Nod. 

Does Iomedae want a hug? 

Yeah, she really would.

"You'd like him too. Marit, I mean."

Hug. So much hug. 

"I am sure I would. I - all we can do is come up with a very good plan, I think, that will be - safer, and more likely to work and not trap us in Hell -" 

"Yep. Alfirin wanted you for our planning session, in half an hour once we've both decompressed. We just need to - come up with the best possible plan, that's all it comes down to."

"Of course." 

Does Iomedae want him to stick around for that half-hour? It's fine if she wants time alone for decompression, but he's also happy to stay and hug her and not say very much, because what is there to say, when you've just made the decision that letting your closest colleagues lose a war and be turned into animated corpses in an evil necromancer's army is worth it. 

She does not really want to be alone. She wants hugs, and occasionally to say inane things about Marit like that he is a swordmage and the only Knight other than Iomedae who Alfirin doesn't really have particular friction with - "they don't trust each other, but that's a different matter" - and that his lifelong ambition has been to hang sixth circle spells so he can cast and fight in his own antimagic field, which he thinks he would be ludicrously good at.

Ma'ar can stay with her, and offer hugs, and make sympathetic listening noises. He would be better at this with the headband, probably, but - it's not like any amount of enhanced perceptiveness and skillful reassurance will make the situation better. The situation is just. Bad. And it feels like just - being with Iomedae, staring at it beside her, is - what she needs, right now. 

And after a while they can go meet up with Alfirin to discuss plans. 

In half an hour Alfirin's books are unpacked and her tears are prestidigitated away.

"We should get Urtho, actually, I think - if diamonds are sufficiently abundant here we should all get wished up over the next few days and he'll know things about diamond availability and I'll need to give him The Talk."

Ma'ar is very curious about The Talk, and can alert Urtho with Mindspeech and summon him to the room. 

(A twinge of - some sort of feeling - noticing that he no longer finds this anxiety-inducing at all...) 

Urtho will be right there! He greets Alfirin cheerfully and then stares in delighted awe at the many, many books. 

"I've got a share language spell for you that should help you read them, but first you're going to have to listen to me tell you something very important."

But BOOKS about MAGIC she sounds very serious.

Urtho nods, and sits down. "I am listening." 

"So in our world there are a lot of - parables, stories, sayings - about people, especially powerful wizards, who are much too Clever and not Wise enough. From what I can tell, there are three people in this room of the type that those stories are meant to speak to.

And I'm about to propose making that much worse."

"We have magic that can make people cleverer, or wiser, or more persuasive. You've tried Iomedae's headband. I have one that is much better at cleverness in particular. We can pass it around, get everyone's best thoughts on our problem. Beyond that, one of the things we can use large diamonds for is just - directly and permanently making someone much smarter. If we have the diamonds for it, I would like to do that to all of us, one each day. We're going to be sitting here, trying to come up with the very best possible plans to solve a very hard problem, and it will help if we are all better at this than we are now."

"And you, in particular, I expect to have some brilliant idea about how we can tear a rift between planes and punch straight through the gates of Hell all the way down to Nessus and set off our antimagic bomb there and ruin Asmodeus' eternity."

"And before you so much as start to write it down, let alone build it, I want you to stop and think. Whether it could ever possibly go off by accident, and what would happen if it did. Or whether it could be stolen by someone with some evil agenda. And then, if you're very very sure that neither of those will ever happen, and even if they do it won't cause very much damage -"

"I want you to still not fucking build it."

"I want you to come to me, I'm quite clever but also reasonably wise, and can check your work. And then we can both go to Iomedae, who is very wise and will be able to tell us if we're being reckless archmages."

"Ma'ar, the same goes for you, and for me. It's an important lesson for all of us, and your world doesn't seem to have it, and Urtho only gets special attention in this lecture because he's the only one who's boiled an ocean this month."

"OK, that's it. Do we in fact have enough diamonds that that was necessary. We'll want at least twenty."

"Can we not...also make one of us more wise?" Ma'ar makes a face. "I realize cleverness is also going to be very important, here, but - if I was going to try to increase one of my - mental traits, in the way you break them down - I think I would want more wisdom, actually." 

Urtho clears his throat and manages to find his voice. "We have at least twenty diamonds, yes. We can get more if necessary, the Ceej Empire will sell us to them even if we run out of diamonds available in Tantara." 

"Oh Iomedae's getting wisdom first, someone's got to keep the rest of us in check. You can too, if you want. I can only do one each day but if we have the diamonds for it we can each get both, eventually."

Nod. 

Urtho still looks kind of shaken. "I - will be careful. And ask Iomedae for advice. I have recently had a great deal of reason to be grateful for Iomedae's excellent advice." He only looks a little bit sheepish as he says it.