Alloran has curled up in sulky confusion and pain. He thinks that any actually Good god would probably stop a bunch of her people from getting enslaved and kidnapped to another part of the galaxy, even if this required smiting the whole ship. 

And he misses his family, which he doesn't usually think about, because Mhalir is doing his best to kill them and it hurts too much to contemplate.

Mhalir does think about the conversation, in the following hours and days, in bits and pieces, in between feeling uneasy and tired and sad. None of which are new emotions for him, exactly, he's felt that way for most of the damned war.

He wants it to be over. 

It would be - too neat, too easy, if he could have that just by asking a benevolent superintelligent being for help. He's not ready to believe that would work. 

In between checking in on his engineer's progress with mining, studying the map, and asking Carissa questions about Golarion so he can plan their next approach, he does nudge the Yeerk who has the cleric of Sarenrae to let his host talk to Carissa. Probably she should hear things about the religious philosophy as taught in other countries. He doesn't expect her to believe it - he doesn't have any idea what effect it'll have - but right now he's in a sea of fragments and finds himself just wanting to do things, in general, and see if some of them nudge other things into motion.

Eventually they locate some gold, it's not exactly dense in asteroid belts but they don't need industrial quantities of it right now, just enough for an initial trip to Osirion. He asks the engineer if they've made any progress on finding the metals Carissa thought might be the magic one. 

They can mine asteroids for those too, if they do turn out to be the right ones. 

Can they get some samples and show Carissa so she can test them using whatever method she was proposing before? They can probably provide her with whatever other equipment she needs, the ship's fabricator is pretty flexible. 

She tests them. They're right. She's delighted about this and does a little dance when no one is around even though she's sure they can scry her quarters at any time. 

She asks Mhalir what she's allowed to make. "I could probably make something dangerous to you with this. I won't, but it wouldn't be hard. So if you want me to retrain out of weapons or something, or only make ones that aren't sharp, I could do that."

<- I am not worried about you making sharp things. Not for my own safety, anyway.> He sweeps his tail around, letting the tail-blade stop in midair just in front of him, neat and precise. <Though if the weapons do not actually need to be sharp, in order to hold magic spells, then you might as well make them not sharp, so that my other personnel are less alarmed.> 

"They gotta be masterwork but I don't know what kinds of eccentric shapes that allows, if I have as much spellsilver as I want I can experiment."

<All right. You can experiment, then. And I think we are ready to move in closer to the planet and plan a trip to Osirion. We need a closer look at the local money in order to forge it, so I will go there first in morph. What city are you thinking you will want to visit, to buy spells?>

"Sothis, nowhere else is going to have much in the way of spells I haven't got."

<All right, we can go there.> 

Mhalir won't start with that, though. Leaving Carissa to her magic work on the ship in orbit, he takes the cloaked shuttle down to scope out Osirion at closer range and find a smaller town, with fewer signs of magic around, and then he flies in in morph to explore more closely. His plan is for them to stun a local, maybe a merchant or farmer on their way back from selling goods in the marketplace, and steal a sample of their money so they can copy it, they just need one of each coin type. It's actually a lot more irritating, forging money in a lower-tech culture; on Earth they could just do it by outwitting the human banking computers.

He watches for a suitable target. Someone moderately prosperous, so they're more likely to actually have gold on them, but not prosperous enough to have a guard, or protective magic items... 

Osirion is hot and sandy everywhere aside from the riverbank, where its population clusters at an impressive density. There's a church of Sarenrae in this city, and six of Abadar. There are merchants who leave with some money at the end of the day, but not with a guard; they generally tie the money carefully under their clothes and carry a knife, and are rarely bothered. 

Mhalir is worried that this indicates a very competent police and legal system, but it's not clear what they're supposed to do about an invisible attacker that takes a few coins and vanishes. He authorizes the shuttle to descend, cloaked, and for one of his crew to stun a traveling merchant; he can instruct them on exactly where to search for the money, so that the mugging takes only a few seconds. 

The shuttle reports back a minute later with the coins.

Excellent. Do they look straightforward to forge? Mhalir asks Carissa to check if they have magical properties to make forgery harder, just in case. 

She Detects Magic on them; they come up ordinary. "I don't think anywhere I've heard of has magic money."

<Well, that makes this easier, anyway.>

They turn all their gold and silver into forged Osirion coins, load Carissa up with a fat purse, and take her down in the shuttle to fly over the city. Mhalir, morphed as a crow, asks her where would be a good neighbourhood to drop her off; they obviously want to minimize how much time they spend wandering the city, since there might be random wizards around with Detect Thoughts. 

She can pick out from the shuttle where the magic shops are, and cast Tongues on herself, and go.

(Her plan is not to do anything suspicious, but she's not going to try to resist any spells anyone casts on her; if they are suspicious enough to read her mind, good for them). 

Mhalir flies above her, and finds a place to perch where he has a good view of the inside of the shop and can mostly hear the conversations inside through an open window, though occasionally gusts of dusty wind muffle the words. 

Hi, she would like scrolls of Protection from Evil and Air Bubble and Grease and Snowball and True Strike and Sleep and Floating Disk and Silent Image and Chill Touch and Ant Haul and Enlarge Person and Reduce Person and Arcane Lock and Book Ward and Summon Monster II and Spell Gauge and Daze Monster and Admonishing Ray and Scorching Ray and Continual Flame and Hypnotic Pattern and Invisibility and Cat's Grace and Bull's Strength and Bear's Endurance and Owl's Wisdom and Fox's Cunning and Eagle's Splendour and Knock and Rope Trick and Magic Circle Against Evil and Summon Monster III and Clairvoyance and Deep Slumber and Suggestion and Fireball and Tiny Hut and Fly and Shrink Item. 

(This is everything in the shop.)

(Carissa is really confused on many levels but also she's having the time of her life.)

The shopkeeper is confused and suspicious. She figures it's best not to answer questions. "You can check the money as much as you'd like."

Various other words of conversation are audible from Mhalir's perch. "Cheliax." "...not here." "Not married."

Mhalir waits, very nervously. He's more anxious about being somehow stomped on by a disapproving local god than about Carissa betraying him, right now, though he's not completely unconcerned. She knows where more gold and more shuttle rides to various cities would come from. 

<Is that all you need to put the magic in your spellbook?> he asks her once she's done. <Scrolls are not the same as spells in your book, right.> He knows a lot more about wizardry than he did before he was in a wizard's head, and he didn't even get to cast any spells; he's a bit disappointed about that, actually. 

"Not the same but I can work it out and then transcribe it from them." Bounce bounce bounce bounce.

She seems pleased, which Mhalir is happy about. He alerts the shuttle via thoughtspeech, asks for a pickup from a location where no one will see them vanishing into an invisible spaceship. 

Carissa looks intently at her new spells. She's going to push to get to go to Absalom, eventually. And she's going to get a headband - maybe just straight for the highest class of headband, why not - 

- and it honestly doesn't make sense to feel as conflicted as she does. This is fine. This is great.

They hang out in the cloaked shuttle above the city, watching the shop from above in case any suspicious legal authorities show up, and listening from a tiny concealed microphone that a crow could easily carry down. Mhalir doesn't see how they could know, but then again, he can't be sure no one read his mind while he was sitting there in crow form, it wouldn't have felt like anything.

If nothing happens in half an hour he'll take Carissa back to the ship in space, so she can work on her new spells. 

<Where would you go if you wanted to recruit wizards?> he asks her. <Also I could use your advice on a recruiting pitch. Your world has mercenary companies - are some of them very secretive, we could perhaps make that the cover story but I am not sure if it would sound plausible...> 

"Probably Absalom, lots is always happening in Absalom. Some are very secretive but usually those are dangerous to work for. I think I'd just - embrace that, say that it's very dangerous, you'll cover resurrection insurance. But I'm not - I wasn't an adventurer. You could maybe enslave an adventurer who isn't a wizard, just a powerful soldier or something, and get a sense from them of how it's supposed to work."