Carissa waits invisible and nondetectable.

Three minutes. 

Four. 

Five. 

...Six minutes. 

Seven minutes - 

- and a thresholdless Gate appears from nowhere in the bedroom. 

It's not Arbas who steps through. 

Teleport.

The mage - an unfamiliar man, of the standard Eastern Empire ethnicity, with the white hair of an Adept making heavy use of nodes framing a face that looks late-thirties-ish - flings up his hand.

The Teleport....doesn't work. It doesn't feel like a compulsion, but something jars against her magic, and the spell folds up and fails to cast. 

- fine. Can’t cast spells where he can see - 

- she runs. 

The mage is looking around confusedly, clearly unable to detect her, but it's going to be pretty obvious if she opens the door, which is currently shut. 

And she can’t cast spells in his vicinity without his noticing and blocking them, and once she opens the door he’ll know where she is and can toss off spells -

Can she get out of his field of view -

She could try slipping under the bed? Velgarth mage-sight isn't entirely blocked by solid surfaces alone and Arbas never specifically mentioned if his bed had wards on it, but a lot of Altarrin's furniture was ambiently magical; it might be enough to at least attenuate the signature of any spell she casts. 

Yeah okay. Very carefully, so as to not break her invisibility - she’ll flatten herself on the floor and try to cast Gaseous Form under the bed.

She can hear the mage's feet scuff the floor as he spins around, looking for the source of something that he must have sensed, but apparently he hasn't yet pinpointed it closely enough to fling spells at her. 

And now she can run.

The mage - maybe just on principle since Carissa isn't visible anywhere in the room - blasts the door open ten seconds after she slips under it. 

He glances around, then raises his hands and fills the hallway with what looks like dense fog (except for a pocket around his head.) Does this give any hints at Gaseous Carissa's location 

Well how is he going to see through the dense fog to see where it ripples, exactly? She’s in any event fleeing for the observatory as fast as she can.

Apparently he can sense something - maybe it's magical fog and she's disturbing it and he can pick up on that? - apparently not perfectly, but enough to guess at the direction she's headed, and fling up an airtight mage-barrier over the stairwell she was about to flee up. 

She is probably going to need to kill him but there’s one thing to try first, which is to un-enslave him.

Dispel Magic.

The spell casts fine, this time. 

It...doesn't appear to have any effect on the mage, who doesn't even appear startled. Maybe they've figured out how to design shields to block it. 

-

-

-

-

And at this point you just have to try to kill him.

Haste. Greater Invisibility. Cat’s Grace. Bull’s Strength. 

And she will just try driving a sword through his stupid face. It probably won’t work but other things aren’t working either, it’s not something they have seen her try before, and - and this might be important if they have Arbas - it’s not something he has seen her do.

He's got a really good shield-talisman. And Carissa is perhaps not incredibly practiced at wielding swords. And the hallway still contains some fading whorls of probably-magical-mist, which might be how he senses her coming in time to at least start dodging. Whatever the exact cause of failure here, the sword strikes and glances off and the man responds by flinging up another barrier - hemispherical all around him - and then blindly throwing some kind of force-net in Carissa's direction. 

- apparently some of the blow got through. There's blood trickling down his cheek, now, and his expression is no longer entirely calm. 

And Carissa is not incredibly good with swords but she is strong and she is fast and can jump around the force net to strike again - these people are so fragile, it takes so little to kill then in the end -

The barrier catches her next strike - she's very strong, though, and can feel it crumple a little, and the next blow shatters it, but in an unpredictable way that makes her miss the mage entirely in that swing. The next try catches his shoulder, and at least some of it gets through his personal shields. He's bleeding more now, but also flinging raw force at her, enough to knock her back a pace and buy himself a second for another shield and then - does a levinbolt at full power at least distract her -? 

Carissa, too, is very well shielded with all Altarrin’s fancy artifacts except the ones Arbas needed. He can hit her with levinbolts until he dies as far as she cares -

-

He tries another shield - a few more fruitless defensive spells, a paralysis-spell that also fails against her fancy artifact - 

- looks around frantically, and then his eyes turn upward and he flings a blast of raw force at the ceiling, where apparently a couple of the stone blocks, each nearly two meters across and long and half a meter thick, are loose enough to come crashing down on top of Carissa. They're not going to kill her, she's spectacularly well-shielded, but they're definitely going to hurt, and be awkward to free herself from even with Bull's Strength. 

The mage flings himself away from her with a blast of force. Which sends him flying into the opposite wall, but he's at least momentarily out of sword-range. 

Gaseous Form again, then.