"I think I'm fine with letting Rathimus know I can do it. What's Chameleon Stride, something for blending in with the background?"

"Yes. It's not as good as being invisible, but it works on Babau and Schirs."

"And those kinds can see through invisibility? Can someone have both up at once?"

"Yes and yes. Nondetection should usually beat see invisibility, which is why it's my primary method, but if that fails I'd prefer it fails in a way that still doesn't let them notice us."

"Makes sense! Also I should buy the Plane Shift scroll outright so you can be the one who casts it. If memory serves it's a big one, multiple circles bigger than I've ever cast before, and I don't want to mess it up under fire."

"I was actually rather thinking the opposite, though perhaps it would make more sense to leave Nenio with it. If we need to plane shift out and I'm able to use spells, I can simply use plane shift myself, but if something happens to me the scroll is a good way for someone else to get us out of there."

"Ah, okay, I thought it was a case of limited spell slots. Nenio can have one and I can take a look at it first and you can have it prepped and then three things have to go wrong for it not to work."

Then with that settled they can head off back to the bank, though Ramien restrains himself so as to not outpace the group.

Brenda spends the trip over asking questions about how having Longstrider up feels. 

"Hello again! I'd like to buy a scroll of Plane Shift, if you have one, and also--rent some scrolls? Buy them and then sell them back to you an hour later?" She lists off all the ones they decided to get and don't currently have: Chameleon Stride, Communal Nondetection, and Heroism.

"I do have those. Do you want the chameleon stride also communal, or is personal sufficient for your needs? If you're just borrowing them collateral is fine instead of payment, but if they're damaged or used up from whatever you do I'll need you to pay for them."

"Communal for both, please, and how much collateral do you need?"

"785 Crowns for all of them, though I'll also loan them out individually if you prefer. Plane shift is 1,125 crowns to purchase if you want it as a divine scroll or 2,275 as an arcane scroll."

Ramien glances at Brenda, then Nenio.

"I think we want arcane; I'll be the one buying this one."

"I can cast cleric scrolls just fine, if that's what you mean. It's not really as hard as everyone says."

Nenio is so cool. "Okay then, let's get the divine version. Nenio, I am going to ask you so many questions about how scrolls work as soon as nothing else is more urgent."

So no unlimited access to the local multiverse for her today, she thinks as she counts out the appropriate collateral, but hey, she hasn't crashed diamond prices yet, maybe next week. She'll ask Ramien later how Elysium feels about tourists.

Once all the scrolls are in Alpina's memory and also in Rathimus' stockroom or Nenio's pockets as appropriate, she asks Rathimus for a private meeting and sets up death insurance for the two members of the group who don't have it. Since Brenda already has death insurance she ought to be able to get them out of any catastrophe a True Resurrection can get anyone out of, but that's exactly the kind of thought that would be ominous foreshadowing so she's just going to get the insurance. And not tell them about it until she's had more time to think it over, because they both seem liable to deduce too much and even if they can both keep secrets perfectly there's a lot of mind-reading on this planet.

Rathimus does not have a problem with arranging this! He’s not entirely clear and unwilling to speculate for reasons of privacy what the purpose of borrowing scrolls like this is, beyond at least confirming the returning scrolls aren’t damaged by it, but selling a scroll of plane shift and the arrangement fee on two counts of resurrection insurance are a tidy profit for this meeting and well worth his time.

Excellent.

Is that it for preparations until dawn tomorrow? If so, she wants to look at the maps of Drezen and its surroundings some more.

Pretty much, yep. The map Ramien found looks quite old, and there's a note that the details may be out of date, but it seems to have a least a dozen internal secret passageways through the city mapped out, including one leading to the prison from the city's temple of Iomedae, and the precise layout of the interior rooms in the walls and citadel.

She memorizes it, spends a bit speculating about what kinds of changes demons might have made to the place. She doesn't trust the secret passages to have stayed secret, especially with minotaurs around--according to Nenio's research, they're disproportionately Baphomet cultists, and Baphomet cultists love secret passages. If they approach by air from this direction, with the stealth spells up, the safest thing to do is swing around to here, scout the doors and their guards from the air, and find either a window or a good place to land. 

There's a risk involved since you need to slow down to maneuver precisely and that takes time off the invisibility duration, but wind walk also works like gaseous form so they can travel even through cracks; they might be able to just go through the prison walls or a broken window, if they're not in good enough repair.

Will they be able to talk normally while wind-walking? Possibly they should do all their coordination over Message either way. Also, will it interfere with her spellcasting at all, bearing in mind that she's very unpracticed?

It's very hard to spellcast while wind walking; spells without verbal, somatic, and material components are fine, but that's a minority of spells. They'll probably want to touch down outside of view from the city - there are a few hills here that might work - cast the spells, and then make the last leg in with the spells up. Thankfully wind walk is very fast so even stopping a mile out shouldn't be more than a minute's travel, and they probably don't need that far. You can talk just fine, though.

Makes sense! Does Nenio have a general sense of what level of resources the demons are likely to be prepared to defend against? Like, will the guards have a plan for invisible gaseous people that they have to defeat, or are they mostly there to defend against escape attempts by individual non-spellcaster prisoners and likely to be taken by surprise? Obviously it's impossible to be certain, especially about demons in a city Nenio has presumably never been to, but it seems useful to speculate about what their enemy would do if they were putting in the same kind of budget the party is.

She's not sure; she's only ever really tried to fool mortal guard before, mostly for lack of opportunity. If they really wanted to be sure they'd have a demon with true seeing there, which could be a problem if they get too close, but even a demon as strong as a Balor would have a hard time keeping a Painajai or Glabrezu or Nalfeshnee assigned to grunt work like that. The other way would be to get a mortal spellcaster to put the area under dimensional lock or have a forbiddance in place and just catch people as they escape, which means she should prepare an illusion to make it look like the prisoners were still there and maybe something to dispel any spells they had on the prisoners.

Good plan! Would a forbiddance have blocked the Sendings or the original vision? If they do run into someone with true seeing, should they just bug out immediately?