Cinnabar has more than enough Evasion to completely dodge a blue fireball exploding in her face at point-blank range. She is right back to bafflement, and reflexively Vanishes again.

"A fire simulacrum? Skinsend?" She has no clue. 

If Weiss can still sense it, her vibrational presence will change as she transforms into a giant mantis herself while remaining invisible, and quietly climbs back up the elevator shaft to make her own exit from the warehouse. Figuring out what the strange apparition is that she just encountered is a problem for someone else with ranks in literally any Knowledge skill.

The Woods Between in the confines of a city take the form of a maze of old masonry and oddly wall-like trees, interspersed by open ground.

She goes to the guardhouse, thoroughly spooked, and appears in the street suddenly.

"Hi!" to whoever's guarding the place. "I'd like to report a crime! Probably to that red lady. Kroft?"

Kroft is still awake. At this rate it'll be a full week of sleepless all-nighters for her.

"You have a crime to report?" She asks, putting on a face of attentive concern. What new play of the Queen's is this?

"This blood and giant bug themed lady was acting suspicious and I figured she was gonna kill someone so I followed her into an Arkona warehouse. Claimed to have bought the place and it was empty, so I figured I'd leave. Then she did some kind of hypnotic thing and tried to straight up brutally murder me! Luckily she attacked an illusion. I left rather than try hitting her from behind."

(Look, helpful illusions to set the scene! She's twitchy and excitable right now.)

Cressida doesn't notice a lie, which tells her that Weiss is an excellent liar, because no way did she just so happen to coincidentally go snooping into the smuggler's den belonging to a noble house the queen would just love to get leverage on.

"That's a Red Mantis assassin. One of a cult of killers-for-hire."

What in the Hells is one doing in here. Procuring a murder hideout until Weiss interrupted, presumably. Which means she'll need to scrape the duty roster for a squad that can investigate the scene, not anyone assigned the docks who might be in the pay of the Arkonas already, even though Weiss' presence has probably sent the assassin to ground in some backup safehouse and the only thing they'll find are some deadly traps...

That headache can wait until the shift change. There is only one person in the city that the assassin wouldn't target, and that's the queen. (The Red Mantis never target sitting monarchs, they're supposed to have some theological excuse but it's obviously self-preservation first and foremost.) But she just arrived, so it must be to do with the death of the king. Which means either the assassin is for picking off the queen's allies and supporters, or she's aimed at the queen's opponents. And since an agent of the queen is the one sharing this - of course. Now Ileosa can have the Guard pursue the assassin and her employers in the nobility in turn, to embarrass and expose her rivals without having to expend any of her personal resources.

"We'll investigate, of course. One of the arbiters can approve the search in the morning, in case she was lying about the purchase. Would you be willing to assist, as you're already familiar with the hidden area?"

If she's going to be the queen's hunting-hound she may as well rope a lapdog in with her. 

"I mean, not until I go try and buy something with Mind Blank! Or similar. I think it was Mind Blank? That shit's scary!"

Worth a shot. 

"Is there anything else you'd like to report?" She says it as a dismissal.

Actually yeah it's just good sense to get all the tactical details down to - well they're fuckin' cops but assassins aren't any better!!

This is the address and it was laid out like this and such and she said her name was Cinnabar and displayed the following capabilities. Weiss might or might not be able to track her later.

That's more help than she was anticipating. She'll take everything she can get. 

To the temple of Abadar then! She wants to buy PROFESSIONAL consultation and assistance on the WAYS to purchase PROTECTION from SPOOKY ENCHANTMENT SHIT on various budgets, please.

She came to the right place! Her options include:

Alchemical remedies such as the meditation teas sold in the Jade Circle that provide some resistance, tens of gold per dose, usually lasting around 10 minutes. Members of the guard sometimes drink some before confronting student enchanters from the Acadamae who have been abusing their spells. 

The Protection from Alignment spells, cast for about 10gp per minute they last, or about half again if cast from a wand. These give immunity for the duration, provided they match the alignment of the enchanter.

A pentacle talisman, costing 600gp, functions similarly to Protection from Evil. They're single-use and less reliable, but they activate automatically when the wearer is targeted with such a spell and glow blue when that happens. They're a little obscure, but their popularity in Ustalav which is why her advisor has heard of them. Supposedly there are variants that cost ten times as much but regain their magic once a day, if she expects to go through a lot of them. 

Cloaks of Resistance cost from 1000gp to 25000gp, giving increasing protection against all debilitating conditions. They're the most popular cloaks for adventurers for that reason. 

A Ring of Delayed Doom costs 5000gp for every stone in it; they let the wearer postpone a harmful effect by up to a minute for each stone expended. 

All of the above would be relatively straightforward to source in Korvosa, though the higher-end cloaks would take longer and the advisor isn't sure about the ring either. If she can wait for a commission or an order from another city like Canorate or Egorian, other options include the Cap of the Free Thinker at 12000gp, the Seducer's Bane bracelet at about 10000gp, or a suit of Mind-Buttressing armor starting from 9000gp.

If Weiss knows a friendly archmage, Mind Blank lasts a full day but spells of that high a circle can go for thousands to tens of thousands of gold pieces for every casting. 

She takes notes.

A ring of delayed doom sounds lovely! So does the general resistance thing. And the cap of the free thinker. And the Seducer's Bane, for being narrowly targeted at the most Concerning thing and stronger for it. Any chance of making the 'protection from evil' thing permanent...? Let's see, what's in her account right now... 70380 minus 16000 plus ~1000 from the queen for the riot work (if she's remembering correctly, it's in bar form), 236 and the ring of protection from the derromancer dive. And a few dozens spent on food and stuff. (She should get new clothes at some point...)

So, ~55600 gp still. Mostly from those laser gain media and metal scrap from those FUCKING laser rifles the 'imperial guard droids' had. Plus another ~20k in probably saleable stuff, things she kept back the first time, the headband if she can stand to let go of it...

...Ring of protection only does physical protection, right? She's not super afraid of that. Maybe swap the headband out for the other kind too, not that they are fungible like that, she'd probably be taking a bit of a loss, but every bit counts, right?

Yeah, she wants it all. Money's just a number and so on. Feeling safe from the notion of slipping away from yourself counts much more... It might even help against sisters' pranks back home! She'll want to illusion them so people don't notice and try something else, deny the enemy information and all.

...How anonymously can this be done if she wants to pay the bank to buy them for her?

A degree of discretion, not mentioning any extraneous information about who the buyer is, is included in the transaction fee by default. Having the people involved swear to secrecy on top of that, if she fears the scrutiny of lawful authorities (lowercase), involves a more noticeable jump in price. Call it a 5% and 25% surcharge respectively? If she does intend to buy armor, knowing her measurements beyond 'Small or Medium' usually isn't necessary as most magical armor is resizeable enough to accommodate all the humanoid variety within a size category. 

The clerk will warn her of where the items are redundant with each other, such as the Seducer's Bane protections being a more specialized version of the Cloak, or the Mind-Buttressing Armor offering the same effect as the talisman permanently while worn. 

It will cost extra if she wants the items fast. By default the items to be purchased will be shared in the next bulk letter deliveries to the cities a single hop away, information on whether any such items are on their markets will be sent back in the batch after, the Korvosan bank's ordering instructions in the third set of teleports, and the purchased items back on the fourth. That could take about a month, all told, and is covered in the 5% transaction fee. Extra teleports out-of-schedule are about 500gp each, though that can go down if other people want to buy in on that delivery, and if the Acadamae opens its doors again the items can be made for her in about a day per thousand gp of value. 

(Please ignore the wider implications of generally accepting the Pathfinder economy as written.)

She tentatively wants... The best cloak she can get today that is already in the city, if there is one, even if it's just the 1000 gp version, she's sure she can sell it for a profit at home anyway, and also the best cloak period, a pentacle talisman and a cap of the free thinker and to... Try on armor that would be physically like the mind-buttressing armor? And wear it for a day before deciding. To see how inconvenient it is. "Complete immunity to the thing she's spooked about while wearing it" is very tempting but runs into again the issue of her frequent shapechanging...

For armor she can try on some of the spare sets for the temple guard if she's in this much of a rush, there's an armored coat that's easy to shrug on and off and a scale mail and breastplate in approximately her size. They don't have any mithral ones available for her to compare, but for an extra 4000 gold she could have her armor made of that metal to halve the weight. Depending on how her shapechanging works, it will probably remain functional while melded into her form? The clerk assumes it's a standard polymorph effect.

(There are also those lighter metals from Weiss' exploits back on Tirra, but this clerk is unaware of that.)

The best cloak that can be found today is the sort a third-circle could make, only one step up from the most basic, and that would be 4000gp. A runner will be able to find several pentacle talismans for sale in the market, and the cap would need to be asked about in other cities. 

She would like to try on a spare set and run around doing acrobatics in it for a while, to see how much it hinders her! She even has a (perfectly ordinary) sword to use. (...She's not very good at using it, but just barely manages 'proficient' most days. It was a hobby.)

So that's going to be... 4000 + 25000 + 600 + 12000 = 41600 * 5% surcharge = ...436XX... 43680 gp? With the +2 cloak and talisman now, the +5 and the cap significantly later. Leaving her with ~11900 gp in account. And maybe another 9450 charge for the armor later after she thinks about it, too. Horray for spending most of her windfall on expensive magic stuff!

Several days later...

It's hard, being a queen and reigning. It's hard and nobody understands. 

Her plan to clean up the streets with a tailored plague has been put on hold ever since Weiss blundered her way into the warehouse that was to contain the workshop for it mere minutes after the months-long deal to purchase it had been settled. No doubt it would take as long again to find a new secure venue for it, hardly worth the effort at this point; there are other ways she can get the blood samples she needs.

The trouble is, that leaves the cultists of Urgathoa unoccupied, and left to their own devices they'll no doubt get up to some less targeted horrors. 

The royal funeral for Eodred was a tedious affair, though it was livened up by that deliciously intense Asmodean knight-enforcer (not a title she'd ever heard in the homeland) revealing that she'd kept her self-inflicted scars as a show of her grief over the king's death. She's one to watch, though perhaps best kept separate from her first party of pet adventurers.

It took longer than she would like to torture one of her guards into a false confession that the king's irritatingly pretty young portrait-painter was responsible for his poisoning and that the guard helped. Just today he's given his testimony and taken a leap off a parapet with the help of Sabina. With the most indiscreet of her servants in the room to hear it, the city should be hunting her down by tonight.  

(Maybe she ought to find someone she could delegate some of the torture to? Anyone who says that if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life has never worked as hard as Ileosa has been these past few days.) 

A liability to watch is Ambassador Amprei. He's sniffing around for opportunities to abuse his office for profit, he's already been angling for bribes with vague threats of interfering with trade.

There are a lot of pieces on the board, more than she can manipulate all by herself. What she needs to do is to reduce the complexity and give them all tasks to occupy themselves with, so that Togomor and his owner can keep working on magic items and bindings and wishes to strengthen her, and she can focus on the fangs. 

First, she'll need to keep the velvet glove, her party of Weiss and company, busy interfering with her enemies instead of proactively overturning her well-laid plans on their own initiative. Fortunately she's heard from her contact in the Pharasmin cathedral, a cleric with a reputation for discretion who she charmed while asking her about her missing monthly, that the bishop has successfully landed a scry on the Key-Lock Killer. With the right nudges, that party can be off trawling the sewers while the painter is hunted down, and when they come back up she can fabricate some Urgathoan connection to keep them chasing the cult so that the both of them will occupy each other. 

Then the knight-enforcer can form the start of her iron fist. She'll put her in charge of some of her sympathizers in the garrison, and if she proves loyal and competent in hunting down the painter that group might be usable in cowing Amprei or clearing her city of undesirables through more traditional means. 

The Red Mantis Assassins are easy to set to a different task, the only challenge there is keeping their killings from being too obviously serving her purposes. Hunting down the surprisingly-elusive Neolandus Kalepopolis will suit their skills, and once he's offed that leaves the position free for Togomor to take on the role of seneschal officially, putting another of the major government roles squarely under her control.

Yes, this is a plan without a flaw nor any possibility of error.