The wizards are also watching the spellform, their eyes glowing blue with the visual effect of Greater Arcane Sight.

"That's unfortunate. I figured if there was any effect you could get from it, it would be being able to imitate 7th circle arcane spells, but it seems like it doesn't work that way. It might have gotten any further at constructing it, but you'd have to boost it by easily a hundred times that much power to span the gap and you'd blow it up a hundred times over doing it."

"I think if I wanted to make it any stronger, I would have to construct an entire new layer of the... structure, and I haven't the faintest idea where to start with that, or if it would even be enough."

"It was a bit of a long shot anyway."

Then with that completed, Kakara can go hunting for diamonds. It takes a bit, to make it clear to the sight what she's looking for, and then a bit more to sort by availability rather than number - the diamond rainstorms on Bretheda are undeniably breathtaking, but the flight out there would take hours. Also ruled out are pockets of diamonds in people's posessions, or buried underneath densely populated areas such that people might consider themselves to have property rights that encompass them. Instead, Kakara settles on a hitherto unmined collection of diamonds and surrounding rock located near a volcanic vent on the northern Arcadian sea floor and takes off.

The ocean depths of Golarion are no friend to mortals. Even if you can survive the bitter cold and crushing, lightless pressure, even if you were forewarned of the enormous wildlife that terrestrial oceans can support, you might still find yourself helpless in the face of the creatures that dwell beyond the gaze of the sun. Even the mighty Krakens and Deep Sea Serpents, so feared by those who sail upon the ocean's surface, cannot swim with impunity, and if the Alghollthus ever claimed total dominion over it such arrogance was thoroughly shattered during earthfall.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that Kakara does not encounter anything such creatures during their dive, nor can her senses detect any within a mile of her. The ocean is really big.

Well, that's convenient! She'll glow up a bit, so she can see where she's aiming, then melt her way through the rock to get her hands on the diamonds.

...probably melting the rock underwater won't do anything bad, right, there's a volcanic vent right over there? This is the kind of question that makes Kakara really wish she could just look up the answer.

After a brief check in over at the vent itself to see how quickly the ocean water bleeds off heat, Kakara melts her way through the rock as planned and starts telekinetically pulling out the diamonds. She doesn't have to - it's not like it would burn her hands, or anything - but the inefficiency isn't really a big deal with this little force being exerted and it's probably good practice. Doing so is a task that requires a lot of focus from her, though, so she'll be pretty distracted. Is anything going to try anything?

Absolutely not.

...Okay, maybe, if she spent more time at it. But in the context of Golarion's oceans, glowing tends to mean mating signalling, lures, or spell-like abilities, and everything in the immediate area is low enough on the food chain to be uncomfortable taking that kind of risk. If she sticks around for long enough some of them might try their luck? Not in the first minute, though.

No, by the time a minute passes she should be done digging up the diamonds and is just finishing up putting all the molten stone back. If that's the timeframe they're working on, she'll end up leaving uninterrupted. The rocks in her cupped hands prove no barrier to rocketing out of the ocean or the transcontinental flight, and she'll return safely, completely dry and with her cargo all accounted for.

"Delivery!"

Unfortunately, Lastwall lacks essentially all the context on that last bit.

Fortunately, they do have the context to appreciate the diamonds. They don't look like the classical Earth conception of diamonds, nor that of Golarion. Even among those gemstones intended from the start for sale only as magical components, unless you work with gemcutters or the organizations that mine the elemental plane of earth, it is astonishingly rare to see completely raw diamonds. The value of diamond dust makes sure of it; any gem seller that leaves diamond in excess of what is needed for a specific class of spell is leaving money on the table. In all but the most foolish cases, of course, that leaves a margin of error, but it tends to result in a certain few common shapes and dimensions. These don't look like that, but they are recognizably diamonds, and relatively large ones too.

One of the paladins is holding back tears, and a fair few are grappling with the fact that there's more money on the table than Lastwall tends to get in a year.

One of them does have a job to do now, though, so they'll force themself to stop staring.

"Thank you, so much; even if you had to leave now, just doing this will save thousands of lives. But between the Teleportation and us suddenly having a lot of excess diamonds, it won't be too long before Hell and Cheliax start hearing about you. We'll try to get you a wished up body before then so they can't just turn your body back with a dispel magic or antimagic field, but in the mean time we should get you loaded up with some magic items to make targeting you more expensive on their end."

Ooh, magic items! She saw some earlier in the store, but there's a difference between window shopping and things you might get to actually keep. Garenhuld doesn't really have much in the way of magic items, but they're a fairly common line in saiyan fantasy novels and in tales of Earth; there's not an exile alive who hasn't heard of Son Goku's Nyoibo or Kinto'un, to say nothing of the dragonballs.

They've got a shirt that makes you harder to cast spells on and a set of robes that make ki users stronger and harder to hit - the latter's magic apparently includes making sure flapping sleeves and the like don't get in the way of melee combat. There's goggles that let you see whether someone is good or evil ("Not completely reliable," one of them mentions, "particularly when it comes to false negatives, but should be useful until we can arrange a permanent Aura Sight and swap it out for keen vision") and some gloves that let the user make use of a variety of healing spells ("though only a limited number of charges"). There are boots that make you act faster for a minute each day and a cloak that aids in avoiding or mitigating most unusual attacks, including magical ones, hats and bracers ("we'll get to those in a minute, which one you want depends on your other choices"), and a belt that increases dexterity and endurance.

Woah.

She knew this planet had a lot of magic, and that most of the high ranking people she met with were incredibly blinged out in magical gear, but seeing them laid out for her is an entirely different experience. What about the decisions she apparently needs to make?

You can only have one of each kind of magical item; otherwise, the enchantments interfere with each other. Over the millenia since earthfall, crafters on Golarion have gotten really good at putting multiple bonuses on a given item and carefully getting different 'slots' to play nicely with other similar ones, like allowing both shirts and robes or use of a second ring without cancelling out the first, but there are still limits, and some bonuses only fit in a handful of specific slots at their modern level of skill, so if you want more than one of them you have to make tradeoffs. Specifically with her, that means Amulets, Rings, and Headbands.

"The headband choice is perhaps the simplest; you'll almost certainly be best served by a mental enhancement. The question is which one; cunning, wisdom, or splendor. Normally I would recommend wisdom for non-Paladin melee fighters, since it helps with avoiding bad decisions and making will saves, but it’s possible some of your spell like abilities or extraordinary skills scale off one of the others which might make them more valuable. There are also headbands that boost all three to a lesser extent, but typically they aren’t all equally valuable so it doesn’t make sense.”

There are four headbands on the table, each labeled with what Share Language: Taldane helpfully informs her is indeed those words.

She'll start with splendor, then, because while the other two seem pretty self explanatory she's not really sure what the connotations she's getting from the word mean. Something to due with social abilities, yes, but that's more a matter of skill and practice, and much of what isn't is things like knowing personal details about the person she's talking with. What does splendor do, that they seem to concider it one of the major components to mental ability? She ties the headband around her head, and-

It's like instinctively knowing how to walk confidently, to control your expressions, to read someone else's body language and just know what they're probably thinking. Or no, not exactly, because Kakara already knows how to do those things. She's good at communicating and understanding people and just social tasks in general, by dint of natural talent and painstaking effort. Moreover, she is aware of her own skills, both their extent and their limitations, which makes the difference obvious even before her expanded capacity to model people gets to work on self reflection. Just off the top of her head, she can think of a dozen occasions since arriving where gave an impression she didn't mean to and worsened their understanding of her, or failed to see across a cultural divide, or gave something away she didn't wish to, and sliding back into the past all the problems she had ignored, the signs of Yammar being controlled and of Maya keeping secrets and even Dandeer's insecurities. And with the same clarity towards how she appears to others comes awareness of her own emotions, of the negative feelings that have been with her since she fled Garenhuld that she's been suppressing and the fear she hasn't allowed herself to fear in its fullness or else risk stopping. It's not self reflection, exactly, but if she had to trigger the super saiyan transformation for the first time again, achieving the right mental state would be the easiest thing in the world.


Is this what it feels like for Papata Fren all the time?

She doesn't want to take it off. She never wants to take it off again, to blind herself all over again to all the ways she could resolve problems without conflict and change society for the better, to go back to flailing around in the dark after having seen at last what light looks like. But if cunning and wisdom are also strong enough to be spoken of in the same breath as splendor, she owes them all the souls suffering in hell and her people imprisoned and enslaved on Garenhuld and everyone in this universe now free but with the spectre of doom over their heads, to find out. With a hint of anguish she can't fully keep from showing, Kakara takes the headband off to try the other two.

That's more than a little concerning! But it's not that uncommon among wizards to describe taking off their headband as feeling like dying, and although it's a much rarer sentiment for splendor that is the primary casting stat of Paladins, so they have a pretty large sample size. It's not enough for them to interrupt her, not when they can't do anything to help.

Cunning is an entirely different animal. With her intelligence boosted, her thoughts come faster, almost as though she'd just powered up but with her energy staying completely quiescent. Only... that's not exactly right, it's not that she's going through the thoughts twice as quickly, it's just that her train of thought only needs to make half as many stops along the route to arrive at its destination. Like this, the instant transmission mathematics that have long since become her second nature seem trivial, as though her cached thoughts for speed of calculation are just vanity; if she wanted to jump anywhere on golarion off of a map, she's confident she could make it within a few hundred feet even accounting for the need to end up aboveground to account for elevation changes. The perfect multiform project, on which she has been stalled for months, suddenly supplies a half dozen new lines of possible investigation, and she's pretty sure if she got down to it she could figure out how to master Jaffur's and Tabe's tricks down as well as they did. The sight also answers her call more naturally than it ever did before, and it's immediately obvious how to turn that into combat precognition without getting bogged down in the static filling up the future.

It's still far easier to set down.

After having felt the effects of both the cunning and splendor headbands, the addition of wisdom is a far lesser shock. Her surroundings come more into focus, and her ki sensing - already without peer - seems to give yet more detail. If she thought splendor increased her knowledge of herself, then wisdom put the lie to that, tearing apart the rationalizations she gave herself for all the small hurts she dealt people without even thinking, all the times she lied to spare someone else's feelings when what she really did it for was herself, how she let her desire to for normalcy come at the cost of other people having to pay the price. It's obvious now, not just in hindsight but how she should have noticed ahead of time, that she should have entered the hall that day as a spirit saiyan.

"Are you sure there's no way to get all three of these?"

"It's not theoretically impossible, people have had headbands with a bonus of 6 to each stat before, but - custom items, each crafted manually by legendary archmages or obtained at great expense from the gods. Geb would have one, but he's impossible to deal with and trying to take him on always ends poorly. Nex, perhaps, if he yet lives, but nobody has seen hide or hair of him in over 4000 years, and not for lack of trying on the part of some of the most powerful wizards to inhabit Golarion since. Abrogail Thrune, if there was anyone else foolish enough to wear a major artifact crafted personally by Asmodeus. Perhaps a handful of less attested to legends like Baba Yaga and Old-mage Jatembe have one and yet live. But it's not common, even for mythic heroes - the Inheritor was supported by the treasury of Taldor at its height during the Shining Crusade, and her headband was only a 4/4/6 and not hers to keep besides. And outside of headbands, the only items that hold mental stat boosts reliably are Ioun stones which nobody has known how to make since Earthfall."

Yeah, she figured. With their reaction to the diamonds, she's pretty sure if they had one squirreled away they'd be willing to bring it out now. With only relatively minor reluctance, she removes the headband of wisdom again and puts back on splendor.

"And just to be clear, there's no way to change that even with a few hundred more diamonds or some other similarly impossible-to-get items?"

The idea of a few hundred more diamonds is still pretty boggling, both in general and especially as potential payment in a single transaction.

"It's not really the kind of thing you can buy for just money, not even in Aktun or Dis or the City of Brass. Abadar is the god of trade, so for enough money it might perhaps be possible to get him to make one, but neither His high priest nor the ruler of His country have one so the price must be absolutely enormous. Even Felandriel Morgethai only has an extra +2 to wisdom on her intelligence headband, and she's the second greatest archmage in Avistan."

"And the first is, who, Geb? And thus impossible to work with?

"No, Geb rules a country on the continent to the south of Avistan. The archmage in question is Razmir, but the problem is, well."

"There's not really a polite way to put this. He's using his unmatched arcane power to pretend to be a god and rule over a tiny backwater nation as a tinpot dictator. He banned all the churches that don't pretend he's a god from operating in Razmiran, which includes us, and he's a horrible trading partner. When he took over, he confiscated all the banks in his country, raised the taxes beyond what his citizens could bear, and spent the wealth of a country on his own luxury and whims. Even if propping his regime up wouldn't be doing his people a terrible disservice, he could hardly be trusted to follow through on a deal, Lawful Evil or no. Which is especially a shame since having a second 9th circle wizard could mean we can turn excess diamonds you supply into a notable abilitystat boost of their own, but enhancing them via wish requires the spells happen in immediate succession and Morgethai only has one 9th circle slot a day."