'Just give up' is not among his options. 

Focus on the here-and-now and the concrete problems, where it doesn't actually matter if he's missing context because he has to make decisions anyway.

....Finish his report to the Emperor and General Salan on the rebels deployments (as of almost two days ago), but he doesn't want to - he abruptly doesn't want to be fighting this war at all, which may or may not from the very beginning have been a plot by the gods to force him down a path of destroying their one opportunity to buy more options. 

Doesn't matter. He has to do it anyway. He can make it terse and to-the-point General Salan, that in light of the results from interrogating the rebel general's very well-informed body double, he wants to pause and reassess some of their priorities and resources, and in particular they may be able to safely use some of Iomedae's magic items to enhance their own people in upcoming battles. Expect further updates in the next couple of days. 

(It really is a major consideration! It just might also be the case that it offers a way to stall, in case he...thinks of something else, anything else that isn't this...) 

In his slightly longer report to the Emperor on the parts of the interrogation that touched on broader and stranger topics than rebel deployments, Altarrin has some suggestions. 

Namely, in light of what they now know – that Aroden almost certainly has no way to intervene here – it seems more likely that the war will continue to go straightforwardly with little need for his personal management, and the main out-of-context risk is the other world.

The most likely way that the Empire will make mistakes, here, is because they know rather little about said other world, including the likelihood that Iomedae can or will come back, and - whether, if she does come back presumably with even more firepower, negotiating is a better option that throwing another fifty mages at killing her. 

(Altarrin does not, to be clear, currently think it's that likely Iomedae will come back to crush the Empire's forces in Oris. If it were cheap for Aroden to send her back, or if Aroden cared enough about the outcome of the war to do it regardless, it would probably have happened days ago, before the rebels lost much of the ground they had gained. And it's possible she can't and won't come back at all, because she thought - assumed - that this other world had the same afterlives as hers, but Altarrin and the Emperor both know that not to be true.) 

Altarrin proposes that he fully hand over command to General Salan, who's been handling it excellently so far, and instead focus on helping the mage-researchers confirm what the artifacts do and whether they're safe to use on the battlefield.

He thinks this is just straightforwardly worth risking, since it now seems quite unlikely that they offer a conduit for Aroden-possession. They're also the only extant source of information on Iomedae's world, which might be both a threat and a future source of resources. 

He'll wait for an official Imperial decision on this, though, and Gate back to the capital tomorrow if the Emperor agrees. (Which Bastran will, this is not at all in question, but he also desperately wants to sleep before he has to face the palace again.) 

It's a somewhat less coherent and well-laid-out report than what Bastran is used to receiving from Altarrin. He's more frustrated than worried, though he's trying to defuse that feeling, he knows Altarrin is busy and probably exhausted. 

He'll send back approval for Altarrin to hand everything on-site over to General Salan and focus on the elements of this related to other worlds (!!!???) and otherworldly magic (???????!!!!). It makes sense; Altarrin is, in addition to his other skills, at least in some ways the single best mage-researcher in the Empire. 

Then Altarrin will, in the morning, be back to give a longer report to the Emperor face to face. 

He's sharper today, and his report is pretty efficient and staying on-topic, but Bastran knows him very well and it's still going to be obvious that something is wrong. 

There are a lot of things wrong in the Empire right now! Also, unknown worlds and unknown gods are pretty alarming.

If Bastran suspects it might be more than that, he's still definitely not going to poke it right now. Altarrin has a plan. That's good. He...is basically just going to trust Altarrin to figure out the important considerations around 'there's another world with alien gods' and react accordingly. 

Altarrin wants to go visit the facilities up north where the magic artifact study is being done. He agrees they should keep them well away from Velgarth gods until their powers and dangers are very nailed down, but he's not actually that worried about Aroden-influence, given what they've recently learned. 

It is of course still some risk. He intends to be careful. He thinks the potential gains are worth it. Bastran should of course plan or delegate the planning of some precautions to verify that Altarrin hasn't been compromised before they send him back out to command any more wars. 

All of that makes sense. Plan approved. The Emperor would like regular updates. 

And Altarrin arranges to Gate north and get a report from the research team in charge of this project. 

Aritha is not one of the most experienced mage-researchers in the Empire; those are not disposable. She is capable enough, and disposable enough, and unusually functional under highly restrictive compulsions (a fact that was known to Mage-General Kottras, the head of mage assignments at court, for reasons he didn't bother explaining when he put them in her file), and so she was sent. It's wartime. Even if they'd have asked under some circumstances they certainly weren't asking under these.

The members of the magical research team in the far north, working on understanding the items captured from the assassinated priestess, are subject to very, very restrictive compulsions. They cannot think about Aroden, is the big one, which required making them unable to think about lots of other things, including many of the core ideologies of the Empire. They cannot think about leaving, or quitting. They cannot think about communications with anyone outside the site, and they cannot think about the Thoughtsensers monitoring them, even when the Thoughtsensers are not remotely subtle about it, and obviously they cannot operate the magic items without authorization or use their own magic without authorization or speak of their work except to their colleagues during monitored discussion sessions and their superiors during formal reports or attempt to disrupt the trap-spells that kill them if not deactivated remotely or attempt to think about why they might want to do that. (Aritha actually had a lot of problems with discipline and focus until someone succeeded at disrupting all her impulses to think about the trap-spells, but she's been highly productive since then.)

She's having an amazing time. These magic items are fascinating. Almost everything else that matters has been stripped from her, but 'magic' was a big share of what mattered to her in the first place, and what she's looking at would change -

- would change some things that she thinks mattered a lot to her, six months ago -

And purely as an intellectual puzzle, forgetting all the unthinkable implications, they're ridiculously cool. What's the power source? How are the spellforms embedded into cloth or metal? Why do some of them operate consistently and some sporadically, why do they interfere with each other, why don't they do that more, where is the structured intelligence coming from - 

- can she understand them -

- if she understood them, could she build them -

- she could, right, that should be the answer, magic is magic and she's a mage and so she should be able to copy any mage artifact handed to her with enough time and study, she has to figure out how these are made but once they are she'll be able to make them.

She can't remember why that would be good, or who it'd be good for, but not all that much of her motivation ran through considerations like that anyway. It'll be REALLY COOL and she's going to DO IT. She's thought of nothing else, every waking moment, and she's pretty sure that at least part of the key is in the materials - they found something that's both a vastly more efficient conduit for magic and that regenerates it slowly on its own like a living thing -

- and another part of the key is the unfamiliar style of bizarrely powerful set-spells around which many of these enchantments are built. It doesn't make sense to her yet but it's the not-making-sense of mathematics that relies on assumptions you've never seen, not the not-making-sense of mathematics that shouldn't work at all.

Aritha is, it happens, the researcher who has made the most progress on understanding these magic items by the time Archmage-General Altarrin arrives; she's not the most qualified researcher on site, but she's notably less motivationally impaired than the people more qualified than her. She's gotten to look at all of the items, and sorted them by how mysterious they are, how much scaffolding she thinks she's missing. The least mysterious is the dagger. It's made in significant part of an unfamiliar metal which is plainly storing the mage-energy for its Fetching-like power, and it's otherwise enchanted to be sharp and deadly; those are things she could fathom how to do in principle, only a few steps ahead of what she already knows how to do already. And in the course of closing the remaining gap she might make more sense of what the other items, which are much more mysterious, are doing. 

Oh boy, Altarrin is on site. Good news, if it goes wrong from now on it's his fault!

They haven't made that much progress since their last update and the person in charge here thinks that if Altarrin's angry about that he should be angry at the mage-researchers directly, look, they're right over there. One of them was just saying she thinks she could make copies of these items, eventually. 

Indeed, Altarrin is interested in talking to the mage-researchers directly, who know by far the most. He's not yet willing to risk doing it in the same room as the artifacts being studied - they can speak in a different shielded work room, to start, and he wants the Thoughtsenser there giving him paraphrased rather that directly-relayed information on their thoughts in real time - but with those precautions, sure, he'll speak to the researcher who thinks she can make copies of the items. Given what he's heard so far he would be surprised and impressed. 

The set of interruptions necessary to get Aritha to stop being upset about the trap-spell meant to kill her if not removed have made her entirely fearless! She recognizes Archmage-General Altarrin but can not think of any reason not to beam at him and start explaining the structure, as best she can guess it, of the bizarrely-powerful-set-spells that she thinks are going into the dagger, and why she picked the dagger as simpler to make sense of than any of the other items, and why she thinks the metal the dagger is made of is specifically important 'aside from just that it must be, it's a soft metal, why would you put a soft metal into your dagger if not because it has important magical properties?"

The set of interruptions necessary to get Aritha to stop being upset about the trap-spell meant to kill her also interfere with noticing she should be respectful of Altarrin's time so she'll just talk his ear off for three hours if he lets her.

The Thoughtsenser conveys that this person is mostly saying aloud every single thought she's having that doesn't run straight into a compulsion which most of them do.

That's definitely an unusual response to this particular set of compulsions but Altarrin isn't upset. He'll gently interrupt and redirect if she's on a tangent, but otherwise, well, he's expecting this to take days anyway and the other researchers will probably be less chatty and definitely less cheerful about it. 

...He'd like to know how she would approach finding a way to target a Gate-search spell on: 

One, this specific artifact, if it were in an unknown location anywhere on the continent. That's easy in itself, if she's ever done unusual Gates, but what if it's additionally behind a lot of shields? 

Two, if it were in another plane, but one also adjacent to the Void. 

Three, if she were told to find a similar artifact, not one of the set they've been given to study, but one built by the same school of magic, say. 

That's a totally different set of problems and not the ones she's been thinking about nonstop for the last week and a half but she can make an attempt at answering it, slowly because a lot of her thoughts are indeed being eaten and now she doesn't have them pent up so she can keep saying things fluently anyway. There is a lot that's distinguishing about these artifacts, a lot that you could target a search-spell on, but she's not actually an expert in search-spell targeting.

(Before this she worked on - she doesn't remember -)

Altarrin is understanding that this isn't her field, but it is (one of) his fields of study, and he can prompt her onto useful sub-questions. 

(He's somewhat frustrated about the compulsions, but he's not going just unilaterally remove some of the more mentally restrictive anti-Aroden ones; he'll have a conversation afterward with the team leads about how this is likely no longer as necessary, and making fast progress on understanding this artifacts, which would be helped by having less impaired researchers, is a high priority.) 

Can he get her set up with enough context that she can plausibly make progress on designing a search-spell with interplanar reach once he leaves her alone to try it? 

Probably not! That's a hard problem and she's incredibly impaired! But she'll try!

In that case, he'll send her off to a Work Room to try her best, and then go request a meeting with the project leads to talk about reasonable compulsion precautions in light of the latest detailed report on the priestess of Aroden - and Aroden Himself - that he has to bring them after the interrogation of a captured rebel leader in Oris. 

(The northern team is pretty siloed from the rest of the Empire's usual chain of command, and has not yet received any inkling of this report.) 

The project leads would be delighted to lighten up on the exhausting incredibly intensive security precautions! They've been making everybody miserable, not that they'd complain to the Archmage-General Altarrin about that. 

(The offsite security who are meant to monitor the primary installation for Aroden-corruption are MUCH LESS HAPPY. They think that the researchers are doing fine, even if they complain a lot, and there is no particular need to make them better at thinking.)

(THEY should have been in the loop for official Aroden-related reports but in fact everything Altarrin has produced in writing, for this, is - not totally up to his usual standards of clarity and completeness. It feels easier to think about now though, for some reason. Maybe just because mage-research has always been something he preferred to fighting wars. He’ll write something better up for them in a bit.) 

Anyway, he isn't recommending that they take off all the compulsions. This is still dangerous enough, and also just sensitive enough, that everyone should definitely be under compulsions not to leave or communicate with anyone offsite or even indirectly plan to do those things, and he'd like to also keep the compulsions against interacting with the artifacts or using their own magic without authorization, though clearly said authorization should be given generously unless and until there actually seem to be problems or the monitoring site is concretely worried (distinct from nonspecific paranoia, which is their entire job.) 

They can definitely dispense with the compulsions around thinking about Aroden, who these particular researchers don't even know that much about. He thinks they can also dispense with the trap-spells, which are not a standard precaution for people studying powerful and dangerous artifacts, and seem likely to either be distracting or else require a lot of separately-impairing compulsions to let the researchers concentrate. 

After the compulsions have been modified and he's been able to set some of the other researchers at various related subproblems, he'd like to speak with Aritha again and see if she can catch on faster with less restrictive mind control. 

Yeah, that helps substantially! She's much more fluent and has better ideas. The Thoughtsenser monitoring her reports that she's also now having lots more unrelated thoughts along predictable lines like 'is it actually safe or a good idea to impress Archmage-General Altarrin' and 'the Empire would lose a war with the civilization that made these magic items and she wants to not personally die in it'  and 'what value would she even have to the civilization that made these magic items, just in case'.

Altarrin personally thinks those thoughts make perfect sense given her situation and he's not upset about them. He's also pretty sure that once he gives her a shinier thing to think about, she'll be fine. 

"So. I want to find a way to target scrying and Gates to the world where these originated. I am not sure which will be easier - scrying is lower-power but the Gate search-spell is more flexible and has more points for possible modification. I assume it is not trivial to travel back and forth, given that otherwise Aroden would surely have wanted to send Iomedae more support – and even if she was returned to life there, it has been over a week since her death. I do think we have an advantage – we have a sample of their world's magic, and they have only what Aroden could see through His follower in another world.

"My most likely guess is that it is in our plane, but - very, very far away, which would make a standard Gate prohibitive even if we could target it. I am going to work on a general method for routing between planes. I would like you to work on how to get the strongest possible search-signal for - assume a world that contains thousands of artifacts like these, given that just one of their warriors was wearing over a dozen - but not necessarily ones identical to these. - if you happen to, in the process of understanding them well enough, see a way to duplicate them, that would of course also be of enormous value to the Empire. 

Questions?" 

She'll get to work on that! 

(It seems like a terrible idea to fight these people. They will lose and be annihilated. She's not going to say that to Archmage-General Altarrin. She's not sure she's actually intended to be free enough to think it.)