And then he forces himself to head back to the infirmary, which feels dangerous in a way where he has to override centuries of engrained instincts. But it won't help to run away, and so he doesn't. 

He's had some time to think about what compulsions he needs to prevent someone from taking the purely mental action of praying to their god. It's probably overkill, his Thoughtsenser wasn't actually sure if the woman was an established worshipper of any of the gods she named - except for the one called 'Irori' but apparently she isn't anymore and he has very little information on how that impacts a person's ability to summon a god's attention. Really, the main information they have is that the woman, herself, thought this was a plan that might plausibly succeed. 

She's not going to be very functional when they wake her up. Which means this isn't a long term solution. They need to get answers, figure out what this woman's goals are and whether she can be convincingly persuaded to not pray to her god or gods. Conducting an interrogation with someone who doesn't share a language and is under a seriously impairing suite of compulsions isn't going to be easy. 

Carissa will wake up in the same place she went to sleep. She's not hungry or thirsty, thanks to the Ring of Sustenance. Her body feels slightly stiff, as though she's been in the same position for a long time. 

And she's under an absurd and very noticeable degree of mind control, her head suddenly full of walls, directions where her thoughts are barred from going. 

Well that's terrifying and horrible -

- no. If they want her to be unable to think, then she'll be unable to think, that's fine. She'll learn what thoughts are allowed and only have those and then it won't be so bad. She will not have a breakdown, even purely internally, about what kinds of torture are locally preferred.

(Everyone who went to Abaddon because they wanted to stop existing must feel like such a dumbass afterwards when they land somewhere worse than Cheliax, though.)

If the thought is permitted all the way through, she thinks that she is grateful about how she apparently still exists and will be very very obedient.

Ellitrea, who was dragged out of bed and has not really had a chance to sleep since then either since she was on duty to check if the Healer's sleep-technique failed, tries not to show any of her distress as she relays this to Altarrin. 

"Tell her that she can sit up." The compulsions won't strictly prevent that, but they might prevent her from noticing that she can, or she may just be too afraid of startling them. Which is fair enough. "You can offer her some water, and then tell her that -" 

He pauses, thinking quickly through how best to frame it. 

"- tell her that we have seen no indication she wishes harm to anyone here, and that we would prefer not to operate on hostile terms, but that we were alarmed by her thoughts of praying to various gods, and are now very concerned about the goals of whichever Power arranged to send her here." 

This can be relayed in Mindspeech. 

She sits up. 

If Abadar and Irori and Iomedae are banned here obviously she won't pray to them. She might have a hard time picking up the state religion - it's not disobedience, it's an unfortunate tradeoff with the mental techniques for headbandmaking - but she can easily avoid participating in any banned ones. 

(Lawful Evil country? It almost has to be; Chaotic Evil wouldn't have her in a furnished prison cell with people communicating that they're going to place the standard compulsions, and Lawful Neutral doesn't ban Abadar.)

(She had previously concluded she was probably on a different planet but her thoughts aren't really going through right now to line this up as an objection to her previous guesswork.)

All of this continues to be extremely confusing. Unfortunately, Altarrin is aware that the compulsions he placed are going to make it even harder to figure out something coherent from the woman's thoughts, no matter how hard she's trying to cooperate. 

He doesn't smile at her, but he tries to keep his body language relaxed, to look calm and as non-threatening as it's feasible to look while they're keeping her prisoner. 

"We have no state religion here; worship of any god is illegal, and no temple orders are allowed. Part of our confusion here is that we have never heard of any of the gods of whom you are thinking." He pauses. "Ideally, we would question you about Them and Their possible motives, in order to draw at least some tentative guesses as to which god or coalition of gods might have arranged to send you here – or whether the simplest explanation is that it was a mortal plot and no gods were involved. This may be too difficult for you to think about with the compulsions I placed on you to prevent you from actively praying to any of the gods in question. In that case, I hope we can come to an agreement where you will believably commit to not doing so, and I can remove the compulsions so that we may have this conversation more easily." 

- Rahadoum? No. They speak Taldane, there. 

But some place like it, possibly in some other time or world or something. 

She doesn't think a god sent her. Well, maybe Nethys. She doesn't think the gods she thought of earlier sent her. She can't think through why not without hitting a wall. It just doesn't seem like something they'd do. Probably whatever sent her here is what sent Keltham to Golarion? She can't think what that was either. She thinks that's not the mind control and she just doesn't know but she's not sure. 

Some other time? Some other world??? 

Altarrin doesn't even have questions, yet, his thoughts are still too unformed for that. He wonders, vaguely, where and what 'Rahadoum' is. What it means. 

"If you were sent here from another world," he says, slowly, carefully, "then it is plausible you will not be able to attract the attention of the gods you know from your own world - and if so, I would not expect Them to have any ongoing influence, certainly not the usual finesse. But I am not sure enough of that yet. Are you willing to give your word that you will make no attempt to draw Their attention to this place?" 

(This is relayed.)

She won't try to reach any gods, she won't be disobedient, she won't be difficult.

In which case he will remove all of the additional compulsions! (Though not the invisible ones preventing her from executing an escape or harming anyone or sabotaging any infrastructure, etc.) It takes a minute or so, clearly going one piece at a time, and doesn't feel at all like a Break Enchantment, but Carissa's mind gradually opens again. 

Altarrin, perched on a stool by her bed, leans forward. "First. Who is 'Keltham', what sent him, and from where?" 

(Ellitrea relays this, uncomplaining, though she's getting slightly tired of this process.) 

(She has Tongues hung, if he wants her to be able to understand him or speak. It's fine if he doesn't, of course.)

Keltham appeared out of nowhere in her world. They don't know what sent him. They thought at first it might have been a coalition of the gods but it also might not have been; certainly many of the gods were working at cross-purposes about it.  He was from dath ilan. In dath ilan they have very sophisticated systems of social control and everyone's very smart and they are prosperous and doing heredity-optimization for Lawful Good. She learned from Keltham, and now knows lots of things about alchemy and mass production, at the cost of the mental techniques making it very hard to believe what you're supposed to believe. 

"Ellitrea, ask her to think in more detail about this magical technique for language translation? It would certainly be convenient, if we can confirm it is safe." 

It certainly would be! Mindspeaking someone un-Gifted gets exhausting after a while. Ellitrea cheerfully relays this request. 

Meanwhile, Altarrin is rapidly taking notes on 'dath ilan' and 'Keltham' and the limited but very intriguing context she's already conveyed. 

Tongues is third-circle single-target, twenty minutes per caster circle, allows you to understand all languages and speak them. She isn't sure what else a person could reasonably want to know about it. It's not an enchantment, it's a divination.

The entire way she thinks about magic is incredibly alien. Altarrin isn't sure how it would be possible at all to do that with magic - what's doing the work - it's especially baffling that she expects it to work even another world, that means the spell can't be accessing a set of records of translation between languages... 

"She can cast it." This is relayed. 

He watches with mage-sight, very very intently. 

Tongues. She feels so incompetent and slow and stupid though of course she's more than capable of casting Tongues. 

It's like she's releasing some absurdly complex set-spell that she had somehow stably tied up all-but-finished; it's powerful, and beautiful, and very unlike anything a mage can do. It settles around her gently. She immediately returns her hands to being clasped in her lap. 

"I can understand you now, my lord."

Altarrin watches with curiosity and awe, which he tries to conceal, more on instinct and habit than because he actually expects it to weaken his position here.

“I have a number of questions,” he says. “As do you, I am sure. Since we will have to start somewhere, I would have you start at the beginning - tell me of where you are from, of the gods you were thinking of before and their known actions in the world - and of your position in your country of origin. And then tell me about this 'Keltham''s arrival, and - a timeline of what happened between when he arrived, and - whatever led up to your sudden appearance here." 

"- yes, my lord." Wow she actually really does not want to talk about any of that. She hasn't really thought about most of it properly. 

"I'm from Cheliax. It is a kingdom in Golarion, which is the third world around its star, on the Material Plane, which is very big and has many worlds in it. Cheliax serves Asmodeus, Lawful Evil god of tyranny, slavery, and compacts. He's, uh - well." She was planning to overthrow Him and take His job.

(Ellitrea is still reading the woman's thoughts, and relays the part she leaves unspoken.) 

- Huh. Altarrin is thinking that he can respect that. And he wants, so badly, to reassure her that she's not in danger, that she's somewhere better. But it's not true, he doesn't know if he'll have the luxury of not hurting her while still keeping the Empire safe. He isn't going to make a promise that he can't keep.

(What's wrong with the world, that he might have no choice but to kill someone who isn't even trying to hurt him or the Emperor or the Empire, just because she might be a weapon aimed at a distance by a Power opposed to his goals? What does it say about his priorities?) 

"I will have more questions about Cheliax and Asmodeus later, I am sure," he says levelly. "That will do for now. Tell me about Keltham's arrival." 

"He appeared suddenly at the Worldwound - uh, there's a big hole that opens to the Abyss and demons pour out of it, I was a staff wizard with a company defending the world against it. He recalled having just died in his own world, and so he had this theory that if you die, you will experience being suddenly somewhere else in the universe; it's not that suddenly appearing people will have usually died, but, if you're going to die, you should expect suddenly appearing somewhere." She had all kinds of complicated skepticism about this position but trying to do novel thought on anthropics without her headband just seems like a waste of time. 

"He was Lawful Neutral, and he wanted to teach all dath ilan's innovations in Golarion and make a lot of money. But we thought he probably wouldn't work for Cheliax if he knew about - well, you know, all the ways a Lawful Evil country inherently is -  he was very naive - and he definitely would do something about Asmodeus if he knew about Hell. - that's the Lawful Evil afterlife. Asmodeus doesn't run it in the interests of His slaves, obviously." This is why she was going to overthrow Him. "Anyway, we deceived Keltham for three months, but then he figured it out and exercised his compacted right to depart, and I was in charge of managing the project in his absence."

Except she realized that Keltham's arrival had changed the game and they had an opening to make Asmodeus make better use of souls, and she was - fighting on the wrong side, if she wanted that to happen, she'd rather Civilization win more concessions so long as the subsequent fight didn't destroy the world - she was worried it might. Keltham is terrifyingly cavalier about destroying the world. He wouldn't be, if he knew, if she could tell him, that most places are worse, but she's guessing she can't contact him. It might be millions of years later or in an entirely different universe or both. 

"Anyway, I had some disturbing realizations that made me less useful to my superiors, decided to set myself on a more practical course and then erase my memory, and I was just doing that, from my perspective, when I wound up here, which is what I'd expect to experience happening - or really I'd expect to be stopped by Security, if that happened in a hundredth of worlds, but in worlds where the spell went off, I'd expect something like winding up here - but that doesn't at all answer your question of who sent me, it's entirely useless for answering that." None of that is going to make any sense to someone without prior exposure to ilanism. He's going to assume she's insane and a useless slave. 

"...but all of that was the product of very unusual circumstances, my lord, and until Keltham arrived I had no history of being heretical or difficult to control, and I am no longer under those unusual circumstances and will not be rebellious or difficult again."