"I don't think I have further important questions."

"All right. Ten minutes, then. I will need to concentrate. ...Please avoid touching anything that appears magical, not everything is safe for a non-mage." 

...This doesn't actually require his full attention, once he's gotten started. Altarrin has quite a lot of practice at watching people without appearing to do so, and gauging what he can from their body language. Carissa is incredibly hard to read, but Altarrin is still going to try to pick up what he can when she's left undisturbed.

(He so badly wants to know what she's thinking - and he isn't going to find out. Unless he decides to ask her permission to have one of his trusted Thoughtsensers read her, but he expects that to be alarming and frightening for her, even if she feels that of course he can do anything he has the power to do, and he doesn't currently feel that knowing exactly what she's thinking is important enough to justify that. He's trying to ally with her; he isn't going to have her mind read without asking.

Besides, given what they've spoken about, he isn't sure that he trusts any of his Thoughtsensers that far.) 

Carissa is totally assuming she's being mindread! She doesn't mind. She doesn't think she's hiding something from herself as big as 'Asmodeus is a sucky god'. She really wants to not die. She doesn't think she'll be threatening to Altarrin.

She's going to sit here not touching anything and try to make sense of him.  His puzzling expression on acknowledging that, his having laid a claim to her, no one will interfere - he'd rather his adversaries be more sophisticated?  No, that's not quite right. He seems - displeased with his empire, in various respects, he wanted it to be Good but that's not how the world works. ...he wanted it to be dath ilan but without the blowing up other universes, that feels closer. He wanted to build dath ilan and feels faintly embarrassed he has this instead, never mind that Carissa personally feels safer here than in dath ilan.

She understands this place. It works the way places are supposed to work.

Altarrin can't get any detail on that just from glancing at her expressions and body language out of the corner of his eye! He can tell that she's slightly tense, but - less than before, he thinks? She seems less disoriented; like someone who has a plan, like she's found a surface to stand on even if she isn't very confident in its ongoing solidity under her. 

(While he's casting, he holds very still, and looks very focused, his face expressionless.) 

He finishes a couple of sham artifacts in just over ten minutes. Metal instead of the more usual quartz or other precious stones, he used some random previously-non-magical rings for the base – they're not the right metal, he didn't have any samples of that here, so it definitely won't pass a close inspection by a metalworking-specialist mage, but even specialist mages won't know how to directly run magic through it to check, like Carissa does, and it should pass for a brief glance.

The patterns of trapped mage-energy he's thrown on won't actually do anything; each piece is roughly just a weirdly "shaped" power storage component that isn't actually hooked to a Velgarth-style set-spell. It doesn't look that much like Carissa's spells or her magic items, he can't figure out how to feed mage-energy in a way that actually stabilizes like that and so he's faking it, but he's done his best to make it resemble the elegant stable-loops structure of her magic - about as complicated as the language-translation spell, though otherwise not matching it very closely - and overpowered it until it looks about as 'bright' to mage-sight as the least powerful of her current magic items. 

He shifts his weight and stretches, mostly to give Carissa some warning that he's finished; she's jumpy, for very understandable reasons, and he would rather not startle her if he can avoid it. Then he stands, and crosses the room to offer the two fake-magic rings to her. "How does this look? It will definitely not be convincing to you, or to close inspection by an expert mage; I think for now we should just avoid having you 'use' them when in the company of expert mages. We might be able to avoid needing them at all, if we can arrange for you to refresh spells while in my room." 

"That's my intent, but it's good to have something for emergencies. Thank you." She examines them with Detect Magic. They don't look like they could possibly work but her understanding is that all her spells look that way, to the locals, and vice versa. 

(Well, Altarrin is pretty sure that with enough study, it would be obvious to him why Carissa's spells and items are stable and can be discharged at will, and maybe even why they have the effects they do. But he thinks that these might have slipped past his own past self, when he was rushed and distracted, and Altarrin is, by a significant margin, the most skilled and thoroughly trained mage in the world right now. He thinks it should get by for now. It doesn't have to be convincing forever.) 

He nods. "Ready to Gate back? We need not leave my rooms immediately, necessarily, but at least if someone tries to contact me, I will be where I am supposed to be." 

She nods and takes his hand without thinking, that being how to share a Teleport in her own magic system.

....That is not how Gates work, but Altarrin doesn't need both hands to raise one (he doesn't really need gestures as a concentration-aid at all, with the level of practice he's accumulated.) 

He raises a Gate. 

And then they're back in his bedroom suite. It's been a little over two hours, Altarrin thinks, and it looks exactly like it did when they left. The shields are, at a glance, intact. 

Altarrin almost immediately heads to the bed and sits down, with enough dignity that it doesn't much look like he's collapsing in exhaustion. ...And then, despite the tickle of a reaction-headache (two long-distance Gates, one of them an emergency unscaffolded Gate and correspondingly less efficient, is enough to tire him), he examines the wards and shields and various even subtler tripwires and passive detection-webs set up to notice interference. Most are set to trigger alarms that will alert him directly if anyone tries to enter his bedroom by force (and the servants know not to attempt it.) It's not impossible that some of the mages at court are skilled enough to have bypassed that, but he should still be able to catch signs of it after the fact. 

"I am almost certain that no one has been in here," he says after a minute or so. "Not that there would have been much to find if they had, but it would tell us that someone was investigating more closely." Shrug. "I assume you are more than ready for the challenge of acting as though we slept together, though you can decide how exactly you want to play it." 

"I don't think I'll raise suspicion, no, and I can be consistent with how I'd have taken it in case anyone read my mind while I was brought here.You have some kind of shield I can employ while I'm learning to block mindreading?"

Altarrin isn’t incredibly in the mood to stand up. He can unlock magical locks and dispel wards on his storage-cabinet from a distance.

“Over there - left side, the second drawer. Should have my spare talismans against Thoughtsensing. It - will not be the first time I have given one out, but it is less common - your unusual “Wild Gift” would explain it, if I were being secretive, but might prompt more curiosity, so…should consider if I wish to instead act as though you have found some kind of leverage and extracted a favor, I think that is at least less suspicious than pretending I have suddenly become sentimental and fallen deeply in love…” 

His expression is so tired, in a way that has nothing to do with Gate-exhaustion. 

This isn't actually something Carissa's good at, court politics, but it's something she certainly aspires to be good at and respects others' talent in, and it doesn't bother her at all because she does not wish this place was dath ilan. "You can have one of my Wild-Gift artifacts, suggest we traded, or does that invite too much curiosity?"

"- Oh, that would be believable enough. Are there any you are actually comfortable parting with?" 

"Not happily, but I'll manage without the Ring of Sustenance, or you could make a fake one I'll replace with a real one as soon as I have the spellsilver. ...I'm not trained in rings. As soon as I have the spellsilver and a couple days to figure out rings, it can't be hard."

Frown. "I am not going to manage a fake that will pass more than a cursory inspection, and while I can keep you away from my mages with expertise in artifact-making work, it would be both costly and suspicious to avoid them myself. But - am I remembering correctly that the ring will not actually work for me? It seems - wasteful, as well as very costly to you." 

"The pin, maybe?" She's even more protective of her ability to lie to people than her ability to go without food and with less sleep, but it's probably pointless anyway with the mindreading. "The pin'll work for you."

(Well, she won't be mindread without her knowledge, she has the shield. And she's an excellent actress. Altarrin thinks that maybe the pressure to learn to lie convincingly is even higher in Cheliax than in the Eastern Empire.) 

"That would be an option." He eyes it. "Is it also something you can make a replacement for? And it will work again for you immediately if I return it? If it comes up, I could arrange to give it to you for anything especially high-stakes, and avoid anyone who would recognize a fake." 

"I can make a replacement, I invented it in the first place. - the spell doesn't settle, wizards can't prepare it, so people figured you couldn't do it in an artifact even though that's different." It is probably a good idea to brag a little, lest he get ideas about the ease of replacing her once he has some wizards.

Which earns her a smile - brief, and tired, but genuine. "That is impressive, even if it perhaps speaks poorly of the other artifact-makers in your world that nobody thought to check their assumptions. - Unless it is common for powerful wizards to develop techniques and then keep them secret, that could also explain it." He nods. "I think this trade would be the best option to minimize suspicion." 

She hands him her pin. "I think I can answer questions convincingly, then, if no one's reading my mind."

And she can have the talisman against Thoughtsensing! "Nobody will be especially suspicious if you tend to be terse, and - you have a language spell that only does comprehension, right? I would somewhat prefer to reserve the full translation spell for smaller meetings with engineering experts, so it would not be suspicious at all if any larger occasions where you appear were ones where you were unable to speak. And it fits well with how we intuitively expect Gifts to work, I think, passive Thoughtsensing is much cheaper than Mindspeaking someone without the Gift." 

"That should work. I can keep comprehension up more or less all day, anyway, and I can't speak all day. 

Summarizing, so you can correct my errors before they're costlier: I'm from a secretive mage-school in Aksell, I have a Wild Gift that lets me make unique magic items, when my mage school suffered a violent takeover I Gated to the Empire using one of my items because I thought they'd permit me to continue my magic research. I also know how to use my items to understand, but not to speak, the local language, and I have a few more on hand the uses of which I will refuse to specify. I traded you one of my unique items for protection from Thoughtsensing. I'm your political prisoner, mostly confined to your chambers, and at least for the time recovering from my ordeal and not doing much interesting. - and we're sleeping together."

He listens intently. Looks thoughtful. 

...Nods, but makes a bit of a face, at the last bit. It's not quite the same apology-head-duck as before; it's flatter, more tired and sad. 

"Note that I may want you to have the full comprehension-and-speaking version at some points," he says. "In private, but with people who I do not trust with the entire truth. I - would select for people who will keep uninteresting secrets, if incentivized to do so, and it would not be very suspicious to claim that you can use your Wild Gift, at higher cost, to create a shorter-lasting but more powerful translation effect, and that I am reserving this for important and trustworthy people only."

Altarrin pauses. 

(He's thinking that obviously making full use of Carissa's actual magical abilities, and even moreso her engineering knowledge from dath ilan, will require working with people who are fully in on the secret. There are enough people whose loyalties he trusts - and not just loyalties, being personally loyal isn't enough for something like this, but there are still enough people whose reasoning ability he trusts as well. And it's not enough, not to maintain a secret like this for longer than weeks to months, even if they make the incredibly costly tradeoff of not using any of what they learn from her at a larger scale. There are very few people who meet all the criteria of personal loyalty to Altarrin plus the necessary curiosity and general reasoning style, and sufficient political adroitness and existing political allies to avoid being mindread or compulsioned by a – he still doesn't want to call them enemies – a non-ally.

He doesn't want to say all of that to Carissa, just yet, because she's scared, and at least some of that is for reasons that don't apply here - whatever its failures, the Eastern Empire isn't Cheliax - and he may not be incredibly skilled at this game, but he's managed to notice that a scared Carissa is a Carissa who tries to be small, and - she's from a world with afterlives, arriving in a world without them, she's under enough pressure already... 

He's still mildly frustrated with the part where they have to pretend to be sleeping together. Moreso than usual. He's not sure why.) 

He made the face again. Why'd he make the face again. Does it fit with the pattern of previous faces? This feels like an opportunity to test her 'he is embarrassed his empire isn't dath ilan' theory, which is an important one to test because her life depends on this relationship right here and Altarrin needs to make sense.

"If you'll forgive me, my lord," she says, already missing the Glibness pin, "I get the sense that you would much sooner have shown me an Empire where a man can't corner a woman into sex even if he's the second most powerful person in the Empire and she committed a capital crime in his living room, and - well, firstly, it is possible to build places like that but it's so expensive, so much of you would've gone into that rather than anything else, including probably things that are a lot more important specifically for the cause of women not getting cornered, if you care about that in particular! I feel almost as if I landed on a road used by three wagons a day and you're embarrassed it isn't paved - that's probably the product of the correct decisions about which roads to pave! I promise I'm not evaluating your hospitality by whether you expended a lot of resources on something not very useful and I'd probably be judging you if you had.

- and secondly, even if you were as rich as dath ilan and accordingly had all the roads paved and it made perfect sense to have configured your entire society so there's no one in Civilization who can corner a girl no matter what she did - and that's what Keltham would say it's like in dath ilan, I suspect - well, probably that's objectively better for most people or something but I personally would be perfectly miserable about it, so if you're wishing on my behalf that's what you'd built you'd better wish it on behalf of other people instead because I like places like this and I like games like this, if only there were some goddamned afterlives so everything didn't have unreasonable stakes."

....Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. Altarrin is sort of wishing he had the headband again, just to keep track of all the different layers of things to unpack. 

He also feels very tired. 

"I would, in fact, prefer an Empire where everyone felt safe. I realize that - powerful men having leverage over less-powerful women that they can convert into sexual favors - is not even the worst way in which people are unsafe in Empire as it is now. I am very strongly against the dynamic where men in general can assume they have that power over women in general, because that pattern is very bad for mage-productivity and team research given that half of our mages are female, so it is actually costly to my goals, and I think the Empire is much better on this front than many other places - but, you are right, building a culture where someone in my position would not have significant leverage over someone in your position is - pushing a great deal against an equilibrium, and I should not and have not prioritized that over the problems that affect more people and hurt them more badly." 

Sigh. 

"...I do not, in fact, especially want to have that much leverage over you. I cannot deny that it would be convenient if you did not share my goals and were likely to harm my Empire if you could, but - I think that you do share my goals, at least where it matters. I wish to work with you as an ally, and an equal; I want you to think your own thoughts, and make bold plans, and tell me when I am wrong. I cannot ask you not to be afraid that any misstep might destroy you, the world is...not, in fact, safe, and there are no afterlives, and I cannot even promise for sure that if you die I will win someday and get you back because I am not sure I can do that...but I wish that at the very least you need not be afraid of me." 

A slight shrug. "Also I am not sure if it is important, just - I am not confused about why you would be miserable in dath ilan, but I am very confused about why you would be miserable about specifically the part where no one, no matter their relative positions and power, has leverage they can use to hurt anyone else. I assume you do not prefer to be cornered by powerful men." 

Carissa has the poorly timed realization that she has absolutely no idea what she would want about sex or like about it if she was safe and assured of her continued safety, and decides not to share important intimate facts about her psychology with this man who after all she met yesterday.