"Of course." She takes it off without hesitation, this time. 

He puts it on, heads to a shelf to retrieve writing materials, and paces for five minutes while he thinks about what to say. Retain option value... That doesn't just mean giving himself an unsuspicious route to return, though, it also means setting it up so that if he does decide not to return, he can still minimize the harm to his allies - and, more generally, anyone currently in a position of power in the Empire who is competent and pursuing reasonable goals.

So he needs to lay the groundwork for a story that would explain his mysterious disappearance - probably 'assassination' is less disruptive, more the kind of thing that just happens sometimes, than 'defection'... 

"I am going to tell them that I took you with me to investigate a situation in the northwest of the Empire," he says to Carissa. "There is in fact a situation there, related to another country under the direct protection of a god - my people know I have been tracking it, and my enemies, who have misleading information about you, will make usefully different inferences about why I took you. I think the best option for long-term stability is just to avoid Iftel entirely, which I think I can angle for both in the case where we return in a day or two, and where we work from elsewhere and I plant an explanation for my disappearance that avoids fallout for my allies. ...You will probably not need to know exactly what message I am sending but I am following a general strategy of telling you my reasoning." 

He gives her back the headband; he has the message-draft now, and it might be noticeable even over the communication-spell if he's inexplicably much smarter. 

"I'm assuming I have wildly too little context to be useful on your navigating the Empire. ...how do you defy the gods at all if there's prophecy? Can't they just see it coming and squish you?"

He sends off the message via communication-spell - to one of his mages who he knows doesn't have the skill to track its bearing or distance, both of which are wrong - before returning to his crate and answering Carissa's question. 

"Well, I think it is debatable to what extent I have successfully defied the gods at all, I suspect the answer is 'less than I had hoped'. But - They do have limited visibility, and perhaps limited attention with which to process what They do see. That is one of the pieces I put together once I had the headband last night, actually; I think that mortal actions which create large and rapid changes in the world also blur Their Foresight. Which explains some of why They do not approve of me - and, I believe, why the Empire ended up the way it is. I could make it wealthy, but only at the cost of freedom, so that it is still predictable to Them. ...The other half is that there was a Cataclysm seven hundred years ago that did nearly destroy the world, and was arguably my fault. The gods did not see it coming in time to prevent it. They - are probably overcorrecting now." 

He's finding this slightly hard and painful to talk about, for reasons that would probably be obvious if he had an Owl's Wisdom right now. 

Carissa's reaction is not exactly making this easier! 

"I did not mean to cause it, I did not myself have the information I would have needed to predict it, I am certain that neither did the mage who used the weapon responsible against me - he was the most skilled mage in the world, and my teacher, then our countries ended up at war - he would not have done it if he had any inkling of the collateral damage it would cause. Obviously our good intentions were...not enough...but I was very young and - in a hurry - and I have learned better. And the current state of the world is not good enough! People are still dying and the gods are not going to allow me to build an Empire advanced enough to cure death with magic or technology!" 

"I– do you have questions." 

"...lots of them. ...how are you immortal."

By means which he hates, along with just about everything about the current situation and his place in it. 

"I set up three or four contingencies in my first lifetime. At least one of the others should have worked - I studied the magical theory in more depth later - except that the Cataclysm ripped apart nearly all magical artifacts on the planet and a number of extraplanar ones. The mechanism that survived...involves pulling my spirit to a hidden sanctuary in the Void, one of our other planes, when my body dies. It is linked to the bodies of all descendants of my first body - I was thorough about having descendants - and there is a spell that lets my spirit jump to one of them. Usually evicting the resident soul in the process. I - did try sharing, early on - but it often caused problems." 

" - wow, okay. The other mechanisms don't require that?"

"No."

(Though the ones involving artifacts in the material plane are generally going to be more vulnerable to direct god-interference. And getting one of them set up for her is going to be arduous and risky, he thinks he can pull it off if he's willing to burn enough of his resources on it - and he's already almost certain it would be worth it - if it's true that the gods can't yet see her clearly, they should try to do it fast, but they need to find a way to test that safety first -)

"Does prophecy work in such a fashion that we can, say, start a project and commit not to have any effects outside the project until the gods interfere with it, will that make it not look dangerous to them, can they see us if we condition on prophecy ourselves, how do we test if I'm a visibility field for them..."

"...The second one is easier to answer, because we can do it empirically. Humans can have innate Gifts of Foresight - in addition to receiving visions that I think must be directly god-mediated, in the absence of the Gift - and according to my study of magic, they have to be accessing the same underlying mechanism of reality. Inconveniently there are two types, short- and long-range, and short-range is the one that can more reliably be used on demand – but will also be less comparable to how gods tap into the underlying Foresight-mechanism, so less comparable. We should try both. Alternately, with enough of your world's mental enhancement, I might be able to derive a more solid answer just from the theory I already know; it all fits together, I am just - not clever enough or skilled enough at spatial visualization to see how. My intuition says that you should not be very visible to them yet, and that over time your blind spot will - spread out among other things you interact with, as noise, while you become more visible - but that is really only a guess. 

"...The first question is harder because I do not have any uncontaminated data on it. It did not help when I tried something similar. It could be that the gods have already decided to oppose any project I start, but it also could be that - mortal humans are not the kind of entity that can make the right kind of legible precommitment." 

"My ex would say, maybe they can't if they're not ilani."

"....Say more about that?" 

Damn it, now she has to talk about this and she has to be fair and reasonable or she will die.

"He would think that mortals out of dath ilan, and maybe those who learned it, know how to use the decision theory gods use, and would be the right shape that their commitments would be visible in prophecy. ....I am, to be clear, unsure if this is right. I am worried that there were unspoken premises to a lot of the dath ilani stuff I learned. But it is true that they're much much better at Law than almost anyone in Golarion."

Well, he was right to be intrigued, that does in fact seem incredibly relevant to the plan he came up with in two minutes last night - and, maybe, hopefully, relevant to finding better alternatives. 

He wants dath ilan's books and it's intensely frustrating that not only can he not have that, even Carissa never saw them, they were filtered through a single random citizen of that world - a young one, it sounded like - and it's so important, it might be the single most important thing he can learn from Carissa, if he - if they - are going to succeed at fixing Velgarth. 

"How much of their 'decision theory' did you have time to learn in three months? I think - even if it is wrong, or has assumptions baked in that do not hold elsewhere, if we enhance ourselves enough and try to make sense of it together we can probably notice that, and pull out only the parts that we can still use -" 

(There's a quiet niggling sense in the back of his mind that this is a missing piece, that it makes sense of everything else he's heard about dath ilan, the parts that didn't quite fit together before. Unfortunately, without the Wisdom-enhancement, he's not succeeding at tracing it down.) 

"I know some things that might be a candidate for - what it takes to precommit effectively in foresight. I'm not, in fact, the right kind of agent, right now, I'd totally break my word to prevent my certain death, but with Foresight that's obviously an error and I think when I reflect on it for a while it'll go away -

- the key thing is that you're not just choosing to take actions, right, you're choosing to be a rule that produces outputs from inputs in all possible worlds, and something like a god will be the same rule in every world, whereas mortals will do all kinds of different shit depending if they just ate snack or if they're angry or if they're embarrassed..."

"Interesting! That sounds similar to the kind of reasoning I was already using, to maintain coherency between my different lives - I lose the majority of my explicit memories but I retain procedural memory much better, so the decision I can actually control even for my future incarnations is - what shape of person to be, what process I am running to make the day-to-day decisions and plans. I have books and personal notes on this but they are not here and I would rather rest longer before another long-distance Gate." 

Altarrin looks intent and engaged and fully present in the room, maybe more than he has at any previous point. 

"I am curious how dath ilan teaches people to think this way? I - did not get the sense that Keltham was extraordinary, for their world, and my own experience is that even very extraordinary people have difficulty when I try to convey it." 

"Keltham's - not special in that way, no. They teach it to all their children, it's one of their highest priorities as a civilization I think, sorting all the children into the exact right peer groups to go through the lectures together. He lectured us, and we - needed to learn it to keep deceiving him, so we did."

"And did it work? Including for others apart from yourself? ...I think I am starting to see why these may have been circumstances where you were more 'heretical or difficult to control'. It - seems somehow unlikely that the usual forms of propaganda and known safe beliefs would...work, on someone who grew up in dath ilan. I suppose I am also impressed that you managed it for a whole three months with Keltham." 

"Different people had different problems. I think I am the only one who had the specific problems I did." Maybe Peranza too. "But in general the project had to tolerate more heresy than most projects, yes."

(Altarrin is not a Thoughtsenser and so has no way of knowing her thoughts on Peranza, though he would certainly be curious if he did.) 

He nods. "And I imagine it was worthwhile for Cheliax to take that risk - including the risk of exactly what happened, where you had some realizations and made plans to leave - because Keltham's knowledge was so valuable in expectation -" 

Pause. 

"- though I am also wondering about what this would mean for - not propaganda exactly, but social control more broadly - in dath ilan. From your description, it seemed as though they are doing quite well on - some kind of top-down social control. Despite their teaching all of their young schoolchildren the mental skills that I predict would result in everyone questioning the authorities and forming their own understanding, even if it was inconvenient for society -?" 

(The niggling feeling that he's missing something obvious is back, stronger than before - it feels like this piece, what he's trying to grasp for right now, is connected to another equally critical piece, and if he could see how they fit together then dath ilan would make sense. He's still not quite seeing it, yet, not without a Wisdom-boost, but the confusion is starting to make itself louder in the back of his mind.) 

"Yeah, it was weird. They taught them all to question society but they all ended up at - the same answers? Keltham would say that if you have lots of people question society and they're reasonably smart they'll still all agree that 2 + 2 = 4, which makes some sense, but - 

- but I think anyone out of dath ilan would probably have tried to destroy Golarion, and it's not just because they're right, it's a value - set of priorities - thought-trap - I vary in how charitable I am about it - that dath ilan gave all of them that normal people don't have."

"I mean, 'normal' is not a single coherent thing, right, dath ilan is hardly the first society to shape the values and priorities of its citizens." And for now he's not focusing on how the dath ilani values and priorities, revealed through Keltham, look according to his own values. Understand it first. 

"Just - from where I am standing, it looks as though they are doing it deliberately. With far more success than I would have expected, but - I think 'how' is not the most important question - there must be something they are aiming for, and I do not see the why...?"  

He's MISSING SOMETHING his mind is raising an alarm it's right in front of him he can almost see the shape of it but he still can't, quite, make it come clear. 

"- actually, would you be willing to cast your Owl's Wisdom spell for me again? I think– I feel very close to making sense of what they are doing, and - I might also request your headband for Cunning but I suspect Wisdom is most of what I need to see it." 

"We figured that it was an Evil conspiracy but I realize that's not a why."

Owl's Wisdom. For real this time.