"And we don't have the constraint of needing to hide it from the gods." Dryly. "There are academies of magic in Westcrown, in Corentyn, in Ostenso and in Egorian - and just across the border in the city-state of Korvosa, which neighbors us, there is the Academae, with a rather remarkable thousand-year history as a school of magic. Though a mortality rate Cheliax wouldn't itself countenance. What sort of research are you interested in?"

"Is magical research for wizards very dangerous? None of my bases have had any deaths in decades, and I think even the academies in Rethwellan are safe enough. My research interests are - varied. I have had a very long time to work on it, after all. Currently I am most interested in, well, ways to reduce the influence of the various gods here, and ideally to communicate with Them in order to negotiate better concessions." 

"Developing more channeling capacity seems to require danger. No matter what you're doing, if you only do it under circumstances where you know yourself to be safe, there's a limit to how far you'll be able to push your abilities. It works if people wrongly believe themselves to be in danger, but that's difficult to pull off at any scale; the Academae solves this by just being genuinely very dangerous. Their spellcasters graduate very powerful, but about a third of them don't make it. Cheliax trains students as far as they can learn without danger, and then deploys them at the Worldwound; it's slower, but a better use of our human capital, we think.

Asmodeus has found the gods of your world strikingly difficult to communicate with. They're not fundamentally unlike Golarion gods but the Golarion gods most like them had, at least until recently, a good enough predictive model of Asmodeus it was possible to negotiate just through that, and these ones don't."

Malduoni hovers, and listens. 

Leareth is very intriguing. And - confusing. It's clear enough from the man's thoughts that he's opposed to Asmodeus goals, though he's avoiding bringing this up with the cleric, for the incredibly obvious reasons. Though he's holding significant uncertainty about what Asmodeus is really like, he knows all his information has been filtered, both by Chelish propaganda-incentives and - perhaps more importantly - across a vast culture gap. That particular uncertainty, he does hint at in the negotiations - that, while he's certainly willing to make some agreements with them now, he's not going to commit to anything involved, and especially not any kind of special relationship with Cheliax over other Golarion countries, until he's seen their world for himself.

He does not, in fact, currently want to fight Cheliax or Asmodeus directly; he isn't lying about that to the diplomat. But it's largely a matter of resources. Leareth isn't lying either, that he disprefers war. And he's appropriate cautious about throwing himself headfirst into a situation in another world while he's still missing vast swathes of context. Throughout, though, it floats in the back of his thoughts that he will someday, probably, want to do something about Hell. What, he doesn't yet know. 

Leareth is - mostly handling himself quite well in the conversation, Malduoni thinks, for someone who must have such a limited understanding of Asmodean philosophy and culture. He emphasizes the aspects of his work and goals that he expects to seem most legible and unsurprising to a Lawful Evil mindset. 

- he wants to build a god. Had intended, originally, to do this via murder on a vast scale. He doesn't, quite, say that outright to the cleric, but he does hint at the scale of his plans. In a way that conveys ambition and power and ruthlessness, and quietly emphasizes exactly what he's doing it all in service of. 

Which is fixing everything and saving everyone. That part isn't hard for Malduoni to pick up on. Perhaps just because it's so deeply legible to him. There's a relentless determination behind all of Leareth's thoughts and it's...oddly, uncannily, bafflingly familiar. And yet something is strange and off at the same time, and he can't pin it down, can't quite give a name to it...

Leareth agrees - after quite a lot of back and forth, but his decision was made from early on - to stay out of the situation in Iftel, in exchange for some initial help accessing Golarion, and non-interference from Cheliax once he's there. The part he doesn't say explicitly is that this is a very cheap concession for him, since Vkandis apparently personally hates him and might try to quash any plans he attempts in Iftel even if he's trying to help. (Leareth thinks that Vkandis understands human motives poorly, and - especially given how noisy Foresight must be, with all the foreign interference flying around - might not be able to tell what Leareth is trying to achieve.) 

This is tiring and stressful, but it won't help to dwell on that, so Leareth doesn't. He's calm and collected and his face is very hard to read - though he has to assume the cleric is very, very good at reading people, and getting more from him than Leareth would prefer. 

He emphasizes - largely via some discreet flattery about Cheliax and what he's heard of it - that he cares a lot about wealth and trade and well-run institutions and ongoing progress in magical and mundane research. This by itself is hardly in conflict with Asmodeus' values. The conflict is in, well, what it's all for - and, almost certainly, the Asmodean cleric is going to realize that what Leareth wants, in the end, is in tension with everything Hell represents. (Unless he's in fact wrong about how Hell works, and missing something key...) But Cheliax claims to get along well with its Lawful neighbours, even if they're Neutral or Good, and Leareth is someone who can ruthlessly consider arms'-length alliances with people whose goals he hates, if it's best for his own work. And he keeps his word. 

- he's incredibly curious what the man thinks of him, but he'll probably never know. 

Laborda is not inclined to indicate what he thinks of Leareth. Lots of people who don't share Asmodeus's goals collaborate successfully with Cheliax, and if that's as far as they can get for now, well, those are acceptable terms to be on, with powerful wizards with their own idiosyncratic goals. Cheliax would like Leareth to commit to staying out of their own internal affairs in addition to staying out of Iftel; it'd make them much more eager to give him powerful Golarion resources that might enable him to amass a lot more power in Velgarth, like crystal balls and demiplanes and Golarion healing magic. 

They've spoken for eight or so hours, including a break for the night and for breakfast, by the time he brings up the prisoners. "Some Chelish soldiers were captured in the course of your capture, recapture, and escape, and now that we know each other better and have assurance we won't come into conflict in Iftel we should arrange their release."

Malduoni, obviously, isn't able to watch continuously. But by the time his first forty-minute block of concealment is wearing off - twenty minutes after Detect Thoughts does, but he can still listen - he's fairly sure that Leareth is able to hold his own and is unlikely to agree to anything awkward. 

He retreats to his Rope Trick, which conveniently will last for twenty hours. He sleeps for his required two hours. Prepares spells, weighted very heavily toward what he expects to be most useful here in Leareth's facility, though he reserves a few Teleports and a Plane Shift if he needs to rapidly leave, and keeps some of his highest-level spell slots empty. 

The room that Leareth is meeting in is well-shielded, annoyingly; he basically has to burn Invisibility and Gaseous Form for every block of time he tries to spend in there. And with Leareth shielding at full strength, he needs a more powerful Detect Thoughts, too, in order to consistently succeed. (He tries it every time on Laborda as well, but not with a high expectation of success.)

He isn't trying to be there all the time - there's plenty else to learn, and some of Leareth's staff who don't succeed at hedging out even his basic permanent Detect Thoughts - but he's just slipped back in a few minutes before this question comes up. 

Leareth sighs faintly, and looks - faintly bored and irritated, but willing. 

"Right, I suppose we ought to straighten that out. We have three of them. I have no grievance with the two non-casters who my people captured, and will happily return them. The wizard...I am glad to learn she's not representative of Cheliax's best and brightest." Shrug. "I am hardly going to raise a fuss over it with your people now. I would be content just to keep her here, now that my Healing staff have confirmed she is pregnant. Her idea, though I was not in any condition to object. You want to take the other two back with you immediately?"

Leareth's thoughts make it clear that he is not bored, though he is very irritated at THIS being the carefully-crafted explanation he needed to come up with. He's keeping that objection tucked very carefully away, not revealing any hint of it in his face or body language. 

....What. 

Laborda is very professional and so he manages to only look the slightest bit startled. "She - you can tell that quickly?"

"Our Healers can tell within a day or two, though at that point it may not take. Can clerics not tell? That sounds inconvenient." 

Malduoni is also enough of a profession that, if it mattered, he would be able to manage not to look more than the slightest bit startled. Fortunately he's an invisible gas without facial features anyway and so it doesn't matter. 

" - no? There's - not a spell for it, and we don't have a ...general sense for it - and there's no soul, at that point -" He composes himself. "I'll want to speak to the soldier to confirm there's no - features of the situation that Cheliax would need to concern itself with. Valdemar mentioned some kind of - bizarre arrangement with the Star-Eyed Goddess -"

"Oh, that. My read is that her impression of it was - mostly a miscommunication - I have no reason to think that the Star-Eyed Goddess cares at all about a random and not very useful Chelish wizard, and from here in the north I highly doubt She would have any way to obtain the wizard's soul even if She wanted it. My impression is that Vkandis, in order to allow Her representatives past His barrier, simply demanded that they ensure Sevar would not be running about Velgarth causing any more havoc." 

He's watching Leareth's face closely. He nods. "I don't expect it will need to be a long conversation."

Leareth can Mindspeak through the shields, which he cast himself and is keyed to. 

:Carissa: he sends. :Incoming with cleric. Couple of minutes: 

"Of course. Would you like to have the conversation now?" 

Leareth is carefully and deliberately not experiencing any of his actual emotions, letting only a trickle of impatience leak through. He wouldn't say he's against lying on principle - that would be stupid - but he's finding that he strongly disprefers this particular kind of deception. Still. It's what achieves his goals, here, and Carissa was in favour of it. And he's - less worried about her half of this. Unlike him, she's good at this. A survival strategy. 

He...can find something admirable in that, despite everything. 

This is fascinating and confusing and Malduoni is going to very quickly slip away, while someone is ushering Laborda over to the wizard's guest room, and re-cast the Detect Thoughts he prepared at seventh-circle and with Persistent Spell. It's probably - hopefully - a waste of a high-circle spell slot, but he wants to be able to react quickly if Laborda decides that he isn't buying it and that Leareth is messing with him. 

The magic is undetectable to the wards from inside his Rope Trick, and he's able to catch up quickly enough, an invisible gas drifting down the hallway just as Leareth impatiently knocks and then opens the door to Carissa Sevar's little guest room.

There's a bored-looking guard beside it, Malduoni notices, that's new. The man looks much less bored once the door is open and the woman in the low-cut sparkly shirt answers it, though he's trying not to look in a way that would be obvious from where Leareth is standing. 

"Leareth."

"This is Laborda," Leareth says gruffly. "He wishes to ask you some things." Here, where Laborda can see his face, he gives her a narrow-eyed, warning look, as though silently saying you had better not misbehave. 

Malduoni should be able to read Carissa Sevar's mind with no trouble at all. 

With a Persistent Detect Thoughts - effectively bumping it to a ninth-circle level of power - can he get through on Laborda as well? 

Carissa is turning to look at the Chelish cleric, feeling hopeful - they've come to negotiate her release - and also slightly nervous - she might be in trouble! Though maybe Cheliax will want the baby. He's going to be a sorcerer.

(There's a self-monitoring loop keeping those thoughts in her mind and keeping other thoughts out of it, but it's barely noticeable even when you're mind-reading her.)

"We should speak alone," Laborda says, and walks past her into the room. He did not miss Leareth's expression, and is vaguely thinking that it'll be hard to get answers out of her if she expects to be punished for them afterwards. Probably it's best to tell her that he's taking her with him, so that she has more incentive to be truthful with him and less to give the answers Leareth wants to hear. (He has no inclination to take her with him. It seems like she's pretty clearly screwed up one way or another and would probably be put to death for it, back in Cheliax, and that's not an outcome worth expending capital with Leareth in order to attain. Having a wizard will be useful to Leareth - more useful than he's saying - but they're not going to be able to stop him from hiring wizards, if they're trading him access to Golarion at all, and there's no reason to think this one is particularly valuable and, well, increasing reason to think she's really not.)

Carissa closes the door and stands at attention, badly, because her hair is loose around her shoulders and the sparkly shirt looks stunningly unprofessional. She doesn't speak. 

"We're in the process of securing your release," Laborda says, "and that of the other members of your unit captured by Leareth's operatives, of which I am told there are two."

She can't be a suspicious degree of incompetent. She lets her shoulders sag slightly with relief, but otherwise tries to answer the question actually well. "Yes, sir. The First Arcane crossed the barrier from Iftel with myself, Valverde, Carvajal, and Lavilla. Lavilla was killed in action pursuing a mage who exploded. Valverde and Carvajal were captured by Leareth's soldiers after leaving our Rope Trick on the First Arcane's orders, for food. There weren't other Chelish units known to us to be in the area."