"If they're probably not a mid-tier Void mage, put a Void collar on them with a tamper-explosive and use a reinforced cell to catch pure Physical Skills.  If you think they might be at least a mid-tier Void mage, put a way more expensive collar on them and have people watch them in the cell."

"So I can leave, but that'll definitely tip people off. 

All right. I'm going to prepare some more spells - I didn't do them all at once, wasn't sure what I'd need - and you should come up with my cover story, and then we can get out of here and get started. 

- I feel some urgency around this because it looks like the fire is actively growing, is that right?"

"It sure is.  If the System isn't - just deciding to fuck with us, now - you should have arrived here in time that you can stop it if you try.  Whether the Fire first consumes ninety percent of our remaining habitable landmass is a separate question."

"Right. Great."

Spellbook. She should have two more second-circle spells left, two more first-circle spells left, and one more third-circle, which is going to be Gaseous Form.

She feels pretty much as fresh as if she just woke up from her night's sleep, actually, like her previous round of spell preparation made no difference.

" - further question, do local spellcasters have a fixed amount of mana they can channel in a day, like, enough to cast a couple fly spells but not do it all day?"

"Some Skills have cooldowns, because the original unstructured activities were so complicated or fatiguing that reality learned that people can do those things, but not do them twice in a row.  Aside from that, living creatures have innate channeling capacities, measured in thaums per second, and affinity transformation capacities, also in thaums per second; dragons have innate mana battery organs, so they can store up breath weapon attacks; some very powerful dungeon monsters are created with a core, which initially contains dungeon mana, and can be taken off their bodies if you know how and then recharged and built into an expensive weapon."

"But most non-dungeon biologically-reproducing sapients don't have innate mana batteries, including humanoids.  We don't produce or store affinity mana, we channel mana and transform it."

"Right, sorry, carry on with inventing a backstory for me."

...can she hang SIX Detect Thoughts? ...no, because she's not actually skilled enough; she can't just pretend she's an eighth circle caster in terms of her low-level spell slots just because she has the channeling capacity, she doesn't know how to hang them all successfully without them interfering. But she can hang three and a Rope Trick and four Disguise Selfs and a Gaseous Form and a Fly and a Haste like she just woke up.

....and then cast the Detect Thoughts. Just to be safe.

Almys is trying to figure out what's the weirdest and quietest sort of person she can fit into a backstory, because her new liege has now given away that she has an innate mana battery that can be exhausted and needs to 'prepare spells' and Almys - should think about how to say 'THANK YOU FOR TRUSTING ME WITH THAT INCREDIBLY VALUABLE COMBAT INFORMATION, MY LIEGE' in a different way because the last way apparently did not take, and actually Almys is just sort of rehearsing this internal screaming for the twelfth time and not thinking of any different things to scream internally about it.  Her liege is not just incredibly concerning but, also, yes adorably innocent and naive, and that is going to get her killed, and then the world will end and Almys won't get to rule any countries as a nearly immortal goddess-queen for a few centuries at all, so her liege's backstory role needs to be somebody who's weird and quiet.

Monks are quiet.  There's no realistic way her liege passes as a monk.

Research mages are weird.  Research mages also talk a lot.

Who's WEIRD AND QUIET.  What kind of person.

She feels like she could ask this question to somebody who was good at riddles, and they'd answer immediately, and it would sound really obvious.  Almys is not in fact good at riddles.  She stabs things so hard they melt.  This is her primary life skill.

Carissa thinks this is an entirely unfair assessment. She has one ally on this planet at this time, she vetted them with mindreading, and having done so she's given them strategically important information because there is a continent on fire and it doesn't seem worth playing coy and therefore being confused for an additional month, much less slipping up in front of anyone she hasn't vetted because she didn't even know that was unusual. However, if she were to reveal that she's mindreading her vassal again in order to contest this totally unfair characterization, then she would be being stupid, so she just moves her hands through a bunch of nonsense that has nothing to do with spell-preparation while she listens to Almys think.

Okay, try a different angle on this.  Her liege is going to... be consuming some affinity mats, Almys is going to be renting crafting textbooks for her - if they're cheap enough, maybe Almys should just buy them, so that there isn't a record of rentals - and possibly at some point they'll be selling some fine but totally normal-looking weapons.  Almys might have to buy 'spellsilver' and come up with an account of that...

Librarians!  Librarians are weird and quiet!  Or... somebody studying the history of weapons who's a crafter themselves but mainly interested in history...

What if somebody asks her liege about history.

Could her liege just be mute.  No because there's such a thing as sign language and somebody might know that sign language.

'Librarian' is good for weird and quiet, and it doesn't get subjected to easy challenges about 'what does this book say' because librarians don't necessarily read the books they organize and protect... Almys thinks you don't have to read a lot to be a librarian, right, you just have to be in charge of a library...

Maybe Almys is overcomplicating this.

Weird crafter who doesn't talk to anybody except Almys!  And there's a reason she doesn't talk, but nobody can know it because it's private so fuck off!

...this sounds incredibly suspicious.  But maybe that's just because Almys knows the truth.  Like.  No spy would take an incredibly suspicious role that would prevent them from talking, right?  So smart people will realize that her liege is like obviously not a spy.

Oh god they're all going to die.

"Okay, done," says Carissa a while after she's done. "Is this language spoken everywhere in the world?"

"The Common Tongue?  I think so.  It's the language that's been so widely used, for so long, that practically any sapient race can learn it, even if they don't have the right mouth equipment."

" - weird. Okay. Do people around here have families - cousins, sisters, that sort of thing - or did some Summoned Hero take issue with that."

"Not yet.  We've still got our families for now."

"Good for you. What's my backstory."

"If your pride permits the disguise, my liege, I suggest - meaning no disrespect and you can read my thoughts about that later - that I am the crafter experimenting with weapons, because I can be rude and not talk about that while knowing how not to make that suspicious in any other ways.  I'll go male, which is helpful in any case for breaking an obvious trace to Almys because I've been female around here, but doesn't affect my legal registration at all; and then when not otherwise disguised you're my useless hanger-on woman who trades sexual effort for getting fed by me, who I think nobody will look very hard at, which is the sole and entire point of that suggestion and again you can read my mind about that later."

It's a plan that'd work in Cheliax. They're not in Cheliax but that's all Carissa has to judge by. "Saves us money on rooms," she says, and casts Disguise Self again, to make her outfit resemble the excessively stretchy excessively white fabric that's popular around here and to make her face, without being all that different, clearly not that of the same person. "Do travelers usually have any trouble eating local food, do you know?"

"Not if you're traveling in mostly-human territories, I think?  And, my liege, if your spellcasting ability burns a limited internal resource, should your baseline self not be one that you need not burn magic to look like?  That was part of my reasoning - that you could use temporary magical disguises, but just a normal physical disguise for the person you were most of the time."

"It turns out the resource is not especially limited, I'd sooner have my real face known to no one, and I was thinking it might make a good test case for whether, if I change my face enough, I can convince this strikingly pliable world of yours that I have shapechanging as an at-will spell-like ability.  If there are lots of people who can see through illusion, though, and find it notable I was cloaked in one, then it'd be better not to be."

"Now there's a fascinating question I've no idea how to test.  Maybe they can't detect it as anything distinguishable from background because you're using unaspected mana - if that's true, it's actually just something I'm guessing based on which questions you asked.  Or maybe they see you walking around with a disguise that's visibly based on unaspected mana with a completely unfamiliar structure.  I really can't guess, and can't think of any safe way of finding out without trusting a high-class mage... who would also be some of the least safe people to use your mindreading magic on, if we didn't already trust them."

"My liege - I suggest we use your disguises sparingly.  If you were already walking around with them, for a while, there may already be rumors, or even reports, about the person with the unaspected-mana disguise spell.  Or maybe just spell, they wouldn't be able to guess it's an illusion if it doesn't have Light in there."

She considers this for a moment, sighs, and lets the Disguise Self melt away. She's six inches shorter than she looked and substantially thinner; her hair is longer and brown instead of the locally popular bright colors. 

She's pretty, though. It'd stand out more in a world that hadn't been somewhat recently rearranged by the Sexy Hero. 

Okay hopefully her mind is not being read right now because her liege is, in fact, kinda hot... this thought is going to turn up sooner or later and hopefully Almys survives the subsequent embarrassment.

"Do you have colors of your service that I can and should wear, when I'm presenting as a man and a crafter?  Going to need some new clothes anyways, for that.  And hopefully nobody kills me while I'm not wearing Almys's armor, because I can't lightly afford new armor."

"I should get you lower-quality and... bluntly, trashier, clothing, to wear.  If your pride permits it, my liege.  Appearing as your true self, you look like an interesting person of worth, in a hard-to-identify foreign style, that many people might find worthy of trying to talk to."