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carissa, somewhere else
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" - with your leave, my lord, I'd prepare four of Comprehend Languages, which will permit me to read in this language, and four of Owl's Wisdom, which enhance - the mind's ability to notice things, including things in itself, and four of Tongues, which I'm using to speak to you." She can prepare lots more than that but would rather maintain some capabilities in reserve.

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Which Ellitrea picks up on, of course, but for now Altarrin isn't going to press her on it. 

"Of course. Out of curiosity, can those techniques also be cast on others? I would be very curious to experience the 'Owl's Wisdom' one."

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"Yes, my lord, not all my spells, but most of them, can be cast on any willing person." Also many on unwilling people but she'd sooner not be used for that; it's not like it is necessary to use her to take over the world and it involves much more risk to her person and much more apparent benefit from killing her in particular.

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And it's very much not in his interests to antagonize the only person in the world who can use her sort of magic. Which Altarrin hopes will become obvious to her as well, if it isn't already. 

"I will definitely want to hear more about the other spells later, but for now, you can go ahead and prepare those." And presumably she knows that they'll have someone reading her mind to make sure that she's doing the ones she agreed to. 

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Then she will start building her scaffold and start hanging her spells on it. She's not going to try for fifth, even though she's close, because it'd be so embarrassing if this scaffold is messy .What if he can see it.

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Altarrin watches intently. He is probably not going to notice any sloppiness or lack thereof as notable either way, given that this is the first time he has ever seen a Golarion wizard spell prepared. 

(His attention is also already half elsewhere, trying to leap ahead to his plans - what he needs to tell the Emperor - which of his various contingency-plans he might be able to pull in...) 

During the time it takes Carissa to finish preparing her spells, his expression does not change at all. 

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And afterward, a servant arrives to alert Altarrin that the guest-room is ready, are they ready to escort his - guest - over? 

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"Do you need anything else?" Altarrin asks Carissa. 

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"Spellsilver, my lord, if you want me to make you things, or a laboratory to make it in."

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"- You do still need to convey what that is, but it might be simplest to explain it to one of our mining and ore extraction specialists," especially since he very badly needs to get back to his ordinary work. "I can send them to meet you in your new guest quarters?" 

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"That should work. Thank you."

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Half a dozen of the mage-guards jump up to escort her, apparently without coordination (it's being done via Mindspeech). 

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Altarrin doesn't. He nods to her, leaves the infirmary room ahead of her, and then walks the other way. 

(And then, of course, continues to receive reports of her thoughts in real time from Ellitrea. At least until she's reached her guest room.) 

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There are more people ambient in the hallways than when she was initially led to the infirmary. Some of them glance at her, though they mostly succeed at hiding any expressions of curiosity. 

She is not granted any obvious opportunities to escape. The extra guards pulled in after her questioning are more visibly on-edge than the ones who responded to Altarrin's urgent call for backup, but the guards loyal to Altarrin are clearly very used to working together, and vigilant enough not to leave her any openings. The hallways are blanketed in protective magic and wards. 

(If Carissa is paying attention, it might be noticeable that all of the guards are under several layers of compulsions; they're much lower-powered than Golarion enchantments, and have the same freeform, less structured feeling as all of the magic.) 

Her guest room is much more ostentatious than the infirmary, with a thick rug, polished walnut furniture, wall tapestries, and permanent mage-lights that can be controlled by verbal commands. The bedroom contains an enormous four-poster bed with curtains for privacy. The bathroom has indoor plumbing with hot and cold water, not obviously magical at this end, and she can use different verbal commands to heat or cool the room to her comfort. There's a skylight set into the ceiling, thoroughly reinforced with more protective spells. The walls and the door are girded with detection wards (some of them hastily added in the last half-hour or so based on instructions from Altarrin, who had the best look at Carissa's Gaseous Form spell.) Two of the guards station themselves outside the door. 

Someone has already delivered a stack of books for her and left it on a writing-desk set against the wall under the skylight. 

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She's not expecting escaping today to work very well. She's trying not to think about when escaping might work. It's probably not even a good idea. The Archmage seems to be an unusually safe person to be the prisoner of, and it's possible she landed on him for a reason. 

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She would still kind of like to have more information than she does at present on what he wants. But, well, there are lots of things she'd like to have and that's not even likely to be the most survival-critical. 

 

She will...sit at the desk and start writing up descriptions of spellsilver refining processes. Keltham would be worrying about intellectual property; she's not. She is worried about not rendering herself more disposable, but in the short term, she won't teach anyone the Prestidigitation trick and in the long term she'll just have to figure out what makes people disposable here.

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If this were an earlier era in the history of the Eastern Empire, there might be enough mage-Thoughtsensers that Altarrin could select someone brilliant and experienced at magical research to eavesdrop on their visitor's mind. Just to learn more, faster. If at all possible he would still compensate her later for anything he learned that way, of course - and it's not even that he doesn't trust her to share her knowledge, it's clearly up to him to give her the right incentives and he's confident he can do that– 

 

It's the present era, though, when he has only a small handful of Thoughtsensers and Ellitrea is exhausted, and so Carissa's current thoughts, whatever they are, will go unobserved. There's no point in dwelling on it. 

Altarrin is still having a stupidly difficult time focusing on his neglected work. He keeps finding himself sending over more instructions to the guards via the communication-spell artifact. Even though he's not worried that their 'political prisoner' is going to try to run away.

...He's worried about her safety. Which, on the surface, makes very little sense - she's in the Palace behind all of the usual protective wards and then some, he has guards who he personally trusts watching her, and hardly anyone knows that she exists let alone how interesting and potentially valuable she is.

It's just– well, he's failed to save a lot of people. And it's feeling very salient, right now, that the people he's failed to save are disproportionately those who left him feeling the way he does right now, about this woman from another world. That she's bringing something new to the table, that he's never met anyone quite like her before - that there are a hundred different plans he could start to prepare, but he wants to wait, because they'll be better plans once he earns her trust and can have her input. 

 

Altarrin is pretty sure that it's unstrategic to let this distract him, right now. Their visitor is very hard to kill or even injure badly, he's seen that himself, and he has no reason to think that the gods can respond quickly to something like this. 

....He still hasn't properly slept since yesterday, which is predictably not going to help.

He passes on a few more contingency-orders to his mages. Writes a report, locked with magic so that only the Emperor can read it. Catches up on the most desperately urgent tasks in his backlog.

And then puts up some additional wards and shields on his office, pulls out a bedroll, and falls asleep on the floor. 

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They leave Carissa alone for almost forty minutes, which is about the length of time it takes for another sufficiently strong Thoughtsenser to be pulled away from his other duties, and for Ellitrea to brief him. 

 

Forty minutes or so later, someone knocks on the door to her guest room. 

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She's finished a spellsilver shopping list, spent a while staring at all the spells on her surroundings, and then started idly self-harming to stave off her exhaustion. She does not feel at all ready to sleep. 

 

"...come in?" she says to the knock, in case they want her permission for some reason.

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A man who looks to be in his sixties, silver-haired but still healthy and fit, comes in. 

"Delias," he says, nodding without quite bowing to her. "I invented several novel techniques for applying mage-gift to extracting metal from ore. Altarrin sent me because he says that you need some kind of metal in order to make artifacts, and you can explain to me the process you know of for mining the ore and purifying the metal?" 

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" - yes. If you can extract just the metal directly with magic, then you won't need any of the steps we use, they're all just for getting the metal to an acceptable purity. You're looking for what we call spellrock, a red/green-brownish, waxy mineral, often found in beach sands. Then we heat it with oil of vitriol, which I can make with magic from sulfur, oxygen and water, and precipitate out - how much alchemy do people know, around here -"

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His face lights up, and he glances around for something to sit on and then settles on leaning against the wall near her desk. 

"It's very helpful to know the usual non-magical steps, to figure out an efficient magical process! We have so many more mages now than we did when I was a little child, but not enough that we can afford to be profligate with it– oh! I might know what mineral you mean but I will have to consult the reference guide..." 

He digs in his pocket and pulls out a compact textbook, which he starts leafing through, his brows furrowed but his eyes almost glowing with excitement. 

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Carissa is not remotely under the impression that if the person you're talking to seems to an adorable researcher-type it's because that is what they're really like. Nor is she remotely under the impression that it's safe to share secrets that make you more disposable if you're sharing them with happy researcher-types. But she does need to prove she's worthwhile, and so she will happily play along.

Do they know the theory of electrons, it helps predict how alchemical reactions are going to go and explains what's going on when you get spellsilver hydroxides. 

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It takes a while to get on the same page, despite the translation-spell and Delias's sheer enthusiasm; it seems like this world has a different ontology around chemistry than either Golarion or dath ilan, presumably because of their different magic. And their scholarship is...noticeably less advanced even compared to Golarion. Delias has several reference-books on him, all hand-copied, and all written within the last 400 years.

Eventually something that Carissa is saying seems to click, and he yells excitedly to one of the guards that he needs a copy of The Mathematical Theory Of The Material Plane by Shotivir of Lorn right now. It's apparently an old and an obscure work, given that it takes ten minutes before someone can track it down, and once they find it the book is clearly very old despite the preservation-spells laid on it. It does prove to contain some theory that roughly matches Carissa's understanding, and then Delias has more ideas for relevant reference-books to request. 

After a couple of candlemarks, Delias is very sure that he knows how to get the raw ore to her, and moderately sure he can figure out a mage-technique to extract this 'spellsilver' to a high degree of purity. 

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Wow. 

They're going to put Keltham to shame. It's not at all a fair comparison. 

 

 

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