Leareth knocks, politely. :It is me: he adds in Mindspeech. :Laborda has left: 

Carissa gets the door. 

"...thank you," she says after a moment, because there's no pretending he didn't do her a favor, even if she's also not stupid enough to think he didn't have his own reasons.

He shuts the door behind him, though not fast enough to prevent an invisible gas from following him inside. 

"- I think I owe you thanks as well, for proposing a plan that would actually work. He did not seem suspicious at all - I am impressed with your insight there." 

"'s my country, I know how it works. ...I guess it isn't anymore since I have just betrayed it. You did well. I thought maybe you were too Good to get anything done but you got it right. It's hard to lie to clerics."

Leareth nods. Smiles, despite himself. It's...oddly flattering, to hear her say that. 

"- Are you - going to be all right?" he asks after a moment, serious again. "About - having betrayed your country, I mean. I would expect that to be upsetting, for most people." 

"I hadn't really thought about it? I'm - they were almost certainly going to kill me. And it turns out I really don't want to die. And I don't know what I could've done about that. I don't really wish I was nobler, because then I'd be dead."

" - or would I - was it a real choice or were you going to keep me either way -"

Leareth considers this for a while, and then answers honestly. 

"I am not sure. What decision I would have made, if I had - made my offer - and you still wanted to return to Cheliax at any cost. I...would have thought that you were making a mistake. But it is not an effective use of resources to - to try to protect individual people from making mistakes - and you are in fact very valuable to me, in expectation, but...less so, if you were unwilling..." He shrugs a little. "I am glad that was not the choice that I needed to make. This one was much simpler." 

- nod. 

"...does the shirt bother you."

"...I am not sure? I think your - different mannerisms - were more disconcerting than just the clothing." 

The uncanny sense of familiarity is back, and Malduoni still has no idea what to make of it. What it means. 

- Leareth wants what Malduoni wants. Or at least there's substantial overlap. 

Leareth...has fewer options, in a way. And in a different way, he has far more freedom. The relief and awe in his thoughts, every time he considers all of Golarion waiting to be understood, is impossible to miss. An entire new world of opportunities just opened to him, and he's - not quite decided yet, on dropping everything to explore that, but he's ready to. 

Malduoni is not currently in a position to drop everything and spend a century finding out if Velgarth can offer a cheaper solution to his problems, or a path to his goals paved with fewer dead bodies. He doesn't have a century to spare, right now. That's another two, three generations of dead in Hell, that he can likely never get back; it's time for Asmodeus to consolidate His power even further... 

But maybe he doesn't have to explore very far. 

He planned for this option, when he prepared spells earlier. Or, well, he hadn't exactly planned on taking both of them, but he can probably succeed at it. 

He's curious, though, to spy on this conversation just a little longer, and he should still have a handful more minutes of invisibility. 

Carissa is ignorant of the activities of invisible gases and has decided she is going to make Leareth make disconcerted faces again. "Lotta guys would prefer stupid Carissa, you know. She doesn't bite."

Leareth is harder to disconcert this way, now that he's had some time to get used to Carissa. 

"I mean, I suppose stupid Carissa would be a more sensible addition to a stable of hot people, but we already established that I am not in the market for that. I much prefer the Carissa who might help me figure out how to replicate a Plane Shift using Velgarth magic. ...Laborda demonstrated one at my request. I have detailed notes if you would like to see them." 

"On the structure? Yes, I would. It's seventh circle for wizards, so I hope your plan isn't that we replicate it with Golarion magic - he'll have done it at fifth, he's a cleric -"

"No - I think it ought to be possible to do a similar thing with a Gate - I had already suspected it should be, Gates route through extraplanar spaces anyway and I have some previous research on routing through additional planes to cut the effective 'distance' and the energy cost..." 

Leareth gets out his notes and unfolds them to show Carissa, and then within about thirty seconds is casting an illusion in midair to show him in more detail what the Plane Shift was doing according to his mage-sight. 

"Plane Shifts use an object to target, how do Gates do it -"

"Gates use a 'search destination' - usually this is a location remembered by a specific mage, in as much detail with as many sensory aspects as possible, but many other kinds of targeting are possible with greater skill. I can Gate from a map, or Gate blindly with just a direction and distance -" 

It's an engaging discussion they're having, but besides the point. 

Malduoni has been considering his options.

- he could try just talking. He would probably start there, if it were only Leareth - but the Chelish wizard is a complication. And so is the fact that, locally, Foresight still works, and Leareth seems to have gotten on the wrong side of every single god in this world. Malduoni has to assume that the Star-Eyed Goddess and Vkandis are very unhappy over Leareth's escape, and will be paying as much attention to his operations as They can manage. He has to assume that the gods will notice something as soon as he makes any move with Leareth; They may not know what, but clearly that only stresses Them out even more. And hopefully Leareth has taken sufficient precautions, but...obviously he'd thought so before, too, and hadn't expected Vkandis to pull out an intervention as blatant as an earthquake right there. 

(It reminds him a little of the gods' interventions in the civil war in Cheliax, a century ago now. How clumsy they were, newly-blind and frightened -) 

Better to have a conversation once they're not in Velgarth. And convincing Leareth to leave willingly with him would require an entire conversation of its own, and - one that would be much harder to manage with the Chelish wizard to account for - Malduoni is pretty sure that even if he were to try approaching Leareth in private, the man would pull in his Golarion liaison for help - 

He has a good read on Leareth, he thinks. The man won't hold Malduoni's paranoia against him, once he's explained. 

The problem is that, while Carissa Sevar might be only third-circle, Leareth...should be considered to be close to equivalent to a ninth-circle caster, in some if not all ways. He's very well shielded; he'll be able to effectively throw off many spells. And his reflexes are very, very good. 

The best cheap option is, probably, to cast Dominate Person on Carissa and have her control Leareth using the existing geas she has on him. But if he does that when Leareth's current permission to 'do whatever actions he wants' is still active, that would give Leareth plenty of time to react, quite possibly enough to Gate out or incapacitate Carissa and prevent her from speaking. If he tries to wait, one, they seem likely to be at this conversation for a while, and two, Dominate Person is going to be quite visible to Velgarth mage-sight. If one of Leareth's staff comes to collect Carissa to have her redo his instructions, they'll notice it.

Fine. The absurdly expensive option is still very clearly worth it. 

Malduoni leaves, silently, with a minute left on Invisibility and Gaseous form. Enough to make it back safely to his Rope Trick, which he plans to just leave there. In a few minutes, it won't matter anymore. 

He Plane Shifts out. Back to Golarion, though who knows exactly where he'll land - he's just heading onward straight to his personal demiplane, anyway - 

- some Random farmland, it turns out, well out of sight of the nearest human habitation. 

And then onward, again, to a quiet peaceful library. 

He's been gone for a while, and really owes some people a quick update on his wellbeing. For now, he settles for a Sending to Parmida, reassuring her that he's back in Golarion, safe and unharmed, and will catch her up soon. 

He has diamonds here, of course, and he already prepared Wish for one of his ninth-circle slots today. The wording for grabbing two specific people from somewhere else is known and not complicated. 

He casts it. 

And abruptly, Leareth and Carissa are somewhere else. 

- what - 

- his mage-sight isn't working. His magic isn't working. Mindspeech doesn't either. Leareth assumes that none of his talismans are working either but, without mage-sight, it's not like he can check. 

- that's the most powerful spell Carissa has ever felt, Golarion magic, and she does instinctively try to resist it but only the way that a child might instinctively try to stop an oncoming sword with their bare hands. 

It doesn't work.

- they didn't buy it. She thought she was clever and they were cleverer and they didn't buy it and now everything's going to hurt very badly for a long time. Which is fine.

Leareth has barely any handle on what kind of magic that was - he felt it so briefly, before losing all his magical senses, and it was so foreign - not a Plane Shift, something else, something much less possible to resist - 

He scrambles up on hands and knees - orient - he's half-blind but he at least has his perfectly mundane senses - 

(His first assumption is, of course, that Cheliax was responsible for this, but...why? It had made sense to him, before, that they had more to gain from his willing alliance, and limited exchange of magic items and research, than from taking him captive again - and he already agreed to leave Iftel alone and they know he's Lawful -)

It's a quiet, cozy...library? He fell on top of a very nice rug. 

"Carissa?" he calls out, looking around. 

Malduoni watches, invisible again for right now. It's much easier to get past Leareth's shields when none of his magic is working. 

They're not going to be able to communicate. She sits up and looks at him. Even if they could talk she's not sure what she would say.

Leareth is terrified. It doesn't show a lot, but it does show at all; Carissa has significant experience in reading his body language at this point. 

He meets her eyes. Makes a vague gesture at the room around them. "Cheliax?" he says questioningly - hopefully she'll at least recognize that word, and know what he's asking.