"Casters can collaborate on a magic item that requires multiple spells, if they don't individually have all the spells to make it. It usually comes up if an item requires something only clerics get and something only wizards get - Sending isn't that, wizards get it too, though Early Judgment is. The problem with an item of Sending is that it has a ten minute casting time and then takes input from the caster, both of those things make a spell harder to lay in an item. I can try, if you want. I'd need a crash course in wondrous items."

"...weapons enchanter, right.  But, arguendo, Early Judgment is touch-targeted and cast quickly, so you should be able to make a Small Poking Needle of Early Judgment, right?  If it's a" mentalisticmagic "conceptual thingy, you could also imagine that as a weapon that distracts somebody during combat.  Also it doesn't have to do it unboundedly many times, doing it once or maybe three times would be enough."

"I can probably make a tiny sword of Early Judgment if you cast the Early Judgement at the stages where it needs that, sure."

"Material cost, time cost both yours and mine?"

"Yours is practically trivial, you'd just have to cast it once a day when I say when. I think it's the kind of thing where if I was working from an existing prototype it'd be 3000gp in spellsilver, maybe less, but the general rule of thumb is that it's at least double that to invent something you haven't seen before. Probably a couple weeks of work."

"Almost definitely not worth that much of your time, alas."

Also, in retrospect he did not think of this quickly enough, 'poky thing that gives you a deeply emotional and possibly addicting experience each time you stab yourself with it' is potentially a bad thing to invent into Golarion or have around even for himself.  That's not trope reasoning, it's pattern recognition in general.

"Cost of one scroll, and how long does it probably take me to learn to cast from scrolls?"

"People who aren't spellcasters at all often find it hard to learn, but spellcasters usually pick it up pretty quick, I think? A couple days of practicing with minor scrolls, maybe?"

"Scrolls sound like obviously the way to go then, unless they cost a huge amount."

Message:  Carissa, I have an increasingly bad feeling about your lack of afterlife arrangement, if there's any 'trope' in play at all that's leaving an opening for something interesting to happen to you before you make it into the safer parts of Hell.  Can we go have that talk right now?

- yes, of course. 

Keltham apologizes to everyone for not resuming faster, but there's something nagging at his brain and he's going to go try clearing it before continuing.

(Good.  She has something to do anyways.)

She goes with Keltham to his bedroom. "What's worrying you?"

"Carissa, I think you have not fully updated on your environment becoming as improbable as yours has become.  You met somebody at the Worldwound who's not supposed to exist in Golarion or be alive at all, his shiny new project has god-wars starting around it, Cayden Cailean taps Pilar with candy powers and sends her to Elysium, and then the Queen decides to go on a date with you."

"You may think it's safe to leave your afterlife arrangements hanging for an additional hour, because probably nothing is going to happen in an hour."

"I think we should expedite that process to its maximum reasonable speed."

"Not rush it and risk making errors, to be clear.  Just because a lot of improbable things have happened, doesn't mean particular improbable things will happen.  I was wrong about Asmodia coming back with superpowers.  Part of the doom of being unsure if you recognize a pattern, is when the pattern seems so much easier to call after the fact than in advance, and that's a sign of the phenomenon maybe not being real."

"But even leaving aside everything about 'tropes', there's a sense in which it feels stupid to leave open a vulnerability like that.  We have adversaries.  Other gods may be our adversaries.  We don't get to assume statistically normal probabilities of adverse events, because smart enemy actors may be trying to force them as outcomes upon reality, using pathways we cannot visualize in toto."

"If your afterlife arrangements are pending a conversation you'd like us to have, we should have that conversation.  If there's any slowness in the process for doing this under the Church of Asmodeus's supervision, where you can't just walk into Jacint's office and say it's time, we should schedule that as soon as possible, do the scheduling step before the conversation."

She takes a deep breath. "You're right."

....here's an idea. "An agreement like ours would not, typically, encompass my soul or my afterlife. ...would you want it to?"

"I would need to know a lot more about the details."

She prepared so many lies about this! "So, the normal arrangement that, say, Asmodia made when she graduated from school, or that Meritxell would've made yesterday, is that your soul, on death, becomes the property of a devil in Hell, one you picked out in advance based on good reviews and an organization you're interested in joining. When you die, you go to that devil, and they're responsible for orienting you, housing you, clothing you, training you, all of that, at which point you work in their organization until you've paid off the services provided. They can't make you work, obviously, but if you go work somewhere else while you have an outstanding contract, they get your pay from wherever you do end up working. 

Obviously devils compete on - how cheaply they can help you, so the size of the debt ends up being small, and how valuable the work you'll be doing is, so you'll be able to pay back your debt very quickly, and how nice the living and working conditions are, and how interesting the work is. My plan was always to be a weapons enchanter in Dis. It'll take me a long time to get oriented - magic works differently there, I won't be able to pick up where I left off when alive. But I'll be very valuable once I'm sorted, so I should be able to get a good deal, I'm not worried about that.

It just - occurs to me as the sort of thing where you might prefer I not be owned by someone else."

"Yeah, that makes sense as something to check with me."

"Uh, for my answer to be understandable, some quick background on Civilization's standard relationship escalation lattice..."

The gist of what Keltham is currently trying to convey:

Dath ilan has a notion of two people promising-not-swearing to each other to be together even in the Future, when they come back.

This is literally as far as a relationship can possibly escalate.

It is well past having multiple children together and raising them to maturity.

It is well past staying together for a few decades after that.

It is moderately past synchronizing your cryosuspension arrangements so that it happens when one person feels sort of overdue and the other person feels a bit of regret about leaving earlier; because more than any of that, they want to finish out all of their first lives together, and not be alone, nor leave the other alone, even for just a year.

People who say this to each other sometimes break up only twenty years later; and that is statistically more common than the breakup of couples who just semipromised they'd be together for the rest of their first lives, with intent to think things over together when they actually got to the Future.  For this to happen to you is one of the more social-epistemic-reputation-affecting errors you can make in the realm of relationships, predicting a relationship will last twenty thousand years when it doesn't last twenty.

No far prediction market has ever put more than a 70% chance on a promise like this, a promise upon the Future, holding up; and that's as of when the two go into cryosuspension together still unbroken.  Usually before you had a kid, you'd want more like 85% out of a prediction market saying you wouldn't rate that as the wrong decision retrospectively; likewise before you started talking socially about your two-decade monogamy compact like it was going to be a real thing and not just a fond aspiration.

People who say this is what they mean to do, and whose dignity calls on them to accept questions and objections, are typically asked if they've considered that maybe the Future could run vastly superior matching algorithms on available mates, and have qualitatively different and better potential mates who'd still be interested in an Ancient.

It's an obvious thought, isn't it?  And yet even so, some dath ilani look at each other and smile and say they've got it good enough, and would rather hold none of themselves back from the promise that they make to each other.  They don't need to worry about what future opportunities they might be passing up, or whether their lives would be objectively better if they made a different decision, or if it's really honest to make somebody else a promise like that when the statistics and prediction markets say what they do.  Because they just don't need to let that sway them, that's why not.

A majority of Civilization mostly thinks those people seem crazy from a standpoint of expected utility maximization, but, at the same time, has a lot of respect for that.  The kind of respect you give to somebody when you wonder, deep down, if maybe they're doing it right, and you're the ones doing it wrong.

This is legitimately actually faster than Keltham is comfortable escalating their relationship.

There's also the pragmatic point that Keltham does not currently have an organizational branch in Hell to protect Carissa, and that her current state is a vulnerability, maybe an awful vulnerability.

That said, Carissa is also right that the notion of somebody else 'owning her soul', even if they don't own her, does not sit well with this new gendertrope that has always been inside Keltham.

And they're living in a world of low probability, and Keltham does not want to close off the prospect of their relationship escalating that far in time.

He can think of one class of obvious solutions; does Carissa have her own suggestions?

"One thing that comes to mind - and it might take some searching to find a devil who'll agree to this - is an arrangement where you own an option on my soul? And right now if I die I go to the devil I'm contracted with, but you can, at any future point, call in your option, if you decide that you want to, at some later point when we know each other better and you have a bunch of operations in Hell."

"Yep.  That's exactly the same thing I was thinking."