Might be fourth now. Yay Carissa. 

She has an armillary amulet, for visualizing the way spell manifolds will curve around each other. She reaches it at her neck, twiddles with it. 

They're probably just toying with her. 

And yet -

"Make a DC 40 spellcraft check" is, in general, a mean thing to say to your players who are in the middle of levelling up their character sheet to seventh level. It is standard at that level for a wizard to have a +12 or +14 to spellcraft.

Carissa Sevar has a +23 to spellcraft, +28 when her hands are free to use her armillary amulet. 

Let the dice roll, then.

Carissa is going to turn her armillary amulet into an arrow of Slaying. She's not actually sure if you can do that. She's going to anyway. She's sure it's supposed to take days. But if you're willing to burn a lot of spellsilver maybe you can go a little faster.

Now that's just bullshit.  Seventh-circle wizard, yes.  Perhaps a prodigal and specialized fifth-circle wizard.  Third-circle who maybe just hit fourth, no.

Skeptical sane people would not believe this Carissa Sevar fact.

All right, keep going then.  Are you actually going to pull this off.

Well, how long does she have. She knows how to make an arrow of Slaying, she's done that before. She knows, apparently, how to use spellsilver at this distance. She's trying some new stuff in order to do it faster, but this is three days of work for a normal arms and armor enchanter, and a day and a half even for a Carissa normally, and she's not sure how much you can substitute spellsilver for speed, though she's going to find out.

...let's say she gets fifteen minutes.

How far does Carissa get in fifteen minutes, is it pretty clear that she would in fact succeed if left to herself for a few more hours?  Is it enough that she starts feeling hope?

Yes. It is. Why do you ask. 

Hell is the destruction of hope.

"That is the most impressive feat I have seen anybody even try from that position."

- like being dumped in cold water, except not the nice kind of cold water that'll drown you. 

Nothing to lose, really. It's an odd feeling, weightless but also too full of wordless agony to enjoy. 

"Your majesty! You don't mean this is your spellsilver, I thought someone had just left it here."

Does Carissa actually have any idea how to not flirt.

"Nothing to lose?  Are you so sure?  You aren't going to try to convince me that Asmodeus would still treasure your soul?  Nor that the reason He singled you out, was that none save you can do as must now be done to keep up to Osirion and Lastwall?"

"It's just barely possible that you'll decide that, your majesty, but not because I claim it's so."

She has not actually stopped work on making her slaying arrow.

Well, isn't it nice to be credited with the tiniest trace of professionalism literally at all.

"I inquired of Hell.  They thought you had outlived your usefulness."

"After receiving reports from the one loyal person present at that incident, I am inclined to agree."

"There was a loyal person present at that incident?"

"The Security officer posted outside Keltham's room.  He didn't try to escape, reported faithfully the incident, and will be extensively corrected for his incompetence, which is not, however the same as treason."

"Someone really has to work hard to end up in this room, Sevar.  Carissa.  May I call you that?  I think our relationship has reached that point.  You need to work to get into this room, Carissa.  You have to somehow personally piss off Abrogail Thrune to a towering degree, you must have made a deliberate and knowing decision along the way - because there is no terrifying incompetent people out of incompetence, but betrayal is something else - and then on top of that you needed to become somebody that Asmodeus and the Church would no longer miss."

"Regrets?  Or are you too busy to feel them?  It seems a shame to cut short your stunning demonstration, but if you can't concentrate on that and having feelings at the same time, I'll have no choice."

"I regret literally every decision I made from the moment Keltham showed up at the Worldwound and am so overwhelmed with misery and terror that I cannot think of a thing to say in my defense. I deserve to be tortured eternally." It's true, in a sense, but also she's holding the misery and terror back, crowding them into a corner of her mind, not actually letting herself fully feel them. 

"Doesn't everyone?  Let yourself feel it, Carissa, or I might start feeling inclined to destroy your spellwork to reduce your distractions."

.....nothing matters....

"And am I supposed to care? Oh no, my spellwork! You were never going to let me finish it! You can't threaten me, haven't you noticed that? You're going to destroy me and I literally don't care about anything else!"

She's - crying? She would not have predicted that.

She hasn't stopped working on the arrow. It's reassuring, one stable thing, like there's a corner of her mind that's still knitting magic, ignorant of all the rest.

Abrogail reaches out a hand and caresses her cheek, where her head is still held very solidly in place by nothing.

"At least you still know how to cry," Abrogail says softly, "from something other than simple pain.  But it's only a few of your emotions that you're feeling, even so, and you don't know how to feel the rest.  You're a broken thing inside, aren't you, no wonder you failed at the end when it mattered.  It would have been so interesting to see whether Keltham could have remade you in truth."

" - wait, that's your fault analysis here?"

"Your Majesty, by far my most significant error - and yours, really, but mostly mine - is that I did not confirm Keltham's room was warded to make Sendings impossible, or, if we had some good reason for it not to be so warded, then we should also have had some group of malicious assassins Send him to lure him into a trap so he'd be appropriately fucking wary in future.  We lost almost everything as soon as he got that Sending; it would be nice if he'd taken me along to Osirion, but it was still a tiny probability at that point of getting anything at all that we valued out of this.

My second most significant error is that as soon as the fallback 'Carissa and maybe Ione escape with Keltham' plan was developed we should have done a dozen live-fire runthroughs with every Security person who might possibly have been in the room when Keltham learned something that caused him to be ready to leave.

My third most significant error was seeking employment in your clownshow of a government." She fully expects this to get her lit on fire but being lit on fire will be refreshing right now.

Ah, Carissa.  If you had spent more than four hours of your life as a project manager, dealing with actual people instead of calm little pieces of paper...

"Do I detect a note of far-too-late interest in becoming Queen of Cheliax?" Abrogail says mockingly.

"Of course I want to be Queen of Cheliax! Have you met the current one, she's an idiot!" WHY isn't she on fire.