Carissa joins them. "You know, at the Worldwound you wouldn't've gotten a personal-use third-circle slot for another seven years."

"I guess I'm glad I'm not at the Worldwound. ....not primarily for that reason."

(Not letting people play around with their new magic for seven years seems sort of pointlessly non-optimal anti-fun?  Is this a Golarion Error or is there actually a good reason?)

"Little surprised and unnerved about invisibility being only a second-circle spell, though.  Are there politeness codes about - not doing that?  Rules?  Or do people in wizard schools just have to run Detect Magic a lot?"

"- mostly there's nowhere in school where you'd expect to have privacy," Meritxell says after considering for a second whether this is also true in Taldor. "It'd be illegal to go invisibly into someone else's house or something, that's trespassing, but you can't trespass on a dorm that sleeps twelve."

"Any safeguards here, or is it just that you'd expect Security to spot the invisible person and nope them?"

"Here I imagine they've got the entire place ringed with Alarm spells that ping whenever anyone crosses them and Security that can see invisibility and - actually now that I've got Arcane Sight I bet I'd be able to see - not the invisible person, but the fact there was a spell, if they didn't have more powerful magic concealing it, which a real intruder probably would."

"Okay, so, it's not that you're hiding that you've all suddenly got Arcane Sight, I am apparently allowed to know if the topic comes up, everyone except Ione and Pilar is not pretending to cast Detect Magic while they're watching Carissa construct her incredibly impressive scaffold, it's just that this thing happened and nobody is mentioning it to me even though I am authorized to know it."

" - did no one mention it," says Meritxell, innocent and baffled. "After Asmodia and Pilar died those of us who hadn't made our afterlife arrangements did, and that comes with a perk, and most people pick arcane sight. Well. Most wizards."

"I hadn't heard either. Congratulations!"

"Thank you!"

Message:  Ione is actually with Nethys.  Pilar got touched by Cayden Cailean.  Carissa, why do you not have Arcane Sight.

Well I haven't made afterlife arrangements in the last two days, I was busy!

Also ... I'd talk to you about it first, actually? It's not strictly in the set of things I've given you, but I'd want to discuss it.

Message:  Got it.

"Why wouldn't everyone make their afterlife arrangements before starting wizard school, if it comes with that perk?" Keltham says aloud.

"- so the reason it comes with perks at all is because you get the perk from the specific devil who you are selling your soul to, in exchange for joining their organization on your death. And setting aside whether children ought to be allowed to promise that, a random child's soul isn't going to be - valuable enough they can get a powerful permanent magical boon from selling it. Mostly you actually wait until you're older than us and more powerful, at the perfect balance between how much you can get for your soul and how long you'll have to enjoy it, but."

"Sorry about that, then, if apologies are appropriate here.  It seems like the sort of thing for which you should get compensation, if there's a more powerful version of Arcane Sight you're locked out of, because you were working on a dangerous project.  Or do the contracts come with a buyback option?"

"Actually I also don't understand why this project is dangerous enough for that if, like, resurrections, also afterlives in the first place."

"Someone else might get to us first," Meritxell says flatly. "If you die normally, you go into the River of Souls, and you go all the way to the Boneyard, where you're judged and sorted, and then you go to Hell, and get magically dumped at a random location in Avernus, the first layer. And Hell has pretty good infrastructure for moving people from Avernus on, but still, you're going to be sort of cut off from comms for a while, potentially weeks. Potentially you get held up in the Boneyard because Pharasma doesn't like to hold trials for people who are obviously going to be resurrected. And while you're in that situation, if you get a raise, you take it, and you have no way of knowing for sure if it's Cheliax sending it. You can tell the alignment of the person offering to raise you, but..Zon-Kuthon's followers are also Lawful Evil. If you're in a known location in Hell, you're safe, your secrets are safe, Cheliax can call ahead and confirm the Raise being offered is ours..."

"Understood, thanks for explaining."

Probability that Carissa just cannot manage to make this arrangement for some weird reason or another... let's say... 20%?  It's just that, if everybody else in the harem has now verified their allegiance... he should check that assumption, though.

"Is there a Security process that makes sure, when someone does this, or says they've done it, that they've actually made a deal with Asmodeus's people and not Zon-Kuthon's?"

"....when we sell our souls?" Meritxell says. "Yes, it was done with Security supervision from a list of devils maintained by the Church of Asmodeus. I'm not even sure you can sell your soul to Zon-Kuthon, though, gods, that'd be awful."

"We didn't get worse Arcane Sight, we got the standard," Gregoria says. "The project didn't force us to sell our souls for less, they made our souls valuable enough for a standard sale a decade early."

"Oh, that's good to hear.  I'm glad that at least this part of the system is so, what's the word I'm looking for, functional.  I guess because of Asmodeus involvement."

So basically if there's a hidden cleric, it has to be Carissa.

"I think Hell is a lot better run than Cheliax," Carissa says dryly. "By the way, can I come when you go ask pointed questions of the site manager, it's not really any of my business but I think it'll be really funny and maybe inspire me to grow up and build Civilization."

"If you think that's safe career-wise."

He frankly did not need this as a Thing to Worry About.

...well, the same logic that says that any of this would be true in the first place, also says that Carissa is the First Girl, and therefore, out of all the girls here, the one who's guaranteed to have a pathway leading to a happy outcome for the two of them.  So if she's a Zon-Kuthon cleric unknown to even herself, it'll be a solvable problem.</optimistic rationalization>

"I don't think they'd have put someone super unprofessional on the project but I won't, like, make faces or anything, and if he has me disciplined for looking like I was having too much fun then we'd have some valuable information!"

"Let's run that experiment then."

"Carissa, what's your favorite spell you've cast, next up spell you're really looking forwards to?"

"I am told this makes me a tedious parody of myself but I really like Fox's Cunning, and I'd be incredibly excited for Dimension Door if I weren't in a Forbiddance. Since I am....Scrying's going to be fun."

Golarion sure does have a lot of spells that seem to have been invented by someone fundamentally opposed to and perhaps offended by the notion of privacy.  "Scrying?  How's that work?"