They probably could get Altarrin right now, is the thing, with the worse necklace and Carissa live-fire casting instead of making everything in advance so she can stay safely home while Arbas does the work.

They shouldn't do that. But not because it wouldn't probably work. It would probably work and is still a dumb risk to take.

You shouldn't be upset when your decisions have consequences that you priced in and decided were worth it. And it's not more sad when people you know die than when people you don't. Her mistakes here were - all far upstream, in places she's already identified them -

Can you please hurt me for a little while?

He can definitely oblige. 

(He's thought of some new creative uses of tweaked alchemy spells. There's a clever little one for imitating the effects of a weak acid bath, and if Carissa isn't reacting to his taste he can even dial up the power and make it a stronger acid bath. Again, it's going to hurt all out of proportion to the actual damage it leaves on Carissa's skin.) 

When he's done - and he stops mostly because he's tired, for a middling Master-potential mage all that casting adds up - he scoops Carissa gently into his arms. Rocks her. 

:You could stop caring, you know. If none of them mattered to you we could be a thousand miles away by tonight. Never worry about the stupid Empire again. ...But it's kinda cute, so I'm not going to try to make you: 

I swore to Rosha I wouldn't abandon the Empire if given the chance, when I was trying to give myself mental permission to make the Dispel item for you and also set her up so she could dispel my compulsions if she wanted to. I don't owe them more than they'd have had through the compulsions, and that's very far from - all of me - but I'm not going to serve the Empire less for not being magically bound to it, until it's had the chance to bind me again, which is a chance I don't want to let it have just yet. 

I'm not saying I don't have a caring-about-people problem, I will absolutely concede that I do, but the thing keeping me here is Law, not attachment. If they execute Altarrin this remains my stupid Empire to fix.

He shakes his head, his expression fondly exasperated. :They don't deserve you, sweetie. The Empire's a shithole. M'not going to stop you if you're aiming to be Empress alongside Altarrin, or whatever, but - don't get your hopes up. And I swear, if you make yourself miserable at it like Altarrin did, the idiot man, I really will set you on fire for as long as it takes to make you stop that: 

And then he kisses her. 

Mmmmmmokay yes that's good though it also seems important he see this bit of Carissa more clearly, if all the dath ilan didn't succeed in imparting it. The Empire is a shithole, and doesn't deserve her, and that's irrelevant. Past Carissa wanted Rosha to know - wanted herself to know, as she tried to push her compulsions to make the Dispel Magic item - that if something were to happen to her compulsions (hypothetically) (not hypothetically at all) she would remain as obedient to the Empire as they made her. Past Carissa was smarter, she can't reconstruct the whole chain of reasoning, but she suspects she thought that the odds of getting killed were substantially higher, if she was substantially more impaired in her work on dispelling compulsions, and that was more important than fighting for the possibility of dispelling them and getting to be free of the Empire. 

It's not a calculation where it features at any point that the Empire sucks, or that compulsions are really kind of awful. This commitment bought her some freedom when she needed it to stay alive, at the expense of some freedom now. She can't betray it because it's not to her advantage now, if you were going to be that kind of person then you'd know about yourself that you were that kind of person and it'd never have worked in the first place.

Honestly, being dath ilani sounds exhausting. Arbas does understand some of it - it was, roughly, the same sort of reason why he was loyal to Bastran, even under circumstances where instead not being loyal to Bastran would have been much more fun - but the difference is, he doesn't see what it would even mean to go on being loyal to a dead man. And he doesn't really see how it works, what it even means, to be loyal - not just compulsioned to serve, but genuinely loyal - to a...set of decrepit centuries-old institutions and conventions. The Empire isn't a person. Loyalty is for things that can give you something in return and the Empire isn't that kind of thing, even if it's made of people who are. 

(The convenient thing about Mindspeech is that he can convey all of this, not even quite bothering to put the vaguer parts into words, without actually pausing in kissing Carissa. She's very kissable.) 

It just means she isn't doing what the compulsions wouldn't've let her do. She agrees that the Law-instincts in humans, the feelings of honor and vengeance and duty, don't bind very readily to something like 'continue providing the Empire the level of reluctant coerced service you were providing it before' but it's not underspecified, just uncompelling.

Arbas feels like you can just…not do things…if they aren’t compelling? …To be fair Arbas probably could not have pushed his compulsions as far as Carissa did in order to make the Dispel Magic artifact, because there’s absolutely no way he could have credibly-to-himself committed to serving the Empire anyway, serving the Empire actually kind of sucks when it’s…in general…and not specifically for someone like Bastran. Most people suck but Bastran was okay. He’s really quite mad at the Emperor-pretender for that.

Carissa’s welcome to be Lawful, of course. Arbas sees the upsides. They’re just, you know, not very compelling to him

(And meanwhile he’s undressing Carissa, with surprising gentleness, and tangling his hands in her hair - does Carissa like having her hair pulled, he bets Carissa likes having her hair pulled -)

Carissa does like having her hair pulled. She is giggly and pliant and will lean in to whatever he feels like doing, not that she can really do anything else -

(mental check, is that true? she needs to stop underestimating how dangerous she is, that's a component of how they all ended up in this situation in the first place. it is aesthetically pleasing for her to possess no meaningful avenue to object, here, but that's entirely separate from whether she could actually take Arbas in a fight if she wanted to, and she obviously could if she got the first move, though that wouldn't be easy if he was mindreading her -)

Arbas is temporarily distracted from pulling Carissa’s hair because he’s instead laughing too hard to breathe.

:You’re delightful. I’d ask myself how Altarrin was lucky enough to find you but he didn’t, did he, you just landed in his lap - I struggle to imagine anyone in the multiverse being more his type - but he’s not here right now, is he, and I am:

Yeah it seems pretty conclusively the case that the powers that put people in new universes are interested in their sex lives, though it's a sufficiently underspecified class of hypotheses that she's mostly not using it to make many further predictions - like, it doesn't mean that those relationships will be a good idea, or not incredibly doomed, or anything like that -

- not the time. 

Oh, is that what I was doing wrong with Altarrin, not trying to ambush and subdue him? I don't think it would've worked. You, I could handle, unless you've pinned me down inside my head such that I'd find myself standing there with no idea what I'd been about to try. 

:Are you trying to make me jealous? Rude: The overtones are amused, though. :You’ll just have to get better at crafting, then. - And I hate losing but it’d hardly be any fun not to give you a chance:

Distraction is fair game, though. He’ll pull out the stone-etching spell, again, and leave his mark on her body, and be very obviously delighted with himself the entire time.

Well. that sounds like a challenge, so now Carissa has to attempt to Teleport out, even though she'll be terribly disappointed if she succeeds.

This is spectacularly entertaining and Arbas is not going to cheat with compulsions even though this would be so easy.

He’s totally reading her mind, though, and it takes more concentration - and longer uninterrupted concentration - to cast Golarion-style arcane spells than to toss off Velgarth mage-work. He can time his distractions very precisely, and he’s spent a lot of time in Carissa’s head while he hurts her, he has a much better sense now of how hard it is to actually seriously damage her — and how much pain she can take, and will sincerely try to exceed that.

Yeah, he can get her to lose the spell that way.

This clearly means she needs more practice spellcasting under pressure. 

:Clearly. How else are you ever going to manage to ambush and seduce Altarrin while I stand there laughing at him?:

Right now, though, he's sort of done with hurting her for the evening, and he wants to be gentle and sweet and eventually snuggle up sleepily with her head on his shoulder. 

:It'll be all right: he sends, petting her. :We'll get Altarrin out. They're not going to be stupid enough to have him killed, not when he's holding half of it together. It'd be hilarious to see it all fall apart, but - we'll do it by rescuing him. Just need you with a headband to figure out some new spells - Mavros has no idea what's about to hit him...: 

It might work out, she says, but can't bring herself to say that it will.

The next day, Arbas ups the frequency on his scrying checks. (Which means he's slightly less available to hurt Carissa when she's not focusing hard enough, but honestly she seems plenty motivated.) 

:If I'm worried about his safety I'll have you scry him: he tells Carissa. :M'not worried about that yet. He's - doing a good job on the Emperor-pretender's security - gonna be an enormous hassle, half of what we need to get past is the precautions he set up. Reckon we could do it now if we had to, both of us together, if you prepared the right spells, but if Altarrin keeps doing his job then we'll have long enough for a real plan. Figure out that antimagic field – I need it, I can't take Altarrin in a straight fight, not even if I'm cheating. Need him at least temporarily clearheaded so he can, I don't know, agree to take off all his stupid talismans, maybe take a nonmagical drug that'll knock him out long enough for me to untangle his mind without him fighting back...: 

Reconstructing spells is very slow and they often explode in your face if you failed at stabilizing them. Altarrin left me - a bunch of very powerful protective amulets - that'd mean I could safely experiment a lot faster, do you have them? They were with my other possessions.

:The ridiculous crate full? Yeah, it's there. And there's an experimental Work Room, here, it's got shielding on it that protects you and not just the people outside the room. Does that help?: 

Yes. Though I think I'm still going to need the headband first, I am not even thinking of a good place to start on rederiving Antimagic Field. It's not an extension of any other spell I know, wizards developed it off the cleric version...

Probably you should also make a plan that doesn't rely on it. I can always Baleful Polymorph Altarrin and you can pick his head apart before I turn him back.

:...That's the one that sometimes turns people insane? Uh, if that happens, do they definitely stop it when you dispel it? Because the last thing I want is an insane Altarrin: