"Goodnight then."

She spends an hour practicing channeling, and then drifts, Gaseous, out the window again. Finds an alley, becomes again corporeal, puts up a Disguise Self and a Detect Thoughts. 

She wants to find the place where they execute the children, if there's such a place. She isn't sure why. She isn't Good, and it's none of her business. But if she does find any she could mindread the children, and learn whether it's disrespecting them or not to kill them instead of enslaving them.

...Midvale does not visibly have a child-executing office that does enough business to run overnight.

It is in fact usually a somber affair where some of the child's surviving relatives who don't care enough to take the child in - or the village chief if nobody like that exists, or in a town like this a town official - will talk to the child about that, give them standard next-life advice for children, and then send them on hopefully to meet their parent or parents.

...not surprising, in hindsight. The child-executing policy does explain why there are notably few beggars on the streets.

She'll wander for a while, disguised, thinking, trying to see if the place makes any more sense if she wanders it with a bit more context.

She'll run across this graffiti while looking around.

Asmodeus, if you're here, your loyal servant awaits instruction. 

But she doesn't think it with particular conviction. This place is - awful in all the ways you'd expect a place without Asmodeus to be awful. There's no way He's dead, but it's not hard to believe He's gone from here.

Did Asmodeus light the fire?

It seems possible.

And if it's so, she should let it burn. This world doesn't serve Him, and He's entitled - right? It's just - killing children because they haven't got any guardians anymore. 

Carissa flies invisibly back to the inn and goes back to practicing channeling.

She'll definitely be channeling more of whatever affinity she practices, by the time dawn comes around, but it'll also feel like the gains might be coming a little more slowly over time.

Even Summoned Heroes don't make Tier-2 without trying hard on an object-level problem that they really care about, as well as honing their skills on practice problems.

Then eventually she'll sleep, irritated about being bad at magic.

He'll wake with her still asleep, then.  He has morning wood and is feeling horny and both of these facts are irritating.  He doesn't like having sex as a man, the orgasms aren't as good, and also he's not really all that good at sex as a man relative to what others seem to expect of him and he hates that feeling.  Hopefully there's no reason he can't go back to female in whatever town they hit up next.

He'll head out to find breakfast for himself, unsure of when the Summoned Hero might wake, since he doesn't know when she went to sleep.

(The Summoned Hero is presently in too much danger to want sex that doesn't make her safer, for example by appeasing someone very dangerous or securing obviously valuable resources. This is actually her default state and she may not be aware there are other kinds of wanting sex.)

She wakes not actually all that long after he's departed; she's tiring herself out mentally but not physically. Checks if she has Tier-2, which of course she doesn't yet. Prepares spells.

She's probably defs like fourth-circle by now, if her spellbook has any fourth-circle spells.

It doesn't. She's thinking of maybe rederiving the principles behind Still Spell and Silent Spell techniques, both of which require you to use a spell slot of a higher circle. A substantial cost, ordinarily, but much less of one when you have spells as often as you can hang them. 

She'll work on that, this morning, because it's less frustrating than casting the simple local-magic spells over and over and not getting her channeling capacity measurably higher. 

This universe has not been thoroughly familiarized with the principles she's trying to rederive, and it's not weapons-crafting, what she's trying to do.  She'll make as much progress as could be expected of somebody like herself with enormous magical potential, but not any more than that.

That's fine. She doesn't actually get irritated with herself for progressing at an acceptable pace at things for which there's a known accessible pace, just for not picking up the local magic system fast enough to put this planet out if Asmodeus doesn't want it to be on fire.

He returns, not knocking in case she's sleeping and shouldn't be woken; but opening the door slowly enough that if she's awake and doing anything he shouldn't see, she could potentially object about that.

She's in character, in case it's not him or he's not alone. "Kramsi?"

"Groya?"  He'll open the door faster, then, in case she's not alone.

Alone. Not injured this time, either. One she sees him alone she rises off the bed and starts hovering; Fly lasts longer now and she's been endeavoring to have it up continuously. 

Serves as a good-enough signal that the "Kramsi" signal wasn't meant to indicate to him to keep up a charade that goes past this point.

"Didn't know you'd be awake by now.  Should I get breakfast for you?"