"No, my lord. I prepared two each of Owl's Wisdom and Fox's Cunning, if you want them."

He's already looking around for his notes. Oh, good, there they are. 

"That was well thought out. If the two spells can be combined without side effects– without worse side effects than combining Owl's Wisdom with your headband - then, yes, I think it would be helpful." 

(Though he's going to grab some water to drink first.) 

"The only side effects are from, uh, thinking, my lord."

Aaaaaaand does he lower his magical defenses, as he did last night, when she reaches out her hand to him to cast Owl's Wisdom.

He does! Not all of them - only some of his external shield-talismans seem to respond to his intent, but it looks like his remaining magical shielding is mostly more like Protection From Energy - a defense against violent attacks (magical and mundane), but his mind is less defended. Since he's expecting her to try to affect it. 

Her face is no different than it was last night.

She is not, actually, sure this is the best plan. Just that it is likely enough to be so to be worth attempting, and that if it is to be attempted it should be attempted now, when she has not yet herself been made subject of the Emperor.

Dispel Magic.

He's waiting expectantly, not trying to resist.

(He doesn't trust her, not fully, but he knows that - it's not that he needs her help, it's just that the alternate paths where he can still win without her help are awful - and he wants more information, which he can only get by explaining his thoughts to her, and he can probably only do that if he's mentally-enhanced back to the level when he can read his messy notes and fully re-derive all of what he was thinking at the time -)

Dispel Magic does, in fact, take out all of his compulsions. They're not especially high-powered or robust, by Golarion standards.

Which would by itself be startling enough to provoke an immediate response, but Altarrin barely has a chance to notice, because Dispel Magic also hits his personal shield-talismans. It doesn't feel like an attack, exactly, but it doesn't not feel like an attack, and he can sort of sense that only the less-overpowered half of his talismans are actually going to succumb and be disabled but

In less than a second, on pure reflex, he's flung a paralysis-spell at Carissa and built a horizontal Gate-threshold under both of them.

At which point they both crash to the bare unfinished stone floor of an underground records cache, a little ways outside the current southeast border of the Empire. 

Hey no fair in principle something being well within the range of expected outcomes you calculated should make it not scary when it happens!!

Altarrin rolls away from her, scrambles up. 

"- Was that your doing or an outside attack." 

"Undid your compulsions, my lord. I didn't think it was likely it would have additional effects but I may have been wrong about the magic system interaction."

He...doesn't really relax, much, but he settles back on his heels and looks at her. 

"Right. I–" he doesn't actually need to ask why, "- it seems it also undoes the magic on some of my protective talismans, which is most of why I was - alarmed enough to Gate us a thousand miles away. This location is secure and hopefully nobody will react to the Gate-signature from my room - it is well-shielded and also I frequently Gate from there and the distance is not obvious from the origin-threshold." 

He's finding it slightly hard to catch his breath properly. 

"...I am guessing you did not, in fact, cast either of the mental-enhancement spells on me yet." 

"No my lord. I prepared them and can cast them but it seemed moderately likely that you were unable to think because of your compulsion-spell and that you'd be able to think more clearly without it and also that you couldn't indicate that and had to stop me if I asked."

Sigh. 

"...That was a correct decision-process, at least. I - was managing all right, but - for reasons you could not have possibly known, and I was in fact having some difficulty with the compulsions around loyalty to the Emperor and the Empire, as– not directly as a result of Owl's Wisdom, but because of some things I realized once I could - finish certain lines of thought that I had apparently been avoiding for centuries." 

Pause. 

"...Part of the context here, which you could not have known, is that I am approximately seven hundred years old, and was involved in founding the Empire. You probably encountered some of my past incarnations in the histories." 

"....so does your world in fact have a way for people to not die?" Because she would REALLY not have risked this otherwise.

(Altarrin wishes he had a way to read her thoughts, right now, because he's still definitely missing something.) 

"Yes. Not scalably, and imperfect - I lose memories between bodies, and I - 

- I want to answer all of the questions I am sure you have, because I think it may end up being incredibly important whether or not I have your - help - in what I am trying to do, but - I am not sure I started in the best order, I - was disoriented." 

- she blinks at him, discombobulated. This is not how she expected this to go! On several levels, at this point!

Well, no point in being small anymore. "I do have a lot of questions, but I'm not attached to an order of operations, here, you're the one who knows our constraints. If we're taking over the Empire I want to be Empress; if we're fleeing, I have some Dimension Doors and Rope Tricks but it, uh, looks like you have that covered. If we're acting like everything's normal I'm going to need some help with your mindreaders."

- he unweaves the paralysis-spell on her, which he should really have done immediately, and retrieves a couple of crates to sit on from the shelves lining every wall. And then smiles at her. It's completely different from his previous smiles, relaxed and natural and not like Abrogail at all. 

"That was fast! ...I was wondering how long it would take before I - had a chance to meet the woman who realized she was fighting on the wrong side and formed a plot to fight Asmodeus. By the way, I am curious - did you in fact have those realizations while using the Owl's Wisdom spell?" 

She is still too scared to particularly parse this as a good thing though it does definitely seem like objectively it ought to be one. 

" - yes? I don't - I don't think it was actually that I needed to be wiser, to see it, so much as that I needed a reason to try actually thinking, and being suddenly better at thinking is a reason to try doing it."

"And I am guessing that you were - unusually confident that your thoughts were going unobserved, and that once that crossed a certain line, the thoughts you were not supposed to have stopped hiding themselves? ...That is not a problem I generally have, so it is rather more embarrassing how many things I realized at once, yesterday. I - suppose your arrival gave me a reason to actually think. And I...suspect I would have made all of the same leaps eventually, with or without the spell or your headband, but it - the spell having a temporary duration gave me time pressure to do it as fast as possible." 

Sigh. 

"And so here we are." And she still looks tense, even if she's allowing herself to think anyway. "- This is one of my records caches. It is very thoroughly magically shielded and nobody but myself knows of its location, or existence. ...The gods frequently try to murder me. I think it will take Them at least a month to want to murder you as badly. - Honestly, I am not sure how much They can see you, given how much of your causal history is from entirely outside this world. We may be able to test that with the aid of a human Foreseer, they use the same fundamental mechanism." 

" - right. There's prophecy, here. I didn't even think about that - wow, it's like being mindread except worse..."

"...There is not in your world?" That changes a lot of things that he thought he already knew. Including, maybe, why Carissa thought she had any hope of taking on Asmodeus. 

"It broke. The gods had a war and they broke it. A hundred years ago. They still do things but it has to be - very overt -"

"Your gods had a war? That is - terrifying in itself..." He drags a hand over his face. "And I suppose we are going to be running into differences like that for quite a while. Meaning that I do not really know what our constraints are, yet, and ought take some steps to retain all of our options. Though it is plausible we should not return to the Empire at all," a brief flicker of a smile, "however incredible it would be to support your bid for Empress. Some of the things I realized last night were around - why the combination of my own goals for it and the gods' goals for it combined to make it - the way it is - and I suspect that makes it a poor base of operations. Also I cannot safely return unless I put back the compulsions, there are precautions around that and I know how good they are because I designed them. ...Still. I will pass on a message so that my disappearance does not arouse suspicion. If I could borrow your headband again for five minutes, it would help enormously in drafting that message to minimize suspicion or later fallout?"