"Nah, I wouldn't have risked it. I'm out the time and components to bind a new one, that's it. Kids in school would murder each others' familiars, sometimes, when they were mad at each other." Shrug.

"Cheliax is certainly...memorable." Altarrin glances around the tiny Rope Trick space. "What have you been working on so far? What are your top priorities for the next three months?" 

"Headband, deriving Mage's Private Sanctum, deriving Permanency. Then I guess Stone Shape so I can build a tower and have Bastran over and talk him around about you. Well. 'talk'. After that petrification, as it's on the path to soul-trapping. I was thinking about spells for possession and necromancy, too - a ring that traps my soul and can be given to someone else, who I can then take over - or if I can do dangerous things while body-swapped with people - the hope being, obviously, that the gods won't bother killing me if it doesn't work."

Nod. "That seems sensible – I do also have some tentative plans drawn up to connect your soul-trapping artifact to the kind of spell I use, and at worst I could do it manually if and when I had your soul in hand, but I think our gods will not be able to interfere with your magic as effectively. , And, hmm - if you body-swap with me and my body is killed, would that interfere with my own immortality setup?" 

"I don't expect so but I would have to look a lot more closely at the spell once it existed. I was planning to body-swap with non-mage staff members hired for that purpose, mostly, it's not an advantage to me if they're a mage."

Nod. "I suppose you can communicate the risk and compensate them well for it, and that would - not be unfair - and definitely more fair than unexpectedly taking over someone's body without first negotiating a contract or paying them for it. - Also, that reminds me, I would at some point like you to start teaching me wizardry." 

"I made you a spellbook. Let's do it right now."

"I would like that!" 

Altarrin has the advantage of mage-sight, and of having spent months watching Carissa prepare Golarion spells with it, and having very astute intuitions for how magic behaves. He also brought one of the +2 Intelligence headbands, in case that turns out to make a significant difference with learning this (though it only helps a little with other types of research, he needs Wisdom just as badly for reasoning about the god work.) He's also very good at concentrating on a task. 

He has the disadvantage that his habits around handling magic are very much calibrated for Velgarth mage-work and using mage-gift directly, and he's not sure how to even go about manipulating magic without using his Gift. 

Carissa isn't experienced with teaching magic to adults except Keltham, who was coming at this from a very different angle, but the mage-sight should help a lot and cantrips aren't actually that hard. It takes kids a long time to pick them up because kids are inexperienced at manipulating magic.

Cantrips aren't that complicated! Altarrin spends a while not even really trying to prepare a spell, yet, just poking at how the magic behaves on the spellbook scaffold, getting a sense of how it moves and what he needs to do to get it to stabilize. 

When he actually focuses on trying to prepare Prestidigitation, about 45 minutes in, he gets it on the first try and his expression is nearly the happiest Carissa has ever seen. (The only moment that rivals it is when he was freed and saw her again in the north for the first time.) 

"Nice! Now, if you want, you can catch it when you cast it so you don't lose it - mostly only cantrips are stable enough for that, though I've heard of really gifted wizards figuring out how to do it with a first-circle spell -"

"Could I watch you do it once, to see how you handle it?" 

Yep, she can cast and catch Prestidigitation repeatedly. It's not that hard; once you've done it a hundred times you won't ever forget.

The tricky part for Altarrin is mostly in managing not to instinctively do it with his mage-gift. He doesn't quite time it right the first time, and has to prepare Prestidigitation again (which is, fortunately, not at all a strain for an Adept mage, he could prepare it dozens of times before he would even need to duck out of the Rope Trick and try to tap a node.)

He casts it again and, this time, catches it. Beams at Carissa. "- All right, now how do I - do things - with the spell -?" 

Prestidigitation can be used for all kinds of minor changes to the surface structure of things! You can make them colorful or hot or cold or coalesce extremely fragile objects out of the air. You can change what color a flame burns as, or make things taste salty, and of course people mostly use it to do laundry. 

That's such an odd assortment of things to be able to do with a single spell! Altarrin is happy to play around with it, but it might be easier if she has more theory behind what the magic is doing that can have all of those effects as part of a single kind of process and he doesn't have to go purely on trial and error. 

It moves things around a tiny bit. That includes moving bits of atoms around, such that they can temporarily imitate other atoms, which makes more sense if the behavior of atoms is a preexisting framework you have for thinking about chemistry. 

Velgarth - or, well, mostly Altarrin specifically - does have the concept of things being made of atoms, though not much more detail than that on their properties. Altarrin will see if it helps to keep the concept in mind while poking at the spell, but it's probably going to be mostly trial-and-error and following his intuitions that aren't necessarily designed for this kind of magic. 

It's still really really fun. He looks relaxed and happy and not miserable at all. 

As he should, because magic is great! Carissa will show him fancy Prestidigitation tricks and then make flavored drinks for both of them (with water from a nearby river; she hasn't risked any human-inhabited places.)

Altarrin does not trust random water from random rivers and will sterilize it for her, but then cheerfully share flavored drinks and try (without too much success, yet) to imitate Carissa's fancy tricks. He can already see how the sheer flexibility of Prestidigitation could end up being very useful for future mage-research. And he's happy for Carissa, that she gets to spend all of her time studying spells far more interesting than just this one, even if he can't - yet - join her. 

He told the Emperor he would be away for the rest of the afternoon and evening, and he intends to spend all of that time here, getting up to speed on Carissa's work and giving her what advice he has to offer and just, generally, being somewhere that doesn't constantly remind him of his past mistakes. 

Carissa is in a great mood. She's spending all her time doing magic research or catching Kelly up on all of the things that have happened. Kelly thinks Carissa is very cool - familiars generally do - and wants to fight all Carissa's enemies, which is a terrible idea since Kelly is just a hummingbird - "I do cast Mage Armor on her, and I'm thinking about a ring of evasion so she's basically impossible to hit -"

"I've been thinking about what kinds of ridiculous unnecessary shit I want in my wizard tower. I definitely want hot springs, and I might want a moat of lava -"

"I have Overland Flight up whenever I'm awake, now - I'm slightly worried my legs are going to atrophy -"

"Diamonds are so cheap on your planet -"

"I made Sleeves of Many Garments to go with the Greater Hat of Disguise - they're suuuuper easy, they're at the price point for 'rich women acquiring a family heirloom' rather than 'adventurers' magic items' - and I'm trying to use them to imitate all the dath ilan fabrics I ever saw - they were such astonishing fabrics, you can't imagine -"

"We should get a Telepathic Bond. I haven't invented the spell yet, of course, but once I do."

It's really good to see Carissa happy. 

"We should! That sounds even better than Mindspeech in some ways. And how expensive are diamonds in Golarion? I suppose needing them for spells would drive up demand, but you must also mine more of them, there are not actually very many useful applications for them here - some non-magical engineering work but it is generally easier just to use magic..." 

"Most mines are tapped out. You can go to the Elemental Plane of Earth and mine there but that's a lot of powerful peoples' time and spell slots supplying and defending a mine there. I do also suspect some god-imposed scarcity, Wishes can't be Their favorite thing ever."

"And there is no way to artificially create usable diamonds with your magic? ...I think it might be possible with ours, if you sufficiently overpowered one of the constructions spells for compressing materials, though it would be a huge power input - not something any single mage could do, and artifacts that channel power are very difficult. Maybe someday. We could certainly figure it out if the alternative were running out of diamonds entirely." 

...Altarrin would, under normal conditions, be tempted to spend the night, but Carissa doesn't have her fancy wizard's tower yet and there isn't exactly a huge quantity of room for both of them to sleep in a Rope Trick. He'll leave some of the immortality notes and some of the god notes for Carissa to look over when she feels like it, and Gate back before it's time for either of them to sleep. 

Carissa (and Kelly) work. On a new headband, and on plans for her wizard tower, and on Mage's Private Sanctum, which she gets working eventually after a few explosions that would definitely have killed her without her very good shields.