Tristian will get to casting Lesser Restoration, then.

Linzi leans around Sivetrys and gives a little awkward wave, and an even more awkward smile. She was not well educated, so about all she knows in Celestial is 'Hello,' which seems like it'd be false advertising to say.

Ah, she recognizes that look. From herself.

Luto does an awkward wave in return, and slips through the room like a leaf on the wind, arriving next to Linzi.

She whispers (with the enunciation of someone reciting something they memorized in the last 30 minutes) "Sorry, I only speak Celestial and Tianji" in barely recognizable Halit. 

Yeah, Linzi gets it. Her attempt at a smile widens a little, and she says the other phrase she knows in Celestial, which is:

"Here to help," she says, which is of course a single word in Celestial. Because it's Celestial.

The gnome ignores this interaction, and turns his gaze to Sivetrys.

"And what are you standing around for, Miss Baroness This-Was-All-My-Idea? None of that! Off you go, scroll of Detect Undead, into the enemy Sanctum, get to figuring out where in this wretched hole the bastard is. See about giving yourself one of those sorcerer pep talks of yours, while you're at it, our tactical options will be much better if you rip the Teleport Trap and Forbiddance down around his ear-holes."

It's nice to know he is serious about this.

"Yes, Jubilost," says Sivetrys agreeably. She gives a little whistle to Bergamot for him to follow, then squeezes her way past everyone, to the little tunnel that goes past the Mage's Sanctum.

Oop! His person is calling, gotta go! Thanks for the pets, shiny person, bye!

Oh. Bye, kitty... 

"Now! You, fellow scholar of the alchemical arts!" This is directed at Uma. "What all do you have available, and what all is currently active on yourself and your martial companion," continues the gnome that will not be stopped.

(Lesser Restoration.)

And then, to spare Uma from the horrors of talking to Jubilost, Tristian just hands him the notebook she gave him.

"What is this now?" He looks at the paper. "Ah! Yes, very good, should have expected it, really, you're an alchemist of caliber, naturally..."

The impossible has occurred; gnome bossiness has been stopped. He's busy reading.

Umakhi has already retreated back to her wall, though now that she knows the gnome is also an alchemist, she's looking at him and his gear with some curiosity.

He seems to have specialized differently than she has; there are little tiny frozen creatures in the bottles on his bandolier. She might remember that some alchemists are obsessed with cataloging and preservation, and he seems to be one of those. He's missing the equipment to make his bombs holy, but he has a similar sort of quick-draw layout that implies he is just as fast as she is with throwing bombs, and also hasn't yet used any today. He is also clearly under the effects of a cognatogen, just as she is; recent intake, probably on the way here.

"Yes, excellent, I can work with this," he mutters, and then starts mixing the appropriate array of extracts for buffing. "Buffs, if you please, wolf last in case we can't manage to bring him along," he adds, not looking up. "Skip the Heroism unless you've already made it up, the bard has Good Hope."

"The bard has a name, tyrant," mutters Linzi, but she does obediently get to buffing people.

Tristian doesn't say anything, but does the same. He has some extra scrolls of Hide from Undead; he's been making them in his spare time. For literally this reason.

Good Hope... oh, the bard spell that's Heroism, but shorter and for the whole party. 

All the stuff she has left that will actually be useful for her and Luto is minutes or less, so nothing to do but get vials in order and wait. 

... and even she goes and hugs Zan, surprising both Luto and herself. 

Zan wraps her arms around Uma in a practiced way that avoids uncomfortably jostling her wings and holds her firmly in place. Her eyes are wet with confused concern. 

"We'll get them back", she whispers, even though Zan can't understand her and she's not sure she believes it. 

She does not need to speak the available languages to understand that.

Fortunately, she doesn't have to social, because she is busy buffing.

Buffs occur, under the watchful (and domineering) direction of Jubilost.

Being a sorcerer isn't fair.

Nothing in Golarion is really fair, of course, but - the whole concept of sorcery is founded upon a fundamental absence of fairness. There is no test of talent, or skill, or devotion that gets a sorcerer their powers. It's pure luck, plain and simple. Having a magical bloodline helps the chances, but does not, actually, guarantee a damn thing. Magic is just a thing that a sorcerer has, with no choice or power over the matter. They don't get to choose what powers their magic, and they don't get to opt out, and steering towards acquiring specific spells is an art, not a science. Wizards are the ones that get to choose what spells go in their spellbooks; sorcerers get to study the scrolls that contain the spellform, and try very, very hard to reach for it with their souls. If they even have a scroll for it. Which, in this case, she doesn't, actually.

Wizards get their circles sooner, too. Sivetrys suspects this is connected; something about being able to know what they're reaching for, and efficiency of power placement. They are not stretching their (proverbial) arms out in the dark trying to shape something by their will and talent, they have neatly allocated resources that they then build into set patterns, that other wizards figured out. Historically, this was often by observing and reverse engineering sorcerer spells, which is for the record very unfair. Not that Sivetrys would want to specifically take sorcerer-sourced spells from wizards, that's not what she wants at all, it's just - the relationship is, for the most part, pretty one way. (And also wizards are often snobs that look down their noses at sorcerers for not earning their magic quote 'The hard way,' like blazing a trail into the near unknown entirely by force of personality is not also hard.)

Anyway, this is all to say that Sivetrys is pretty sure that she's at the point where, if she were a wizard, she would be sixth-circle. She's based her life around doing magic, and she's got a feel for these things now. Tristian is sixth-circle, and has been for literal months, and shut up, she's not jealous (she is, a little bit), she's very happy for him, just also please c'mon she wants it so badly!!!! But she is not a wizard, she is a sorceress, so: here she is, at fifth-circle, perpetually feeling like she can almost reach it but not quite being able to grasp the magic she wants with her mind.

Wanting it is not the problem, though. Being a sorcerer is about need. She needs to need this.

So.

Here is what will happen if Sivetrys does not manage to break into casting sixth circle spells:

They will have to brute force their way into Vordakai's lair. They will have to walk into a Forbiddance, or possibly a series of Forbiddances, if Vordakai has any sense, which admittedly he might not. Either way, they have exactly zero passwords for any of them, and Tristian will need to heal them immediately after, which will eat several of their channels. Tristian admittedly has a lot of channels, but every single one that is used to heal them is not being used to do horrible things to undead, or heal them from other damage they were not forced to directly eat. Then, they will be essentially trapped inside, both in the sense that they can't teleport out, and also that Vordakai will know where they entered from, and be able to cut off their escape. They will be forced to physically fight their way to where Vordakai is located. There will be traps. There will be ambushes. Vordakai will absolutely show up at the exact worst time, probably several worst times, to pick them off one by one with his bullshit soul-eating nonsense. He will have time to rally his forces to make a proper counterattack, instead of not having that. It will be a long, slow, painful slog through a wizard's meat-grinder, and it will suck so, so much. Sivetrys tries to be something of an optimist, but especially with the foreign adventuring party already being on their last legs: people will probably die. People will probably be killed, have their bodies reanimated, their souls poorly reattached, and they will be forced to experience fighting the people they care about, in a horrible undying prison of their own rotting corpse.

It is not clear that they could win, if they did things the hard way. The odds are, quite frankly, not great.

Or, they could do this the easier way (which is very different from easy, to be clear) and rip the Forbiddance down, skirt around the Teleport Trap, and Dimension Door directly on top of the lich to kill him. They would not have to deal with the majority of his traps. They would not have to deal with the majority of his forces. He will not have much, ideally any, time to buff and prepare. They will still be in an enclosed underground space with a fucking demilich. It will still not be fun, it will still absolutely suck a bunch, and some of them might still die, but: the odds are much, much better.

They do not have a scroll of Greater Dispel Magic. Tristian could prepare the spell, but Tristian did not prepare the spell, because they were not expecting to go fight a demilich today. They have to, anyway, because the seal on this fucking lich has been broken (by someone else!), and now he is about to gain access to Teleport, and therefore become much, much harder to track down and kill. He would also become much more of an active threat to Sivetrys and her party in particular, because they live within easy teleportation distance of this place, and he knows that they exist. Probably he wants to add even more powerful adventurers to his collection. They could run, but that would be abandoning everyone and everything she's built for the past several years of her life. Every single person she's ever helped: at this lich's mercy. Every bridge she's had built: used for this lich's purposes.

She needs to not let that happen. She needs to keep her people, her party, safe. She needs to minimize risks and play this smart and there are people that need her to do this and so she needs it too.

There is one spell she wants. One. She knows the basic sketches of what it looks like, because she has the little baby Dispel Magic, at third circle. It's just - that, but more, but better, more powerful, more thorough. Probably it came first, and got carefully pruned to being smaller and tidier.

She needs it now, not tomorrow, not the day after. Right now. Or people will die. She needs it like she needs to breathe.

Sivetrys reaches out with fingers that are not there and thinks about how much she really, really, really needs this, and...

... she feels the edges of something that she could maybe cast.

Ha.

Okay. Okay. She stops there, much as she hungers to cast the damn spell right now. Casting the damn spell right now would not be smart, and she's being smart. Timing is very very important, and Vordakai will almost certainly notice her wrecking his shit, so she will wait until her party is ready to pounce. But.

Yesyesyesyesyesyes~!