"I suppose I am curious how you think I ought present myself and my goals? I think that to a significant extent, I want to...make myself legible to them? Which might mean picking and choosing carefully which facts to share and what to emphasize. I am also not sure what they already know of me? The Heralds know...almost everything, but I doubt they freely shared it with their Asmodean visitors." 

"I bet they got along not at all. They know that you have a pretty impressive army and don't get along with Vkandis and read Lawful Evil and are thousands of years old and that might be all. They're going to assume - uh, in our world, wizards that powerful tend a certain way, possibly because they all get intelligence enhancement until normal people are very boring to them - a wizard as powerful as you would spend most of their time on magical research and their own projects of wildly varying Evilness, much of that in private demiplanes where the laws of physics and magic work how they want. It's basically pointless trying to kill them, they have a dozen backup plans. You go to them if you want a favor, and they name a price. Generally they make it known if there's something you might do that'll make them mad.

The favor they want is help with Iftel, the thing they want to pay you with is access to Golarion."

"...I see. Yes, that makes sense. Honestly, presented in a certain light my actual plan is very Evil? I am not sure I want to inform them of it and give them that leverage, but I was intending to murder ten million people for the power needed to make my own god. Is that the sort of project that would be - on theme, for a powerful Lawful Evil wizard in Golarion?" 

"I mean, you don't have to kill ten million people to become a god, in Golarion. And killing ten million people sounds - incredibly hard - definitely Evil, though - it'd explain why you read that way despite your entire personality - I think to do that and get Lawful Evil you'd have to be ruling a country and using it for sacrifice sources, if you did it by conquest I'd expect it'd be hard to be Lawful through that many wars. But I don't know exactly. They'd probably be - I don't think they'd offer you ten million people, unless the war's going worse than I expect it is, but they'd probably be fine with it, in principle, if you had a way of going about it that wasn't very disruptive."

"- Oh, I was not going to ask them for that! I want to go to Golarion and explore what my other options might be - that seems worth at least another century of time investment - I have been working out this plan for a thousand years and I would not have been ready for most of a century anyway. ...I had intended to conquer Valdemar and then rule it and build an empire around it with a high enough population. I suppose the sacrifices would - meaningfully cost less, in Golarion, given afterlives. But I still hope there is a different way." 

- nod. "I think they'll be happy to give you access to Golarion so long as they don't think you're going to immediately pick a fight with Cheliax. Which - being Lawful Evil will help, with that."

And quite abruptly she stops whatever she's been doing with her posture and her mannerisms. "You shouldn't go to war with Cheliax. It's a bad idea. If you don't like Hell you can try building something better, but - not destroying what we have."

Leareth meets her eyes, levelly. "I know. I was not under the impression that a war with Cheliax is one I could win, with my current resources, or that it would be a very good route to accomplish what I want." 

"Okay. Then I think probably they'll be persuadable to help you get established in Golarion."

Nod. "I think that is all of my questions, then. Do you -"

He hesitates, unsure of what he wants to ask.

"Do you need anything else here...?" It's not exactly what he wanted to ask, but Leareth still can't figure out what that is. 

"Spellsilver, in the long run, but nothing right now."

"I will need to get more information from you at some point on what spellsilver is, since I do not think we use it for our magic, but I am sure that can be arranged. At the very least, I imagine I could purchase some in Golarion." 

He turns to leave. 

She has some dancing lights chase him out of the room and bop him on the nose.

- what. Leareth has no idea what that's about or how he's supposed to react to it! 

He turns around, smiling slightly despite himself. "I am sorry - did you have something else to say, or was I just rude?" 

" - hmm? No, I'm just fucking with you. See, in Cheliax people get their subordinates to cut that out by slapping them and I have no idea how they do it here."

Leareth is still deeply confused! What is even the point of this entire interaction. 

- is Carissa flirting? If so it's a very strange way of flirting, but then again, most forms of flirting seem strange to him.

"...For now, I will start with asking you politely not to 'fuck with me' if I am actually doing anything important. And it is worth noting that I have considerable combat reflexes and if you startle me I might do something unfortunate." 

Hah! A threat! He's capable of them!

- she's going to stop while she's ahead. And not aggravate him for no reason. "I'm sorry. I didn't have anything else for you."

...not less confusing but, whatever was going on there, it doesn't seem necessarily bad? 

Leareth nods. "I will send someone to warn you when the cleric is about to come talk to you." 

He goes. Back to the infirmary room, because this isn't his main working facility and he doesn't actually have a bedroom set up here. He sits down on the bed and tries to think. 

A candlemark and a half later, after a lot of mental preparation and a quick nap, he sends someone to tell the cleric of Asmodeus that he's ready. 

Laborga has finished the book - he reads quickly - and is praying. He would be happy to see Leareth. 

"I should warn you," he says, "I was sent on this expedition to protect my colleagues, not to speak for them. I will represent the interests of my country and my god as well as I can, but healing and diplomacy are different disciplines, in Golarion - though, of course, many healers feel strongly that they really shouldn't be, as patching people up after wars may be the best antidote to the impulse to start them."

Malduoni spent two hours successfully hiding in a Rope Trick in one of the messier magical-research-lab type spaces - it's not hard to get in and out of rooms when you're a gnat, and he could time casting it for when his permanent Detect Magic informed him that a very preoccupied mage was testing their own magic.

He's prepared another modified, higher-circle Detect Thoughts - this one is the version cast from fifth circle rather than seventh, which may or may not get through on Laborda, but should hopefully succeed on Leareth even now that the man is recovered and, one assumes, wisely shielding himself in the Asmodean's presence. He's not exactly running low on spells just yet, but he also doesn't know what else is going to happen. 

He explores the rest of the facility, invisibly, and mindreading enough that he knows within seconds when Leareth summons the cleric to talk. Which means he needs to slip back to his hidden Rope Trick to re-cast Invisibility - Extended, so it's good for forty minutes - and Gaseous Form, and his more powerful Detect Thoughts. 

Invisible and a gas, he slips easily and unnoticed into the room as Leareth ushers Laborda inside. 

Leareth looks vastly better than he did earlier. He is, in fact, shielding very thoroughly, but not quite enough to hedge Malduoni out. 

He's fairly calm, his thoughts ordered, holding onto the stack of everything he's making sure to keep in mind for this negotiation. (He's clearly very intelligent, to a rare and surprising extent for an unmodified human with no intelligent-enhancing magic items.) A lot of that mental space is dedicated to planning - something, Malduoni can't quite get the details from surface thoughts - that Leareth intends to say about Carissa. He's mulling over how best to present his own plans and goals - he wants to make sense, here, to a Chelish audience, and this won't require any lies but it does call for a certain spin. A very different spin from the one he's spent a decade practicing with Vanyel.

He smiles, takes a seat in the small, comfortably furnished private meeting-room selected for this purpose. "I appreciate the caveat. And, yes, I quite share that sentiment." 

He made an agreement that there would be no mindreading or mind-alteration, and he's not even trying it. 

Malduoni made no such agreement. 

He has a go at reading Laborda as well. It's less critical, he understands Asmodean reasoning - better than he would like, in a way, or at least he wishes it hadn't needed to be a priority. Still, seeing two perspectives is always more informative than only seeing one. 

Laborda is a high-level cleric of Asmodeus. He fences Malduoni out without noticing he's doing that. 

"This is quite a remarkable facility. You do research, here?"

It's one of his less impressive facilities, really; it's secure and well-shielded but not top secret, or he wouldn't have risked bringing the cleric here. 

"Some, yes. I mostly do not work out of this area, but a number of my mages are set up here. I am sure Cheliax has more impressive academies for research, though? You have the wealth for it."