"I really don't understand why he hates the job so much - you know, this is for me to take up with him once I have a tower he can visit. Don't promise things before then."

"I mean, I would not love his job either! Being Emperor involves far too much time spent carefully tracking political favors with deeply unlikeable courtiers, and far too little time to spare for interesting magic research. I would not hate it if I believed it were the best thing I could be doing for the world, but - I am not sure he does believe that, not really, not anymore. Which would explain the misery. It - is not very surprising that it would affect him, how obvious it is that I want to be somewhere else." 

He smiles crookedly at Carissa. "And, yes, good luck. Do you want me to fix the compulsions now?" 

"Yes, please."

Altarrin trusts her. Carissa is just definitely not going to bolt the instant her loyalty to the Empire is no longer magically enforced. He takes everything off first, before starting on the list of carefully approved, action-blocking but not otherwise mind-affecting compulsions. 

He's very good at it, in a different way than Arbas, who is - well, sort of entirely specialized in the 'mind-affecting' direction. Altarrin's compulsions feel clean and precise and light, somehow, there are barriers standing between the inside of Carissa's head and certain kinds of trying to affect the world, but they don't press down on her mind. 

Carissa believes these precautions to be reasonable, and anyway if she's flinchy it'll make Altarrin sad, so she remains calm and cheerful. Gives him a hug, when he's done. "You know how to reach me if you need anything. Other than the Emperor cheered up, I'm on that."

He hugs her back, for kind of a long time, and then digs in his pocket and offers her a velvet-wrapped crystal focus. "The newest version of the communication-spell talisman. It still will not let you initiate, but - you have a spell to send short messages, right, if you need me to contact you? Tell me if you need anything. Minions, spellsilver, books, more artifacts, Gate-transport to locations you have not seen before to Teleport to - anything that would help. And - I will be free in a week, if you are ready to host a guest by then." 

"I'd like that. You may have to put up with some construction dust."

"I will not hold it against you." 

And he's going to take Arbas and the mage-guards with him, when he Gates back, unless Carissa wants any of them to stay as minions. Bastran was hesitant about this, especially given how vague Carissa has been about her exact plans for the wizard tower, but it feels like it sends very much the wrong message to leave her under guard by the Emperor's people. 

She kind of likes the idea of being alone, actually. Well, she'll go crazy from loneliness, but there is a canonical way wizards who spend all their time doing wizard research fix that, and it's with a familiar, not with friends. She's planning to bind one this week. 

But there's some other stuff she needs to do first. 

There's real safety in being weak. But not very much of it. In this world, all weak people die, eventually. Bastran is not entirely not her adversary, here, but he doesn't want her weak. She'd thought he might, right up through their final conversation; she'd been watching him, for signs that at a plain declaration of what she meant to grow into he'd regret that he hadn't already ordered her killed, maybe reconsider it. 

And once you've decided that you're going to grow up to be a god then all remaining smallness is definitely just a bad habit; whatever risks you incur by ambition, you're incurring them already, and they will eat you if you're not one step ahead of them.

Her head is hers. It shouldn't feel scary to think. It does, but it shouldn't, because not thinking is more dangerous, and you should only be scared of the most dangerous of your available options and not of everything that has ever gone wrong for you in the past, which if she survives is going to quickly get to be a very long list.

And - if she were anyone else on this stupid planet, and knew what would happen if and only if Carissa and Altarrin could do it - she would not want Carissa to be small. She would pray very fervently for Carissa to be powerful. And, relatedly, for Carissa to know that she is powerful, to want to be powerful, to be floating at the rapidly-expanding surface of her ambitions rather than running from them -

- it doesn't feel like she's done it yet, whatever she was trying to do, convincing herself of this -

You can't really jump back and forth too much between being ambitious and not being ambitious. The habits of mind don't transfer, and -

- and in practice, it's a fact at this point about a small Carissa that she's a coiled spring, that she'll turn into something completely different as soon as you're not watching her, and that's threatening, that's dangerous, it's in some ways more frightening to a certain kind of person than just having a powerful Carissa in custody, because they can't extrapolate precisely who she'll be. If she's going to stop being small, that's it, she won't be small ever again, she might die of it but it is on the whole the route she's least likely to die of.

At some point, you just have to grow up, and surrender all the safety of not-being-worth-killing for the safety of not-being-possible-to-kill or not-being-possible-to-survive-without or not-being-possible-to-win-without, and really, that point passed a long, long time ago, only she didn't see it, because it doesn't serve Cheliax for people to have a clear picture of what makes them inconvenient to dispose of. Or maybe even that framing puts too much blame on Maillol and Abrogail; she did this to herself, in significant part, before she ever met them, and they never pretended they wouldn't be lying.

The best time to grow up would have been the moment Keltham landed on her. The best available time is now.

She's thinking a flying familiar, it remains her main strategic advantage over local wizards that she can fly and they to a first approximation can't. A bird or a bat. She won't advertise their existence and they'll have the ability to cast her spells for her; she should be able to arrange for them to hold on to a Dispel Magic to hit her with if anyone else hits her with anything, until she's arranged to do the same thing with Contingency. She asked Altarrin for the best uninhabitable swamps and will fly around for a while, pick a location, but she doesn't want to build it until she's mastered Permanency and Mage's Private Sanctum, so it can be unscryable from the minute the first stone lands on the foundation. In the meantime,  living out of Rope Tricks never hurt anyone, and hers can now be extended so they last nearly a full day -

(She does, in fact, want to get out of this place, with the low ceilings and dim light and no windows; it will be the setting of all her nightmares for a long time. She can come back once she's had a vacation.) 

She packs up. She Teleports. She wonders what the gods see; she suspects, whatever it is, it makes them nervous.

Altarrin works.

Bastran can have his service to the Empire. He hasn’t made any promises, not beyond “six months”, but in the meantime he’ll serve the Empire with as much dedication and care as he ever has.

….For a reasonable number of candlemarks per day. Twelve candlemarks is already working very long hours, for a man his age, though the Belt of Constitution makes it easier. He needs to set aside two candlemarks to sleep, and will generously allow himself another two for meals and exercise and the sort of reading that counts as leisure, for him. It’s more than he really needs, even, to make this sustainable.

The remaining eight candlemarks each day are his. 

He works on Carissa's immortality. Start from an assumption that Carissa will provide, from her end, some kind of artifact that will trap and store her soul. That makes his work a lot easier; no need to fiddle with building impossible structures in the Void, he just needs a way to stick Carissa's soul in a new body. Ideally not a body that already belongs to someone else, but pending Carissa reaching 8th circle, none of the other options are great either. Sticking her in a magic-altered animal body is preferable to gluing her to an artifact or doing the combined-artifact-and-fetus plan, but it's also a much higher setup cost and at some point he'll need to collaborate with a Healer on it. For now he'll track down old records, obtain some rats for experimentation, start working on re-learning those techniques. 

And he works on defining the problem of how to create a god. 

It's definitely possible. He's not sure it would even be that hard if the power input were solved and if one didn't care too much about the exact final shape of the god at the end of it. Inconveniently, he does care very much about that. 

Golarion solved it. Maybe not perfectly, Carissa knew rather little about the exact mechanism of the Starstone and Altarrin is incredibly unclear on what Irori did, but - well enough, it sounds like Aroden the immortal human and Aroden the god had recognizably similar goals. 

(He has a lot of notes, from Arbas, on Carissa's rather confused early reasoning about truth-preserving minds - on her speculation that dath ilan teaches the sort of process that Irori followed in order to become a god. He's not sure how useful that direction is, yet.) 

Fundamentally, the difficulty is that god-minds (especially Velgarth gods, swimming in Foresight with, he suspects, very limited sensory modalities to perceive reality on the level that mortals do) need to be very, very differently shaped from mortal minds. And the pieces of a mind are all interconnected, and most human minds don't have - stable invariant centers. By default, he suspects, if one part shifts then everything connected to it will shift along with it, not entirely predictably, and that includes the parts where values, goals, priorities are kept. 

There's the thing he does, but it's hardly mathematically rigorous. It works, or seems to, but it's been tested only in a narrow range of use cases – he can transplant himself to a different human mind with different former innate traits, but he's never tried his method on a mind even as inhuman as say, a gryphon's. And it relies heavily on the fact that his implicit procedural memory and mental habits largely come with him, even if he retains only a few dozen explicit memories of events. The content of his core memories isn't nearly enough to specify him or his values, just - to tie together the other fragments, to reassemble them into the right shape around the core driving force of a promise he made to the world seven hundred years ago. 

It does feel, subjectively, like that is a clearly definable core – and probably to Carissa as well, he just can't introspect on that one directly. The challenge is in actually defining it, in a way that isn't just robust to massive shifts around it, but is provably so. Because - once you start the process of turning a mind into a god, it's not easily reversible. If you get something subtly wrong, one, it might not be possible for a non-uplifted human mind to fully check it, since that require understanding something more intelligent than they are. And, two, even if you knew exactly what had gone wrong, you would now be in the position of trying to control an entity that was already much more powerful than you, and wouldn't necessarily want to be changed into something else... 

Carissa thought that dath ilan taught reasoning methods that...would apply, at least to an individual trying to shape their own mind in ways such that the core of them could if necessary survive major transformations around it. It's - in a way a similar problem as how to hold the important parts of oneself constant through the smaller mental transformations of various cognition-enhancing spells. While, of course, not locking in the wrong aspects of one's thinking – it seems important that enhanced-Altarrin was able to recognize that the Empire had been a mistake, and that wasn't a change in his highest-level goals, only an update to his strategy. It...also seems important that Carissa, with her thoughts unobserved and an Owl's Wisdom, was able to recognize that Asmodeus was opposed to her true values. Who knows, maybe both of them are still wrong about things just as big as that, things that want a god they're planning to build or become to be able to notice...

It's dizzyingly hard to think about. Altarrin isn't sure he's ever faced an intellectual challenge that was so far outside his current skills. He very badly wants Carissa's +6 headband– actually, he wants that and Owl's Wisdom, so he can hold enough in his head at once to reason about this non-sloppily and catch himself when he's being sloppy anyway. 

Well. Carissa said she needed a year or two to figure out how to make a headband with both. This is going to be a project of decades. (He suspects it would be centuries, if he were on his own.) He'll make what progress he can on at least sketching out what problems need to be solved, and wait. 

A week later he contacts Carissa through the communication-spell artifact to ask about meeting her. 

She's working out of a Rope Trick in the sky; it's what feels safest, and when she wants a break from crafting she can go fly around. Altarrin, of course, can presumably Gate right to her with the specialized items he's made her. 

She informs him he can drop by whenever is convenient.

He can, indeed, Gate straight to her. (The only other person who's seen the specialized artifacts up close enough to do it is Arbas, and he almost certainly doesn't have the trick down for Gating to pocket dimensions.)

He's brought a large satchel of notes, but doesn't open it right away; he sets it down and hugs her. 

She has, now that she only has to change Rope Tricks once a day, invested in a desk and chair and a pot with a flower in it. She also has Kelly, a hummingbird who is circling the air below the Rope Trick. She hugs him. "How are you?"

"As well as I can expect! ...I have notes on the immortality setup. And on the problem of making a god that has the priorities we want – which I think is mostly the same problem as how to transform a human into a god without irreversibly altering their values and priorities. It is a very frustrating problem that I am not really smart enough to solve, yet, but - I think I could do it eventually even on my own. With a headband that included +6 to both Cunning and Wisdom, if you still think you could work that out eventually, it might even take years or decades rather than centuries."  

"I can do that in a few years, I'm sure. And if I get to ninth circle I can directly make us smarter, that'll be helpful too. Once I have re-seduced the Emperor I'm going to ask if I can find the smartest peasant children in the Empire and elsewhere and recruit them as apprentices, so in a decade we'll also have some help, assuming I'm better at teaching ilanism when I don't have to worry the kids will realize they should fight Asmodeus."

"I imagine you would be. And that it will help that you do not need to fear for your own safety if your superiors decide you are disloyal to Cheliax." 

Sigh. "We will need to be careful about their safety. We have the resources to do that, I think, and it is worth doing, but – in the past I tried having apprentices, not just - cultivating someone for a future leadership role in the Empire, but teaching them how I think and prioritize. And usually it was not good for their lifespan. Presumably it made them look frightening to the gods." 

"Oh, good to know. - maybe I can mostly keep them in the far north, once I have demiplanes and can make it more habitable. And see how long Kelly lives, that's a decent proxy."

"Kelly?" 

"I have a familiar! Kelly, come here."

The hummingbird flits on in. She is barely an inch long, and moves too fast to see. Carissa smiles warmly at her. "To be clear, I am against Kelly dying, and have tried pretty hard to avoid it, but if she does die I'll have a lot more information about how hard the gods are working."

Altarrin smiles delightedly at the tiny hummingbird. "How beautiful! ...Does anything particularly bad happen to a wizard whose familiar dies?"