- right, she can at least check if, uh, the books on the bookshelves are in Taldane, guess from that whose demiplane this is...

They're in a bunch of different languages! Many of them are in Taldane, though. Most of the ones in view look like they're about arcane magic. 

Emphatic shrug at Leareth. 

It's not how she'd expect Cheliax to do it, though. She'd expect the room to be utterly lightless, and she would not expect you'd be left alone with other prisoners before they even started hurting you. Of course, Leareth is very important. Maybe the rules are different. 

Maybe they just decided to politely insist he make his lie true. As a lesson in why he shouldn't lie to them. She can see someone thinking that was funny though it doesn't seem like it would have been the most strategic thing to do.

...All right, that's probably enough. 

Malduoni dismisses Invisibility. Casts Tongues - on Leareth, he and the Chelish wizard already share a language. 

"I apologize for my rudeness," he says levelly, in Taldane. "I judged it important and time-sensitive that we speak in privacy, and I was concerned about intervention by your deeply obnoxious Velgarth gods." 

What. 

Leareth gives Carissa a baffled look. 

His hands are kind of shaking. He clasps them together over his knees, willing them to stop. 

"Who are you?" he says, finding to his own surprise that he's speaking a different language - and that that was a different language before, too, and he understood it just fine. He didn't even feel the magic, but it must have been cast. 

"- A surprisingly complicated question. And one that I think we need to discuss, but - not immediately. For now, the name I go by currently is Malduoni." 

Which of course means nothing to Leareth! Does Carissa seem to recognize it, though? 

....no? She's pretty sure he hasn't swung by the Worldwound. She'd remember him. 

Carissa is having an intense internal conflict about whether to sit next to Leareth and pretend she totally belongs in this conversation or hide in the corner and hope that from this everyone decides not to bother her - no, that sounds hopeless. Sit next to Leareth and pretend she totally belongs it is. 

"You're Chelish," she says, because his face is; of course, there are Chelish people other places, and not everyone wears their real face.

"I was, yes - I suppose I still am, in many ways. I have not been back - not publicly under my own name, at least - since 4606." 

Leareth has no idea what that year signifies - or how long ago it was - and glances questioningly at Carissa. 

"The year Aroden got himself killed. - it's 4708, right now."

Well, that makes sense. It must have been a particularly bad time to be living in Cheliax. 

Though Leareth still feels like he's missing something - missing something huge -

"Why do you think it so important to talk to - us?" he asks, flatly. Talk to me, he had been about to say, but...he didn't say 'you'. He said both of them.

Leareth's thoughts continue to give Malduoni a bizarre, disconcerting feeling of déja vu. It feels like it should make sense - like there's some explanation that should make everything suddenly clear - but he's not seeing it. 

"A long story. In the short run - because I intend to take Cheliax from Asmodeus. And I would like your help." 

- Leareth's first coherent thought, after ten seconds of skidding in circles as he absorbs the words, is that Carissa is not going to react well to this at ALL.

That assumes it would be safe to react badly to that! It obviously wouldn't!! Good thing they're in an antimagic field and so there's no way to tell whether she is in the privacy of her own head reacting badly to that!!!!

"That sounds ill-advised," she says calmly.

The old man smiles slightly. (This does not do anything to make him less terrifying.) 

"I will not deny it is a bold move. Whether it is actually ill-advised depends on the resources I can bring to bear, no? And you know nothing of those, to make a confident pronouncement one way or another." 

Carissa is probably paying the right kind of attention to notice that there's - something - about his body language, something not-quite-describable, but...reminiscent of Leareth. 

"And I gather you are asking for my resources as well," Leareth says, just as tonelessly. "To make it even less ill-advised." 

Leareth doesn't have any feelings about it, yet. The situation is too sudden and baffling, and with his most important senses cut off he has very limited avenues for getting more context. He can't orient.

It's incredibly distressing, but panicking won't help, and so he doesn't. 

"I guess if you have the sworn commitments of all of the other gods to aid your cause then it doesn't seem as ill-advised."

"Really? I - think perhaps you have some misapprehensions about Asmodeus' relative strength, here. Which I suppose is not surprising as Chelish propaganda. If I wished to invade Hell, then yes, I had better have a very strong alliance with all the other gods, but whatever you have been told, I assure you He is not all-powerful in the material plane."

...He kind of talks like Leareth as well.   

Leareth isn't especially surprised by this new claim, and - finds it more plausible, overall, than Carissa's claims about Asmodeus' power. Though obviously he's not about to take it at face value either. 

He is much too distracted by not-panicking to have consciously noticed that Malduoni moves and speaks a bit like he does, but he's half-noticing something, mostly a vague floating confusion. 

"If someone attacks Cheliax Asmodeus will involve Himself. He's involved Himself in the Iftel situation and that's genuinely somewhere where He's very limited and it's not even an existential threat to Cheliax. I don't expect He'll show up personally, but - look, imagine I wanted to fight you, and I had reason to be sure you wouldn't come to Cheliax. It would still be very stupid fo me to fight you. Because with an amount of money you wouldn't even miss you could hire people to kill me, or enchant them, or convince them, or you could mail me a magic item that trapped my soul and returned to you, or had someone show me a mirror that trapped me inside it, or you could make, I don't know, some money that was harmless to everyone else in the country but caused me to die on the spot, or you could call an outsider and bind them to do it, and if for some reason you wanted to do it yourself you can evidently Wish-kidnap people, and if you'd been all out of Wishes for the day you could still've kidnapped me. And I bet I haven't named the half of it because I don't know what you can do at ninth circle!

And the difference between Asmodeus and you is bigger than the difference between you and me. He doesn't have to be trying, He doesn't have to be willing to get to Cheliax, you can be the fifth item on His to-do list and you'll still lose."

"...I think we disagree on the level of impossibility here, and how much it can be mitigated by a century of preparation and an entire country at one's back. I do agree that it will be very, very hard, and bear a cost in lives and destruction that I do not care for. Which is why I am asking for your help." This is addressed mainly to Leareth, but not exactly excluding Carissa. 

Leareth feels...tired, mostly. Tired and quietly scared. The last week feels like one nonstop relentless deluge of out-of-context problems that he can barely wrap his head around. And - this is maybe hopeful, this is maybe the opposite of a problem?

But, at the same time, he's a prisoner again, stripped of the ability to use magic again, and he's still tired - it was a draining negotiation with Laborda - and how is he supposed to assess this, when he has no way of fact-checking anything... 

"Why," he hears himself say, dully, distantly. "Why are you doing this?" 

"Because Cheliax was - is - my country. And I failed, and - lost it - but I was never going to give up." 

The man's eyes are dark and haunted and somehow very, very old. 

The feeling that he's missing some critical connection, something that would make the rest of this bizarre situation fit, is back. Leareth looks helplessly over at Carissa.