Was coming here the right decision? 

It's a moot point, in a sense. He's here. He may or may not have leverage to convince Iomedae to let him leave, but - what would he be returning to? An Empire he can't operate in without being under compulsions, even if he could somehow undo the damage done by having vanished in the first place.

(They must be panicking over there. He really should do some scrying and figure out what's going on, but the spell is draining and separately he's noticing himself flinching away from it, from the way even interacting with the Empire from a distance feels like being trapped, right now...) 

So put his head in order first. That's a good first step regardless of what he ends up deciding his next priorities are. And - figuring out whether he endorses the decisionmaking that led him here is an important step in that, if he's playing with stakes as high as those in Iomedae's war, he needs to trust himself to be thinking clearly and he really shouldn't, right now. 

The actual outcome of his decisionmaking process, however dubious it was, is incredibly good for Iomedae and Iomedae's war. It feels - good, it feels like one thing he finally got right, remembering her saying that she could save hundreds of thousands of lives with the diamonds he frantically bought in half a candlemark for three pounds of gold. 

It's probably not a disastrous situation for him personally. Altarrin knows that he has no interest in allying with Tar-Baphon, or in allowing the Empire to do so, and once Iomedae and Alfirin believe that, he'll probably be trusted at least slightly further. In the short run, it's not clear that being a prisoner is actually constraining him from actions he would otherwise want to take? He doesn't have nearly enough context to be acting unilaterally in this world; he would want to run any planning through Iomedae anyway, to avoid stepping on her toes. It's going to bother him if they don't even trust him far enough to keep him informed on what's happening, but - that's something he can best address by being trustworthy. Alfirin is taking reasonable precautions given their current information on him, but - he saw her face when he unpacked the diamonds - she and Iomedae aren't going to decline an offer of alliance from someone very useful for no reason. 

It's a bad situation for the Empire, obviously. But - not a vastly worse one than in the scenario where Altarrin returned to Jacona and ended up dead. Maybe better, depending on what the the collateral damage would have been. 

Mental flag: how likely is it that 'assassination' would have been what went wrong in Jacona? He's...inclined to think not that likely, actually. A destabilized Empire is a less predictable one. And since the gods can't get rid of Altarrin forever, and returning in a new body would likely mean returning without compulsions, it might have been better from Their perspective to keep him pinned down and trapped exactly where he was, forced to keep following the same lost and lonely road he's been steered down for centuries. 

He's pretty sure that even in his most pessimistic anticipations of how things go here - imagining that he doesn't manage to earn more of Iomedae or Alfirin's trust than he has currently, maybe because he ends up concluding that their goals are ones he can't fully support, and they keep holding him captive in this sumptuous prison indefinitely - it's going to be better for him than that. They might not be letting him leave but at least they're letting him think. Encouraging it, even. 

He mostly doesn't think the pessimistic case is all that likely? He wasn't wearing the headband during the questioning, but even without it he's not terrible at reading people, and Alfirin is guarded but Iomedae doesn't make herself hard to read at all. (Unless that's a trick. He - would be very surprised if it were, though, being manipulative in that way just doesn't fit with the rest of her decisions.) 

The optimistic case here is...

...he's bouncing away from thinking about it, and it's not compulsions, it's - why can't he look at it head-on - is it just that after so many centuries of disappointment, good news is too hard to believe -? 

He remembers reading through Aroden's holy book, back in the Empire. (Probably he wants to read it the rest of the way through, actually, and reread the beginning in less of a hurry, he knows it felt important at the time but he mostly couldn't think about why, which is a serious impediment to reconstructing those thoughts.) 

Aroden is confusing. Aroden...might be the best news he can imagine, a god who was once a human fighting for a better world, who retained that core goal through the process of ascending, and - can make sense of humans well enough to actually aim for it - 

- he doesn't know where to go from there. It's a pointless thought, but - it feels like he doesn't know what it would mean to be himself, in a world where a god is already looking out for everything he cares about. 

Come back to it, then, once it makes sense to request another copy of the book and read it. What else. 

He keeps being confused by Iomedae, which is strange considering just how long he spent trying to make sense of her, with headband-enhancement and everything. ...Or not, maybe, because in hindsight he wasn't really trying to understand her, as the person she actually is, so much as trying to imagine a person who could think the thoughts that he couldn't. Inconveniently, he suspects a lot of it was happening below the conscious level, where his compulsions wouldn't press quite so hard, and that's going to make it incredibly confusing and frustrating to untangle what he actually justifiably knows about Iomedae, versus what's been contaminated by having modeled the version of her most convenient for reasoning through the Empire's problems. 

(Though he's pretty sure the real Iomedae would be good at reasoning through the Empire's problems, even if her precise diagnosis of them doesn't match the words he put in her mouth.) 

It's probably not a good use of her time right now, to make her sit through him recounting everything about imaginary Iomedae so she can correct the parts which are wrong. She has a lot of far more urgent projects than helping Altarrin sort out his head. But - he does want to understand her. It feels very important if he wants to try to be her ally, and it's going to feel safer, too, if he's not repeatedly being slightly surprised and off-balance every time they interact. 

He's mostly not confused by Alfirin. (Aside from the apologies, but in hindsight it's just that he finds kindness jarring when he's terrified.) Alfirin seems like a sensible, straightforward, reassuringly ruthless sort of person, someone who will make plans that work, someone who can protect the resources she needs for those plans. He expects he could work with her easily and without friction.

He is confused by - something at the intersection of Iomedae and Alfirin, some off note in the way they interact. He's pretty sure there's history there, and it may not be any of his business but it does feel at least somewhat unsafe, seeing just the surface of it and not knowing what's underneath. 

Also for some reason he's abruptly...sad, and restless, and doesn't want to be sitting alone save for a mage-construct servant refilling his tea and his own endlessly looping thoughts replaying the past. He wants to be making forward progress on something that isn't just inside his own head. 

- and also isn't scrying Velgarth, which is the main obvious next step on his mental to-do list, but he's still flinching about it, in a way that feels at least somewhat bad to push back against. This is not normally a problem he has! But he feels like he only just got to a a state where he can be fairly confident he isn't going to randomly cry if a confusingly good thing happens, or panic if he tries to do magic and is blocked, and he doesn't feel like it's very stable yet.

And...is it time-sensitive? His options for doing anything about it are limited, and if he actually drags his mind down that line of thought - which is also flinchy but less so - he acknowledges that he does just know enough about the Empire he built to narrow down his guesses. There would have been an immediate panicked report when he Gated out. They would have tried to reach him with the comms spell and order him to return to Jacona - which failed, obviously - and tried to scry him and target him with a Gate-search, which also failed.

(It's possible they did scry him in the Haighlei Empire and just didn't have the range for a Gate, which is a potential point of divergence - they would know he was buying diamonds, which would let them predict more confidently where he was going - but even scrying is range-limited, especially the overpowered variants that could have gotten through his shield-talisman.) 

At the point when immediately retrieving him had clearly failed, the investigation would slow down and spread out. The Office of Inquiry is going to be thoroughly questioning everyone from the research site. They'll be trying to rederive the full technique for interworld Gates - which he doubts anyone but him can figure out in less than a decade-long research project, he didn't teach Aritha the Gate-search routing and without the headband she might not be clever enough to recall it even if he had; he's barely clever enough, it would have taken him months without the headband for the most difficult parts, and he has vastly more practice at chunking mathematical-spatial concepts to fit more complexity into his magic. They'll be trying for interworld scrying as well, which they might be able to get by dragging everything out of Aritha's head - she's seen him actually cast the spell - and throwing it at the most brilliant researchers in the Empire, but he overall thinks this is unlikely; if he has to put numbers on it, maybe one in twenty odds? In the remaining 95% of cases, re-deriving it from scratch might still go faster than Gates, but - six months to a year. 

(Aritha is probably having a terrible time. Altarrin genuinely feels bad about that. He wanted her to be in a better situation for having worked with him.) 

...They're not going to try to contact Tar-Baphon, because Bastran isn't an idiot, and because even if Bastran manages to lose the throne in the aftermath of this - which Kastil will be fighting tooth and nail against, Kastil doesn't like either of the pretenders in the current rebellions - the candidates likely to take his place are - more conservative than that. More likely to stick to what's known to work, which is NOT trying to mess around with other worlds that have scary gods. 

(He's also going to feel terrible if Bastran dies as a result of this. He already feels kind of terrible for leaving Bastran behind, despite the fact that there is no conceivable scenario where he could have kidnapped the Emperor, and if he had the Empire would be facing a genuine disaster now.) 

The most serious risk is...that Aritha did follow enough, in the process of watching him scry Iomedae, for the Empire's best researchers to figure out scrying in days or weeks rather than months. And that Bastran orders a major effort to collect intelligence on the other world, and they aren't careful enough, and some poor fool scries Tar-Baphon and ends up compulsioned and Tar Baphon takes the Empire from there. 

One in twenty that they'll even have the option in the next week. One in...three odds, maybe, that Bastran is careless enough, and they get unlucky enough (and Altarrin thinks this isn't a case where the gods of Velgarth are going to steer for the worst luck, even if They could see what they were doing it seems very bad from their perspective for the Empire to end up suborned by an incredibly disruptive powerful spellcaster from another world). But he's not sure of that, so call it one in two. 

One in forty, then, that if he does nothing and Iomedae does nothing, the Empire ends up belonging to Tar-Baphon in the next week. 

It would be very bad if that happened! He should probably communicate his reasoning to someone! 

It doesn't justify a rushed decision, though, because it seems absurdly unlikely they'll get it in the next two days. Kastil isn't going to clear Aritha to interact with anyone important until he's assured himself that she isn't either mind-controlled by Aroden or turned to His side. Which means Altarrin can afford to sit huddled in his blanket and finish the rest of the pot of tea, steadying himself before he asks the construct-servant if they can find out whether Iomedae is available, he needs to speak with her or (if she's on the battlefield, say) at least with someone she trusts. 

...actually, before that, he sort of wants to bathe. And wear something other than moderately gross mage-work clothes. 

He can be led to a bathroom, then, with an enormous tub and, bizarrely, a cauldron. The mansion can conjure plenty of cold water and firewood but no hot water. A small group of uniforms lift the cauldron together to fill the bath, then hold out their gloves for his clothes. One stands by with a towel in case he should step in the water and immediately decide that he'd rather not bathe, after all.

He hands off his clothes, though he makes sure to hold onto the magical artifact belt. It's slightly weird to bathe in front of a bunch of uniformed constructs but it's really not the strangest thing about the last candlemark. Altarrin sinks into the water, and over a few minutes manages to coax himself from 'mostly not that tense' to 'actually relaxed.'

...Which has the unexpected-but-not-in-hindsight-incredibly-surprising consequence that he does actually sort of start crying, if only for about thirty seconds and he can make it unobtrusive by pretending he was definitely planning to wash his face very thoroughly during that time. 

It helps. He's back to feeling mostly calm by the time he gets out of the water, and he trusts it a lot more. Do the servant constructs have non-disgusting replacement clothing for him? (Though if that single spell also conjures spare clothes from thin air, he has so many questions.) 

If the constructs notice him crying they make no indication of it. One of them has a selection of gray robes in various shades - they seem to be about the right size but not particularly tailored to his body. Probably there's a room full of robes somewhere and it just grabbed the ones that seemed most likely to fit?

There's no trace of his old clothes, at least in this room.

He will put on the maybe-spontaneously-generated clothes - wondering vaguely if they disappear when the spell ends - and then repeat that he needs to talk to Iomedae, and follow the construct-servants. 

Iomedae is sitting by a fireplace in a different room along with Marit, in principle going through Miracle-related options, though at this point they're less discussing strategy and more inventing glorious ways to solve random problems that no one's solved for thousands of years. They're both laughing loudly. 

When she sees Altarrin she sits up a little straighter. "Marit, this is Archmage-General Altarrin - Altarrin, this is Knight-Commander Marit -"

        Marit turns to smile at Altarrin. "We are all very much in your debt." And to Iomedae - "- should I go -"

"I'd actually sooner you didn't, 'm still mildly impaired. Hit me with a Tongues and then we can speak privately while you hover in case Aroden has anything more to say to me."

Altarrin manages to return the smile. He smiles at Iomedae as well, and sits. It's very good to see Iomedae and her people happy, and - it does make him feel safer, to know it was the result of his decisions. 

(To Iomedae, he looks vastly more composed than he did a few candlemarks ago. His smile isn't perfectly convincing, but he's calm and not especially tense and is definitely no longer radiating misery and fear.) 

"I am not sure if this is private or if your people need to know as well," he says quietly, once she has Tongues up. "I - thought through what was likely to happen in the Empire, when I was deciding how urgent it was to scry it - the spell is exhausting. I mostly expect the situation to keep but I am concerned about one - unlikely but not impossible - way that things could go, that might result in Tar-Baphon learning of the Empire within a week or two." 

- she nods. "That's been a worry of mine as well. Within a week or two, but you're confident not sooner?"

"- Fairly confident, yes. I think the only way they could learn and cast the interworld scrying spell, rather than having to re-develop the technique, is if Aritha - the particularly talented mage-researcher who worked with me - saw enough when I was casting it to pick up some pieces of the planar routing component, which is necessary to reach this distance. If she saw enough then it is possible that the best mage-researchers in the Empire could put together and cast the spell in less than a week. But no one else has seen me cast it, and - they know that she wore the headband, so she is going to be under suspicion of being controlled by Aroden and I would be shocked if it took them less than two days to refute this and be willing to put her in the same room as anyone powerful or important." 

- she nods. "And you consider it unlikely even after that, but - not so unlikely that it wouldn't be worth avoiding even at substantial expense?"

"...I had estimated one in forty odds that they learn the spell and go on to do enough careless scrying of battlefields to attract Tar-Baphon's attention. I am not especially confident in that exact number but - less than one in twenty, more than one in a hundred." 

"Do you have in mind an intervention by which we can protect the Empire? I have some options, but - I don't like them, and it'd be good to have more."

"...My inclination would be to get Aritha out." From his body language, it's fairly obvious that he wants to do this anyway, he feels responsible for her and worried about her current situation and safety even separate from the spell-development implications. "At which point - they have my working notes, they would not be starting completely from scratch, but I think it would be a project of at least six months to a year to get scrying, and much longer for Gates." 

He ducks his head. "I am - I might be able to get her out alive without risking just - ending up trapped there again, but it would depend on luck more than I like. ...I could almost certainly kill her without much risk to myself but I would really, really rather not." 

" - brain damage? Or would they just kill her themselves, if you do that far enough to make her useless?"

"I think they might kill her out of paranoia, at that point, if it looked like it was done by your world's magic, they would assume it was Aroden's doing and she was a conduit for his influence and interference in the Empire. I am not certain they would but they are going to be very much on edge." And a lot of mage-researchers would feel, at that point, that they might as well be dead. Though probably not Aritha. She seems very motivated to avoid dying. 

"- I don't want to extend you - hope I might not actually be able to follow through on. But I think that in about a month, we should be able to substantially address the situation in the Empire. We might not be able to do it at all, and we might be able to do it much sooner, but - a month would be my best guess. I don't strongly expect that we'll be able to raise the dead, at that point. Your gods reuse their souls, Aroden says, and that - complicates every known method we have of returning the dead. - I do know you figured something out. You can tell me more about it if it's relevant for planning. 

To buy a month - one option is for you to send Alfirin there. She's flatly much more dangerous than I am, and I think with your help she could end the civil wars and force the Empire to terms quite quickly. That is not my preferred option. It opens some avenues for the Velgarth gods to interfere. It means we don't have her here." I think it'd be bad for her, she doesn't add. 

"Another option - the one I was leaning towards when you first arrived -  is to send some delegates that they will presumably imprison, interrogate, and kill but who can explain what's going on and hopefully be persuasive about the importance of not scrying Tar Baphon. I - try pretty hard to explain myself, wherever it's possible, and that'd be a high cost to pay for it but - I'd have plenty of volunteers. 

Another option is a targeted kidnapping of this particular woman, it sounds like. I can't myself help you with that. I am committed to not operating within the Empire. I am sure from their perspective I have obviously betrayed that commitment and I'm now gaining no benefits whatsoever from it, but I haven't, and won't. I also won't stop you.

Are there more options I haven't thought of? I know much less than you about Velgarth."

He shakes his head, slightly, when she says he can tell her more about his immortality setup if it's relevant. It's not, especially; he can't do it for anyone else, he missed that opportunity. 

"If you send delegates and they are anywhere near as - committed to your work and good at explaining it, as you, I think the Emperor at least would be inclined to listen to their explanations. I - am not sure how much that matters. Paranoia does not come as naturally to him, he knows this, and when things are going badly he defaults to listening to his most paranoid advisors. 

- I might be able to kidnap her more safely with Alfirin's help? I...would rather not send her to fight the Empire, not if we can do something better than that if we wait a month. I might be able to get more information on how likely it is we can afford to do nothing and wait that month, but they know I can do interworld scrying and are almost certainly going to take precautions to make it hard for me to learn too much." 

"I spoke to Aroden this evening. Well, 'spoke to'. He is - better at interfacing with human concepts than most gods, it's still not safe or really reliably possible to actually communicate with Him directly. We have a spell that lets us safely get yes-or-no answers, and that was what I intended to use, but -

- He can't see. None of our gods can see right now, because when you arrived from another world you caused a bunch of nearly-guaranteed-to-not-happen things to happen. Aroden wasn't annoyed, but the other gods probably are. He asked me to, at least for now, not use Wishes - a dangerous kind of magic the gods prefer to supervise - and to not use you directly in our war or use your plans, and to - be conservative, to assume He can't see it and warn me if things look risky. 

This is inconvenient timing because I want to use a lot of very powerful magic to take the city of Urgir, and I want to do it very soon. We've pushed it back several days, now, and the army is pretty vulnerable out here, and there's going to be a ridiculous amount of complicated work after we take the city too. But my current plan for taking the city involves the cooperation of between five and seven gods, so I need to keep them happy for now, and that means not making a lot of noise. 

If you use magic yourself to go back and forth between your world, I don't think that will fog up Foresight in Golarion. If you take Alfirin it probably will, because ninth circle wizards inherently are the sorts of people who will do a wide range of things, and so making them unpredictable makes everything unpredictable. So - I really don't want you to do that until we've taken Urgir, which I sincerely hope will be in the next few days and I guess this is additional reason to make sure to get it done by then. After that it'd be only ordinarily costly, not to have her, and I'm sure she could do your kidnapping for you, if she wants to, and the justification you've given would probably be persuasive to her.

If you think the Emperor would - take the information seriously at all, consider that it might be true - that it'd even reach his ears - that does incline me to send him delegates, even if he won't listen. It's - surprisingly often valuable just for someone to have the truth, even if it'd be entirely unreasonable to expect them to believe it. I didn't write you letters in the expectation you'd believe them. And lives are a much higher price than letters, but -

- but purchased with diamonds. A hundred thousand people are going to live, in Urgir, because of the ones you brought us."

- he tenses up visibly when she mentions the Foresight noise. He's doing a much, much better job than before of maintaining his composure, and his expression doesn't change, but Iomedae is good at reading people and will be able to pick up that he's scared, and upset and - disappointed...

(It's exactly what went wrong in Velgarth, and there's a lot he doesn't know about this world but it's not a positive sign, that their gods - even the ones Iomedae would ally with - also dislike it when people are unpredictable to Them.) 

"I understand," he says, quietly. "I think it is not too much additional risk to wait three or four days, even if they already have Aritha working with the best researchers I expect it to take a little longer than that. And if it would not be a risk to your own war effort, to send delegates, then - yes, I do think Emperor Bastran would make sure to hear what was said in their interrogations, and he will almost certainly not think he can afford to listen to it but - I expect he would want to."