Ellitrea can work with that.

It would help to know what his real plan is, and the timeline on it. She assumes Altarrin has an outline sketched out, even if he hasn't had time to fill in the mandatory eight layers of contingency-plans – and obviously now isn't a good time to get the full explanation, when he's busy and distracted, but how long he wants them to aim for keeping the secret, versus how fast he wants to push for using more of Carissa's full knowledge and abilities, probably will affect some of the planning that he's delegating to her. 

(Well, he may or may not end up deciding to stay in the Eastern Empire at all for all that long. But that is definitely not a conversation to have via Mindspeech at a distance, while he's also trying to ask Carissa appropriately subtly-flirtatious questions about her "country of origin" while also remembering to telegraph the answers if anyone spying on them might be able to check.

He keeps that - and most of his other ambient thoughts - tucked away behind his shields, and is very careful about what and how much he pushes across to Ellitrea) 

He's going to need to work on a large scale, to take full advantage of Carissa's abilities. He doesn't know what exactly they'll need to do or how, yet, but - he's definitely going to need competent people, loyal to him, who can be trusted with the full story of what they know so far.

...He's not really expecting the secret to hold for more than six months, but he definitely needs a minimum of one month to lay the groundwork. Which means it's all right to bring people in who are personally loyal to Altarrin or have strong incentives in that direction, and where there's no specific reason to expect that an opposed figure at court will single them out and lay compulsions to learn all their secrets, but - it's acceptable to bring in people who can't necessarily defend against that, if Ellitrea expects they can manage to avoid attention. 

(Altarrin would actually be very surprised if this held for more than a couple of months. And one week would be enough, probably, assuming that no other bizarre events happen but that's a dangerous sort of assumption to start making.) 

In terms of which skills he needs, mostly mages? Mage-engineers in particular. He would prefer to work with the sort of mage who has little interest in the broader political landscape and will focus entirely on a new interesting problem - not all of the mages loyal to him match that description, but many do, and Ellitrea knows which ones. 

That being said, he does need some people who can focus on the court politics side of things, track the rumors and scheming. And report to him, of course, but also be capable enough to make urgent decisions independently, because Altarrin expects to be too busy for that. - A woman, if possible, because ideally she could explain things to Carissa, and he thinks Carissa will learn more from a woman and would be more distracted by a man. He can think of several potential candidates, but Ellitrea may be more up-to-date and certainly has more time to think; he'll leave it to her. 

Altarrin is very clearly holding back quite a lot of potentially very important pieces.

...That's fine. He's probably right if he thinks it's safer for her not to know. Ellitrea is a Mindspeaker and can shield her thoughts and detect compulsions on her, but that doesn't make her immune to non-magical forms of leverage. 

There are plenty of options for mages, and most of those who responded to the initial emergency are among the potential candidates; this isn't a coincidence, obviously, but it's convenient. 

For the last thing... She should put Ledia on it, the girl is loyal enough to Altarrin, and disinclined to ask too many questions about the weirder aspects here – and she's a young  nobleborn mage just recently out of the Hall of Learning, who knows the ins and outs of the social cliques among the young ambitious mages at court (who, with mage-sight, are most likely to notice something in conflict with Altarrin's cover story for Carissa.) But she's also nineteen, and, well, Carissa won't like her, she's - not frivolous exactly, but not nearly cynical enough... 

Betril would do better on that front, except that he's not that deeply loyal to Altarrin, and also not a woman... 

Merda, maybe? She's not Gifted, but if anything that's a benefit, she's by default below the notice of anyone who is. She was one of Altarrin's protégés, which is why she didn't come to mind first - it's a potential hint for watchful eyes that Altarrin is playing at something here - but that was twenty years ago, most of the watchful eyes have short attention spans.

And Merda is a good pick in other ways. She made her way to the capital by scoring highly on the civil service examination, despite her lack of noble blood, and she - may have had her fumbles at first, but if anything, it might just have taught her a deeper cynicism about the Empire. She's certainly organized enough to keep track of everything that Altarrin wants to know. 

And her loyalty - isn't totally unquestioned, she might betray Altarrin if it were in her interests, but it's been twenty years and she hasn't done it yet. 

Once she's passed some brief updates to those of Altarrin's mages who already know that something happened yesterday, Ellitrea summons a page and sends a note to Merda, asking her to please urgently bring some records from the Archives to a particular mage's office. 

(It's a code. The mage in question is one of Altarrin's people, he works on sewage-purification spells and is of little interest to anyone, and the unusually thorough shields on the Work Room are because he runs tests on potentially disease-causing raw sewage – if anyone thought to check, which they haven't, it's a coincidence that they also block scrying.)

Merda believed in the Empire, once. The Empire gave her a lot to believe in. The minor nobles for whom her mother was a nursemaid noticed that Merda could read when she was only three, and said she ought to be educated, that she could pass the examinations, that she could rise as far as she was intelligent and hardworking, and she spent every waking moment of fourteen years of her life studying, and she passed, and she came to the imperial court perfectly versed in the Empire's law, and history, and poetry, and regulatory notices, and eager to rise through her brilliance and determination and obedience and loyalty. 

That lasted around three weeks, and for twenty years she's been a touch more realistic about what it takes to survive around here. It's Altarrin who fished her out of her initial trouble, not that she acknowledges a debt of any kind. (She does acknowledge that the time she tried to bite him was unwarranted.)

If you're Gifted, like Altarrin, maybe then you can afford to say all the things he likes to say. If you aren't, then the real rule of the Empire is to have friends, or to have blackmail material, or ideally both, and to arrange your protection from as many angles as possible so you don't lose your footing when one of them dies.

She brings some records from the archives to the office at once. 

Ellitrea passes on some more messages. She assigns someone to giving Ketar a homework assignment (to mindread some of the not-relevantly-shielded people involved in the project as well as various other people who shouldn't learn things where it should be immediately flagged if they get suspicious, since he already knows more sensitive details than he's likely to pick up that way.) She blocks in a time for Ketar to receive a full briefing later this afternoon; she'll make it if she can, otherwise she'll delegate it. 

She lets Altarrin know that several of his mages will be ready to meet him in twenty minutes, which should give a clerk directly loyal to her long enough to finish helpfully taking down notes for the mage-engineer who interviewed Carissa yesterday. She'll send a page with a note summoning Altarrin to a meeting; it's less suspicious than a communication-spell summons. 

She goes to meet Merda, reaching out ahead with Mindspeech to warn the mage whose Work Room they're borrowing. It's only polite. He'll arrange to have some work to bring in that might plausibly require a Work Room, an assistant who can do concert-rapport and share reserves even if she isn't mage-gifted, and a scribe. (It's a spacious Work Room with multiple sections; he can put up a sound-barrier and work on whatever he feels like.) 

...It's taking more effort than she expected to figure out how to explain this to Merda so it doesn't sound like some kind of bizarre and implausible ruse. 

Twenty minutes. Altarrin tucks a lock of Carissa's hair behind her ear. (He's overdue on casually touching her; the Mindspeech conversation was distraction.) He suggests she try the blackberry jam with their breakfast - she's probably never had it before, blackberries don't grow in the south. 

He wishes he had managed to invent a communication-spell to target the un-Gifted. Mostly so he could warn Carissa that the upcoming interruption was planned, but also because this conversation is tedious and it would be much better if they could hold a more interesting private conversation in parallel, like he could if she were a Mindspeaker or a fellow mage. 

She meets Merda at the mage's office. His muttered excuse for summoning them here would be deeply unconvincing to Altarrin, or to any mage who had read the first three pages of a mage-engineering book on sewer-work. Ellitrea might have worried about that if Altarrin had asked for ten years maintaining this cover story, but he didn't even ask for one year. 

They duck into the Work Room. 

"- Altarrin has a new project," she says, as soon as their host is off in his corner. (She can't see the sound-barrier directly, but he doesn't shield against Thoughtsensing.) "He wants you to–" 

And she hesitates. 

"...He asked me to find someone who could be trusted with the secret - and it is a very powerful secret - and who could manage all of the court intrigue related to it, and report to him whatever he needs to know. He did not specify you. I trust you with it, but it is unusually likely to draw attention and may - probably will - be dangerous, at some point, for anyone involved. Do you want to be involved?" 

(The answer is going to be yes, almost certainly. But Ellitrea still feels better giving her the option - and, besides, Merda can't shield out her Thoughtsensing, and her thoughts might be informative.) 

Favors for Altarrin are safer than favors for most people; he'll repay them, and she's yet to observe him arranging to dispose of people once they're inconvenient. 

They're not safe, but then, little is, and knowing more is generally safer than knowing less. "Yes."

Good enough. Ellitrea nods. 

"About two days ago, a woman appeared suddenly in his office. She believes she is from a different world, with different magic - including magical artifacts that can make people cleverer, and she was wearing one of those - and also with different gods. She was from a kingdom that served a god of evil that she had renounced, but shorter after Altarrin captured her, she tried to pray to other gods, ones who she - thought might help." 

(This is a terrible summary, Ellitrea was distracted at the time, but that's fine, it's not the point. She has very little idea how Merda feels about gods, and it seems like it might be important.)

Gods are just powerful beings that don't repay their favors, and illegal besides. Merda is mostly ignoring that to boggle at 'from a different world with different magic'. There are other worlds? How would there be other worlds - like, where would they be? Why didn't anyone know about them? Why Altarrin's office?

Why Altarrin's office indeed! It's not like Ellitrea has a better explanation there!

Other worlds are presumably like the Elemental Planes, presumably, or the Void, except...further. A lot further, or else some clever mage - Altarrin, probably - would have found them first. 

"Altarrin was understandably alarmed. We kept her unconscious while he sought out information on the gods she had named in her thoughts - we had not, at this point, fully put together that she was from another world. When he failed to find any information on them, we woke her, while keeping her under a number of compulsions, and questioned her. She was - very frightened, very eager to be cooperative - in the country she was from, being captured after accidentally teleporting into a palace would have gone very badly for her."

Pause.

"We learned that she already knew that multiple worlds existed, because several months earlier a young man from a third world had mysteriously appeared in hers. His world had very advanced non-magical engineering and science, but no magic and no gods, at least not that he was aware of. Though he might not have known - on the orders of a mysterious elite order, his civilization had destroyed all records of their history." 

She is at this point pretty sure this is in fact an elaborate test of some kind. She nods patiently nonetheless. 

- if it's real, Altarrin would be willing to do that to get rid of the gods. He dislikes them even more than the politically encouraged amount which is a lot.

Ellitrea hides a shiver. She doesn't think that's what Altarrin is planning, but - he would, if he thought it would work. 

"Unfortunately her world - she calls it Golarion - may be in danger of being destroyed, because apparently the third world, which is called dath ilan, has a philosophy that worlds that contain more than a certain amount of suffering are better off not existing and should thus be destroyed. You can ask her about it later if you want, I really did not follow the reasoning. Anyway, she thinks it is unlikely we would be able to reach dath ilan or Golarion from here and this will probably not affect us in any way. Altarrin may try to research ways to rescue her world anyway, but I think his main focus is going to be making use of her magic, which has some very powerful capabilities like enhancing intelligence. In the meantime, our public story is that she is Altarrin's political prisoner, after having fled a mage-school in Aksell. We are claiming she has a Wild Gift for an unusual form of artifact-making." 

A slight sigh. "Keeping the secret is going to take some maintenance, and Altarrin needs as much warning as possible if it is about to leak. I want you to be one of the people monitoring rumors at court. And Altarrin's prisoner - her name is Carissa - is going to need an introduction to local politics, so she can navigate it herself without slipping up." 

It's not an impossible secret to keep, even in this nest of vipers, mostly because it's so ridiculous that anyone who stumbles across it will think it's another layer of a game (it quite likely is). A Wild Gift makes more sense.  

The obvious question is what Altarrin's playing for. He has everything she understood him to want. The obvious thing to try is a coup, and he doesn't seem the type but - but then anyone who isn't an idiot wouldn't seem the type. She can imagine Altarrin's reaction: he'd tell her, serious and grave and innocent, that there's nothing he'd have as Emperor he doesn't have already, and it seems true, but - if not that, then what. 

"What's the girl like?" She can half guess already. Altarrin has a type.

Ellitrea considers this for a few moments. 

"Very intelligent, very skilled at what she does. Impatient with people less intelligent or skilled than her. Very...survival-oriented, I suppose, and adaptable, she was immediately tracking what resources and allies would make her safer here. Very - mentally flexible, is I think how I would describe it, she is willing and able to use very different strategies depending on where she is and what she can pull off. ...Capable of ambition and - dedication to her ideals, I might call it - to a rather startling extent, in the right circumstances. Her mysterious arrival here was shortly after she had come up with a plan to personally fight the particularly obnoxious god in charge of her country. I think Altarrin approves." 

Merda thinks it sounds like the last thing they need. Much better if the girl takes her ambitions down about ten notches and aspires to not cause a civil war. "I'll see what I can do. Where's he holding the girl?"

Well, Carissa seems to have scaled down her ambitions right now. She's in a new environment, with new constraints; she's going to play it conservatively at first.  

...Or at least that was Ellitrea's previous impression. But Altarrin hasn't even begun to explain what he really spent the last several candlemarks doing, and Ellitrea has a worried feeling about just how disruptive Carissa's arrival is eventually going to be. She can't even mindread Carissa to check, and that's separately concerning, it feels - out of character - for Altarrin to leap so quickly to offering her a talisman against Thoughtsensing, well before the point when it would be necessary to prevent the secret leaking. 

"In his quarters, right now. I am inclined to send you there to meet her in a few minutes, once Altarrin leaves for his next appointment, I want your read on her. You can be there ostensibly to fill her in on our trade customs and property and contract law, she had questions about this yesterday." 

Property and contract law? 

"All right." She's assuming Ellitrea will be mindreading Carissa, because obviously that's what's going to be actually informative, and that she'll occasionally be fed prompts for what to ask Carissa; they've done that before. 

Siiiiiiiiiiiiigh. "I am not going to be able to mindread her. Altarrin for some reason gave her a talisman to block Thoughtsensing. If you can come up with some guesses of what might be going on with him, I would also appreciate that." 

Well, fuck.

The obvious possibilities, which she's sure Ellitrea has already thought of and which she's not going to say aloud, even here behind shields: the girl has some way of controlling Altarrin with her unfamiliar magic, one they can't detect, and is puppetting him. (Variants: blackmailing him. Seduced him.) The girl and Altarrin have some plan that Altarrin wants to keep even from Ellitrea, which would almost certainly be a play to be Emperor. Altarrin has done something to the girl which he thinks even Ellitrea, who has no complaints about his tastes or about extensive compulsions, would object to.

A play to be emperor seems likeliest, because it didn't seem all that unlikely to start. She's steering carefully, now, around the compulsions that'd oblige her to report that if she suspected it. She has no grounds for suspicion; Altarrin is himself subject to the same restriction; if he were to take the throne, it'd be for the good of the empire, which she's obliged to serve even above the person of the Emperor. And it might not be that. 

"Do you know that the girl's magic wouldn't permit getting to him once they were alone?" she asks neutrally.

"...It could in theory. She would have had to be very good at hiding it in her own thoughts without appearing to hide anything, but - she might have that skill, she was accustomed to being mindread by her superiors and nonetheless managed to form a plan that I am fairly sure would have counted as treason. I - would be moderately surprised if she could get past all of Altarrin's usual precautions, if she could work around our shielding I think she would have considered different options where I could see it, or at least considered that she had different options. I suppose she could have convinced him to remove some of his protective artifacts, but it would have required an actual argument." 

"Hmmm." She tries to imagine it. Altarrin is different, in private, behind the unscryable walls of his suite. Not less paranoid, but less - hard-edged. Earnest and apologetic, or at least much more inclined to appear that way. Persuadable to take off some of his magical precautions? Maybe if she had a good enough explanation. Maybe if she played him just right. 

"This all seems very risky," she says after a moment. "I'll keep an eye on rumors for you, I'll tell you what people are saying, I'll warn him if they're saying too much. But I don't care to go near someone who you can't read who is playing a game I don't know." And if you all get strung up for treason I want to be able to say I never met the girl.

BIGGER sigh. 

"I need to discuss that with Altarrin, then, since I think he wants us to trust her, and right now it would be stupid to trust her, especially if he is not going to tell us any of his reasoning!" Shrug. "I would expect Carissa - which is her name, by the way - to realize she will be safer if we are not half-convinced she is scheming to sabotage Altarrin or something. And there is separately an argument that she should learn to hold native shields - talismans can be removed. Maybe I can send you over with Ketar to have her practice - he already knows quite a lot of the secret, and I want someone keeping an eye on him as well." 

"I'll be curious what Altarrin says," she says mildly. 

So is Ellitrea! 

She reaches out with Mindspeech again. (Her head twinges. Mindspeech at range, to someone un-Gifted, is hard to begin with, and she's keyed to Altarrin's outer room-shields but that doesn't make it effortless to push through them.) 

:Altarrin, I am assigning Merda to keep track of court rumors and instruct Carissa in navigating the politics here. She thinks it is uncharacteristic of you to have given Carissa a way to block Thoughtsensing so early on - it would make sense if you were sending her to public functions, but none of the servants are secretly Thoughtsensers! Is it really going to destroy your working relationship with her if I send Ketar as well to have her practice shielding, and incidentally Merda and I can reassure ourselves on how far we can trust her?: 

If Altarrin says no, that's - going to be informative in itself, regardless of whether of how compelling and logical a reason he gives. He's good at giving compelling and logical reasons; it's a lot of how he's been so successful at court.