The woman goes very still. 

"I - wha...? Whoa. - Shit, you got any paper, I don't– I realized something I have to write it down right now–" 

“I know, right -“ She pulls out a notebook for her.

Seconds later the notebook is being frantically scribbled full of entirely incomprehensible math notation. The researcher is so excited and, for a couple of minutes, completely blots out Carissa's presence because she just HAS to get this written down - 

Relatable, honestly. Carissa waits and mostly does not panic about her headband being requisitioned.

About two minutes in she reaches the end of her thought, stares at the notes in awe for a second, and then apologetically looks back at Carissa. “- I’m sorry, that was rude - I just get very caught up in my work, I guess.” An embarrassed giggle. “You’re right, this is amazing. How do I get kidnapped too so I can get an apology headband?” Her tone is mostly joking.

"I can make them - the problem is the cost of materials, and that's really high, but probably if you can get that much math out of it you can convince Leareth it's worth it. Did you hear, he's gone Lawful Good now?"

Blink. "I don't really know what that means? - Oh, right, people've been gossiping about it in the dining hall lately. The whole weird sorting system your world has? That determines which god gets remit over people's souls when they die? I guess it's interesting, but I asked and no one had an explanation of it with any math in it - oh, hey, do you know if that's a thing and how I could get it? I bet it'd be relevant to my work, I just hate trying to work from starting material that isn't formalized at all..." 

She sighs, looks very reluctant, and then takes the headband off and offers it to Carissa, with an expression a little like that of a child valiantly deciding to share their last sweet. 

Again, relatable. Carissa puts it back on. "A formalization of how people get sorted? It's - not done through a process with formally consistent outputs, there's supposedly trials, where the afterlives that want the person argue that they've earned them. Maybe different angles on it are published outside Cheliax. Don't you, uh, want an afterlife, or is the plan for Leareth's god to be done before it's likely to matter -"

"...I mean, that was the plan? I dunno - that's part of it, obviously, no one wants to die forever, but I...guess I'm mostly excited about there being better schools and more people inventing incredible things. You know, when I was little my papa used to say, everyone dies, but some people's work lives on forever? He was an architect. And an artist, I guess. He -" 

And she stops. Blinks a little faster. 

"- He was too old to have a chance at really living forever. And it's not like I could tell him about Leareth's god, ever. Information-security and all. But he's designed buildings in Rethwellan that might still be there in a thousand years. And I...wish the world let more people do that. He was unusually lucky - if he'd been born a peasant he'd never've had the chance. And I guess I'd never have ended up here, either." 

"Should I - let everyone try the headband on - so we get done faster -"

"- I think we should convince Leareth right now that it's worth investing in the raw materials so you can make a lot more of them? That's...called "spellsilver", right? I was curious about it but no one here seems to know whether it's a thing you can mine here in Velgarth too. If it is then I bet Leareth can do that more cheaply than buying it from your world. And -" another slightly sad-puppy look, "- you should obviously have the headband to yourself while you're making more headbands. Assuming it helps you do it better?" 

"It does, yeah - I haven't actually trained Wondrous Items, I do weapons, but I can cross-train, and if I'm a genius I can cross-train faster. It'll take me a couple weeks per, even once I figure it out, it's just slow going stabilizing an enchantment this powerful. - I can do weaker headbands in a day or two."

"How much weaker? That might still be worth it - I did some modeling of this, actually, in what circumstances it's more useful to have a single incredibly smart agent versus multiple somewhat-more-smart agents that can coordinate better as a result..." 

"Wouldn't they have to dedicate a lot of resources to enforcement and commitment mechanisms so they weren't constantly betraying each other? - never mind - on the scale we use for measuring intelligence an average person is ten, the average person here is a sixteen, the headband is an increase of six, and the cheapest kind - the kind I could probably do in two days - is an increase of two."

"- Wait you have a scale and can measure it - how didn't I hear that earlier, that's amazing - can you tell me everything about how that works?" 

They were going to go ask Leareth about spellsilver first thing but - 

- Carissa doesn't feel like it right now! She feels like explaining everything Cheliax knows about intelligence! It comes along with her kind of mindreading, a sense of a person's mind, and while with children it's only a moderately reliable predictor of their adult intelligence, Cheliax scans children in order to get the most promising ones tracked for wizardry - "otherwise if there were peasants who had talent, like you said, they'd never get the chance to do anything -"  and intelligence as measured by the spell is stable in your late teens through your thirties, potentially longer if you're a wizard and using anti-aging. The spell doesn't spit out numbers, of course, but people can learn to report numbers from the look of a mind to the spell with high reliability across people. It works on extremely powerful nonhuman creatures, though if you try to look at a mind too much more intelligent than your own the spell will end on you and give you backlash - "which actually happened to Aroden, hilariously, because he tried to mindread Leareth while Iomedae, the god, was talking to him -"

The god-alignment researcher (whose name is Rashee) is very easily distracted, when it comes to shiny interesting new ideas, and listens intently to Carissa's explanation! 

Up until the last part. 

"He - wait, what? Leareth - doesn't trust any gods - that's like his entire thing–" She stops, frowning. "...I guess he did say he tried to talk to some of Them anyway. And then Vkandis just set him on FIRE which is honestly incredibly rude and messed up? Is Iomedae less messed up than that?" 

"Even Asmodeus wouldn't set you on fire for talking to Him, that's just stupid. I guess if somehow you kept interrupting Him and He didn't have an easier way to shut you up? But I don't think that's how prayer works...anyway Leareth was really freaked out by Aroden kidnapping us and went for Iomedae and She answered him, and now he's going in hard on Lawful Good, which, it'll take some adjusting."

"....Um, right, it seems like I should probably - put some more effort into understanding Lawful Good and - how it's different from what Leareth was doing anyway?"

Rashee looks very tired about this prospect. It's much less fun than math. 

"Well, you can let me know if you figure it out. I didn't get to explaining the distribution of intelligence - there's way more tens than fourteens -"

Spending the whole day discussing math with Leareth's math people just seems way better than spending it banging her head against the concept of Good again. And maybe tonight Leareth'll explain it to her, if he hasn't been persuaded he has some kind of incredibly stupid moral duty to stay away from her.

If they're going to be talking about statistical distributions then tearing pages out of the notebook is super not sufficient and they should go to one of the Work Rooms here that has walls designed to be easy to write on in chalk? ....And maybe, just maybe, it would make sense for them to trade the headband back and forth, so Carissa could write and explain out loud with it and then Rashee could borrow it briefly to try to stare and boggle at the explanation...? 

(She's so excited! This seems important and like something that no one here has actually gotten all the information on yet, and Leareth will probably endorse her committing time to doing that, and also it's way more fun than confusingly un-grounded morality concepts.) 

Rashee would be delighted to spend quite a long time discussing this with Carissa! 

Leareth eventually wraps up his conversation with the paladins, and heads off to rest again. 

...Except, as he realizes a few steps out from the door, he still doesn't know why they supposedly wanted him to put off interacting with Carissa more until after they'd spoken? He... all right, fine, he made some updates there, apparently Good's policies and guidelines think it would be a bad idea for him to take her up on the offer of having sex, not that he was particularly inclined to anyway - 

But he does still feel like he's missing something, here, the particular emphasis doesn't make sense? 

Leareth stops, turns around, heads back to the room. 

"- I am sorry. I have another question, I think? ...It is probably an uncomfortable one." 

"...yes?"

”Nayoki passed on to me earlier that you had - thought I should not be interacting with Carissa, until after we had spoken about the policies that Good follows? And I - am still not sure if there are any updates there that I ought be making…”

He pauses. Takes a slow breath and lets it out. 

“- Also, I am not sure if this is appropriate to ask of you, but - I expect her to be upset that Iomedae made me Her paladin, and I could…use advice on how to approach that conversation.”

"I mean, mostly I think you shouldn't be sleeping with her," Ignasi says. "Because she's - Evil, and dangerous, and probably trying to manipulate you and definitely not looking out for either her wellbeing or yours."