When Pilar gets back out, Ione is talking with a collared being that looks like a dwarf with brazen skin and hair of literal fire.  Whatever they had to say, they were apparently just finishing up, because Ione nods and pays over a small handful of platinum and then turns back to Pilar.

"Congratulations!  I'm guessing this is the first time in your life you've wanted something for yourself and then acted in order to get it?"

"Nah.  That's private, is all.  I do it, I just don't do it where you can see me."

"Lies."

"I have done that before on as many as several occasions in my life, all of which I can remember individually."

"Okay... we need to stop quipping at each other using our shiny Splendour headbands and go start the actual mission."

"We're looking for places that offer the service of selling 5-Wish sequences if you bring in 5 Wish diamonds, and then I go in and swear them to the extreme negotiation secrecy conditions, and then I go engage in mysterious secret negotiations, and then I come out again.  We need to find twelve places like that."

"We can buy basically anything we want along the way."

"Look... I can see where this is going."

"Can you?"

"Yeah.  You're waiting for me to ask why we're doing this, and then you tell me that I can't be told because I won't reliably react only in a way that benefits both Cayden Cailean and Asmodeus -"

"I don't, in fact, tell you that.  You are able to figure that out for yourself, without being told, and it is better that way."

"You are likewise perfectly able to figure out the other thing I'm not saying because it's better for you to see it yourself."

"That I kept complaining about how I never, at any point, volunteered to be part of any such compact, and how I never made a bargain like that.  So you're waiting for me to actually say of my own will that I'll be part of this thing, and only use the information to benefit Asmodeus in ways that don't harm Cayden Cailean."

"Mm-hm.  Up until this point you've never been knowingly faced with a serious choice like that, Pilar.  Only mysterious commands you didn't understand.  You've never had to knowingly look at a serious case where you could benefit Asmodeus a lot, but you needed to turn away, or only help Asmodeus a little, because that was the condition under which you were granted the information."

"Past that point, we're no longer comfortable just telling you that you need to predictably behave yourself, or we'll have retroactively not included you in the fun."

"I have to agree explicitly."

"No.  Worse."

"I have to ask."

"Yes."

"So you're actually doing that thing where you make the torture victim ask to be hurt more.  Who knew that Good did that too?"

"GROW THE FUCK UP, PILAR.  Use decision theory instead of just letting other agents with better decision theory use you.  Stop whining about being given chances to advance your own interests just because they're not simple and don't let you do whatever you feel like.  And also quit complaining if the other grownups here want you to behave like a grownup too, someone who pursues her own decision-theoretically-nonsimple interests instead of having to be pushed into that every time."

"What if I don't wanna, though?"

"You follow me around on this shopping trip and don't ask questions.  Maybe Mister Doomlord destroys Cheliax or something, because you couldn't properly help, who knows?  Mister Doomlord sure does seem like an ominous mysterious figure.  But what do you care about that, so long as you're comfortably not making your own decisions?"

"All right, shut up and let me think about this."

"Your will, mistress."

Pilar starts to snap at Ione not to do that, then stops with a feeling of odd disorientation as she realizes that... being called 'mistress' wasn't as wrong-feeling as it should've been, on Pilar's model of Pilar?

She follows Ione around the City of Brass instead.

Thinking.

She doesn't ask why Snack Service is being so quiet, in case it answers.  It's nice, to be alone in her head for a time.

Is that a ROD OF WONDER being advertised for sale?

It is!  Ione will buy it!  People mostly stopped making wild-magic items in Golarion after prophecy stopped working there.  But it's a fun thing to have around if you're a Nethysian, and interested in scaring the utter shit out of people afraid you might actually use it.

"Come on Pilar, don't just think!  Buy random expensive shit!  We're not just on any shopping trip, we're on an EPIC MULTIVERSAL SHOPPING TRIP such as whose like may NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN!"

"The fact that you consider this to be valid reasoning does not give me confidence in the rest of what you consider valid reasoning."