Okay yeah sure whatever but the parts of a plain normal headband of vast intelligence would be easier for her to make once she's fought through a dungeon wearing one of her own devisement, or she could more easily incorporate that pattern into something larger; does the Unique Skill object to that?

Minds, memories, workings; these things already grow stronger with practice.  Nothing more than this need be said.

What if she just tries to make a +4 headband. That's not even hard, if you set aside that she's not actually a wondrous item crafter; she can see the Cunning spell right in front of her and just needs the spellform stable.

She has already seen the form of this item, has she not?  It is something an ordinary fourth-circle could make, with sufficient time and resources?  She wears a lesser +2 headband even now?  Then for her to fail would be sad.

Unless she's trying to go about her work way too quickly.  The Unique Skill permits you to hammer a nail through wood with one blow, if you are able to do that precisely every single time, and otherwise perhaps you could stand to nail it in with quicker taps than before.

Frankly the world of Kekaro has not seen anybody try to pull off what Carissa Sevar is trying to do right now, and her Skills or whatever are not in a form that Kekaro finds particularly legible --

Maybe call it a DC 20 Spellcraft roll, with a net -5 penalty, after taking into account +20 from the Unique Skill and -25 from Carissa Sevar trying to do this at a speed that archmages would consider insane?

It fails, but she thinks she sees why. What if she just corrects - no?  - okay, what about - no?  - okay, what about -

There.

If she wasted spellsilver like that in any other context she'd be tortured to death very slowly but -

- she doesn't, actually, even as she puts her new improved headband on her head, think that she made a mistake. She is not limited in spellsilver, and she is limited in time. 

And she hasn't been being strategic enough, has she?

"What's the fastest a Summoned Hero was able to tackle their problem?" she says aloud a second after putting on the new headband. "How large is this planet and how long ago was the fire spotted? Does it cross the oceans? Are people being evacuated and where to?"

Possibly he does want himself some of that, if it does what he thinks it does and what his liege promised him it would do.

"I thiiiiiiiink there might have been a case that was like four months, but only because the Summoned Hero was a crazy person who lived in a dungeon until he got the job done.  I don't recommend it because you might die."

"8,000 miles diameter.  It was spotted five years and three months ago, and from its width and rate of growth it's thought to have started almost immediately before being spotted.  It crosses oceans.  Sufficiently rich people can get evacuated to continents further north, and other people have tried to flee on foot, hoping the Summoned Hero turns up before then, before they get burned to death on the edge of their continent once all the ships are gone.  There is a continent being consumed even now; I think it's projected to last another year."

"Please don't rush.  Maybe you or another Hero can put the land masses back afterwards and I think it's very bad if you go too fast and die.  We've got some other continents left."

"Can I have your old headband?"

"Yes." She hands it to him.

"...huh."

"Why hasn't the Fire boiled all the ocean water and burned up our atmosphere?  Also I wonder if I could have always thought of that if I'd ever tried to think before.  This is great, can I have whatever more powerful version you made for yourself when you get a chance?"

Oh good, a sensible minion. "Yes, let me see if I can do it again now that I figured out the spell configuration -" Can she? That would be utterly unfathomably ridiculous, of course, but - can she?

What she has done once, she remembers in form.  But no two pieces of metal are perfectly alike and she must each time exercise thought and skill, and the art of striking a magical hammerblow with perfect precision is not yet something she has mastered.

If she goes too fast, she will fail.

But how fast is too fast?  She cannot find her limits without pushing herself.  If you cannot remember a recent time that you have failed, you have been playing underambitiously and under your level.

Roll for it, DC 20 Spellcraft check.  +20 for Unique Skill, and we'll say the penalty has gone down to -20 now that you know what you're even trying to make.

Yep, got it. 

"....here you go." Right, she's just got to figure out how to do that for something they can nonsuspiciously sell and there are the money problems gone...

This has in fact been taking some time, a fair amount of time actually although his liege does not appear to have noticed the fact, and food has now mysteriously appeared.

"Thank you very much my liege.  Can you get these undetectable to magic, and either invisible or I need to get some ordinary forehead protectors if you can enchant those, because I didn't really want to take mine off to go out and get food and I bet you don't want to either --"

"-- and also I've changed my mind about you not messing with anything, before you get too powerful for Kekaro I vote for you to do that thing Heroes sometimes do where they make a self-replicating item.  A self-replicating item that takes in lastglint and makes headbands.  The most powerful kind you can figure out how to make.  That would be an improvement."

"I will keep that in mind but should probably check whether more than one person thinks so," she says soberly, because last time she read his mind he really felt quite strongly about the not changing things thing and he'll probably be more loyal if she's also very serious about that. Even though obviously one should end death and give everyone headbands, if one can. 

Right. Food. Then she can start figuring out how to make them undetectable to magic. "Are there skills for detecting out of affinity magic? If these were to have an affinity, what would be expected? Or what's a headband people wear with an affinity, ideally one I know how to use already?" 

"There must be all kinds of Skills for perceiving magic in all sorts of different ways, and I don't know anything about those... is what I'd say without the new headband, but with the headband on, I can see that no Skill I've heard of uses a capacity its user fundamentally doesn't have.  So there's got to be -- something simpler that underlies all the different Skills, the capacity it uses -- and for seeing magic, it's got to be, something about how magic, impinges on us, can be felt by us -- so if you've got something that actually muffles magic and prevents it from leaving the item, somebody shouldn't be able to see through that, unless small amounts are still leaving, and then somebody with very leveled Skills will feel it oh wow this is great it feels like the difference between being all muzzy with sleep and waking up.  And if it's a mind-control sort of illusion, then somebody who's trained in resisting things like slave collars, or who's got the kind of fighter skills that are down the meditation tree, might shrug it off... but that wouldn't do them any good unless they could see out-of-affinity magic and identify yours as Devoid."

"What was the second part of your question.  It's hard to stop thinking and I forgot -- right, headbands people would expect to detect.  Uh.  There's forehead protectors and helmets, we don't go in for just headbands, so much.  I guess most forehead protectors would just be Earth for solidity if they were enchanted at all, or Light if they doubled as forehead lamps.  Maybe a few expensive Force, if they projected a helmet, but I couldn't afford one of those for you to use as a model unless you can get it just by glancing at it in a store."

"Well in that case we should just wear helmets and I'll try to make the headbands not leak any magic but even if they do, they won't leak it through solid metal. Nondetection is technically not an illusion, it's more like making the magic not leak than it is like making you fail to see it. Why don't I make you invisible on a regular basis and see if I get any local Skills for noticing invisible people that might give me a sense of what to subvert -" Invisibility. 

"I'm going to have to get used to this before I'm not just completely bumping into things.  Also I don't think a normal person would get that Skill unless they were fighting about it, should I be trying to stab you -- no, just poke you sharply, maybe, or tickle you if you don't like that, stabbing wouldn't make sense unless you've got a healing Skill or you can make a healing item -- oh oh we should both be invisible in case I can get the skill too, and we should do it in a separate pocket dimension so we don't break anything --"

There are proverbs about wizards and bright ideas, but to remember those right now Almys would need a Wisdom headband.

"We can spar invisibly in the Rope Trick, I suppose. Surely attempting to do someone an injury they dislike works better than attempting to do them an injury they like?

 There's a spell of mine for seeing invisibility but if I put it up I probably won't get whatever the locals use."

"No I meant tickling would only work if you didn't like tickling.  And yeah that tracks."  Almys almost starts out toward the rope trick and then realizes his liege wouldn't see him do it and so this would not work to socially initiate the common action.

She's been at the Worldwound for years and can mostly tell where invisible people are if they're not stealthy, which Almys really isn't. "Go on."

Almys is an Adventurer!  He's sneaked!  He's just not sneaking right this minute.  Not even to spring it on his liege later as a surprise, it just hasn't particularly occurred to him to do that.

He'll head unstealthily up the rope, then!  Right now he is mostly practicing kinesic awareness absent vision.  The problem isn't so much that he lacks kinesic cues, he's practiced fighting blinded even, it's that his vision is constantly telling him that his limbs aren't where he expects them to be.  Learning to ignore the constant error interrupts and wrong corrections is not instantaneous.