And now he has to prepare Overland Flight. You're only considered a fifth-circle caster if you can prepare a fifth-circle spell and be competent for combat afterwards, which he very much isn't - it'll be all he'll have for the day. He shouldn't need much else, though, and there's a wand of Fireball for emergencies. 

He starts building the artifice for it in the air. It's a lot of magic. 

Carissa practices throwing and catching Detect Magic while the heat-stone sears her wrist. Watching someone prepare a fifth-circle spell is at least wonderfully distracting. 

Watching it is distracting, and fascinating. And, separately, Leareth has...some concerns...around what the leadership decisions here indicate about Cheliax as a country. 

He lies sprawled on the floor, spending rather more willpower on not-panicking about the immobility than he would prefer.

And considering what to say to Carissa, once her superior finishes his spell-preparation and flies off. He's not really sure where to start but it - seems like it might be important, to attempt a conversation at all. 

She loses the cantrip three minutes in. The burn of course does not really hurt any less once she removes the heat-stone.  That's the thing that sucks, about assignments like this one - the more you fail at them, the harder they get.

Of course, that's often how life works. 

She can give it a try again after Tongues has run out; maybe once she has a lot of burns it'll be easier, because there'll be no background expectation that the pain'll lessen once she loses the cantrip. 

She re-prepares Detect Magic, since she's going to need it if she's going to get the prisoner to teach her artifact-making while they wait. She sees the First Arcane off. 

"How do people learn artifact-making, here?"

The other wizard with a translation spell has left. Which also means he's on a timeline, here. He could continue speaking with Carissa once her spell runs out, if she clears him to use Mindspeech, but he's not sure he wants to poke at that yet. 

"Most frequently in apprenticeships. There are a few academies." He pauses. "- May I stand up and walk around? I am somewhat uncomfortable from being immobile, and it is distracting." 

"With the constraints that you cannot leave the space or approach within a foot of anyone, you can stand up and move around for five minutes."

"Thank you." Leareth picks himself up from the floor, going slowly with the position change; he's been horizontal for a while and hasn't eaten. He waits for the lightheadedness to pass, then mentally marks out a square that avoids approaching anyone else too closely, and paces. 

"...Why did your superior order you to - do that, with the heating-stone?" 

"Huh? Oh, it's practice for spellcasting distracted. There is a standard combat course on that but I missed it since I did artifact enchanting, before the war."

She is thinking that perhaps there was something deliberate in her never signing up for standard combat courses. She is a spectacularly good artifact enchanter and only an average combat caster and - it just didn't seem fun. A stupid reason, now, but probably she can in fact catch up at this specific thing in the course of a day.

"Ah, I see. I think there are more effective exercises for that, but - perhaps less easily practiced now, when you are already out in the field. I had been unsure if it were a - punishment, for something he thought you had done wrong...?" 

What's he angling at? ...hoping your captors are having internal strife is entirely reasonable, actually. "I would think the time to resolve discipline problems would be once we've reached Chelish-held territory, really. This is just something I need to know how to do."

That's not exactly what Leareth was angling at but it's not implausible as a guess. 

"- Why did he hit you? ...I assume it was him, since it appeared to be done with magic, which must take some skill." 

"I was out of line. It doesn't take that much skill, 's not like hitting a civilian or a kid where you need very precise control over how much force you're using."

"Ah - are you shielded all the time, or something?" Leareth hasn't noticed shields on her, but he does already know that their magic is different from his. 

"I'm - a spellcaster? It takes a lot more force to hurt a spellcaster. Is that not true of mages if they're not shielding."

Leareth spends five seconds trying to think about whether he wants her to know that, no, mages aren't inherently physically tougher.

...It's probably not something he can hide in the long run - quite possibly her superiors already know, via reports from other parties elsewhere in Iftel - and it would be awkward if they seriously injured him by accident because they didn't know. 

"...Not to a significant degree, no? Healers are more resilient against illness and injury, since they will often do self-Healing on a subconscious level, but an unshielded mage will take the same bruises from a strike as an un-Gifted civilian. Though, of course, mages are rarely unshielded if they expect danger." 

"....huh." That suggests that maybe it's the divine healing after all that makes adventurers more resilient, which was a theory but never quite persuasive to her. "Well, where I'm from spellcasters are physically tougher." That cantrip is safe to hit students with but only in the back, buttocks or thighs, not the face. She doesn't expand on this because it seems like he has some weird expectations about punishment and that doesn't necessarily seem like a rift it's wise to explore.

It's a rift that might be interesting to explore, according to Leareth - and it's interesting that she's noticing it explicitly and trying to steer around it - but he's not thinking of a good plausibly-deniable way to poke at it, right now. He's still distractingly hungry, and the lightheadedness never entirely cleared. It turns out that heavy casting followed by far too little sleep and no food is - not an ideal combination. 

He sits down heavily, letting his tiredness show a little just to gauge how Carissa reacts. 

They are aware that the locals don't have good magic for skipping sleep - certainly nothing as good as a Ring of Sustenance - but sleep deprived prisoners are probably more pliable so this just seems good. "We sent some people out for food," she says. The farmhouse wasn't far - less than a mile - so unless something went wrong they should be back soon.

It might be in his interest to appear more impaired by exhaustion and hunger than he is, then. It doesn't require too much in the way of acting; he in fact feels terrible, he just has a lot more practice than most humans at working through this. 

He yawns. "I am glad. ...You must have magic for going without food, if you do not carry any with you? That is - interesting, if so. Our magic cannot do that." 

"Yep. It's expensive but this is an emergency." Their magic is more convenient for logistics on the whole - Gates are a lot better than teleportation for that - but this doesn't seem like something he really needs to know.

Leareth notes that thought. He hadn't been sure, himself - it wasn't clear up front how costly their teleportation was, relative to the energy-cost of Gating - but it's relevant. 

He yawns again. "- Anyway. I am curious - how do you find the working conditions, as a combat wizard for Cheliax? That seems relevant, if I am considering my price for signing on to work with your country's forces." 

It's also a question one would ask if they had zero intentions of signing on but were expecting a rescue. What's useful if he wants to join up and less useful otherwise - "the pay is excellent. A priority of Her Majesty is that combat casters get better over time, there's plenty of opportunity for research and study. Resurrections are available for senior people who die well in the line of duty. The sexes are integrated." Men tend to consider that a perk. "We have the world's most wizards and premiere institutes of wizardry. If you have good test scores or a sorcerous bloodline they'll pay women to have your children," also a popular perk. "Pay has never been late, healing is consistently available, magic items are standard issue where they're necessary for mission objectives."

"That sounds...well run." Which is a good thing only to the extent that whatever Cheliax is trying to do, overall, is something Leareth approves of. He's having more doubts about that.

"Your magic does resurrection in a repeatable and scalable way?" he adds, neutrally. 

"Yes. It's very expensive, but Cheliax is very wealthy." - okay, his society has got to have resurrection, no one's this calm about being captured if they don't have a backup plan - well, she could just ask, let him assume she got the information from mindreading him. "Why isn't your method scalable?"

All right, this isn't even veering dangerously close to topics Leareth would rather not to discuss - it's well past that line. 

She's not in fact reading his mind. Leareth could lie. ...He doesn't want to, though, if he can avoid it. He hasn't outright lied at all, up to this point; he's omitted a lot of information, occasionally in ways that let Carissa jump to misleading conclusions, but there's still a line there which he hasn't, yet, crossed. 

...And there's a true and relevant piece that he thinks might resonate with Carissa, for all that her overall philosophy is somewhat baffling to him. He's curious to test that theory. 

"It requires a costly and difficult magical setup, and - based on Their past actions, our gods seem to be against humans being resurrected, except in specific cases that accomplish Their purposes. One must be very well-resourced and competent to manage it oneself against Their interference."