae. And Abadar, and some other ones - Erastil, Irori, the lesser rulers of Hell. Neutral ones include Pharasma, who sorts the dead, Gozreh, god of nature, Shelyn and Sarenrae, gods of love and niceness I think, and Norgorber, god of crime, and Urgathoa, goddess of disease. And the Chaotic ones are - Lamashtu, the demon queen, Calistria, goddess of revenge,  Gorem, god of battle, Desna, goddess of wandering, Cayden Cailean, god of drunks... Chaotic gods tend to think order and expectations are bad and everyone should do as they wish at all times, or at least that's the human gloss on a god-thing that's probably mostly about something else...:

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Lacie is scrambling for paper. :I'm sorry, I think I need you to say all of that again more slowly so I can get it down - that's so many gods, do all of them give people magic and have - plans of the general nature and scale of 'running wars'... I guess probably not Nethys if he mostly drives followers insane:  

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:I think all of the gods have important projects and aims but I don't know much about most of them and some of them sort of have human-comprehensible elements or intermediate steps, and some really don't at all, and some might be giving humans misimpressions about their ultimate aims or just not bothering to correct the impressions we came up with...: She lists them all again, though.

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:Thank you. Hmm, one moment...: 

And to another mind, further off:

:- Leareth?: 

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:- I think she is leaving out significant elements of the gods - value and goal systems, or else Asmodeus and Iomedae who are literally at war with one another would not be in the same bucket. Can you ask her to clarify, politely?: 

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:Are there - other dimensions or concepts that the gods care about?: Lacie asks her after a longish gap. :Just, it seems like gods who both are pro-Law can still be very, er, different in outlook: 

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:I mean they can also vary on Good or Evil but even within gods that are all Lawful Evil gods disagree about lots of things, the dimensions are not, like, wholly determinative of what a god is or anything and they still have strategic disagreements and different values and want resources from each other and things. Iomedae and Erastil are both Lawful Good but almost completely different in what they want. It probably makes more sense if you're a god.:

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:- Can you, er, unpack 'Good' and 'Evil' and...how much the god-version is different or counterintuitive compared to the, uh, common sense human meaning of the words?: 

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:Uh, it doesn't not correspond at all but the standard is set in place where most stuff is Evil, the best way to not be Evil is to just try to not take actions that have large-scale effects on the world at all. Or to worship a Good god, lots of stuff that'd otherwise be Evil is Good if you're doing it on behalf of a Good god. Almost all people end up counting as neutral or as Evil. But things like, I don't know, opening a soup kitchen to feed hungry people, is Good, so if you really want Good you can just do that and mostly not do anything else and you will probably make it. Maybe. Like two percent of people end up Good.:

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:...Everywhere? I - am confused about how all of the other gods continue to maintain a power base for more than a generation or two:

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:There is a relationship between how many supporters you have and how powerful you are but it's not very direct. Asmodeus is the most powerful god by a significant margin, though.:

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:Asmodeus is - 'Lawful Evil', yes? Is he the most powerful mostly based on his number of supporters or from other factors as well - what are the other factors anyway - also how does relative power cache out, here, what does it enable...: Lacie stops. :I'm sorry, that was multiple questions, let's do one at a time. What makes him the most powerful?: 

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:I'm not sure. I think it's a mixture of - knowledge, he's one of the oldest gods, he has seen more things - resources, which are those accumulated over time - and he has more because he's one of the oldest gods - and those being earned today, which he has more of than Good gods because most people are neutral or Evil, and innate background features of the universe like, the Lawful afterlives are finite and take resource expenditures from their gods to expand, the Chaotic ones are infinite, the Neutral ones are finite but grow on their own, that affects how gods have to spend resources...I don't think the number of supporters alive today is a very big part of that whole but it is some part of it, and he has lots of supporters, though I don't know if he has the most, there are species other than humans and some of them are very numerous and they mostly worship other gods I think.:

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Leareth is absolutely not taking any of this at face value at all. That being said, he's aware that he's communicating across a vast cultural divide - and also via intermediaries. 

:I want more detail on this: he sends. :Ask her what Evil's goals are, other than...'having goals' in the abstract: 

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Lacie asks this. 

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:Evil peoplehave all kinds of normal people goals. To discover new magic, to inherit a duchy, to run a successful business, to travel and see the world. The goals of the Evil gods - I don't know that they have much in common with each other. I know Lamashtu is the most powerful demon in the Abyss but I have no idea what He wants. People say Urgathoa is the goddess of disease? I guess she values disease, or one of its correlates? Asmodeus is opposed to free will because it made everything on Golarion much worse for everybody but I don't think that's because he's Evil particularly.:

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:- What do you mean, free will made everything worse for everybody? Can...you define the term 'free will', I wonder if this is another thing like Law where our world doesn't - have this as an ontologically basic concept...: Lacie has a feeling it's not quite that but she's so confused and also starting to feel moderately disturbed. 

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"So, if you're a very talented wizard you can make a construct-person who is reasonably intelligent and can follow reasonably complex instructions, but it just does that, it doesn't drift and decide it'd rather run off and do other things, it doesn't resent the purpose for which it was created, it has goals about the world not goals about itself. Mortals - used to be like that. They were a thing the gods made for god reasons and they were meant to do that thing, and they did that thing, and there was something that it was like to be a mortal and it was pleasant and satisfying because the goals and circumstances were aligned. And then this god called Ihys made mortals - the way we are now, instead, where people want all kinds of things and are very unhappy about being made to do things someone else wants them to and spend most of their energy pursuing little mortal goals. Asmodeus was upset about this. Kind of like how you'd be upset if someone turned all your possessions into people and they wandered off to do their own thing."

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Lacie, for lack of any better response, calmly takes notes on all of that.

:I - see. I think that's not quite a philosophical concept we have in our world. Our gods - don't seem to interact with mortals on that level, though I'm guessing they find it inconvenient when we go having goals: 

She takes a deep breath. This - probably isn't the helpful or strategic thing to say, but she thinks she's kind of lost the plot here, this interrogation has just gone several levels more bizarre and confusing than she was prepared for. 

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:I realize she may literally not know, but I wish to learn more about how 'Good' thinks of itself, here, can you ask. ...Also make sure to read her thoughts too: 

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Deep breath. :...Does 'Good' have any philosophy other than fighting Evil?: Lacie asks. :I - assume they tell themselves something different, 'we fight anyone who has goals' isn't very, I don't know, convincing to follow: 

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:They have been trying to explain it to me but they weren't very successful. I know that they think that they can defeat Asmodeus and that if they do this then they'll be kinder rulers of everything than He is. I know that they think that everyone in Cheliax is brainwashed and otherwise we would want to worship Iomedae like they do. I know they think that it's very very bad when anyone has painful experiences, even if the person having it is fine with it and wants the end result, and they don't think we're able to say that anyway because once you decide people are brainwashed then it also makes sense to decide they're wrong about what they want. I know they think that they're better than us because they follow weirdly specific rules that prohibit some ways of hurting people even though you can hurt people just as much other ways, and they have done that, and they think that's fine. We agree on the destruction of souls being bad. We agree on the Worldwound being bad, and are successfully cooperating with them about that. We also agree that more people should go to school to learn to be wizards, and that ideally people wouldn't get in trouble if they hadn't done anything wrong, and that it speaks well of places when they have enough discipline to not abuse their prisoners in ways that don't advance their goals, and...I think that's all the common ground we had run into.:

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Lacie is yet again very unsure how to respond and falls back mostly on noting it all down and relaying it. 

:What is the Worldwound?: she asks when Sevar finishes, at least that one's concrete and non-philosophically-baffling question that might have a comprehensible answer. 

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:A hundred years ago a hole tore open to the Abyss and now demons pour through it constantly trying to eat and destroy everything in the world. It's very far from Cheliax but the nearby countries couldn't handle it and a problem like that doesn't stay in one place so we keep as much of an army there as we can supply, keeping the demons penned in.:

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:- Leareth, you figure that's the same thing as the Abyssal Plane?:

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:Could be. I - can scarcely imagine what kind of event might tear a permanent opening between separate planes like that, though. Ask her if this is - known to be easier or more common in her world: 

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:How did the Worldwound get torn open? Are there any other interplanar, er, openings, like that?:

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:There was a fight between gods. Asmodeus won but the Worldwound got torn open in the process. I think there's a much smaller one in Garund, to Abaddon, Cheliax has offered to go close it but the local government has been refusing so far.:

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Lacie shudders slightly. :How - often, do gods in your world have wars on a scale like that: 

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:I can't think of another example in recorded history. It was very awful. I have seen estimates that something like fifteen percent of the population of the world died. - not mostly of the Worldwound, there was also two weeks of violent storms and a storm surge that basically destroyed the entire harvest that year, everywhere north of the equator, and there were earthquakes that swallowed cities.:

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:...That's awful:

Lacie can't think of further questions, mostly because she's utterly horrified. 

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:I think we ought call it off now: Leareth instructs her. :Tell her we - need some time to consider things. ...Oh, and ask what magic she can do right now: 

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:I...think...that's all our most urgent questions about your world: Lacie says, shakily. :Er, you said you're a wizard - what sorts of magic can you do, here, when you're not in your own world: 

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She wonders what these peoples' deal is. Probably the location would not have been chosen if they were going to help her but that could be 'won't want to' or 'won't be able to'. Probably Nefreti at least thought this would be better for Carissa than being married or petrified -

- Nefreti would understand, she thinks, a bit absurdly, an Osirian woman, unmarried, at whatever cost she must have pulled that off - they marry them at eighteen, nineteen, she would've needed to be sure already she could support herself -

- or maybe it served Nefreti in some way that had nothing to do with Carissa and she should stop being pathetic and assuming people were doing her personal favors when she has absolutely no reason to think that.

 

:I could test whether I can do magic here if you untie me.: The only thing she could do without that is summon her spellbook but she doesn't want to summon it here if she's going to be unable to use magic to put it back.

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:...Leareth?:

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Leareth grits his teeth slightly. Forces himself to relax. 

:This seems important to know, actually. Please untie her. Have Allentara watch: (Allentara is the mage summoned to test Sevar's Gifts.) 

...It's important to know, and so far Sevar does not seem to feel that she's in a position where trying to fight her way out will help, or work - she's right about that, almost certainly - and, at worst, he can afford to lose everyone in the room and if the shields don't hold he should still have a second's warning to Gate himself elsewhere. 

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:...Yes, of course:

Lacie glances at the Healer and the mage standing by, then unties her.

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She tries dancing lights.

 

It works.

She feels - like she can breathe, again. 

 

She wants to read their minds. Probably a bad idea right now. But they're obviously consulting someone invisible or something and she wants to know what's going on, she wants to understand them, she wants to -

- there's no afterlife here, she's going to have to be really careful if she wants anything she cares about to be real....

:It looks like my magic works normally here: she says. :I mostly prepared translation spells, the day I was kidnapped, I could cast one of those to give you my language, if you'd like it. It won't be permanent but it does aid in learning the language.:

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Lacie relays all of that to Leareth in real time. 

:Translation magic?: she says, impressed. :We - don't have that, I'm not sure how you'd do it even in principle given what we know about magic here. Any chance you know how it works?: 

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(And Leareth is thinking, absorbing it, noting that - she's very clever, she's very strategic, he's impressed - and she's also very dangerous, clearly misaligned with what he cares about in some deeply confusing way...he's deeply confused about most of what they've learned, actually... For now he doesn't give Lacie any additional instructions.) 

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:I can explain it in terms of my magic but I don't know enough about yours yet to explain it in terms of yours. It's a divination, which is the school of magic that deals in information - scrying, and reading minds, and detecting magic or minds or Evil or whatever else. It's second-circle, which has to do mostly with how complex a spell is, though complexity in magic isn't exactly the same as complexity in language or complexity in human terms. It lasts a bit more than one day on my planet.:

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:Huh. Does the spell work by reading both of our minds to get our respective languages and how that correlates to the thought-concepts, or something in that vein?: 

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:It just gives you my vocabulary and concept-associations, it doesn't do anything to you.:

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:Ah: Lacie isn't sure she follows, magic giving her Sevar's vocabulary definitely sounds like it's doing something to her mind, but whatever, not really the point. :Sure, you can cast it: 

(The mage nearby is watching very closely.)

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And she moves her hands and pulls out from nowhere an elaborate web of magic, beautiful, very complicated, and draws its ends together in a motion sort of like tying a knot, and touches Lacie, and the spell discharges. There's - a significant amount of magical power, enough to easily kill someone unshielded if it were directed as force or fire rather than as this elaborate thing.

Lacie now speaks Taldane. 

Carissa notes the mage watching. She continues to be pretty sure she can't fight her way out of here and actually the thing to do is to see if she can specialize into conjuration and pick up that dimension-stepping power they get. Anyway the spells she has prepared right now are all mindreading and translation and Endure Elements.

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Leareth’s people are all very disciplined and don’t show much reaction, but that is SO COOL!!!

”- Probably it makes sense to use this to start a dictionary between our languages,” Lacie decides. “If I talk to you and then repeat everything we are saying to my colleagues so they can note it down...”

She doesn’t want to keep being distracted by shocking and confusing revelations, right now, so she starts asking the most innocuous questions she can think of - what’s the food like in Cheliax, what about the weather, how are schools run, how good are their sewage systems...

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Carissa is in a much better mood now and can answer questions. She's from Corentyn, which is a port city, lots of fish and seafood and imports from faraway, with the coastal climate of mild summers and mild, wet winters, though even a little bit inland it's hot in the summer and snows in the winter. Schooling is universal, Cheliax being the only place in the world that accomplishes this, students divided up by age and aptitude and more strongly by aptitude as they get older. School is six days a week, the seventh being the holy day. Corentyn was badly damaged in the catastrophe previously referenced and in the subsequent civil war and but repairs to the aqueducts and sewer systems and roads and seawalls are well underway, the nice part of town is pretty much back to its former glory. 

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This is all very interesting in its own right and Lacie can keep up the conversation for a while; she switches to relaying/translating in Mindspeech to the Healer who takes notes, so they can do it more simultaneously. 

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Leareth can catch up from their notes later. He paces the hallway and thinks very hard. 

...After a bit he goes to review the ward-alarm notes taken by his sentries, trying to see if he can gauge anything at all from the magic signature left by her means of transport here. It's - hard to tell if he can or not. Maybe. 

Other worlds. Multiple other worlds. This changes everything

Eventually he heads back to his office and sits down. Dawn was a candlemark ago, now; they've all been up since the middle of the night, but he barely feels the exhaustion. His other staff may not be as thoroughly energized by the news as he is, though. 

:You all ought take a break and rest: he instructs Lacie. :Excuse yourself whenever it is convenient and leave her alone. You can tell her that she can call if she needs food or anything. She does not have any combat magic prepared and the room is shielded anyway.: 

And he summons another of the strong Mindspeakers on site, also keyed to the room-shields, to sit outside and read Carissa Sevar's mind while they give her some time and space to consider her situation. 

Leareth is very curious. 

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Carissa Sevar walks around her room, once she's left alone, swings her arms - the paladins tried to nudge her to exercise but it was unpleasant to walk around while chained up, she kept feeling off-balance, and it felt like they only cared because they were pretending that it was somehow less of a wrong to her if company and stew and words like 'marriage' were thrown around, or maybe because they genuinely get Good points as long as those boxes are checked, which feels somehow even worse....

She detects magic, and studies the wards on the walls. They are not comprehensible, not really, but - she could probably learn, with enough time. She probably will learn with enough time. 

She does dancing lights and races them around the corners of the room and breathes, and once the dancing lights have systematically determined that there's no one invisible in the room she curls up and cries for a long time, which is stupid but she's too tired to do anything about it. 

This might be okay. She won't be able to get word home, but - honestly it's hard to be too invested in getting word home. It is hard to imagine Asmodeus doesn't already know about other worlds, millions of them, and he has his plans, whatever they are, and if she went home she would...well, maybe evade being executed for being stupid in the first place, but maybe not, and even if she did she wouldn't be the clever youngest wizard of her class who can get scholarships someday for travel to Absalom and to drink Nefreti Clepati's wine in Sothis, she'd be - entangled in this mess, and scared forever, and she's so tired of being scared.

She should be careful that she doesn't let being tired of being scared tempt her into not being scared here, though. She arrived at a location she knows nothing about, and was within ten or fifteen minutes in a nicely appointed cell with magic wards and a telepath and a sorcerer on hand to figure out what was going on. If Nefreti dropped her in a random location that implies terrifying logistical capacity. If Nefreti dropped her in a secure location in an important building she knew to conveniently already have an empty cell then it's much less impressive. There's no way to know.

She is valuable to them. It would be stupid to kill her right now. It'll stop being stupid to kill her once they know enough arcane magic to derive the rest themself. They'll want her to teach them. How can she stall, teach it slowly, without making it suspiciously obvious? This is an interesting question and she considers it awhile. She can avoid admitting it's possible to start with cantrips and make them practice on first-circle spells first, make out cantrips to be an advanced technique you can only master once you have the basics down. She can reject spellbook ink as inadequate. She can probably buy six months, which is enough time to figure out whether they're likely to kill her once she's disposable and maybe enough time to do something about it if they are. 

Some conjuration specialists learn to jump through space without even having to cast a full spell, pinching the plane around them and slipping right through. It takes years to learn, but she's probably learned some of the relevant concepts already. Maybe... and she loses herself in trying to imagine how you'd do it.

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A while into this, the Mindspeaker watching calls Leareth over. :You're going to want to see this yourself. - I don't think it's much additional risk: 

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No, probably not, they know this strange woman from another world, who serves a god who publically calls himself Evil - serves an ideology that claims the act of having goals is in itself evil - in any case, they know she doesn't have offensive magic she can cast right now, however her magic works it needs to be prepared in advance. (No wonder; he saw an attempted diagram of the translation spell, drawn by the mage afterward, and it's so complex and rich and beautiful...) 

Leareth is thoroughly keyed to the wards; he made them himself. So he sits on the other side of a wall and reads Carissa Sevar's thoughts - wishes he could afford a deeper probe than what he can pick up passively from the surface around her odd native shields, but she would notice that - 

Leareth sits and does his best to follow her meandering thoughts about her strategic plans and objectives - feels admiration for it, her goals clearly aren't his but she's smart and she's trying and that's...really rare, actually. 

(Maybe less rare in a country serving a god like Asmodeus, but...no, he doubts it.) 

Leareth watches her think about magic, just passively observing he can only catch the surface of it but he can guess at the rest, he's very familiar with interplanar mechanics - a Gate is, in a way, pinching the plane around itself and slipping right through... 

He wants to talk to her. But he's feeling the sleep deprivation, at this point, which means it's not at all a good time for a fraught, delicate conversation.

He hands back off to the Mindspeaker and another mage, asks them to arrange shifts for the night and call for him if she does anything unexpected and hostile, and goes off to eat supper and sleep. 

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Some different stranger brings Carissa meals, and asks if she wants a change of clothes, or hot water to wash up, or paper to write on. 

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Carissa would be very grateful for all of those things. 

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All of those things can be brought to the room, and after that they let her sleep, and in the morning someone brings her breakfast. 

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And in the morning, a different person arrives. He knocks first, politely, before entering. His body language is very still and his dark eyes are unreadable. 

"Sevar," he says. "My name is Leareth and this," he gestures around, expansive enough to indicate he means a lot more than just the room, "is my facility. I think that we ought to speak." 

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In the morning she can prepare spells. She fetches her spellbook out of the ethereal plane, which to her relief works, and spends a while waffling over which ones she wants and ends up preparing a bunch more Share Language because that'll almost definitely come up and leaving most of the rest of her slots empty. She needs to know how their magic will work to guess whether Detect Thoughts is a good idea.

She decides that the first thing she wants and doesn't have is Nondetection, which will help if they're reading her mind, she might have plans that are easier without that. She doesn't consider what plans, especially. And she wants whatever precursors exist or can be derived to Dimension Door, and she wants to see if she can get materials for magic item making, and she wants Dispel Magic - 

- magic research is stupidly dangerous, she should figure out first whether her situation is dangerous enough to warrant it -

 

She puts on her new clothes and ties up her hair and sends dancing lights racing all over the room again and then is interrupted.

 

He's scary. 

She tries not to let this show. She nods. "Of course."

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There's a chair at one end of the room. Leareth takes it and brings it closer and sits. This does not make him appreciably less scary. 

"I have a great many reasons to be interested in your world," he says, levelly. "Most of which I cannot share, at this time, but - obviously the existence of many other worlds at all is a huge resource, which I intend to explore in due time. However, I also wish to understand why, exactly, this Nefreti Clepati who serves the god Nethys decided to handle the paladins' request by bringing you here. I...am generally very suspicious about this sort of interference, and it makes no sense to me, which indicates I am missing an important piece of the picture here. I think it would be in both of our interests to figure this puzzle out, honestly; I assume you have just as much desire as I do to understand how and why greater Powers are using you as a pawn in Their schemes." 

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- honestly Carissa has mostly narrowed her desires to not ceasing to exist forever. She does not have the slightest intentions of being honest, there, though.

"I suspect I'd need to know more about this world to even begin to guess at that," she says.

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"Of course. I will do my best to summarize the relevant pieces and then you can clarify where you are confused." Leareth takes a slow breath, his hands still in his lap, his expression still illegible. "This world is called Velgarth. We have different magic than Golarion - at least, arcane magic was never discovered here, it does appear to work and I assume we could learn it. All of our magic is in the form of inborn Gifts, I think what you would call 'sorcerers', but these come in many varieties, some of which are quite specific - Mindspeech, for example - and one of which, mage-gift, is extremely general. - Your magic lets you sense other magic, I am guessing? In which case you have likely noticed the wards and shielding on this room. All of those are done by a mage." 

He pauses for a moment, eyes resting on her. 

"- Also relevant context, is that I am immortal, and about eighteen hundred years old; I was born shortly before the Cataclysm that Lacie explained briefly to you. I - have spent a very long time trying to address various problems in this world. Many of them are the sort of thing that Cheliax seems to do quite well - roads, trade, schools, medical treatment, enough food for everyone. The gods here are not on our side in this, however, and in particular seem very opposed to civilizational progress. They are - more cryptic than Golarion's gods, They seem to perceive the world mainly via Foresight and operate mostly with subtle nudges and coincidences, such that it took me a long time even to realize that my various projects failing was too consistent to be merely bad luck. They are not very interested in talking to me or negotiating a compromise here, I have tried; I think it is likely They are fundamentally not the sort of beings that can communicate with humans in that way." 

Sigh. "Anyway. I have a plan to improve this state of affairs, but I would prefer a better plan, which is most of why I am interested in your world. I also have significant concerns about attempting to work with gods, given my past experiences, and - the goals and values of your world's gods both confuse me deeply, and seem to lead to vastly more inter-god conflict than occurs here. I have no desire to involve Velgarth in that. Also. I mean no offense, but you are not an unbiased source, here, as the follower of one specific god among many, and - I have significant concerns that Asmodeus in particular is not very well aligned with my goals. That is much of what I wish to discuss with you." 

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She has no way to verify any of it but it's not like powerful wizards can't make themselves unaging, if they wish. 

"If your gods are against civilizational progress then that seems very inconvenient," she says carefully. "I guess I should count my people fortunate that Asmodeus wants our nation to be prosperous."

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"That - does seem a point in his favor," Leareth acknowledges. "I would like to hear more about how Asmodeus runs Cheliax, and - what his goals are, in doing that." 

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She's so tired. 

This is more straightforward than the paladins, though. The paladins cared about Good, and the things this man described caring about are just - reasonable things. Prosperity. 

"Cheliax is ruled by House Thrune, one of our ancient noble houses. After the King Gaspodar invited ruin in the calamity of a hundred years ago, there was a civil war, and it lasted nearly a decade and was very terrible, and House Thrune won and brought it to an end. They had allied with Hell, for help winning the civil war and rebuilding the country afterwards. Hell has lots of resources, and it is not traditional, for the gods to intervene so directly in the world, but - the war among the gods broke prophecy, and I guess that changed a lot of things. Asmodeus wants everyone in Cheliax to worship him primarily, and for the country to be prosperous and return to the role it had in the world before the great disaster. We have to be strong enough to close the Worldwound and win the allegiance of our neighbors and check the expansion of rivals, all of that. I do not know what Asmodeus's ultimate goals are but I would expect Cheliax being prosperous to be a priority for a long time, there are few advantages to being weak. I have heard it said He intends to eventually conquer the other Outer Planes."

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Nod. "Why does Hell have so many resources? Or do the other Outer Planes also have this and simply avoid intervening in the material plane with them?" 

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"Some of both, I think? The Chaotic planes don't have anyone who could organize large-scale long-term trade with the material plane, random individual warlords can and do sometimes do it I think, when they want specific things. I don't know why Heaven doesn't do Good things in the material plane much but maybe they do in some place I haven't heard of or maybe you don't get Good points for it that way for some reason, and either way Heaven is much weaker than Hell so they'd do much less of it."

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"Hmm. Why is Heaven much weaker than Hell?" 

Leareth is confused and moderately suspicious and is now paying even more close attention to all of her surface thoughts. 

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She doesn't really expect it to matter for grand strategic things what she convinces him about Asmodeus because Nefreti wouldn't have sent her here if she could get back, but it probably matters a lot for what happens to her once they've learned the basics of arcane magic from her. She thinks that Asmodeus has reasonable goals and sounds like a vast improvement on the local gods in terms of how things work out for his humans, but honestly this guy sounds like he probably wants Abadar, if he could get the attention of a god for some reason, but it might be treasonous to suggest that instead (...but it doesn't matter, because Nefreti wouldn't have sent her here if she could get back...)

"Hell is unified under Asmodeus; Heaven has several main gods with different definitions of Good. Erastil likes farms and made a big chunk of Heaven just farms where people are farmers forever. - outsiders don't even need to eat, He just wants them farming. Shizuru... quit Her works when Her lover died, I think, and now She doesn't do anything. Iomedae does things but She's a new god and very weak compared to Asmodeus and also one of the main things She did was ally with Aroden on causing the great disaster, and Aroden died in it, so I don't know where that leaves Her. Aside from that sometimes Her paladins kidnap people from the Worldwound and give them to Nefreti."

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Wow, a god of farming making people who don't need to eat farm sounds - incredibly pointless - though he wonders if Carissa even has accurate information there, or if she'd know if Heaven actually exported that food to living humans in the material plane who do need to eat...

"- Your gods are the sort of entities that can have lovers?" Leareth shakes his head. "Nevermind, that question is not a priority, just - our gods are not nearly humanlike enough for that to make sense. Do - you happen to know what Aroden was trying to do, when He ended up causing a disaster? Since I assume that was not the intent." 

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"The lovers thing is almost certainly a metaphor but it's a licensed one, from their official priests and everything. In Tian they conceptualize all the gods as having familial relationships to each other, brothers and sisters and in-laws, and it's wrong but - anything humans imagine about gods is going to be wrong, it's a useful way to understand how they'll be allied. Familial relationships aren't as useful as alignment for imagining how our pantheon will be allied, I don't think.

Aroden was supposed to usher in an Age of Glory for Cheliax."

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"...Interesting. That - seems like a worthy goal to me, anyway. What was Aroden's alignment?" 

(What does Carissa think about Aroden - does she feel like she's allowed to think about it...?)

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"Lawful neutral." It is probably vaguely treasonous to give the impression Aroden's plans were a good idea but she doesn't know enough about them to convincingly argue they were bad. And if they were good aside from how they didn't work and instead caused a disaster, that's a kind of being bad, really.

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Which, Leareth is thinking, is a fair point. 

"Anyway. Given what we have discussed, do you have - any ideas or theories at all, even very speculative ones, about what Nefreti or Nethys might have wished to accomplish by bringing you here in particular? ...Nefreti dropped you in - a remote location in my territory, but one with detection wards, so it is predictable that I would find you very quickly and end up speaking with you as we are now." 

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Information about their capabilities but mostly obviated by thousand-year-old spellcaster, if he's telling the truth about that; it's easily within the bounds of what a thousand-year-old spellcaster can do. Most things are within the bounds of what a thousand-year-old spellcaster can do. Probably it is very nearly futile to get anything past him while he still finds her interesting. But he won't forever, and she can work on magic - she closes off this line of thought before it touches on any of her planning from last night. 

"I don't know. Maybe it serves the god of magic for people in more places to learn new kinds of magic. Maybe it was the likeliest place around to have me not die forever right away and also not have any way to learn" scrying, which works across planes and which she can use to contact Asmodeus "seventh-circle spells, which are what I think I'd need to get home."

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Leareth's mind races through quite a lot of thoughts, very quickly - it's half in shorthand, jumping back to all the thinking he did yesterday while he was reading Carissa Sevar's mind from the other side of a wall. None of this shows on his face; his black eyes are like still pools, fixed on her. 

...He likes her. Feels admiration for - what? Not just her obvious cleverness - for the fact that she's not giving up, even though it must be tempting, she has so few avenues to get herself home. Her thoughts are so careful and paranoid. He's impressed by that. 

He doesn't trust her. He mistrusts her more than he would just on the grounds that she's a single, inevitably biased source from a world with a dozen factions and incredibly complex politics. The specific way that her thoughts are cautiously strategic is - concerning, in some vague way he can't name, and - he doesn't trust Asmodeus, he doesn't trust her to be telling him everything relevant, she has an agenda and on priors it's not his agenda and in addition to that some evidence is mounting that it's not. 

He's not exactly sure where to go with this. Possibly he wants to make contact with Golarion; possibly he wants to definitely avoid that and just learn everything she knows about arcane magic and go from there. ...Either way he could best accomplish his goals here if she were an ally, and she isn't - unsurprisingly - and he's not sure how deep that divide goes... 

He needs more information. And to - keep as many paths open as possible, for now, though he's not sure how that cashes out. 

"Well," he says, after only about fifteen seconds of silence, "I certainly would like to learn about your magic. Also it is possible I wish to help you reach your world so that I can propose an alliance with Asmodeus, but for that I need more information." And he has a feeling she's eliding quite a lot and will keep doing that even in her thoughts. "As a start, can you tell me what your day to day life in Cheliax was like?" 

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That's probably a lie. It's possible that they're just far enough away he couldn't do it but if he's telling the truth about being thousands of years old she doubts that he couldn't do it, so it seems likely that he won't want to, and for it to be overdetermined enough Nefreti sent her here - not a productive line of thought, not right now.

She's scared. She's scared that once he resolves whatever he's still confused about he'll decide to be more careful, and she won't have a chance to - she curtails that line of thought too. Focus on the questions. 

"I'm an arms and armor enchanter serving at the Worldwound," she says. "I did a two-year tour of duty on our border when I graduated, but I was doing well at learning weapons enchantment, and there was a program to get weapons enchanters a tour at the Worldwound because it attracts adventurers and armies from all over the world. Cheliax is the bulk of the force there, of course, but other people cycle in and out, and lots of them have powerful magic weapons they won or had commissioned or scavenged from a tomb, and I can look at them and take lots of notes and then I'll be able to make those myself. On a typical day I do that. I work on magic items all day while most people are out fighting, and then in the evening I meet other adventurers and ask them how they got their gear and ask to look at it. They usually find it flattering."

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He smiles slightly. "I see. You must know quite a lot about magic items at this point, then?" 

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This line of questioning is much less concerning. "Yes. I planned on opening a shop once I was out of the army."

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"What sort of supplies and setup would you need, to work on magic items here?" 

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"Spellsilver. And - I don't have most of my notes. I can probably reconstruct some of it from memory but not all of it."

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"- I am not sure I know what spellsilver is, but if it is a metal that can be mined, it seems plausible we have it here and I could provide it. And - you seem very clever, I expect you could make progress even before we have any leads on contacting your world."

Another slight, brief smile, and then it fades back to a level, neutral expression. "I want to know more about Cheliax, though. What was your childhood like, there - you can describe to me an average day when you were, say, ten." 

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He wants to get at something and she doesn't have any idea what. "When I was ten I was in school and I was tracked for being clever but not for magic yet. I went to Imperial - to the Imperial Academy of Corentyn, it predates the war, it's a big old school up on the cliffs. You can see the Arch of Triumph, which stretches all the way across the Inner Sea at its narrowest point, ten miles. I studied math and composition and drawing and Infernal and geography. I was good at all of them except Infernal, I'm rubbish at languages for some reason." A pang of misery she doesn't dwell on.

"The school fed us breakfast, lunch, and dinner - some schools only do breakfast and lunch but at Imperial most students stayed after class to do their homework. There were prayer services before breakfast and there were sports after class, but you were allowed to skip them to do homework and I always did because I wanted to be a wizard and that takes being smart, not much in the way of sports, and also boys are better than girls at sports but not at magic so it seemed like I should compete where I could get a fair playing field."

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A flicker of something like approval in his eyes. "That makes sense. You sound like a very diligent student. ...Can you tell me why they taught Infernal in school, what it was important for? It is...the language spoken in Hell?"

(And Leareth pays a lot of attention to her thoughts because he wants to figure out what that pang of misery is about.) 

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"Yes, they speak Infernal in Hell. Lots of important books about Asmodean theology and so on are only written in Infernal and lots of people summon devils to do work or trade goods and you want to have a good command of Infernal for that." She resents about herself that she's bad at languages. It seems to mostly go off intelligence, she hasn't really met other wizards who are bad at it, but the sounds sound the same to her and it's all just memorization and she had to be beaten for it a lot just to get up to average.

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Leareth nods. Looks sympathetic. "There are many skills that correlate with intelligence but that some clever people are bad at for no reason. I am rubbish at drawing, for some reason, I would not have done well in that class had I studied in Cheliax." He looks thoughtful. "What is discipline like, in Chelish schools? I know that varies widely even within this world." 

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She wonders if he's reading her mind. "I don't know what they do in other places. I guess they consider most students not worth educating and maybe they just kick them out if they seem incompetent at it. We punish students for misbehavior or slacking. Not enough to need healing, except in unusual cases. You can get transferred between schools but not kicked out of school entirely until you're of an age for an apprenticeship."

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Well, she was bound to get suspicious at some point - he was surprised she hasn't been more suspicious about it, actually, she didn't even seem to be considering that someone might be reading her mind while she was alone in the room. Maybe her world's mindreading has different limitations, she hasn't thought about it in enough specifics for him to guess. 

"I see, that does not sound especially unusual," Leareth says smoothly. "Aside from the firm commitment to educating everyone, which is - unusual at least. The Eastern Empire - a kingdom in our world, I founded it many centuries ago but it still exists without my intervention now - has something similar but I think not as well executed." His lips twitch. "They lack a committed deity to help with it. Perhaps I could bring you a history book on them, you might find it interesting."

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"That sounds fascinating."

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"I will do that, then." Brief smile. "Anyway. Most people who die go to Hell, yes? The existence of afterlives in your world seems like - a significant improvement on what we have here, but I am curious what existing in Hell looks like, for the souls there who are serving Asmodeus' goals. What would their days consist of?" 

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"You turn into a devil. I might be able to summon them here," probably not though. "They do - all kinds of things. I wanted to work on magic item design. Some of them are soldiers, some of them are craftsmen, some of them do politics, some argue for souls in the courts of Pharasma, lots of them visit the material plane to help Cheliax and devil-summoners elsewhere..."

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"They turn into a devil? Is that not like...turning into an entirely different species of sapient being?" Leareth looks mildly surprised, and curious. (He is in fact not very surprised at all.) "How does Asmodeus manage that - what does the transformation look like?" 

(And he pays close attention to her thoughts, again, because he doesn't expect her to be honest about this at all.) 

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She already explained this to Lacie, when she asked why the paladins hated them. Maybe he's playing a game, maybe it wasn't conveyed, maybe she's misunderstanding the question or Lacie mangled her first explanation in conveying it -

"It takes a long time, decades or sometimes centuries. It is referred to as being - reforged. I think it is partially physical, learning to take a new shape in the world, and partially mental, fixing - the original error introduced in people, that makes us have random goals and priorities and frailties and not follow through on things. It hurts. It is inherently painful, to come to terms with your weaknesses, to see the places where you fall short of what Asmodeus requires. A lot of people are scared of it, because of that. But - I've never met a devil who thought it wasn't worth it. And lots of valuable things hurt. And I wouldn't rather keep being weak."

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"Ah. - I think this is related to the part I am not sure Lacie conveyed to me right, because it was very confusing. The...fact that humans in your world at one point did not have 'free will', and then it was introduced, and...this is the inherent error that Asmodeus works to correct in His souls in Hell? I - am confused, I think, because the way the phrase translates at least does refer to a concept that philosophers in our world have studied, but I am not sure it is the same one. ...For one, our philosophers have sometimes disagreed on whether free will really exists at all or whether the whole world, including the living beings in it, is predetermined by physical laws." 

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"Yes, that's right. The translation is probably not exactly right, it's sort of about -" and she repeats the explanation she gave Lacie, almost word for word, about how constructs can be without free will and what it was like to be a human before free will and how free will broke things. This is the sort of thing that's better to recite word-for-word because if you introduce any new ideas you might accidentally say something heretical.

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Leareth nods along as though this makes sense, even though it DOESN'T and he is very concerned, especially about the thought regarding accidentally saying heresies. 

"I see. I think I understand how the concept fits together in your world, but...I confess I am unsure how to interpret it in this world, in the scenario where it turns out to be impossible to ever contact your world and its gods. I - do not think we have any equivalent time when humans lacked free will, and to be honest I do not think any of Velgarth's gods have goals that are more worthy than what sapient beings want to create and build for themselves. Do you have any thoughts on that?" 

Leareth does his best to sound genuinely unsure and thoughtful, which isn't hard because he is feeling both of those things and he can fold the other, by default much louder feelings to address later, not in Carissa's presence. 

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It is very strange to imagine concluding that none of the gods's goals matter. It seems very pathetic but if you are a thousands of years old wizard that might make it not pathetic, you don't need to worry about dying... "Probably your gods' goals would...seem more valuable if they communicated them. But, uh, if they can't explain why you should care and they lack the resources to make you care then I guess it's their own fault, if you don't care, and maybe they don't care about whether you care? Not being of any value to any gods sounds - awful -  you'd have no one with a reason to make you keep existing - but if they haven't got a reason to keep you existing then I guess that's the hand you were dealt and you should, uh, become immortal about it, which." Tight smile. 

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He returns the smile, small and tight and brief. “Exactly. Though - I have not yet succeeded at sharing my immortality with others. The gods seem to oppose this too, though They do not care to tell me why. And from what Their actions reveal of Their goals, I - do not care to serve Them. If Asmodeus existed here it might be different,” the ‘might’ and his remaining uncertainty make this not quite a bald-faced lie, “but - in fact this is the world I have. Perhaps I am an ant beside them, but They have not stamped me out yet.”

He sits back in his chair. “This may be relevant to you as well, since from my preliminary study of the magic I detected on your arrival, it will be incredibly difficult and perhaps impossible to replicate.” This is not quite a lie. “So this world and its gods might, if we are unlucky, be all we have to work with. And - I think that nobody should ever stop existing, if they prefer existence over not - I think that our gods’ failure to care about this is Their greatest fault, and a terrible tragedy in need of correcting. What do you think of it?”

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It's a bizarre frame, considering it a fault that the gods care about different things than people. Probably the things the gods care about are more important, even, but - it's hard to blame him, for wanting his things, when the gods haven't even said what they want.

Or it's a lie. It's a very convenient story. If they've been reading her mind it wouldn't be hard to guess it's a cause she is sympathetic to. 

Either way it's smarter to play along. "Do you have ascension here?"

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“Well. Not a preexisting known route, but - in fact I have a plan, here. Not to ascend personally, per se, but - to create a god of our own, who does care to make use of human souls. Given our magic this is not harder than ascending myself, and allows more control. I have been working on this plan for a thousand years and am currently preparing for the final execution of said plan. It will be very costly, but - worth it, I think, in the end.”

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She forms no opinion at all on the truth value of this claim. "Wow. I - that's a clever plan. I see why you are curious whether Nefreti meant to enable it or disrupt it or - what."

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“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.

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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."

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"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?" 

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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."

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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.)

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"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.

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"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. 

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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.

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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: 

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:I would enjoy that!:

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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.) 

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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...

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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.) 

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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...

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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?: 

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: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.:

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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.) 

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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.

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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?: 

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:Yes?:

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

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: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: 

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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. 

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

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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. 

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She's awed. They should be much richer than Cheliax, if their magic can do that.

 

 

 

She returns to her room and examines the daggers and writes a list of things she knows how to do to daggers, for once they get her some spellsilver. Maybe Leareth is very very rich and can arrange her lots of spellsilver and will want a brilliant energy weapon, she's always wanted to make one. 

She prays, before bed. She does not expect anything to happen, but if somehow she ever gets home she doesn't want to have totally lost everything that would let her hold herself together in Hell. She prays for Asmodeus to make her an instrument of His will and burn away everything unworthy of Him and see His aims realized through her hands. And get the people of this world an afterlife. And let them make their countries prosperous.

 

She sleeps.

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In the morning, rather than having breakfast brought to her, Lacie asks if she'd like to join Leareth's other staff in the dining hall. :Ooh, also he has some metal samples coming for you, so you can check if any of them are spellsilver, and if not he wants a more precise description of it: 

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Sure, she'll do that. :What is this facility, is it a garrison? His wizard tower?: If he hasn't told most of his people she's a prisoner that'll help with escaping, should it come up.

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:His...wizard tower?: Lacie giggles and seems to think this is a hilarious concept. :Nah, this is just a research facility - the garrison is a lot bigger. We've got a big library and Work Rooms and a lot of mages work with him here on, er, various projects: 

There are a couple dozen staff in the dining hall, eating and chattering away in various local languages. The food is laid out for self-serving on a sideboard; there are beans and vegetables and a separate dish with meat. 

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She casts Tongues so she can eavesdrop and takes some of everything and sits down to eat.

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There's a lot of the usual social gossip - who's dating who, whose cousin just had a baby, whose parents are sick - and a lot of very, very technical conversations about magic, with a lot of vocabulary and concepts that don't straightforwardly translate. There's also a table of people who seem to be talking about healing-specific magic; based on the way they refer to it and themselves, it's an entirely separate kind of magic from the regular sort here.

A couple of people nearby are apparently mages who can sense magic; they look impressed at her spell, one of them sort of whistles and comments that it's just as pretty as he heard, but overall they don't pay her too much attention and quickly go back to their conversations. It doesn't especially seem like they're holding back because of her presence.

(Lacie reads Carissa's mind and continues to find her likeable and quick and to feel very sorry for the fact that her god TORTURES PEOPLE and this means that Leareth is definitely not going to let her go home even if it turns out to be possible. She shows no sign of this on her face, just makes a bit of small talk with Carissa about how she's finding things and then lets herself appear distracted talking to another woman at their table about her niece's education elsewhere.) 

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She eats and tries to learn everybody's names and faces and what work they do. She doesn't contemplate escape plans in much detail but that information will be useful for every plan short of 'hit fifth circle and teleport out of here'. She is only a little homesick for her unit at the Worldwound. Probably they would've scried her, which the paladins were blocking, and probably they'll try occasionally because she's on a list of deserters somewhere, but it's not likely to work at finding her here. They'll question her parents and her sister and her girlfriend and her acquaintances and then -

- not her problem. She needs to figure out how to stay alive in this world.

She says she's finding everything lovely, and she's excited for the swimming pool.

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It'll be ready to swim in in a couple more days, Lacie thinks, they're setting up some equipment to keep the water heated at a pleasant temperature and pump it through a filter so it doesn't get full of debris, mages can sterilize it every so often but that doesn't get hairballs. Leareth has designs for everything buried in some book somewhere in one of his libraries, it's absurd, but really who can be surprised, he's Leareth. 

Lacie wanders off before Carissa is done eating, apparently assuming she can find her own way back to her room. (She is, in fact, once again parking herself in some random person's office nearby to supervise.) 

When Carissa makes her way back to her room, another woman is there waiting for her, with a box that contains small ingots of a dozen different kinds of metal, all of which are some variety of silvery colour since that was Leareth's guess for what 'spellsilver' would look like, and he also excluded really common metals like iron and lead and tin as obviously not it - are any of these right? 

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She discards half out of hand and studies the other half more closely. Detects Magic and then tugs a little magic through them, watching - "I think this is an alloy that contains some of the right thing. Can your magic be used to isolate it?"

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"Huh, fascinating! Yes, almost certainly, for rare metals quite a lot of our metallurgy is done with magic. And since this is Leareth we're talking about, I'm sure he's either an expert on the topic somehow or can have someone over here by this afternoon to do it. Should we - just get a bigger sample of this alloy and have it separated into all of its base elements, and then you can tell us which is the right one and we'll research a more efficient process for it then?" 

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"That sounds good. Thank you."

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No one else bothers her for a few hours, except to bring lunch to the room, apparently lunch is a less communal affair here and most people grab food to eat while they work.

(Lacie reads a book in the office that shares a wall with the shielded room they put Carissa in, and pauses every three lines to check if Carissa's thoughts are interesting enough to pay full attention and take notes for Leareth.) 

Whether Leareth did it himself or called in an expert is left unexplained, but by late afternoon the person is back with a few little ingots in a box. "These are the ones that still came out metallic in pure form - which one?" 

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She believes Leareth, about being a thousand years old or something comparably scary. 

 

She points out the right one. "It tarnishes in air, we keep it in a solution...."

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"Ah, good to know. What sort of solution - water, oil, something else...?"

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"Oil, not water. I'll need about this much -" she shows a palm's worth - "for a really minor magic item and more if you want something fancy."

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"Of course. We are going to need a couple of days to work out a more scalable metallurgy process for it, but we can certainly do that for you. I expect Leareth would appreciate seeing some notes written up on what sorts of magic items you can make and what they can do."

They nod to her and leave her alone. 

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Leareth is somewhat behind on other things - putting various plans on hold pending more information on Carissa's world has been time-consuming and a hassle - but at this point he sets down his work and heads over to take Lacie's place and eavesdrop on thoughts. 

He's learned everything he needs to, at this point, to make a decision, but he's still curious. Carissa is getting more information on him, his resources and capabilities and - maybe a corresponding update in how likely it is he could pull off building a god. 

He's very curious what, left to her own devices, she's going to do about that. 

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She makes a list for Leareth. She can make weapons deadlier and make them pierce shields more easily, obviously; she can make them, rather than slicing through skin, deliver crushing exhaustion and unconsciousness, though this still often kills people if you misestimate how hard to hit; she can make them appear as some nonmagical object of the same approximate size; she can make them teleport back to the bearer's hand on demand though only a distance of a hundred feet or so; she can make them break spells when they strike; she can make them sense heat and attack unerringly even against invisible enemies or in a cloud of smoke or something; she can make them easier to throw; she can make them attune to a target over the course of a minute or so and do more damage when they attack; she can make them particularly deadly against creatures from the Outer Planes. Those are the ones commonly in demand; she also has notes on much more expensive and complicated enchantments like making a weapon of light that ignores magic armor and regular armor alike, or storing invisibility on a weapon so you can make yourself invisible while holding it, or a weapon that turns unworthy bearers into toads. 

 

 

She wonders what is up with Leareth. Of course a man like that must be very busy, but his people apparently did not know that there were other worlds at all, which makes her presence even more momentous than Kyeo's was on Golarion, and Kyeo on Golarion has caused (she thinks, resentfully) a lot of fuss. It's a good thing, that he has not demanded yet that she teach him magic, but it's a bit surprising, and a bit confusing. She puzzles over it for a moment. Doesn't come up with anything.

The more confused she is, the more careful she should be. But it's not clear what being careful is, here. 

 

 

They don't know how much spellsilver anything takes, or how long a project ought to take her. She could siphon some off, and make something for herself. Not - not anything in particular. She doesn't know yet what she might need. But if she pilfers some spellsilver for a minor magic item she can reuse it later, it's stable once it's in a magic item, she would have the resources to reuse for whatever she turned out to need. 

 

 

She sets her notes for Leareth at the door and waits for them to come and get them and turns her thoughts to something else. Swimming. She hasn't been swimming in a long time. She misses it.

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Someone else comes and gets them. 

Leareth glances through them, but mostly he paces, and thinks. 

He's frustrated. Right now he's sitting on a vast resource, and a new piece of information with almost unimaginable ramifications, and he doesn't know why, and he hates being a pawn in the schemes of greater Powers more than almost anything else. And the person this Nefreti and her god dropped on him is brilliant and careful and - and something he doesn't even have a word for, 'damaged' isn't quite right, 'broken' even less so. But she seems deeply committed to serving a god who sets people on fire and tortures them to turn them into tools He can wield, and so far there's no sign of that budging.

He's not sure to what extent there's a right approach here, if it's even possible to get all of the things he wants, but - almost certainly continuing to play games with her isn't going to be the most valuable path. 

Eventually, still frustrated, he goes to bed. 

...

In the morning he arrives at Carissa's door at the same time as one of his staff bringing breakfast. "We need to talk." 

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Why is he so terrifying. Does he do that on purpose.

 

She manages not to think of anything she might be guilty of that he'd want to confront her about. She has a lot of practice at the mental motion of not interpreting suspicion as a cue to rehearse what people might be suspicious of. 

"Of course. You got my list of magic items?"

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"Yes. Thank you, it was very thorough and at some point I want to discuss it further. Not now, though." 

He sits down. Looks at her for a moment. 

"- I was genuinely uncertain about what to do, the last time we spoke, that much was true, but - I was not entirely upfront with you, then, and it would do you a disservice to continue with that game any longer, now that I am sure enough. First. I do not want to kill you because that would be very stupid of me, and also because - in fact - I disprefer anyone dying, but I expect the first point to be more convincing. Second. You should not expect running away to work; in addition to all the default precautions on this place, which are considerable, I placed a compulsion - something like an enchantment, in your system - while you are asleep, that you cannot deliberately leave this place until I change that. Third. I am fairly sure that your god Asmodeus tortures people and in other ways - does not value human lives as I do - and I am under no conditions going to consider allying with him, given that, or allowing you to contact him." 

Leareth sits back. "I still want to work with you, to the extent we can make that happen, but I understand this leaves us in an adversarial position. I do not think it would be better to lie to you about my goals, though. I want nobody to die forever and I want people to have good lives and I intend to make that happen. However long it takes." 

And he waits. 

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He is almost definitely reading her mind and that makes it very dangerous to think in any depth and so she's left with very shallow things. 

"I knew I was a prisoner," she says calmly. "I knew it would be impossible for me to go home for some reason, or Nefreti would have sent me somewhere else, where it was impossible. I want you to build a god, if you think your god will be able to use more of people and mean they won't die forever and no one is taking care of that already. I don't think your caution or your being upset about Hell makes us adversaries." She does think his being fussed about Hell is predictable and disappointing and it's silly how that's the final word on the subject instead of them being able to argue it, but, whatever. "I am happy to do magic for you while you work on this god plan."

And she casts around for a thing to think about, that's smart when some thoughts are dangerous - she will think about all the things she's not going to argue about Hell, that sounds good. Torturing people is not really a big deal and no one whose world has people just get no afterlife at all has any right to be upset about a perfectly good afterlife that involves some torture. Has he even tried torturing people, you would think that would cause you to notice it's not a big deal, though maybe that's not true among living humans who have only a little while before they're gone forever, maybe the improvements aren't on a scale you can appreciate. 

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Leareth's expression is hard to read, but he seems - quietly approving. And then, surprisingly, he smiles. 

"Actually I think debating the merits of Hell sounds fascinating, now that I can do so openly and get all of my questions answered. ...And I wish you did not feel that thinking was dangerous, if I were going to punish you for thoughts that disturb me I would surely have done it days ago. We are both missing huge pieces of each other's context, and yet it seems that you are the ally available to me, and vice versa, so I think it is in both of our interest to try to understand each other's perspectives. I - doubt I am wrong, but I could be, since I have data only on living people - which I think clearly demonstrates that torture is very bad for people's ability to pursue human-scale goals, but that could, in fact, be a different question from your claim." Shrug. "Personally I would not mind a little torture but I would very much mind being - shaped into a different sort of being to serve an alien entity's values rather than my own. And I expect if you polled many people in Velgarth, they would prefer nonexistence over eternal torture. You would be welcome to poll my staff if you wish." 

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"It's not eternal torture, that would be stupid, there is not much torture once the things that are wrong with you have been corrected, which takes centuries sometimes but I don't think it'd ever take eternity. I guess if you just refuse on principle to leave Avernus you'll be there for eternity but you could get in line at any time.

 

I think torturing people is bad for their pursuing their goals but that's - the point, right, that's what one uses it for, getting someone to do what you want instead of what they want, and it can be hard to be cooperative without any incentive." She does not actually want to argue him into hurting her, that would be stupid. Unless it's better than whatever he'll do instead if he learns think about Hell, "Most people hear 'a century' and they think that's a very big deal but it's not, people are just bad at math and don't realize how much eternity is."

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"...Hmm. No, I agree with you that people are often not good at considering long timescales, but I do not think that is the root of our dispute. I - think that people pursuing their goals is good. Most of why I spent centuries trying to build prosperous, functional civilizations was so that the people in them could pursue their own goals and values rather than be constrained by the risks of starvation and disease and crime."

A little, slow shrug. "I suppose I have little sympathy for the position that Asmodeus is far larger and more powerful than a human and thus his goals matter more than ours, probably because the gods I know here have not inclined me to think that way. ...Also, honestly, I think the point applies in the other direction as well. Probably ants cannot really experience suffering in the way we know it, based on the reports of Animal Mindspeakers trying to read them, but - mice, say, can, and I think that matters, and humans torturing mice to make them compliant for our experiments is bad even if it is sometimes a cost we judge worthwhile, for example to save more lives via better Healing research."

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"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."

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"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." 

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"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."

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"- 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." 

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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.

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"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." 

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"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."

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"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." 

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" - 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?"

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"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." 

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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.

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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." 

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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."

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"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." 

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"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."

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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. 

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She casts Detect Thoughts.

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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.) 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

 

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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. 

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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.

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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? 

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

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It's generally the custom, yes. They bring her one; it's sort of like a short cotton nightgown with drawers to go underneath, and she can borrow a fluffy towel to dry off after. 

Over at the pool, Lacie is already paddling back and forth. "This is great! I can't believe we got a pool, I didn't even know you could make them in buildings like this -"

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She lowers herself in. "Leareth is very powerful, isn't he. Does he like showing off in general or only for confusing otherworldly visitors."

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"...I think mostly the showing off is for confusing otherworldly visitors, although he definitely dazzled me enough when I was being recruited for his organization, and he'd do that more for, oh, the one mage in the world who's best at inventing artifacts or what have you, if he wants them here. And you're even more one-of-a-kind than that, right?" 

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"Not where I'm from, but here, I guess so."

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"...Yeah. I'm sorry, this must be a lot to get dragged into - I don't know the whole story but some mysterious god of magic and their possibly-insane powerful priest were involved?" 

The water is a very pleasant temperature, cool on her skin at first but just right after one lap back and forth. 

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"Yeah." Carissa is doing a lot less thinking today. Probably that's what she should've been doing all along. "I don't know much more than that either. I think Leareth would really like to know what Nethys wants but in my world it's well known that trying to figure out Nethys drives you mad."

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"Great." Lacie rolls her eyes. "Some completely new and exciting way for a god to annoy Leareth - be impossible to understand without going insane." 

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She doesn't think about this in much detail either other than to try to remember it. "Have all of the local ones annoyed him?"

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"I guess some are mostly neutral on that axis, by dint of not - doing things, so far as anyone can tell, or only doing things that no one with big goals in the world cares about. I don't know what the deal is with Kernos of the Northern Lights, but Leareth isn't too worried about His main territory being - not that terribly far away from here." She pauses midsentence, as though swapping out that phrase for something else. 

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She is presumably not allowed to know where she is. "Mmm. We have some gods who don't seem to really care about any human-scale things. In Tian Xia there is a rat who ascended by accident. Cares about rat things."

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"- What? Goodness! How did that - I did not know I needed to know this but I'm now desperately curious how a rat accidentally ascends to godhood!" 

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"Unfortunately I don't know much about it either. I mean, I know that there was a fight among the gods, and it left - people call it a god's corpse but it's just a kind of magical residue - and contact with those can cause ascension, and the rat ate it.

Usually the process of trying to ascend kills you, and I don't know what the rat managed that most powerful casters can't. But," shrug.

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"Mmm." Lacie falls silent for a bit, just enjoying the water. "Heard you got your spellsilver sorted out?" 

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"Mmhmm. Should be done in a couple of days."

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"That's good." Lacie doesn't seem to be able to think of anything else to say. 

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Carissa's going to be pretty mediocre company until she's more confident she's thinking the right things though she is optimistic about getting there. They can swim awhile.

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Lacie lets her be and occasionally makes some small talk about her nieces and nephews in [unspecified city in Velgarth]. 

Leareth's staff mostly let her be while she's working on her enchanted dagger, though the next night Lacie does ask if she wants to join them in the dining hall rather than eating in her room. 

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Yes, she'd love to. (Or at least it's informative and she doesn't actually like or feel safe while hiding in her room not interacting with people.)

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Then she's welcome to join them for breakfast and dinner! The staff don't treat her any differently compared to before; they're mostly caught up in their own conversations, but they're friendly enough and sometimes curious.

She gets a note that whenever she's done with her magic item, Leareth wants to meet along with some of his other people who're interested in learning the basics of her magic. 

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She should probably get herself together, by then, in that case.

 

 

She attends breakfast and dinner and tries to make friends. She suspects it'd also be a good idea to find a hookup, for the unsupervised conversation and the reason to care if she's alive and the opportunities to impress her by telling her things that aren't secret but that no one's mentioned yet, but she's still feeling stupidly prickly so she doesn't do that yet, just scouts candidates without saying anything. 


She spends most of the day working on the magic item and the rest of it trying to feel less scared. She is pretty sure it's not helpful at all, so she just needs to find some frame that makes things not feel tremendously important and high stakes. Leareth still hasn't had her punished and at this point probably isn't going to bother, presumably because he is satisfied that she won't be defiant again. He wants her to - do more for him - but not things she's at all equipped to do -

- well, if he told her to dig ditches she'd be digging ditches, and telling her to figure out how you ought to design a god isn't objectively more unreasonable than that. Though mostly her answer is that she would make herself smarter. ...maybe that's an acceptable answer. Retrain into wondrous items and make myself a headband. It has the advantage that if he lets her do it she gets a headband (!). Maybe that entire genre is safe. If he told her to dig ditches she'd be digging ditches with an Unseen Servant. 

She's not sure the line of thought exactly holds together but it's soothing. 

As promised on the fourth day the dagger is complete. It's got the base enchantment to be wielded more easily and to do more damage, you have to lay other enchantments atop that, and then once you've attuned to it you can teleport it to your hand from up to 100 feet away. 

She lets someone know that it's done and she can present it and teach her magic now.

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Leareth arrives. He actually smiles at her, when he asks if he can look at the dagger, and then he spends a long time presumably examining it with his equivalent of Detect Magic and looking almost awed. 

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He brings a woman with him, this time, about Carissa's age or a little older and with incredibly dark, nearly true-black skin and fuzzy short-cropped hair that, despite her youth, is a salt-and-pepper mix of mostly silver. 

She introduces herself as Nayoki and starts peppering Carissa with questions about how the process of learning arcane magic works. 

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Carissa can explain how learning arcane magic works. They're going to start on cantrips, the easiest kinds of spells. She'll need to make up a spellbook for everyone who wants to learn. Once you get used to the magic manipulations involved in drawing, stabilizing, and casting spells, you can try harder spells; normally new wizards don't have the channeling capacity for that yet, but Velgarth mages might start out with an advantage there (which is a terrifying thought but she's not going to try to slow down their progress at not needing her, there's no safe way to do it). Over time you can get good at more powerful spells. You need third-circle spells to pick up arms and armor enchanting, but most people learn wondrous items enchanting first, and those can be learned at second circle. (Carissa didn't learn it, because by the time when her class was scheduled she was already almost third and decided to go straight into arms and armor, which had a better stipend and more travel opportunities.)

No one can naturally through deliberate practice acquire the channeling capacity to get past third circle. However, use of magic in emergencies under time pressure - mostly combat, but people also get it from espionage - can get you past third circle. To, in principle, ninth, though that's very rare and the overwhelming majority of people who want to get that good die instead. In Golarion most wizards either stop at third and run a magic item shop or serve as guards to rich people or something like that, or they become adventurers, which translates loosely as mercenaries but more positively connotated, and go for fifth. Most wizards who adventure stop at fifth because that's where you get Teleport and Permanency and that's enough for you to be rich for as long as you live, and it's harder to level past that.

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Leareth is still captivated by her dagger, but Nayoki says he's definitely going to want to learn cantrips even if it doesn't make sense for him to dedicate a lot of time to learning more, given his many other responsibilities. And they've got a roster of interested people, including a couple of the Healers who don't have mage-gift even in potential and are very excited at a way they could maybe learn magic anyway, even if it's more limited than being born a Velgarth mage. What does she need for spellbooks? Does it need to be her personally who makes them or can she make a demo one and then Nayoki can delegate for someone else to copy more? 

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In principle they can be copied by anyone but she can tell which parts have to be copied precisely and which don't and the diagrams are really complicated and in four colors of ink. (She shows her own spellbook.)

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Whoa, that's so pretty! 

To start with she'd like spellbooks for herself and Leareth, then. Also would it be all right if she watched Carissa do some cantrips, to see what the magic looks like to their mage-sight? 

(And also what the mental control aspect looks like to Mindhealing Sight, because Nayoki has more than just mage-gift, but she doesn't volunteer this.) 

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Of course.  She can make them some spellbooks right after this.

 

She runs through her cantrips - Detect Magic, Dancing Lights, Prestidigitation, Mage Hand.

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That gets Leareth's attention, and he watches the magic intently. He seems to be enjoying himself, or at least is very engaged. 

"What would researching new spells look like?" he asks her, once she's run through all of them to his and Nayoki's satisfaction. "You mentioned it was dangerous and would require precautions; I am wondering if the shield-talismans and Work Rooms we can provide could be enough to make it not very dangerous for you and thus lower-cost." 

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"You have to try to derive for yourself what the spellform should be, from the forms of related spells. Sometimes it explodes in your face. It'd depend on the quality of your shield-talismans, I'd think. Inventing new low-level spells won't kill me regardless but, for example, you'd probably want Scry and Teleport, and those are powerful enough to kill me if they explode in my face. At home powerful wizards mostly arrange for resurrections before they do dangerous spell research but I would have to rederive Limited Wish for that, and I'd worry that with no afterlife it might not work."

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Leareth and Nayoki share a glance, and then Leareth nods. 

"That does sound like more risk than I would prefer to take. Hmm. Can your Detect Magic gauge the approximate power level of a spell as well as its structure - for example, if I wear a shield-talisman and have Nayoki demonstrate attacking me with a spell that is within its tolerance to block, and you were watching from a safe distance, could you judge whether that was more or less power than an exploding Teleport?" 

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"Leareth regularly tests magic that explodes in his face and would kill him if he were not shielded," Nayoki says, smirking. 

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"I haven't seen fifth-circle spells explode. I could probably manage an informed guess."

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Nod. "And if I can arrange enough protective shielding on you to hold off two or three times that much magical force, I would feel reasonably comfortable with you carrying out that research. ...Hmm, also I am guessing you could try to derive some third or fourth circle spells first? How does the power tied in in spells increase with circle - could you make a third-circle spell explode on purpose so that we can observe its force...?" 

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"Sure, if I do it a little bit wrong, and I'll definitely do it a bunch by accident trying to rederive the third-circle spells I know but don't have. Power scales faster than circle - the difference between fourth and fifth is larger than the difference between third and fourth. More powerful casters also sort of incidentally get good at channeling more power in their lower-level spells, and at making them last longer, there's a single underlying skill."

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"...Hm. Do you recall if there is a consistent mathematical relationship there, even if not a linear one? If you have first, second, and third-level spells now, and can make supervised mistakes so they explode while we are watching, then maybe we can graph it out and predict what fifth-level will look like." 

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"It is consistent, yes, within the range we have good ways to measure which doesn't go all the way to ninth."

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Nod. "Well, I think that with some research and preparation, we can probably make it safe for you to do spell research, if you are up for that." 

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"Of course." He has good reason not to get her killed yet and it might be something she has an edge at over the locals because she's been studying magic longer.

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Leareth folds his hands over one knee, looks levelly at her. "It sounds like we have a plan, then. Nayoki and I will study cantrips to get better intuitions for how arcane magic behaves, and I can design some tests to figure out a model and get a ceiling on power discharge from exploding spells at different levels, and we can build you a safe work area and get you shields for that research. ...Also if you think you can make the enchanted dagger that makes the bearer invisible, I am especially curious to study that one and compare it to our illusions, invisibility is possible but very challenging with our magic. Is there any other research that seems particularly promising to you?" 

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"I don't know what else is easier with our magic than with yours. Some things might be valuable if your world's defensive measures against them don't happen to counter our version, like scrying. ...I'm tempted to try to rederive the ancient prophecy spells, if prophecy works here - does it?" 

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"That makes sense. We have a local spell we call scrying, and defences against it, but I would not be surprised if the Golarion version works by a different route. And, yes, we have Foresight, though mostly it is the gods and certain - beings created by Them - who can access it fully. Humans are sometimes born with a Gift of Foresight. It comes in two variants. Short-range gives visions of personally salient events in the next few minutes to candlemarks; long-range usually shows up as cryptic vivid dreams and refers to events months to years ahead, and I think it is more likely to be directly mediated or at least easily meddled with by god-level powers. There are also...weirder phenomena, here, followers of our gods will sometimes receive direct prophecies despite not having the Gift of Foresight. I am not sure if the mechanism of Foresight here is similar enough to prophecy as it once existed in Golarion that your spells would work, but - it seems worth trying, it could certainly be very powerful." 

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"The gods used to be able to see futures, in our world, but it broke when Aroden died. I don't know what it was like but there are spells for extremely short term knowledge, the next second, and I think the prophecy spells that don't work anymore were related to those, and I could try, eventually, if it's safe to experiment."

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Nod. "That makes sense. - Also your world has spells that increase intelligence? I am very intrigued by that. This is - as far as I know impossible with our magic." 

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" - huh." Actually she should've guessed that because he's smarter than her but not nearly as smart as someone with a thousand years of access to intelligence-enhancement should be. "Yes. Wish can do that but I'm not going to be able to rederive Wish, I'm sorry. But you can also make headbands that do it and those I could learn how to make."

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Leareth nods. "Then that would seem a high priority. Probably you ought make one for yourself first, since I assume it would help with your research? I am not sure how costly each one would be in time and materials." 

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"I need to retrain into wondrous items or - do something that I can't think of a reason you can't do but I've never heard of -" she could make very small wearable swords. In concrete terms this is probably not very different from retraining into wondrous items but it's more obvious how she'd do it, with no wondrous items to study. "Once I can make them at all I should be able to make a standard one every two days, with less materials than the dagger, or if you have lots more spellsilver I could make the most powerful kind known to be stable, which would be...between four and five times as much spellsilver and take four or five times as long. It'll help me with my research but I presume it'll also help you with yours."

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"Well, yes, but I have been doing my research for a very long time and you have not. And I do not expect to be bottlenecked on raw intelligence for the initial part of learning your magic, it looks - complicated but not that complicated and my existing senses and intuitions for magic will help. I am in favour of you making a standard one for yourself first and then me, and once we have more spellsilver available - I am planning to open a new mining project to obtain more of the relevant ores - then you can try the more powerful one. How does that sound?" 

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"I can do that." She still hasn't figured out the locally appropriate term of address for him; maybe there isn't one. "I don't know how long it'll take; properly training into wondrous items usually takes at least a couple of months but I might be able to do something faster than that."

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"I understand." He shifts in his chair as though to rise. "- Anything else?" 

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"No."

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"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. 

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She is only trembling a little bit. 

 

She gets to copying spellbooks.

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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. 

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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.

 

 

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(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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Certainly.

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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.

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

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"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.

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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."

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

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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.

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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."

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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."

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"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."

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

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"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."

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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."

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“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.) 

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"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...

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“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.”

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"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..."

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"- 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?"

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"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."

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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...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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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"Tomorrow, then!" Nayoki is so excited!

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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." 

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

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"Just a couple of minutes." 

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"Fair enough. And how many times can you prepare and cast it?"

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"Twice a day right now."

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"All right! We can plan a trip up tomorrow morning, and you can fly for a bit and then Leareth can fly for a bit. He will have fun." Nayoki smiles broadly. "...He does not tend to prioritize having fun, but it is enjoyable to watch when he is anyway."

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"It seems hard to tell whether or not he is having fun."

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"He is hard to read, that much is true. I suppose I am used to interpreting his feelings, since I have been here for several years now." Nayoki seems mostly amused about this.

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"Where are you from?"

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"...A place called the Haighlei Empire, not that I expect this to be meaningful to you. It is - a place that dislikes change in the extreme and tries to contain and control it. And also tries to control anyone with M- with Gifts in general. So I had several reasons to leave, really."

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"I guess. Does Leareth advertise? That people who want to - fix the world, live forever - should come here?"

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"Not directly, no, it - would draw too much attention from the gods here who oppose him, I think. He advertises for ambitious people in general and then there are further interviews."

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"Huh." Her first thought is that thousand-year-old wizards in her world do not hide from the gods and her second thought is that she wouldn't know. "Well, I'm glad Leareth is having fun sometimes even if he doesn't look it." It fits with the theory that if she gets away with anything he'll mostly find this entertaining.

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Nayoki seems to consider that a dismissal, and goes off to organize their expedition to the surface for flying demos.

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For which Leareth is present, after breakfast when Lacie summons Carissa for it, his expression as always impossible to read.

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Carissa FLIES! Invisibly, so no one can be very impressed with her, but she's having the time of her life. It lasts six minutes or so and she lands as it is running out and transitioning to a gentle float downwards. 

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In this particular instance it's somewhat inconvenient that Invisibility also blocks mage-sight and he can't study the spell, but Leareth is ready whenever she lands to have it cast on him, and he can conceal himself with an ordinary Velgarth illusion that his other mages will be able to penetrate in order to watch how the Fly spell works.

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Carissa walks over and reaches out for him and casts Fly on him, too.

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And Leareth flies!

He conceals himself with his own illusion as soon as he passes outside the bounds of the one being held over the spectators by one of his mage-staff, and it's visible to Detect Magic but Carissa can't actually see through it, so while he's in the air she won't be able to look at his face.

When he lands, though, he's smiling more broadly than she's seen to date. "How incredible!"

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"It's great!!"

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"It is." Leareth stands and looks at her for a moment longer, still smiling. "- Is that enough fresh air for you? I am not sure how good your Endure Elements spell is, but I am getting chilly."

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Having his attention on her is terrifying, even though she can't think of anything she could possibly be doing wrong and really feels that she's been very well-behaved. She's not cold at all, but she nods. "That's enough. Thank you."

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"All right."

And the party of fresh-air-takers heads back down into the base together. Leareth peels off, presumably in order to get back to his busy schedule.

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Carissa has an idea. She avoids thinking about it until Leareth's out of sight and then decides that's not avoiding thinking about it nearly long enough.



She ends up settling on thinking it through only while having sex since they're probably less likely to be reading her mind then. (She can try to get this confirmed or disconfirmed by Calib by mentioning she knows they mindread her sometimes and it makes her feel embarrassed and shy whenever she's alone or with him.)

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(Calib blushes SO MUCH and confesses that he doesn't actually know what their current mindreading-her policy is, but he does know approximately what other things the Thoughtsensers in the compound spend their time doing and they no longer have long unexplained gaps in anyone's regular scheduled duties, so it's got to be just spot-checks, and it seems especially unlikely they'd bother doing those when she's in bed with him.)

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Oh good that makes her feel better. 

 

 

 

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She thinks.

She wants to level. She can make magic items with spells she can't cast so she always expected to not be that fussed about levelling but while she's stuck here in another world she can't see the spellforms except by successfully stabilizing them herself, and that means she can't see how she'll reinvent anything really cool without levelling. And if she's ever going to escape she's going to need Teleport. It'll be hard enough with Teleport but it'll be impossible without it. 

 

The only way to level is to use magic under high pressure conditions. Usually combat, but adventurers manage even if they clear out a dungeon without a fight, as long as they're using magic under pressure with real stakes. Sparring doesn't do it, though. Magic experimentation can but she's pretty sure hers isn't doing it because she's wearing the invincibility artifact, and she knows it. 

Trying to get away with things is using magic under pressure. Trying to escape would be. And Leareth has all but told her she's welcome to try, though he expects her to fail. Maybe - maybe because he'd like her more powerful, too. Even if that's not his reasoning she can credibly say she thought it might be, and that she thought he wouldn't be displeased with the outcome, and - that doesn't mean she won't get in trouble, if she weren't terrified of him she wouldn't level from trying to sneak out of his complex. She should expect that if she fails and gets caught it'll be bad. 

But he won't kill her. She's valuable to him. And - and it makes sense, right, that he's not indulging her out of vague boredom but for a specific and clear reason.

 

She starts contemplating how to escape. 

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If Leareth or any of his staff are aware of these plans, they show no sign of it.

After several tries, Leareth successfully stabilizes Fox's Cunning. And then casts it on himself, sitting in his library, and pays very close attention to how it feels.

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It feels like being smarter. Ideas come together a little faster, and some might be able to all sit in his head at once where they couldn't before. Mental math is easier. It's just - better.

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This is incredible.

Leareth goes to Carissa the next day and asks how far off she is from being able to make the most powerful version of the headband. They have a mine for the spellsilver ore now; they can get her as much as she needs and more, so she can afford to experiment with it when it might not work.

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"Twenty days, if I do it full-time. A bit longer if I'm doing spell research too. Should I start on it? Headbands are great, I was saving up for one when...stuff...happened."

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"I can imagine they are excellent to have! Yes, I would like you to start on it, though I do not think it need be a huge rush; you can keep doing spell research as you judge fit."

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"Of course. - the next thing I'd like to have is pearls. You can enchant them to recall lost spell slots, which will let me get lots more research done in a day, and I don't know how to do it but I bet it's not harder to figure out than headbands." Which in the end took her less than two months. 

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"I agree, that sounds like a valuable next priority. Would you need any special materials other than spellsilver?"

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"Yes, you need pearls. From oysters - I guess I don't know if you even have those here - uh, they're going to be hard to substitute if not..."

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"...We have oysters, yes. Though not cheaply obtainable in this region. How large and high-quality do the pearls need to be?"

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"I'm not sure. The pearls of power I've seen were this big." She holds her hand to gesture about half an inch.

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"Ah. I think that ought be feasible, though it would be much cheaper in a month when spring arrives and trade from the southern coast can happen without needing Gates everywhere. If it will take you longer than twenty days of work for the most-powerful headband anyway, I am inclined to wait for that."

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"Of course. I'll keep doing the spell research and you can put in an order when it's convenient." She is not-thinking several things.

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This would be unsurprising to Leareth even if he were right then reading her mind, which he isn't; he and a few others do read her at random a few times a day, and check her room with mage-sight, but he's not doing anything more systematic than that.

Leareth nods, thanks her, and goes back to his work. He tries to figure out the maximum number of times he can prepare Fox's Cunning per day.

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He can manage it three times. Maybe if he spent a while optimizing the spell stabilizations he could get four.

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Leareth has an advantage to that, since he has mage-sight and almost two thousand years of experience, and he is totally going to optimize how many times a day he can make himself smarter, while he waits for Carissa to figure out the permanent version of it.

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She's working on it. 

Half the time.

The other half the time she's working on Nondetection, which should make her mind harder to read, she hates how everything she's doing could fall apart in a second if anyone reads her, and testing whether if she Alters Self into her boyfriend she has Healing (she does not), and trying to figure out a variant of Alter Self where she would, which explodes so violently and repeatedly that she eventually concludes if it's doable at all she has the wrong angle on it. 

There is no way she can siphon enough spellsilver for Boots of Teleport but she sketches designs for them anyway; trying to figure them out isn't a suspicious thing to do. Actual plans she continues to consider only during sex. You can make magic items cheaper by making them worse. Making them crowd out every other magic item on your body with a loud obnoxious interfering aura is one way, but that would also make them really conspicuous. Making them one-use-only, maybe - more like a scroll of teleport than a magic item - using the spell-diagram for Teleport she used for Leareth's teleporting dagger...

- it's a criminal use of spellsilver, designing a single-use sewing needle of teleport, but it might work.

There's the fact she's apparently under a compulsion not to leave. She's not sure how that works or whether casting Dispel Magic on herself would make it go away. 

 

She makes Calib a spellbook and walks him through cantrips and then scribes Charm Person for him as a first-level spell to practice. "Does Velgarth have anything like that - I know Leareth did something to make me not run away but I don't think it worked by making me like everybody..."

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"...Oh, right, I guess you wouldn't have gotten the run-down on that." He looks sheepish and awkward about it. "Mages can do compulsions - Leareth is very good at it, apparently, guess he has lots of practice. Uh, everyone who works in this base has one, mine's not as intense as the research staff's but it was part of my contract, I can't share anything I learn here with people not cleared to the same level, or sabotage any projects I'm aware of." Shrug. "Not like I'd want to, right, it's half just to make sure no one does stupid stuff when they're drunk on holiday. And the other half is that Leareth is a paranoid bugger. - You don't count, as someone off the base I mean, since you're right here."

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"Oh, that makes me feel better about it, if it's something he did to everybody and not just to me." She squeezes his hand. "I mean, I guess mine might still be different, but. It's not an entirely different class of thing? If that makes any sense?"

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"I think that makes sense. It's the same kind of spell."

(If Carissa reads his mind, Calib is thinking that it does seem pretty different whether you signed a contract on paper first saying you were signing up for this life, because you thought it was worth the restrictions, versus being dropped out of the sky from another world and snatched up by Leareth before you could make a splash anywhere else - it's probably still for the best, for Velgarth, Carissa wouldn't exactly be better off anywhere else, but...it does eat at him a little bit, that she didn't sign a piece of paper first to agree to this.)

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Snuggle. "I wonder whether they show up to Enchantment Sight. - the charm one I showed you does, you're all glowy if someone's charmed you, they use it to make sure no one's, say, signing away their life savings under an enchantment or something."

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"Oh, huh, what's Enchantment Sight? Compulsions show up to mage-sight like any magic does, but they're low power so apparently it takes a close look to notice. Also I don't have mage-sight anyway so it's not like I could tell."

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"I wish I had mage-sight!" Sigh. "I can only see magic when I directly Detect it and I don't get a lot of detail and I can't really see myself. ...I guess you could cast Detect Magic, as a cantrip, and look at me, and see if anything shows up."

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Calib sighs. "Now I wish I could show you Healing-Sight that easily! It's so beautiful. But...sure, I'll give that a go."

He gets out his spellbook for reference, stares at the cantrip in fierce concentration. Casts it, and looks intently at Carissa.

"...No, sorry, I don't think I see it?"

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Shrug. "No worries. I bet it needs Enchantment Sight, which is heavier duty. And it's not really a big deal at all, only it's weird, right, having something in my head and not knowing."

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"I guess so? You could ask Leareth about the details, I'm sure he'd tell you." Calib snuggles up closer, as though trying to reassure her just with his physical presence.

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Kiss. "He's so scary, though."

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"- I guess. He's almost two thousand years old and planning to literally create a god and working for him means I have to be mind-controlled not to share his secrets. Other than that he's all right, though. My boss at the last place I worked was way meaner."

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"He told me about the plan to invade Valdemar. Since I'm going to be scrying for him, as soon as I can crack the spell."

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"...Yes, that's the plan." Calib doesn't seem happy about it. "I think he's - still hoping he'll find another way before the final go-ahead. And...I heard he maybe had a lead on that. Don't know anything more than that, though."

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"I mean, Golarion magic might change stuff. Though he said that even before that he was - exploring alternatives."

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Calib brightens. "Oh, that's a good point - I don't see how yet, but I'm not Leareth." His arms tighten around her. "I really, really hope it works out that way."

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"Yeah, me too." She has no real preference. 

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Her routine continues, week after week. Leareth checks in every so often. He asks for Eagle's Splendour too, once she figures it out.

Spring comes, somewhere or other, and this means trade routes are open, and an order is sent down for pearls, they should arrive in a few weeks for her perusal.

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Exciting!

 

Carissa causes endless explosions and eventually gets Dispel Magic and Haste and can't think of a good justification to be working on Enchantment Sight so she doesn't. She wants to cast Dispel Magic on herself but if it works he might notice it's gone.

 

Instead she announces once she's finished Leareth's fanciest headband that aside from the pearls her next project is going to be glasses of permanent Detect Magic for herself. She thinks it'll speed along her research if she can see magic like Velgarth mages can.

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Leareth is very grateful for his headband and impressed with her progress. He thinks that's such a reasonable next project! He would be very frustrated, himself, if he had to study magic without even being able to see it at the same time as he's casting it.

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It never bothered her before, but it does now. 

She gets to work on it. She siphons spellsilver for invisible sewing needles. 

 

 

She knew a guy once who had sniper goggles. Improved his distance vision. She has no idea how it worked, but - she can cause as many explosions as she wants, and she has time. 

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Leareth knows that Carissa is planning something, and he ends up guessing at the outlines of what without even meaning to. He's not reading her mind that often, nowadays; mostly he studies the new magic and re-checks his god design now that he's SMARTER and - has dreams, every so often, in a snowy wilderness, speaking to a Herald who looks like a tired silver-haired man but isn't, yet, is really just a boy...

Leareth hopes Carissa knows what she's doing, right now.

He hopes he knows what he's doing. It's been a long, long time since he last felt this unsure of his footing. Enough that he doesn't remember what it felt like, then, and so this experience feels very new and strange.

A few weeks after a box of very fine, very expensive pearls arrives for Carissa to examine, Leareth shows up as she's finishing her magic explosions for the day. "I would like to speak now, if that is all right with you?"

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"Of course."

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"Walk with me?" He starts walking without waiting for her answer. "I am curious whether you have thought any further on - what sort of god you would create, if it were up to you. I am not looking for a well-structured essay, right now, off the cuff will do."

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Why is he SO TERRIFYING she not-thinks that and all associated lines of thought. 

"I think that maybe there should be several of them," she says, a bit inanely. "There are some gods where the concept sounds good but I don't like their church much in practice, and if there were gods of different things, but they got along and you were allowed to pick, there could be healthy competition."

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"I see. Would it also work to meet this preference if, instead, there were a main god with multiple facets or aspects, which had different churches? ...Note that I am not sure 'churches' in the sense they exist in Golarion map well to what we have here, but I am somewhat hoping to create a god that is more interested in communication and coordination with mortals than our current set, so perhaps the Golarion-style churches are not a bad model to build from."

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"Most churches don't do that but I don't know why not. There are lots of Hellknight orders and that seems to work okay....I also don't actually know that much about religion in places that aren't Cheliax, one wasn't really supposed to."

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It's...nice, somehow, to hear her admit that. "Yes, I think you have a limited window onto how things are done in Golarion, but unless I can find your world and judge it a good idea to open communications, we are starting fresh here anyway. I do think a difference is that Velgarth gods are - less specific and bound, in a way, they are not gods 'of' nearly such specific concepts. To the extent I wish to create a god 'of' something, they would be the god of - protecting the interests of mortals, I suppose. Which is complicated because there are a lot of us and a lot of interests to represent, sometimes conflicting ones."

He paces in silence for a bit. "...I am curious to hear your thoughts on that too, actually. If - you imagine you yourself were the god of human interests, and you were called on to respond to a dispute between two human countries, what factors would you take into account?"

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"Gods rarely weigh in that directly. I guess I'd go off Law. What the treaty between them says, what keeps them both stably ruled."

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Nod. "That makes sense. Law is a very good concept for this, actually. I do not think any of the current Velgarth pantheon is very Lawful - or very Good or Evil, come to think of it, I sat down with a list and tried to categorize them and they seem to cluster around neutral. Having a god that is - predictable, consistent, keeps commitments and promotes a world where mortals are rewarded for doing so also, is - in significant part what I wish to build here."

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"Law is really important. And lawful countries go to war less often; they have to both think a war is a good idea, instead of it kind of just happening by default. Almost all of Cheliax's conquests were bloodless - or at least that's what it is desirable to believe about how they went - because you shouldn't have to fight a war, if you can trust each other to keep your word and you know how the war would go."

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"Indeed." Leareth glances over at her. "I would be curious to hear you unpack 'that is what is desirable to believe about how they went' - is there propaganda on these conquests that is broadly understood by clever people within Cheliax to be that, or something else?"

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" - everyone knows that what's in the history textbooks is what's important to believe, not - what they believe in other countries or what you'd have believed if you were there at the time. But you like it when I distinguish between those."

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"Yes, I do." He looks at her, pensive. (He is especially terrifying with that expression.) "Beliefs are for making predictions about the world, and the outcomes of possible actions, right? And - for you it was very important to have accurate predictions of how others, especially authorities, would respond to certain beliefs you held. That is a perfectly valid type of belief; there would have been very real effects had you been caught having the wrong thoughts, in Cheliax." A flicker of distaste-unhappiness in his expression. "However, it is important to disambiguate now, because we are not in Cheliax, and the prediction I care most about, right now, is whether following a given policy would lead to lives lost. That is...a very difficult fact of the matter to guess at from history books, even in countries that do not punish thoughtcrimes; what is believed in other countries may not be a much better proxy for it. But you can see that it is a different question, right, and it matters what question you are using your beliefs to answer?"

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She's not sure if there's some double meaning she's supposed to take away from that. "I think lawlessness leads to lives being lost. But I don't know."

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Leareth is quiet for ten seconds or so, walking.

"I expect you are right," he says finally. "Anyway, I had better get back to my work, so I will let you be. But...think on it. It is important."

He peels off, leaving it unspecified whether 'it' is the kind of god that needs building, or the kind of belief that matters here in Velgarth, or something else.

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It takes her longer than usual to stop trembling.

 

 

She wants to rush ahead. The thing she wants to do is possible to do now, she's pretty sure. But - but the backup plans aren't, and there'll be countermeasures, and she's not going to get this much latitude twice.

She works on her glasses of Detect Magic and doesn't do anything on the side except make them also really good at long distance vision. She starts trying to get the pearls of power to work. She starts trying to learn spell-duration extension. She writes up regular reports for Leareth on all of this except the long distance vision.


She asks Calib how things are expected to change after the invasion, if there is an invasion. What Valdemar is like. Whether they'll still be stuck on this base.

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Calib always looks kind of sad and worried when she brings up the topic, and gets snugglier. "Well, either way the invasion wouldn't be for at least a decade. Leareth's been laying preparations for decades already and there's still some planned."

He sits up, expression growing more animated. "...Valdemar's pretty interesting, though. It was founded eight hundred years ago by some guy who fled the Eastern Empire, I think during an especially bad period - uh, from what I hear the Empire's still the place with the best material standards of living in the entire world, but it's very authoritarian, Leareth's theory is that the gods will let more technology slide if there are other factors that reduce people's freedom, and it got more corrupt after he gave up on running it himself. Anyway. So picture this: Baron Valdemar flees all the way to the edge of the Pelagirs with his whole landholding and entourage, and then founds his own little kingdom there, and - I guess he gets worried about it going corrupt too. So he prays to the gods. All of them, every single god whose name he knows. And - someone answered. None of the histories say which Power or how many, but - all of a sudden these magic intelligent white horses show up from nowhere. They're called Companions and they soulbond to the Kingdom's leadership, and supposedly they're incorruptible, right. I reckon what that really means is they're bound to serve the god that made them, but it seems to be a very hands-off relationship, you don't hear about overt miracles there like in Karse or Iftel. The first Companions started having Companion babies and now there's a couple hundred of them, and they Choose all the most promising and moral children - in practice I think it's just Gifted children, actually - from all over the Kingdom, and if you're Chosen you go to Haven, the capital, and train to be a Herald, that's what someone chosen by a Companion is called. They're a hereditary monarchy like most places but the monarch has to be a Herald, sometimes that means a cousin inherits instead of the last monarch's children."

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"Huh. 

 

Why're we invading - there instead of some other place, if it basically works and it's lawful..."

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"I don't know all of Leareth's reasons for choosing them. I...do know that it basically works but not great, it's - Leareth said it's too centralized, in a way, everyone Gifted works for the Crown and so there's no free market in how their time is allocated. They're stable but they're very poor compared to somewhere like the Eastern Empire or even Rethwellan, and they're not making especially effective use of their land area for, uh, maximum population size. I think their location's part of it too, they're accessible from, er, here, which was the best staging-area for Leareth's plan since it's not claimed by any gods, but the other places nearest here are the Pelagirs, which are under the Star-Eyed's control, and Iftel, which Vkandis has a bloody giant impassible shield around. But the god that claims territory in Valdemar seems - unusually hands-off, and Leareth's been able to operate there in the past with a lot less interference. And there's probably other reasons that I'm not cleared to know."

Shrug. "I don't like it. I don't think Leareth does either. It's definitely - well, he wouldn't be doing this if he were directly trying to fix things instead of, uh, getting ten million people for the god."

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Shiver. Hug. 

 

 

 

She goes out flying with her new glasses and looks south and tries to fix in her mind the farthest point south that she can see. 

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She can see a range of mountains! They're at least fifty miles away, and they're gorgeous, rearing up tall and snowcapped and gleaming in the weak winter sun.

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And she probably can't go high enough to see past their peaks, but she'll try, going as far up as the spell permits, using Feather Fall to save herself on the ride down.

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She cannot in fact get high enough to see past the peaks or get a good view of the other side, but if she casts Fly twice in a row and powers up as hard as she can, she can manage a peek over the lowest point between two mountain peaks. Though of course the angle means she can only see what's past the 'shadow' of the mountain range, which is probably five hundred miles away, and even through the glasses it's mostly lost in the haze of distance, a brief impression of green and brown and maybe the glint of a large lake or inland sea.

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It's not enough for a Teleport but that's fine.

 

She plummets to the ground and catches herself with Feather Fall and lands, grinning. "I have got to make an item of Fly for you all," she says to the other people out travelling with her, and spends the rest of the time outdoors thinking about how to do it.

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Later that day, in another part of the complex:

Nayoki goes to Leareth. :Carissa is planning something:

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Leareth doesn't look up from his notes, but he does smile slightly. :I am aware:

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:No, I mean, actually. I think she might be trying to escape to Valdemar:

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:Yes, Calib told me she seemed especially curious about it. Though there are perfectly innocuous reasons for that too. It is a rather curious place:

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:- Leareth, are you just - having fun toying with her? That seems cruel:

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:No! But...well, she is very motivated and making excellent progress on her study of magic, right now, and...I think it is important to give her some breathing space. I am not going to intervene just based on this:

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Nayoki sighs gustily and throws up both hands. :Suit yourself, then, it will serve you right if you get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to go retrieve her from some escapade:

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Leareth shakes his head and goes back to his work.

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Carissa doesn't expect to have very much longer. 

The plan rather comes together all at once, since she wasn't allowed to think about it earlier. 

 

She sets two unseen servants to packing and cleaning, and some dancing lights to racing across the ceiling; they don't matter but they'll be distracting to mage sight.

 

She goes invisible. 

 

She goes to her wardrobe and takes a string of rope and pins it inside one of her longer dresses, and casts Magic Aura on it, and casts an Extended Rope Trick, and climbs it, and secrets herself away in the extradimensional space at the top. This is not leaving the secret base, she thinks to herself determinedly the whole time, because she knows there's an enchantment on her that makes that impossible to do.

But they'll notice the planar magic. They know she's been asking questions about Valdemar. 

She'll see what they do about that.

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The magic itself doesn't set off any alarms; Carissa does magic in her room regularly.

The disappearance of the tracking-spell in her shield-amulet and also on the gown she's wearing from the wards DOES. It's very early in the morning and Leareth is not actually asleep but isn't yet up. He is thirty seconds later, though he strolls into the ward-observation station at a walk rather than a run.

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The junior mage on night duty is looking half-panicked. "I'm extending the search-range - we should know in thirty seconds if she's in Valdemar -"

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"Do not rush it. I doubt she is in Valdemar, anyway." He turns, unhurried, as another mage rushes into the room. "- Perfect. Albrat, there should be fresh hair from her hairbrush in storage room three. Top shelf, left, white box. I would like you to cast the search-spell for her." It'll take half a candlemark, it's a fiddly and difficult spell, but it ought to find her anywhere in the world, even if she's somehow spoofing his tracking spell. Which he doubts, but - well, he did semi-deliberately avoid learning too much about what she was planning.

(This is fun. Leareth is mostly not consciously aware of the fact that he's enjoying himself immensely, he's too busy thinking about the object level problem-solving, but he is nonetheless having a great time.)

     "On it," Albrat says, darting out.

Leareth turns again as someone else enters. "Review the ward-coverage, please, I want anything on the magic detected immediately before we lost her signature."

    "Yes, of course - it doesn't record it in a lot of detail though..."

"I know. Come to the room and tell me once you have a report." Leareth turns on his heels and strides down the hall.

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Nayoki is already standing in the open doorway to Carissa's empty room. "I told you."

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"Yes, yes, I know." Leareth steps past her. Looks around.

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It's dark; she lights it with magic, usually, and those spells don't seem to be active at the moment.

She took her spellsilver and left almost everything else; the room is not very neat. There are in progress magic items. No spellbook, of course. 

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She is watching interestedly from the Rope Trick. It's been five minutes. The use of magic shouldn't have triggered an alarm that quickly. So...something else. Maybe the room is under observation, but she's been invisible in it before. Probably he has some way to track her. The obvious one would be her invincibility amulet. If Golarion summons worked she'd give it to a summoned creature, see what that did, but the local style of summons is different...

 

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The other mage catches up. "Some low-level spells right before, then - here, look at this..." He doesn't know how to interpret the magical signature, especially.

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Leareth frowns at it. :Maybe a conjuration?: he guesses to Nayoki, in Mindspeech. :It could be a Teleport:

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:You think she -:

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:I continue to think she is almost certainly not in Valdemar, but the tracking-item search should turn that up soon enough, unless she is behind someone else's shields, in which case the search-spell will give us her rough location eventually. Get someone searching the room closely with mage-sight, please. I am going to past-watch:

The spell he can use to view events in the recent past is very tiring and will inevitably cost him an entire morning of productivity on mage-research, but that's fine. It also takes a bit to set up. Leareth starts working on it.

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Someone arrives at Nayoki's direction and starts looking around for spell-residue, though Golarion spells leave less helpful residues than Velgarth ones and they're not sure they know how to interpret it anyway. Leareth would do better but he appears occupied. And also still very unworried.

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So they can see spells cast. That's not surprising.

 

She takes off the shield-talisman and sets it down. Then, regretfully, takes off her headband, too, examines herself closely for any other magic.

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There's also a very low power and well-concealed but findable scrap of magic on her gown; it proves to be a crystal focus no bigger than a grain of sand, sewed into the lining where she would never have noticed it without combing herself over thoroughly.

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Leareth is half done casting the spell when someone taps at his shields, letting him know that Carissa is not in Valdemar or, in fact, anywhere within the range that their highest-powered search can pin down the tracking spells on her. Which means either she's over a thousand miles away, or she's behind very very good shields - the oldest Palace Work Room in Valdemar might suffice, but little else - or she's not in this plane at all.

:Thank you: he sends back, and returns his focus to the past-watching spell.

(To Carissa's viewpoint, it's not obvious what he's doing, aside from 'magic', and he's not speaking out loud at all.)

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Carissa examines the gown, and then very carefully slices it out, and then decides she can't be sure she missed one and takes the whole thing off, and then prepares spells for her remaining slots, hurriedly. 

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Leareth gets the pastwatching spell up. Like with Farsight, the image is only visible to him, though he can pull Nayoki into Mindspeech rapport to share it with her.

It's been a little over ten minutes. He reaches back with the spell until the moment at which the wards triggered an alarm, then to about two minutes before that point, and then he pushes in more power and watches it with mage-sight as well as he plays forward those two minutes.

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Carissa sets some Unseen Servants to work tidying the room, and some Dancing Lights racing about it. She looks cheerful. The Dancing Lights go out. There's a planar spell, third-circle. There's an illusion spell, second-circle. The Unseen Servants continue their work sweeping and moving her books around (it being dark, this is mostly only visible to mage-sight as the magic itself, not the effects), and then abruptly wink out. 

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Leareth goes back again to the point where the Dancing Lights went out, and this time tries to specifically keep his attention on Carissa's visible aura of mage-energies - where does she go?

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Her aura disappears when she makes herself invisible. Then there is the third-circle conjuration spell. Then there's the second-circle illusion spell. 

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Leareth replays the sequence several times in a row. It...doesn't make sense? For one, the third-circle signature isn't powerful enough for a real Teleport, or even a real Dimension Door, the shorter-range version. It's - not impossible, he supposes, that she invented some hyper-optimized short-range Teleport that could work at third-circle, maybe just enough to get her a hundred feet away or so and outside his wards, but - also, it doesn't make sense that she would have cast that and then an illusion. There's not a huge gap but the second-circle illusion spell's signature is definitely after the planar magic.

He's so curious.

:Organize a search for her or for any sign of spell residue within a two-hundred-foot perimeter of the base: he orders to whichever Mindspeaker is nearest. :Anything on the search?:

      :No, not yet:

That's not surprising, the exhaustive search-spell based on the hair sample - which is fresh, he had a Fetcher taking some from her hairbrush every night once she was asleep - takes a long time to cast, and is especially fiddly when done from hair instead of blood. Obtaining nightly samples of Carissa's blood would have been a lot more inconvenient and he judged it not worth the cost.

All right. Focus. Replay the past-spell again; can he see where the illusion-magic is landing?

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On the ...wall? Maybe on the wardrobe.

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Still holding onto the spell even though his head is aching a bit now - it'll be even more tiring if he has to re-cast it - Leareth strides over to the wardrobe, and this time pays very, very close attention to what his mage-sight can sense there in the present. Is there still any hint of active illusion magic?

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He has to look very very very closely but - yes, there's a careful illusion clinging to this dress, or to - something pinned in the dress.

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...Weird. He can't figure out what she's playing at, here. (It is also apparent to Carissa, watching unseen, that Leareth is definitely enjoying himself right now.)

     A tap against his shields. :Update. Search-spell - she isn't in Valdemar - she...isn't in the material plane at all...? I'm sorry, I can't get closer than that:

Leareth's lips twitch. :I see. Thank you:

Planar magic. Low-powered. Maybe she could teleport herself to the Elemental Plane of Air or something, just 'adjacent' to this spot, but - that's awfully chancy, it's unclear that even the friendliest other planes accessible from Velgarth would support human life for long, she would have to trust her protective spells a lot and he doesn't think Endure Elements would suffice...

She won't have done anything suicidal, he thinks. Wherever she is, she's fine. Probably very pleased with herself, too.

He takes down the past-watching spell, he's gotten everything from it that he's going to and he wants to be less distracted now.

With a twist of magic, he reaches out and snips through just the right place in the illusion spell to set it crumbling to pieces.

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Carissa is relieved that Leareth is enjoying himself and hopes he still feels that way when she's done, which she isn't, she still only knows slightly more than she started with about how he's tracking her. Detect Thoughts would be so informative right now but it doesn't work across the planes.

 

Well. It's time to get out of here anyway.


She casts Nondetection. Invisibility. Detect Thoughts. Gaseous Form. 

 

And she leaves the demiplane, which still contains her dress and her invincibility artifact and her headband. She takes her pearls of power and spellsilver. She thinks he can't track her now, and she wants to see if she's right.

Also she really really really wants to see if she can read his mind.

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The illusion appears to have been concealing that this rope has an aura of transmutation.

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(Unfortunately Carissa cannot read Leareth's mind; he seems to have a very high will save against Detect Thoughts, possibly related to one of the multiple protective magic items he wears all the time; there was the one he took off back when he offered to let her read his mind.)

...What is the rope doing? What does it even mean for a rope to have an aura of transmutation because someone cast a third-circle conjuration spell with some sort of planar effect on it?

Leareth tries to unpin and pull the rope out of the dress to get a closer look at it.

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Elsewhere, Leareth's mage still has the search-spell up and is trying to narrow down which other plane Carissa is in right now -

- and the spell is suddenly going nuts and so confused! He still can't pin her down but the spell seems to think that she's now in the material plane and - probably within ten miles?

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The rope seems incredibly stuck! To - a particular point in the air? It can be pulled out of the dress but it's still stuck to the air.

 

 

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Carissa frustratedly leaves the room and looks for someone else to mindread.

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Nayoki is standing in the hallway, simultaneously talking out loud to someone and also Mindspeaking someone else further away, and she's not wearing any magic items against Thoughtsensing and isn't paying the most attention she ever has to her shields; Detect Thoughts can get through. There are also a lot of other people who aren't that well shielded but Nayoki seems like the one who's the most in-the-know about what's going on.

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Carissa flattens herself against the ceiling and listens in.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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?"

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- 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.

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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.)

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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.

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: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:

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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. 

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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:

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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.

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: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:

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It's what powerful wizards do in her world. Why die when you can, instead, not do that. And he's strange in a way that is easily made sense of by the thousands-of-years-old claim and hard to make sense of otherwise.

 

She notices herself paying attention to his face, again, and stops that.

:I'll think about it:

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:I appreciate it:

And he hauls himself out of the pool, dripping, and gets his towel, smiling at her one last time before walking away. (At the same time he takes off the heaviest-duty compulsion that would block her from casting spells. He's not worried about that, not now.)

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The actual Calib finds her a while later, once the disarray in the facility is settled down. "So you played a practical joke on Leareth or something? Honestly, good job, you impressed him and surprised him, and hardly anyone ever manages that."

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Hug. "I hope I didn't startle anybody too badly! I just experimented with some new spells and then when that set off lots of alarms I snuck off invisibly to see what I had wrought. I was worried he'd be mad but I don't think he is."

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He laughs. "Oh, dear. No, I don't reckon he is. Some of the others might be a little bit sore about being wrenched out of bed at the crack of dawn, but I'm sure they'll forgive you if you get around to making that magic item for flying. Or show them the new spell. I heard you can make your own tiny plane to hang out in?" His smile broadens. "Sounds useful for privacy. And certain activities one might want privacy for. ...Although we'd have to clear with Leareth how to make it not set off alarms, or people will get really tired of it."

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"I'd like that a lot. It's pretty small and totally featureless, by default, but we could get a mattress up there. ...I think it won't set off alarms if I go in naked."

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Calib chuckles. "Well, then I think I'd like that too. ...Did Leareth give you any new projects once you were finished showing off? I've heard he likes doing that."

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"Not exactly? He offered that I could go to Valdemar."

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"Wow. To check up on his claims yourself? That's - well, it makes a lot of sense for him to offer, given...things, but it's pretty generous. He's so paranoid."

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"He did specify that it would be with lots of mindcontrol. But - I guess it'd still be taking a risk."

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Nod. "More than not doing it, anyway. But - I think he really wants you on his team. Which, no wonder, look at you - smart, talented, and gorgeous." He grins.

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Kiss. "He doesn't really seem like the type to have an opinion about that last thing!"

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"I suppose not." And he kisses her back.

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And Carissa returns to her regular routine, and apologizes to her friends for waking them up early, and continues implying that the alarm was entirely accidental, triggered by her testing out her new dimensional pocket spell, though she did then go invisible to check out what all the fuss was.

She works on pearls of power.

In her weekly report she tells Leareth she would like to go to Valdemar.

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He nods, level, unsurprised. "Good. I do want to take some precautions for your safety, as well as for operational security. Also I unfortunately cannot transport you all the way to the capital, assuming that is where you want to go; Valdemar has Kingdom-wide wards, they are not all that sensitive but a Gate to Haven would certainly be detected immediately. Do you have plans for transportation and for your own defense should it be necessary?"

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"I have the needle that's a one-off Teleport. ...I think. I don't generally make mistakes with magic items but it's a weird one I invented myself secretly, so. I can double-check it. How far is the nearest location you could Gate to?"

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Leareth makes no comment on her secret inventing habits. "Two hundred and fifty miles north, give or take. Can you Teleport to a place you have never been? I suppose I could have someone Farsee it for you and share the image over Mindspeech."

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"You can try but there's some chance it'll fail. I can ride two hundred fifty miles if it's reasonably safe territory."

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"If I deliver you twenty miles from the border then it ought go undetected and then be a reasonably safe ride, yes." He frowns. "What is your plan to get out, if you are - in trouble, of some kind, and need to return here or get my attention? ...I have measures I can set up but I would like to hear your ideas first."

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"If I'm in short-term trouble I can go invisible and fly off. If I'm in bigger trouble than that I'd use the teleport."

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Leareth nods, seems satisfied. "Good. I would like if you also took an artifact from me; it will not be detectable by magic except at extremely close range, and is meant to resemble a different minor artifact to a quick look even then. It would enable you to send an emergency alert to me, if you are unsure whether you will be able to successfully teleport out."

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"I can do that. Will my hair still work for your tracking spell if it's not stolen off me that night."

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Leareth smiles slightly. "Much less reliably after a full day, though if it were me casting the spell personally I could perhaps manage it up to forty-eight candlemarks. I am very good at it."

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"To be clear I cannot ride two hundred fifty miles in a day. If I have the horse gallop all day it'll only make half that and we only did that once in the army and it was horrible. I'd probably take three days there and three days back."

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Leareth nods. "I am sure I could find you eventually in any case, but since I would prefer if I could find you promptly if you were in danger, I would like if you wore your shield-talisman. Unfortunately it is not subtle to mage-sight, which might present a problem if you wanted to interview any of their Herald-Mages. Could your Nondetection spell be cast on something else permanently, or paired with it, to conceal its magical signature?"

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"I bet I could figure out how to make it permanent."

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"I think that would be good. And if you are wearing it then you are - not impossible to injure, but it would take a Final Strike at short range, anything short of that ought give you at least some time to fly away and teleport."

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"I have noticed that. It's a very good artifact. If I do get murdered you will just have to build your god and get me back." You have to say that sentence very, very jokingly for it to not be pathetic but she thinks she managed it.

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(Leareth has a few much more serious plans in the eventuality of Carissa's murder - for one, he could prioritize finding Golarion a lot harder and try to persuade one of the non-Evil gods to tell him how resurrection works - but he doesn't mention that.) He ducks his head, almost chuckling. "Yes, of course. So three days there, three days back - how long do you intend to spend in Haven?"

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"I don't know. Possibly a week?"

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"All right, I will give it a fortnight before I become seriously worried about not hearing from you. I should also station someone up north to meet you on your return."

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"You should tell me more about Valdemar. Calib explained the general history, but I don't know - why you picked it, whether they know..."

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"I - am not altogether happy with the choice, though mostly I am not entirely happy with the plan of murdering ten million people to begin with. Valdemar seemed the best of several non-ideal options; it is geographically accessible from here, it is relatively poorly defended since it has fewer mages than most places - Gifts are hereditary and Valdemar does the opposite of what is sensible given that, most Heralds accept it as a vocation and are too busy running the Kingdom to have children. It is under the territory of a less overtly meddling god and there is some existing magical infrastructure that I could repurpose if I can capture it intact."

He glances down. "However, there is some sort of god-meddling afoot here and I do not particularly understand it, yet. I am not even Gifted with Foresight and yet a couple of years ago I began having a vivid recurring dream, of meeting and fighting a powerful Herald-Mage in the north, at the location where I had planned to take the main body of my army across the mountains. And about eighteen months ago this rather inexplicably became a lucid dream. One where both of us are present. So - now I have regular lucid prophetic dreams where we have awkward conversations about it. My best guess is that the other leadership are aware of the dream's existence but not of the second part, or else I would surely have heard more of it. The Herald-Mage's name is Vanyel Ashkevron, he is currently still very young, and - in terms of raw power, he is by far the strongest mage in the world. I am fairly sure this is not a coincidence either, and some god or gods arranged a horrific magical accident to cause it. Questions?"

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"In Golarion power is straightforwardly just - uh, I've been thinking of you as a ninth-circle wizard and past ninth circle it's just a matter of inventing new spells and techniques and accumulating resources, there's no sense in which someone can be more powerful than you without being at least a little bit a god. What does that mean, here..."

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"I think we are more similar to Golarion sorcerers than wizards, but I suppose the same might hold of them. Here, a mage's raw channeling power is mostly based on the innate strength of their Gift, rather than a matter of experience; it can be increased with practice, but by twofold at most, not more than that. To the extent that I can compare with a ninth circle wizard from your world, it is because I know many uses of magic, some unknown by anyone but myself, and I am very skilled at doing magic fast. And, of course, I can throw together artifacts like the shield-amulet you are wearing. However, in terms of channeling capacity, I am not that much stronger than the average Adept, like Nayoki." He shakes his head. "I could almost certainly beat Herald-Mage Vanyel in a fight, still, unless he resorted to Final Strike, because I would fight smarter and I would arrive very, very overprepared. But, from what I have been able to gather - which is limited, Valdemar is understandably secretive about him - Vanyel's maximum channeling capacity could easily be five times mine, and has been since the day he became a mage."

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"Wow. With Golarion magic that'd mean there were a lot of things you couldn't do at all that he could learn to do?"

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"Oh, I am sure there exist vast numbers of possible spells that have never been explored, here, because nobody can channel the required power, and if he has a chance then Vanyel could discover them. Among other things, I suspect he is powerful enough to directly modify the Web, the ward-structure that King Valdemar set up; it is partially the miraculous work of a god, so it is more powerful than anything an ordinary mage could work on alone, but I think Vanyel could do it. Though I am not sure he has recognized this fact yet and I do not intend to enlighten him."

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" - right." Sigh. 

"If it's your country could you kill the people - when they're old, when they're going to die anyway..."

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"I can make some choices around that. But - if this ends up being the plan, in the end, I am likely to have less leeway than I would like, and most of it needs to be within a very short period of time. If there were a way to store huge quantities of mage-energy, like water behind a dam, then there would be less need to use blood-magic at all, I could accumulate it from nodes over a very long time instead."

He sighs as well. "I do not want to be Vanyel's enemy. It is stupid and tragic and - I am trying to persuade him..." Shrug. "I am not sure what I hope to accomplish with it, he is a pawn of the gods being steered on the path They want him to follow."

Carissa has never seen Leareth visibly upset before, or even sad, but there's a flicker of it now.

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"Everyone is. Except you, I guess."

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Leareth says nothing, just nods heavily.

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Carissa works on making Leareth's shield-amulet less visible to mage-sight and reads books about Valdemar. She doesn't try to learn the language because she hates languages.

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Leareth asks about her progress at their next weekly check-in and how much longer she needs. He's very serious, no sign of the smile and warmth from before.

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That seems like a bad sign but she doesn't know what she did wrong. "I can get it in the next couple of weeks."

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"No need to hurry, this trip is for you." Leareth sits back, takes a breath and makes a deliberate attempt to relax his shoulders and soften his curt expression with a smile. "- I am not irritated with you. I am just - it is very wearisome to fight the gods, sometimes. Especially when They try to point bright children toward killing themselves at me."

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"I....guess it would be. I'm sorry."

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"Thank you." Leareth breathes in and out, and manages a slightly more genuine smile. "Anyway. Keep me updated, I suppose. And...that is my hope, right, in learning your magic and in having you on my side. That there will be a better way."

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"I could almost definitely kidnap this specific guy? But - maybe he's metonymy, and I don't know the general solution, there. Probably fighting the gods is very hard even with an additional magic system."

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Sigh. "Probably. I have sometimes had the hope that if I could just sit down in a room with Vanyel and have him listen to me, I could convince him that I am not working for evil. But - it is not actually that simple."

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"I mean - it would suck to have your country invaded to be blood sacrifices to make some guy's god. I would surrender, if it didn't look like I could win, but - I wouldn't like you about it. 

And you probably are Evil. I've been - thinking, about what you'd see if you went to Golarion, and - I think it's true, that most big ambitious things are Evil."

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"Maybe 'evil' was not the right word. I...think I am working toward something he would understand, if I could afford to explain it." Shrug. "Not that it really matters, right now, since I cannot do that."

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She has the absurd temptation to hug him again. "Do you want me to talk to him? Or to avoid doing so?"

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"I would not ask you to seek him out in particular, especially since most of the questions I would want answered would be incredibly suspicious to ask, but if the opportunity arises naturally for conversation, then - yes, I would be curious to hear your impression of him."

(Probably her impression would be incredibly Asmodean. Poor Vanyel. Leareth can't imagine that he comes across well to that particular framework. Still. It could be informative.)

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"Do you have a recommendation on where I should say I'm from? If I cast magic in front of them it'll be obvious I'm from another world but that might make lots more fuss than I want, and I could make a dagger of Tongues and then not use magic in their presence and pretend I speak the language normally."

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"Oh, yes, I would prefer you avoid fuss." He frowns at her. "Ethnically you could plausibly be from Ruvan, I think. South of Karse, but no one in Valdemar will know too much about it so they will not expect you to know more than you do. And of course you have that spell to disguise yourself, too."

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"Yes, but not all day, so it'd be better to look only a normal amount of foreign in my default clothes."

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"We can provide you with clothes that match what would be worn in Ruvan, just in case any of the Heralds would know, which probably they will not."

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"Thank you. And I assume you'll make it impossible for me to tell them anything I'm not supposed to tell them, but things I'm not supposed to tell them include..."

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"...Ideally, do not tell them anything about me or about magic from your world. I am not going to make hiding everything about your magic a compulsion, though, I assume your judgement agrees with mine here that drawing attention is much more likely to make them want to arrest and question you, but if you are caught using it then the least suspicious route out might be to offer some minimal explanation until you can get away. I absolutely do not want you to reveal any specifics of my operations and resources that you have observed, though, or anything about the god plan even at the highest level, and those I will include in the secrecy compulsion. ...The standard way those are set up means that if someone else spontaneously offers a fact that you know is true, you are not compelled to deny it or pretend you have no idea, since that kind of deception is not actually something most people are any good at." His eyes narrow slightly. "You perhaps being an exception."

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"...it seems dumb to try to do anything important while bad at deception. ...I guess lots of your people here are, like, Calib."

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"Yes. For research in particular I recruit the brightest and most curious people I can, who...in this world at least, tend not to be the most practiced at social deception, the best strategy there is to make sure the subject never comes up such that they need to lie about it. Honestly, though, you may be better at lying than I am."

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"Do you ever have to lie? You're - almost a god."

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"...To be honest, I hate lying. One of the upsides of operating more openly, as I am now, is that I rarely have cause to lie outright, and concealing information bothers me less, I think I am adequate at that."

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She nods, processing that. "I'll - let you know when I have the magic item ready, then."

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"Thank you." He's curious about her reaction, just then, but doesn't ask, just nods to her and heads out.

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She gets back to work. 

 

It takes her another two weeks to have a permanent Magic Aura on her shield-talisman from Leareth and to have double-checked her one-off teleport and to have the rest of her projects and notes organized so if she does get killed or imprisoned they have good odds of reconstructing everything eventually.

 

She lets Leareth know this.

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"All right. Good. I will arrange a Gate to just outside Westmark - that is a town twenty miles north of the current Valdemaran border, but the road from there ought be safe enough. There is really just the one road, you want to follow it due south. I will get you a detailed map anyway, of course."

And then he looks at her for a moment, his face still but warmth in his eyes; it looks like he's maybe having the inexplicable urge to hug her as well, though if so it's not clear he's noticed this fact.

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Her read is that he thinks she's hot but is a very singleminded person and also maybe doesn't quite parse all other humans as the same kind of entity he is. If he had thought about it more he'd also probably have other reservations but she bets he hasn't even considered it enough to generate them.

She does not hug him. 

 

She nods and thanks him and leaves her notes and goes.

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Leareth's mage delivers her through another Gate to an anonymous patch of packed-dirt road. It's not raining right now but it looks like the sky is considering it. There's a field nearby, maybe barley, which appears to have very recently been harvested. It was still winter in the north when she first arrived; it's early autumn now, by the look of it.

"Westmark is that way," the mage points out for her, "and you'll want to go straight through and follow the side road until it joins the main road at the fork, and then keep following the main road south. Once you hit the Valdemaran border it'll be paved. There'll be a Guard post. I don't know if you were planning to talk to them or just go invisible for it?"

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"I'm claiming to be coming from the south so I think I'll be invisible." She studies the area carefully, so she can remember it to aim a Teleport later.

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"Well, good luck! We'll have someone camping out around here for whenever you come back and need collecting."

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"Thank you." 

It feels...almost suspicious, that Leareth trusts her with this, but. He's not risking too much. He has all her notes. And - she ought to be pretty good at this. 

 

She summons a Phantom Steed, and has it set off at a gallop. Being a phantom it won't get tired; she will, but for a while it's actually exhilarating, to be outdoors and moving and, at least in a fashion, free.

 

She makes herself and her steed invisible to pass the guard post, and then keeps going, until the sun is starting to set and she is sore and exhausted and weirdly happy. She makes an Extended Rope Trick to sleep in.

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In the morning there are birds chirping and the sun is weakly making itself known through a bank of cloud, and there's some actual traffic on the road - which is in fact paved, very nicely, in some sort of smooth stone that seems out of place with the visible local tech level.

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Because mages are really good at earthworking. She's jealous. 

She doesn't have enough invisibility to evade all traffic but hopefully she can beat word of her to the city by most of a week. Normal horses cannot go twelve hours a day at a gallop.

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The locals she passes at a gallop do give her some curious looks but that's all. Leareth told her that she should particularly avoid or make sure to look unobtrusive in front of people in white riding white horses, that'd be Herald-Companion pairs and they have access to Mindspeakers with long range. She only sees one, though, and they're off the road in a town.

Halfway through the second day it starts drizzling, then raining in earnest.

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This makes her life unpleasant and makes her grateful for the good roads. She uses Endure Elements and is only a little miserable, with the misery still mostly outshone by the sheer joy of being in some limited sense free. 

(And it's not a very limited sense, right. She can't report Leareth but the compulsions she knows of don't actually prevent her from ditching the tracking items and going off to Rethwellan. She just - doesn't really want to, because she doesn't want to die forever when she gets old. Presumably Leareth reads her mind and knows this.)

By the end of the second day she is really unpleasantly chafed and astoundingly sore and has a bit of a hard time even climbing the rope into her Rope Trick. She sleeps well.

She keeps going.

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The drizzle continues on and off, which at least means less traffic on the road.

And eventually she reaches Haven. There's an outer wall, stone and two head-heights high, and a gate, with a blue-uniformed Valdemaran Guard waving people through without paying them much attention. The sun is out, at least temporarily, and there are a lot of people coming in, some with vegetables or wares presumably bound for the market, others just on foot. There's one fancier-looking carriage just ahead of Carissa.

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She waits for her Phantom Steed to run out before approaching the city on foot. It's not the kind of thing local magic can do. 

 

Then she casts Tongues and heads on through the gates.

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Haven is...way way less nice than Cheliax in almost every way, actually. It feels crowded and dirty and it smells. The roads are paved, at least, the buildings in reasonably good repair. She seems to be in a merchant district; the road is lined with shops. People are shouting cheerfully to each other in the street.

She passes a Herald riding a white horse. He doesn't seem to notice her at all.

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Leareth gave her some local money. She will try to find an inn with a nearby place to drink and talk to people.

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She can eventually find a reasonably priced inn and a tavern next door, not the nicest establishment she's ever seen but it's seeing quite a lot of traffic. The rain looks ready to start up again and people out for the afternoon are seeking shelter and some of them are headed there.

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Carissa is a scout for a merchant company from Ruval, she rides ahead and takes notes on the roads and on politics and what people are buying and selling and worrying about. She buys herself a drink and tries to get some conversations on this topic going.

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She gets some interest, and then after a bit a woman - though it takes a moment to tell because she's dressed in men's clothing and is very tall and muscular - joins her across the table. "You're from out of town, huh?"

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"Yep." Also she's reading all these peoples' minds.

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"I'm Lissa." The woman is delighted to meet someone from far away, who sounds interesting. And she's very pretty. Lissa doesn't normally lean that way, really, but she's had a few drinks, and some part of her kind of wants to prove to her damned brother that not everyone is so uptight about it. Not that he's here tonight, he said he was "tired" or something. Oh well, that just means she won't have to keep an eye on him or worry about staying out too late.

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Carissa is definitely not above sleeping with people on her spy mission but she's going to be strategic about who, probably, she wants to get close to the Heralds. That's not a consideration against flirting a little bit, though, and buying the woman a drink while she asks her about how Haven is doing and what trade goods are most expensive in Valdemar and which gods are worshipped here and what people think of the Queen.

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Lissa will tell her what she knows about trade goods. She doesn't have much to say about gods, most of the Heralds go to the temple of Kernos and her family worships Astera (Lissa thinks with annoyance that her mother used to be quite enthusiastic about it and one of the few upsides of her not liking their new priest is that it cooled her down a bit.) They're overworking her brother, is how Haven is doing, she's only here for a couple of weeks and he's not taking leave for it; she rolls her eyes about this. The Queen's all right. Everyone calls her Elspeth the Peacemaker, she's well regarded - Lissa leans forward and admits to having met her, though she doesn't dwell on that line of conversation.

(Her thoughts steer away from what seems to be a painful memory, of torrential rain and thunder and sitting up in a room with a glass door to a garden, staring at a sleeping figure in a bed - and Queen Elspeth looking just like a normal person, talking like one too, being apologetic and mostly seeming tired and old...)

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Ooooh, that's interesting and Carissa will order the girl some more drinks. She's heard about the Herald system, how does it work? It is true that people here don't think anything happens when they die, in Ruvan lots of people think you go somewhere nice and glory in the presence of the gods.

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The way the Herald system works is they Choose nice kids and then overwork them. Lissa rolls her eyes again (and thinks about her brother, and the circles under his eyes, not that this is really because of his duties.) People talk a bit sometimes about going to the Havens when you die? But it's not like you can check, or - talk to dead people... (Her voice tightens on this sentence and then she trails off; she's thinking about her brother again, remembering him curled up sobbing, and then she shoves the memory aside.)

Lissa is at this point quite tipsy and this nice girl from Ruvan is very gorgeous and she kind of wants to not keep getting reminded of topics that make her sad and is also vaguely itching to pick a fight with some man who deserves it, but she's not socially graceful at the best of times and isn't sure how to turn this conversation into that.

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She can do happier topics though she's not sure she can do - actually, she can probably find a man who deserves it, by reading their minds.

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There are lots of men whose minds she can read, it's getting quite raucous in here, and this one is definitely thinking some not-very-nice thoughts about the young woman he's buying drinks for.

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Then she'll frown conspiratorially at Lissa. "Mind if we move over to keep an eye on that guy, he's giving me a bad feeling."

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Lissa looks startled and then nods. "Good idea, we'd better."

...In this case they'll be close by enough to spot the man putting some sort of extra something from a hip flask into the girl's drink while she's ducking out to use the privy.

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Well, leaving your drink unattended is pretty much asking for that, and Carissa kind of thinks the girl has it coming, but instead she'll nudge Lissa so she doesn't miss it.

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Lissa is pretty unimpressed too, but in her books that means a friendly conversation with the girl, who does look very young, and not everyone's mamas tell them what to be careful of. (Her mama didn't, Lady Treesa is airheaded as anything, it was the other women learning swordfighting at Lord Corey's manor who gave her those essential lessons.)

She gets up, not stumbling at all despite the number of drinks in her, and taps the man on the shoulder. "Hey. That wasn't very nice."

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His eyes play over her face for a moment and note that she isn't exactly pretty, on top of being dressed like a man. "- What's it to you? You're not my ma. Bugger off."

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"I'm not her ma either, but in a sense every nice girl out there's my sister, and you're not being nice to her."

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The man seems to find this hard to follow. "Bugger off," he repeats. "Or I'll make you."

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Lissa appears to consider this solemnly for a moment. "No," she decides.

- She waits until the man rises and tries to grab her arm before spinning, startlingly graceful given how tipsy she has to be, and catching him under the chin with her elbow.

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It's not hard enough to knock him out or seriously injure him, but it does send him toppling back against the bar, grabbing at it for support. "You bitch -" He shakes his head for a moment and brings up his fists.

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"Oh, look at that, not nice at all."

It's not a very long fight, but based on Lissa's expression and blissful surface thoughts, it's a very satisfying one. It attracts quite an audience in the thirty seconds it takes. Lissa makes sure to wait until the man is about to hit her.

Eventually she seems to get impatient, and when he tries to grab her and pin her against the bar - he's only a fraction taller but a lot heavier - she headbutts him, breaking his nose, and then somehow uses his own momentum to send him flying to the floor.

"I wouldn't get up just yet," she says sweetly. "If I were you." Oh but she loooooooves fighting.

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"Lieutenant Ashkevron," the bartender says wearily, "I told you, no fighting in my -"

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"Hey, it's captain now. 'Cept I'm off duty so actually it's just Liss. And he had it coming, you should kick him out." Lissa is still completely steady on her feet, but her voice is the teensiest bit slurred.

     The girl finally gets back from the privy, face freshly powdered, and stops dead, blinking.

"Your date was a slimy bastard," Lissa says, just as sweetly. She looks so pleased with herself. "Hey no, have a seat with us for a minute and I'll tell you what a girl's gotta do to look out for herself..."

This takes about three minutes. The young woman seems to find Lissa baffling and kind of scary, and also walking in to find her date bleeding on the floor and then shuffling out under the bartender's glare totally ruined her mood. She leaves.

Lissa turns and beams at Carissa. "That was so fun."

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"You make a habit of that? Captain?"

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Lissa rolls her eyes. "Not when I'm working. I'm on leave. All week, actually." 

She's thinking that okay fine she does sometimes go to the worst tavern in whatever-town, not in uniform obviously, and pick a fight, sparring just doesn't hit the same buttons for her. But it's really only in Haven that there's a semi-infinite supply of skeezy men she can catch doing something they deserve to be beaten up for, and it's such good stress relief.

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Well, people who aren't wizards also get better at what they do by doing it with real stakes. "It was very impressive." Giggle. "I couldn't do that sober." She could Sleep them but that is, technically, a different thing.

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Lissa chuckles as well. "I've had practice. Next round of drinks on me?" She's relaxed and in such a good mood and pretty glad now that she didn't drag Van along with her, he'd be squeamish and upset. Honestly giving someone with his personality extremely powerful magic is a waste, she thinks, he haaates fighting.

She brings them drinks and sits down and smiles brightly at Carissa, waiting to see what she'll say.

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"How'd you get so good at that?"

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"I had a really good teacher. Lord Corey. I persuaded my father to send me out to train with him when I was not quite eighteen, since I'm," vague gesture at her face and current clothing, "not very marriageable. Conveniently, who wants to get married to some crusty noble. "And then I joined the Guard. I guess it's really only been a couple of years. Feels longer."

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So she's in Valdemar's aristocracy. And her brother is a Herald. 

 

"It was incredible," Carissa says, and kisses her.

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Oooh. Lissa had been wondering but unsure if things were headed that way - women are harder to read, there are all the ways women can be friendly and sweet to each other that aren't that sort of thing - but she's pretty pleased with this outcome.

They get some wolf-whistles from the bar. Lissa pulls back after a minute. "If we're gonna carry on like this," she whispers in Carissa's ear, "we should take it somewhere else - I've got a room at the inn..." She is thinking that BEST VACATION EVER.

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"Good idea," she whispers back.

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Then they can take it upstairs!

Lissa gives the impression of being someone who isn't per se experienced in bed with other women but is nonetheless enthusiastic and certainly bold about it.

And if Carissa times her remaining Detect Thoughts right, to when they're snuggling and murmuring flirty exchanges to each other, she can learn a few things, though of unclear relevance. Lissa's brother - from context, the one who's a Herald - is gay. Their father disapproves and partly as a result her brother is very ashamed of it. (Lissa thinks this is STUPID and he should care less what their idiot father thinks.) Included in the subtext here is that Valdemar frowns on same-sex relationships generally, though it seems to be more the case for men; two women kissing in a bar won't attract derision, if only because the men around find it very hot.

Lissa's brother also...lost a lover in tragic circumstances? Maybe. There's an upsetting memory here that Lissa makes a habit of not-thinking about, it seems to be the same thing she wanted distraction from earlier.

They have an aunt who's also a Herald and a mage. (Lissa is at one point thinking that she's supposed to have lunch over there tomorrow and she wonders if she can manage to talk to Savil about her delightful liaison with the foreign merchant cryptically enough that Savil's teenage student won't catch on.)

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Huh. She picked well, if this was luck. (Why would a society discourage same-sex relationships? Though probably the nobility in Cheliax have lots of arbitrary taboos that are something like fashions.)

She is not totally sure she wants her liaisons accounted to the Herald-mages but, well, she is going to want to speak to them at some point. 

She sleeps well.

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Lissa is apparently a morning person; when Carissa wakes up she's already up and has made tea. "I'm going to the market this morning," she announces once she notices Carissa is awake. "Gotta get presents for the cousins, and my baby brother's engaged! Er, the other one, back home, he's the heir now. Can't hardly believe it. Last I remember he was thirteen and a fathead and getting maids pregnant - gods, Mother was upset about that one."

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"Oh? Where I'm from that's practically expected." Though also stupid because no one assassinates each other like noble half-siblings.

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"Oh, it's not surprising or anything. Just rather insensitive." Shrug. "Probably he won't be so much of a fathead when he's grown up. And at least he wants to inherit, Van never did. Anyway, I'm guessing you've got things to do, but I'll be down at the Oakenshield tonight." (This is the name of the tavern.)

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"Well, hopefully I can get my things done by then." Wink.

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Lissa returns the wink, and kisses her, and then downs the rest of her tea. "You'd better."

She heads out.

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She prepares her spells. She will have Tongues for a total of three hours of the day and should save two of them for the evening; she will have Detect Thoughts four times for a handful of minutes each; she can do Comprehend Languages much of the rest of the time, but that won't let her speak it. 

 

She goes looking for temples, not to participate but to hang around and eavesdrop.

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She can find several! There's apparently a private Heralds' temple to Kernos inside the walls that encircle the Palace and grounds, but at a glance the Gate-guard there is paying substantially more attention to questioning everyone who goes inside, and there's a much bigger temple just outside. There's also a temple to a goddess called Astera - the one that Lissa's family worships, apparently - a bit further out, and one to Vkandis Sunlord on the edge of town, in the Karsite-immigrants district. There are a few smaller temples and specialized monastic orders with locations in the city: Anathei of the Purifying Flame is mostly followed further south but has a small number of followers here; there's anuns' cloister dedicated to Astera, separate from the main temple, and also an order of monks of Kernos with a location here; there's even a very small temple to the Star-Eyed Goddess, though She's mostly worshipped by Her peoples, the Tayledras in the Pelagirs and the Shin'a'in down on the Dhorisha Plains.

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Huh. What does eavesdropping at all the ones that aren't on the palace grounds teach her? Do they have sermons? Prayer services? Libraries?

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Astera's order is a scholarly one and has a library, though the public section of it isn't that impressive. The temple to Kernos is the most widely attended and has locals dropping by to pray and leave offerings at the altar (mostly bits of paper with notes on them) throughout the day, and prayer bells every hour. The temple to Vkandis has a sermon delivered at high noon. The tiny temple to Anathei mostly has a single priest supervising an oil lamp burning, available to answer the few questions he gets from passersby.

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Maybe tomorrow she'll come back when her Tongues aren't spoken for in the evening and ask lots of questions. Today she's content to just wander the city eavesdropping and thinking.

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She sees a few Heralds from a distance. One middle-aged man appears to be a mage, and is helping out with repairs to the stone wall around the back of what seems to be the city courthouse, precisely knocking out the sections that need replacing and then floating new stone blocks into place - and fiercely concentrating at them, which apparently heats and fires the cement-grouting between them.

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She's so jealous. She stays well away from them.

 

 

In the evening she goes back to meet Lissa.

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Lissa is back at the tavern, relaxed and cheerful, and would be delighted to buy Carissa a drink and ask how her day was.

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It was okay, she collected about half the price information she needs, tomorrow she'll finish that and then there'll be the more awkward work like figuring out how long the Queen is expected to live.

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Lissa rolls her eyes. "Is that what your people want to know. Hmm, I think Savil's guessing five or ten years. ...Though Savil's older than the Queen is and I wouldn't bet on her croaking anytime in the next two decades."

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"Well, some people age better than others. Maybe I will just put your number down as a reliable estimate from an expert and leave it at that."

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"Aww, I'm an expert now, how flattering!" Lissa giggles, and then moves on to recounting things she noticed in the market about the price of goods, she paid special attention since she knew Carissa might want to know. Also she took her brother for a bit in the afternoon and he has no idea what ANYTHING is supposed to cost and is incredibly helpless at haggling. The Heralds' stipend isn't even that generous but he's got loads of unopened stipend packets shoved under his bed, she thinks he literally never does anything except work. (The Heralds' room and board and work-related expenses are all covered by the Crown, the stipend is just for extra spending money, but what's even the goddamned point if you never DO anything with it.)

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Seems pretty silly to her, even if you don't need anything it's nice to have more servants and nicer clothes and vacations and so on. Is it true that Heralds get sort of drafted by their horses, usually as kids?

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Yep, that's true! Her brother didn't want to be a Herald at all, though most kids do, it's very glamorous - at least, the stories are. This gets another eyeroll from Lissa. The reality is a lot of time out on circuit with wet feet, dealing with annoying upset townspeople. Her brother used to get very excited about nice clothes but nowadays she has to nag him to wear anything from his closet that isn't Whites.

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Awww, that's so tragic. She kind of wants to meet a Herald, is he draggable out?"

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Maybe with some coaxing! She can try to get him out tomorrow night.

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Carissa would be so appreciative! This won't help her with her job at all but she's also curious what the Guard is iike.

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Lissa is happy to chatter away about what the Guard's training regimen was like and how she's just been promoted and given a whole company of three hundred to lead, they'll be out at the western border near someplace called Deerford, mostly they'll have to deal with holding off incursions of Pelagirs beasties.

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Sounds like fun! She is content to spend most of the evening soaking up local cultural context and also hooking up.

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Lissa is not complaining about any of this! She seems to have worked out her restless energy for the moment, and doesn’t seek out more opportunities to start fights.

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The next day she saves her Tongues for meeting a Herald in the evening and spends the day eavesdropping around temples again, in various illusion-disguises.

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She learns...some things.

Vkandis Sunlord isn't that popular here except with the Karsite immigrants, and based on the conversation she overhears, Karse and Valdemar are on mildly contentious terms right now - they're officially at peace, Elspeth ("the Peacemaker") made sure of that treaty, but they have a long history of border wars.

Astera's temple is very boring but some number of locals seem to treat it similarly to a library, and come to consult their rare books collection.

The monks of Kernos are a martial order and practice fighting katas in the courtyard; Kernos in general is apparently supposed to bless soldiers in battle and give the 'righteous' side good luck, though it's unclear how this cashes out in practice. Certainly she doesn't get the slightest hint that the gods of any local temple even give their priests or lay representatives any magic, let alone communicate with them.

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Lissa is slightly late to the tavern that evening. She's tugging a slightly younger boy by the arm, presumably her brother, though he's dressed up very nicely in a blue velvet tunic rather than wearing the Heraldic uniform.

"Carissa!" she calls out, waving and lighting up.

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Her brother mostly looks anxious and overstimulated. Oddly, there are a few streaks of white in his dark hair, though he can't be older than eighteen or nineteen.

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"Liss! Hey! And this must be your brother?"

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"Yes! This is Vanyel. Vanyel, this is Carissa, she's lovely."

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Vanyel smiles nervously at her and bobs his head. There are dark circles under his eyes, like he has a habit of not sleeping enough.

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She does a little bit of a double take at the name. "Nice to meet you! I've only been in Haven two days but it's very nice." It's not. She's homesick. "Are you coming out drinking with us? So far we get into bar fights fifty percent of the time but I have a small sample."

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Vanyel makes a face at his sister. "Apparently I'm coming, sure. Lissa likes fighting but you shouldn't encourage her."

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Lissa sticks her tongue out at her brother. "Get us a table," she tells Carissa. "First round of drinks on me tonight." She heads for the bar.

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Carissa follows. "I hear you're a herald, huh?"

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"I am." He seems kind of glum about it.

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"Not your dream gig?"

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Shrug. He doesn't seem to be in a very talkative mood.

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Oh well. She'll chat with Liss and try to read his mind.

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As with Leareth, it seems that she can't get past his shields to read him.

He occasionally participates in the conversation, mostly when elbowed by his sister, and the rest of the time stares into space a lot and looks vaguely sad and despairing.

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(Lissa's mind is still totally readable and she is WORRIED about her brother and doesn't seem surprised at all by his moodiness and keeps trying to refill his drink-glass even when he makes faces at her.)

Fortunately Lissa is pretty capable at holding up her end of a conversation and she also seems to have some practice at coaxing her maybe-shy brother to talk once in a while.

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Vanyel can be convinced to talk about weather-magic a bit, tonelessly, not quite making eye contact.

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Carissa feels fairly free to make up random things about how government works in Ruvan in order to elicit commentary on Valdemar. Ruvan ends up coming out a bit Chelish, of course. In Ruvan everyone in House Thrune can inherit but there's a lot of intrigue around who does, the current Queen's uncle died in a suspicious accident when she was seventeen. In Ruvan there's only one religion allowed for primary worship though some groups are permitted to secondarily worship other gods.

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Lissa grimaces a bit about this and says it sounds like the nobles aren't very into following laws, unless assassinating your relatives is legal for some reason - she supposes they might not have Truth Spell to check, since that's a Herald thing and also pretty new, do they?

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There's truth magic but she doesn't know how it's done locally, probably not the same way, since in Ruvan it's done by priests through the gods.

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Lissa shrugs and doesn't seem that curious about it.

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Vanyel, however, does perk up at this point to say he read a book about the Eastern Empire once and it sounds sort of similar, except he thinks you're not allowed to worship any gods there, just the emperor's ancestors.

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Lissa rolls her eyes and smacks him lightly on the shoulder. "Van's constantly reading weird obscure books."

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Huh! Are the emperor's ancestors, uh, around doing things, such that worshipping them is useful, or is it more that you have to substitute something to get people to cut it out with the gods.

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Vanyel shrugs. To be honest he hasn't heard of the gods doing much overtly either, he's not sure it would make a difference. Except for -

(At this point he trails off and goes quiet and looks very upset.)

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Lissa looks more worried, and hugs him, and goes off to buy them more drinks.

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"If you don't like being a Herald are you allowed to - take a leave of absence, you know. See the world. Train in magic in some other country, that's a good way to get better at it..."

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Vanyel gives her a baffled blank look. "I dunno why I'd want to do that."

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"Liss makes it sound like your job sucks."

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Vanyel turns and makes a face at Lissa. "No, it's - all right. I mean, it's really important. To the Kingdom. And - some of it's interesting."

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"Also he's extremely good at it but he's also too modest."

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Vanyel blushes and looks down at the floor, and then something seems to remind him of an upsetting thing again, and he shrinks into himself a little, his eyes resolutely fixed at just below the table-edge.

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Well, she can change the topic. She wants to learn about Vanyel for Leareth but it's impressive Leareth gets him to talk at all.

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Lissa (who of course has no idea why this is especially important to Carissa) joins the team of 'get Vanyel to talk, ever', and they can bounce around between topics for the next candlemark.

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"I should go soon," Vanyel says finally. "I have Mindspeech relay tomorrow." He sounds like he's trying to sound apologetic but in fact is mostly relieved.

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"- Oh, all right. Be responsible." Lissa smacks his shoulder again. "- Oh, hmm. Aunt Savil would like Carissa too, don't you think? She used to travel all over, she'd enjoy hearing all about Ruvan."

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"Mmm," Vanyel says noncommittally.

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Lissa glances over at Carissa. "Want me to ask our aunt if you can come over for dinner tomorrow?"

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Carissa is slightly distracted by trying to steal one of Vanyel's hairs without him noticing but only slightly. "Yes, that sounds great."

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(Doing things in Vanyel's vicinity without him noticing is really not hard.)

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"All right! Tomorrow night?"

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Vanyel really needs to get out of here before he starts crying in front of Lissa new friend and humiliates her. "Mmmsoundsgood goodnight," he mutters, and gets up and flees.

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"Sorry," Lissa says quietly, watching him go. "It's - not personal, all right?"

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"I didn't think it was. Should we go get into a mild amount of trouble?"

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"Sounds great!"

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Then they can go out to some bars, and she can burn her remaining mindreading looking for trouble - which, Liss is right, is fun.

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It's great! So much fun! Lissa remains skilled at fighting her way through trouble even when very drunk, somehow, even though she's swaying a bit on her feet as she tries to walk Carissa back to the inn, very late that night.

"You're amazing, you know," she says conversationally. "Wish you were Valdemaran. - Damn it, no, the Heralds nab all the great people, nevermind."

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"I don't wish I was a Herald at all! But I don't know, maybe I'll spend more time around here if the route gets popular," or if she decides she wants to spy for Leareth sometimes; presumably he already has people on that but probably none of them are sleeping with Vanyel's sister.

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"That could be fun." And Lissa stops as they reach the inn and presses Carissa up against the brick wall and kisses her.

Even this late, there's still some street traffic in this neighborhood, and they get catcalls. Lissa lifts one hand to make a rude gesture at whoever's there, then tugs  Carissa into the inn.

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"That is such a weird taboo," she mutters, and goes along with Liss.

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They pass a very pleasant evening together.

As usual, Lissa is very much a morning person, and is already awake and dressed when Carissa wakes up. "See you tonight!" she says brightly. "I'll meet you at the north Gate to the Palace, all right?"

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Carissa is pretending to be even less of a morning person than she is in order to cover for how she only speaks the language three hours a day. She nods and mumbles back what Lissa said, groggily.

 

 

And then spends the day exploring and eavesdropping and reading, again.

None of it proves anything but - certainly the world is consistent with Leareth's take on it.

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And that evening at sunset, Lissa loiters outside the north gate to the inner walls that encircle the Palace grounds. She's donned a dress for this. It's an unusually daring dress by the local style, leaving her muscular shoulders bare. "Good day?" she says brightly.

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"Yep! I'm all done with my work. Now, this aunt, is she as gloomy as Van, because that was very gloomy."

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"- I'm sorry. Maybe he'll be having a better day today. And, nah, Savil's more fun. I hear she used to be a lot of fun back in the day, but she's old now."

Lissa waves to the gate-guard, who apparently recognizes her on sight and waves them through. The Palace grounds are cleaner and better groomed than the rest of the city, though still very soggy after all the rain, and the nearest stone buildings look very old.

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Carissa looks around interestedly and makes conversation. "Two Heralds in the family? Is that unusual?"

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"- Maybe? I mean, except for with the royal family, they're always chock-full of Gifts and Heralds. Gifts do run in families, you know."

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"And do most Gifted people get Chosen?"

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"I think so, yes. Almost makes me relieved I'm not Gifted, though I'm still kinda jealous."

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"I wish I had mage-gift," she says completely truthfully. "It looks so cool."

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"It is! And I hear you can make a lot of gold as a mercenary, that way, if you're born somewhere other than Valdemar."

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"Yeah. We've had groups roll through recruiting. Great pay and you get to travel."

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"Mmm. - All right, this way." Lissa steers her down a fork in the path toward one particular low stone building. "I hope Savil didn't forget I'd invited you for tonight, she can sometimes be a little absentminded."

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"Does she not have someone to schedule her appointments? She's a mage, right?"

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"You'd think, right! I know Queen's Own Lancir has a secretary, and I think Savil shared a clerk with Deedre and Kilchas for a while, but she didn't get on with them." Lissa shoves open a heavy oaken door with her shoulder and pulls them into a dim-lit stone hallway lined with doors. 

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Carissa is paying SO MUCH ATTENTION. It seems like a very good Teleport location to have.

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Lissa stops in front of a particular door and knocks. "Saaaavil oh Saavil, it's me - you didn't forget, right?"

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There's the sound of a lute playing, abruptly silenced, and then Vanyel's voice, muffled. "Er, one moment -" Footsteps.

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Distant swearing, then more footsteps. "I'm coming!" And ten seconds later Savil opens the door. "I'm sorry, Lissa, I completely forgot..."

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"Should we come back tomorrow?" she says to Liss. 

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" - mommy!" says a voice from inside Vanyel's room, and then someone launches themself through the door and into her arms.