- possibly being alone right now would be good for her, actually, suddenly she feels very jumpy even though it seemed like he was sincere about needing to keep her alive. "Thank you."

She heads into her suite.

"No problem!" he calls. The door shuts on its own behind her.

What has Hell got on the letter-writer?

Chelish foreign intelligence service! She was awarded the title paraduchess for her work ten years ago routing out a network of internal traitors loyal to the Galtan revolutionaries; she's involved now in smoothing treaty negotiations in Thuvia (not that much has been committed to writing about this? probably sketchy?) and developing networks of loyalists in Galt, Taldor and Andoran. She has won a number of top secret awards. She's a wizard and any private notes seem to be done with magic.

How inconvenient of her private notetaking behavior! They haven't gotten around it? What's the state of the art in magic notetaking? What are her top secret awards in.

Service to the Chelish Crown! One for the roundup of spies, one a decade before that, there are a couple going theories on what for, possibly preventing an assassination of the King? And one more recent, a couple of years ago, for catching an attempted infiltration by a foreign church. 

Most magic-users just take notes on paper that they then change to conceal the words, which does not give demons trouble. Some use ink that's only visible to the user, but this can be handled with a substitution. Some lay illusions on blank paper and have eidetic memories, which is not as solvable. 

How irritating of them. He writes up what they do have into a pamphlet and slips it through the letter slot on Carissa's door.

Carissa has absorbed herself in making her headband, but when she next looks up she reads it.

That seems...promising? A competent person, who wants to talk. Who'll presumably kill her if she turns out to be bad at this, but who can help her, if she's worth it.

She goes back to work on the headband.

Cam reads newspapers, and Abadaran church publications, and highlights from the home team's assessment of the place. Asks them for suggestions on what notes he should airdrop into what cities; he can see much of the Inner Sea region from here, but could also fly around the world, it's just he doesn't speak those langauges. Though he'll install their translation software as soon as they have the kinks worked out from the written corpuses on all the languages of Golarion et al. If Carissa lets him.

Most of these countries suck in various ways, it's technologically the late 1700s or early 1800s and the magic isn't simplifying matters. Some people are enthusiastic about Galt as the best prospects of overthrowing Cheliax. Some people are enthusiastic about Andoran, leading the fight against the slave trade, or Lastwall, leading the fight against Evil in full generality, or Goka in Tian Xia, bigger and richer even than Absalom. Cases are also sent in for Osirion, the economics theocracy, Nex, waiting for the return of its destined ruler and therefore maybe open to a different one, or Numeria, where someone thinks that with enough time he could hack all the androids and overthrow the government. (They deserve it, he adds.)

What does Numeria deserve a robot uprising for?

A while ago a spaceship crashed there. It routinely builds androids of varying degrees of sapience; its other systems seem broken. The androids do random things. The ship and country are controlled by a powerful cabal of wizards who have mind-controlled/bribed/seduced the ruler into ignoring the country's affairs while they try to repair the ship. The ruler has extravagant tastes. So do the wizards. Everyone is starving.

Gosh, okay. How would he go about hacking the robots. Would the more sapient ones object to this.

He can probably only hack the not-sapient ones as those are the ones he's copied to his own house and is currently fucking with! Here's what he's figured out so far.

Well, there were bound to be some drawbacks to recklessly publishing the existence of Golarion but at least they can't get the sapients direct and he really needs the information processing to fix up the world, or at least it looked like he might need it at the time. He writes to Wistful Parents of Hell asking them to keep an eye on whether any sapients can be gotten as eggs and arrange some kind of children's rights oversight if so. He reads up on the robot hacking. He's running out of paper. "You awake?"

She's working on her headband! "I should have a sign so you know how interruptible I am. What do you need?"

"More paper allotment! Or permission to make formats that go on this." He waves the computer. "Which I'd rather, really, makes them searchable and stuff."

She looks suspiciously at the computer. "What're you researching?"

"Right now? Feasibility of engineering a robot-uprising-backed coup of Numeria."

"....we're not strong enough, we don't know enough about the landscape - maybe in ten years once the Worldwound's closed and people are sort of accustomed to dealing with us - that's not really how Chaotic people operate, is it -"

"I'm not operating out of some sort of Chaotic Good playbook, here, is there something you'd like me to be researching instead?"

"I mean if you're just having fun then by all means have whatever fun you want, I just don't - want you to come up with something that sounds like a good idea the way giving Andoran ten thousand apsels sounds like a good idea, and then do it, we'll get killed. We'll, uh, get to do more good in the long run if we're more careful." She says this like she has absolutely no idea if it is the sort of thing that'd be a convincing argument to him.

"So, right now I am very constrained in what I can do, because I have to clear most things with you, and that means that I am more interested in opportunities to do things that do not have affordances for you to sabotage them, such as putting information or leverage in the hands of people who seem like they might be reasonably placed to make use of them and do not have the same limitations as me. If I had been summoned unbound we would probably be in a fairly comparable position right now because I'd still need you alive and you would still have a lot of value as a native guide and item enchanter, but I would not find slipping stuff through your loopholes nearly so appealing, because I would have a better alternative to negotiated agreement with you, namely assume you like being alive and fuck off on my own, so I could talk things through with you more thoroughly."

"I feel like you are really - overestimating how hard it'd be to kill us if someone powerful was genuinely invested in doing it. The main constraints here are not me, the main constraints here are seeming worth expending a lot of resources to destroy."

"And this is the sort of advice I value! But can only value it so much when it's - in the context of coming with a leash on me, right, not a very good leash but one that I can't trivially shake without trashing all the opportunities here. If you had a tighter hold on me I would spin my wheels a bit looking for ways out and eventually determine there weren't any good ones and figure fixing the Worldwound is probably better than not that and I'd be pretty manageable apart from my charming sense of humor, but you can't get there from here. And if you had a much looser hold on me, so I could view you as a source of advice and not - a person who is trying to wield me - then I could take more of your advice at face value. I could check up on things you say without having to ask for more paper, I could, I don't know, abduct a starving Numerian and treat them for marasmus and talk to them and let them go pending a discussion on how dangerous that would be, I could suggest tricking some random people into summoning more apsels who just want to adopt babies and live on farms but would at least leave a lifeline between your cosmology and mine if you should have a tragic encounter with assassination. Oh, uh, fun fact, in my magic system if you've ever summoned one of us you get to be one when you die."

"Can't get there from here because I'm not smart enough? Because I am working on fixing that. Though I guess if I am also going to be bribing you with headbands I won't have much of an actual advantage for very long."