First up… I look up communication spells, and quickly settle on Telepathy. It's a sixth circle spell for Wizards, and would be out of reach… but it's a fourth circle spell for Mediums, which lets me take care of it via Dream Manifestation… and while it is Personal range, I can drop it on Last Shadow easily enough because she is my Animal Companion (even though she's not an animal). That will let her talk mentally with anyone within a hundred feet that has a nguage (it does not need to be a shared nguage, they just need to know something), regardless of her form.

  As for the other thing I need to do… what are my options for keeping Chard Wuodrazed down? He has prepared Clones, so simply killing him won't work….

  I do my research and come to the conclusion that I probably need to sabotage his Clones, THEN kill him. I could contain him indefinitely via a Flesh to Salt spell, but that is risky: He can penetrate fairly arbitrary defenses, I can't; better to overwhelm him with summons and things that won't be affected by Spell Turning after quietly removing his safety net… Divine Providence can only stop things so quickly; it can be overwhelmed.

  So I pick one of his bases at random and sketch out what I remember from Death's drills, spending some time pouring over it: Traps I can disarm, golems and Simucra I can sneak past, doors where I'll need to pick the locks, solutions to door puzzles, and so on. No, I can't just Greater Teleport all the way in: He hired Forbiddance spells. They won't hurt me, but they still block pnar travel, so I'll need to go in through the door. I'm feeling pretty confident about doing so, though: With my Mythic ring, Invisibility will get me past all of the guardians undetected. The magic traps are all subject to spell resistance, so I can simply ignore them. The mundane traps might hurt if I can't just disarm them, but I'm immune to everything save the actual damage… from which I will recover VERY quickly, and it can't kill me. Same applies to the various guards, really. I could smash my way in through the front door, sughter everything that gets in my way, and burn the clone to ash… but then he would know I'm alive, that his clone was compromised, and that I somehow have knowledge of that hidden stronghold… which would give him the option of making another clone elsewhere, which I wouldn't know about. No, I need to do this quietly.

  Honestly, there's no real reason to dey.

  I confirm I'm wearing one of my rings, cast Greater Invisibility on myself, focus, and Greater Teleport to just outside the stronghold I picked… a hole in the ground a dozen miles from a city, in the middle of civilized nds. Dungeons are always pced a few miles outside of city limits for safety reasons, but they support magic within a certain radius - which makes the far side of one an ideal pce to put things you don't want people to find: No town guard to worry about, few people going through the area, and you still have magic avaible.

  Of course, I don't need to find it: I know right where it is.

  One Silence spell on a pebble to keep the door from making noise, reach in for the handle, put a Major Image of the door over the door while I open it so that the stone golem on the other side doesn't react as I pull it open, and I'm in, walking calmly past the ten foot tall, magic immune mobile stone statue… with a pair of perfect prisms held in pce by golden frames and affixed to the head by a bck leather strap… Truesight goggles: Expensive. Still, True Seeing doesn't help when I'm wearing my Mythic ring. I calmly proceed to the next door, disable the poison needle trap on the handle, and use the same drill to go past that. I ignore the Por Ray trap in the hallway beyond - it can't “see” me to go off. Left, left, right, left, forward, right, forward, left in the maze. The combination on the next door is 31, 41, 59. Same drill for opening it as the prior door so the Simucra of the gnome doesn't notice. A little further in, ignore the hallway, avoid looking up because the evil gnome did those sight-triggered Symbols of Death on the ceiling, pick the lock and open the hidden hatch in the floor… and there's the Clone, surrounded by spare gear. It's all trapped, of course, and looting the pce would give away that I was here, so I don't touch any of it. A nail driven through the helpless thing's brain, a Dress Corpse spell to hide the wound, and back out the same way, dismissing the illusions and Silence spells as I leave: I'm in and out in under an hour, today's job done.

  I still have some time before morning, so I recharge my Resolve Points via the Heroic Fortune spell, use Greater Teleport to go do the same at the gnome's underwater hideout: It works the same way. I disable the handful of traps I can't simply bypass, pick a few locks, manage to avoid the urge to make funny faces at the guards, use the combination when that comes up, and so on. Just… underwater, so the Simucra has a Neckce of Adaptation, different spell traps are in py, it's a new maze, and so on. I find I still have time, so I hit the third (carefully constructed in the sky, no Clone currently in that one), and the fourth (he actually built a volcano base, the idiot; that clone is still growing, so I skip killing it: Interrupting the growth would make it obvious it was dead, and as long as I kill the original before the clone finoshes growing the gnome won't come back immediately, so I'll just come back after the evil, evil man is temporarily dead, and kill the clone to make it stick.

  Divine knowledge is CHEATING.

  Satisfied with a good night's work, I Greater Teleport back and plop the Telepathy spell on my still-sleeping Companion. A wonderful woman… I should work with her on what kind of a body she wants to see for a mating flight after she wakes.

  For now, I have fifth level spells avaible, which includes Carve Passage, Wall of Stone, Wall of Iron (although I need Dream Manifestation to get this one), and Wall of Force… all very useful spells for building. So I stay invisible and start a conversation with my master mason about it. Under his direction, I use Carve Passage to dig a twenty foot deep moat all around the exterior wall, which I then fill as I go with yered Walls of Iron and Walls of Force up to twenty feet above ground level… which takes a while, even as fast as I cast. I also use Sudden Stagmite to get seed stone within the pits followed by Wall of Stone to build ptforms, stairs, and crenutions for the archers who will actually man the walls. It takes time: Step one: Carve Passage for a tench. Step two: Wall of Force. Step three: Wall of Iron four times (it overs much less square footage per casting than Wall of Force) to cover the Wall of Force properly with an iron backing. Step Four: Repeat steps two and three enough times to fill the trench in the ground (it's five feet thick, and I'm only getting two inches per cycle, so it takes a good thirty cycles). Step Five: Four castings of Sudden Stagmite to get a framework for the next spell. Step Six: Wall of Stone twice to build a support column and a walkway with crenutions to the prior support column. A hundred fifty eight castings for each twenty foot section of wall (plus a hundred twenty of Heroic Fortune to recharge the Resolve points)… basically fourteen minutes, for me.

  “ARE YOU CRAZY?!” Aldamen interrupts partway through, “Do you have ANY idea what that will do to the dungeon?”

  Yes: Nothing, because I don't use dungeons directly anymore, and I'm doing the casting personally. So I start with a truth for the half-orc, “It's fine, I've already accounted for the amount of drain this puts on the dungeon, we won't have any build-up from this,” and follow it with a lie, “I sent some folks in to continuously clean it while I'm working.” I also mentally fg my team to get over there and clean it out so there's some matching evidence soon. Which… technically makes the lie true now? Eh, whatever.

  She considers a moment, and looks back at the hundreds of yards I've already done, calmly closing the distance, “...okay, just what is your…” she pauses to think for a moment, “...’Prophet's Gift’?”

  “That's hard to expin properly,” easier if you've studied the more esoteric subjects at Mom's university, “but part of it is that I don't get exhausted from spellcasting.”

  “Clearly…” she looks at the walls, and looks back at me, “...I suppose that expins why I can't see your magic; Divine energies don't necessarily follow the rules….”

  Strictly speaking that's not how it works for me, but the statement itself is mostly true, and it's probably useful if she thinks that's how it works, “True enough. I need to get back to work.”

  “I'm going to go check the dungeon,” the guildmaster speaks ftly, lowering her head and frowning.

  I don't want her there before my minions… “Please head there mundanely; I am pushing things a bit right now.”

  Fortunately, I'm pretty skilled at Bluffing, “Fine…” Aldamen agrees, “I'll walk.”

  As soon as she's out of sight, I take a short break to use Greater Teleport to get to the dungeon, spam a few dozen more Summons, give them some basic buffs, and send them in to clear out the pce repeatedly. We just cleaned out the dungeon a day or so ago so it should be pretty empty, but the half orc is expecting them. I then head back the same way, and get back to work on the yered Walls. The town isn't very rge - I only need a few miles of walls - but with breaks it will take a week or two to finish… and I still need to figure out how to track down the evil gnome, which is most of why I really need breaks.

  While I'm working, my uncle speaks up, “So…care to know what you're getting for level nine?”