It's weird having a Scrying sensor on someone while doing other things. He's constantly in my "peripheral vision" as I go about my day.  Which… lasts right up until he gets in a car and heads out, at which point, the spell collapses.  The sensor on a Scrying spell only goes 150 feet per round, which works out to about fifteen miles per hour. Folks drive faster than that in school zones. If I really want long term surveillance on someone, I need another spell, such as Chain of Eyes. I should also probably have a copy handle it and send me reports of anything important, rather than handling it myself.  This is a little trickier to set up, however, as the spell is touch range. I can expand that, but I still need to place a clone close enough to get line of sight and effect… which isn't particularly hard, mind. Greater Scrying, Greater Invisibility, and Greater Teleport do the job just fine.

Still, something to think about. I need to know who to monitor, of course. But I can always start at the top and work my way down based on who the ruler talks to. So I can know just about anything I care to know about reasonably quickly, but I have to know I need to know it.  So finding out, say, how many destroyers France is sending is easy enough, but sorting out who's planning to invade means… what, spying on every country that's a maybe? Ugh. There needs to be a better way.  I could try Commune, but I'd just be talking to myself … maybe Contact Other Plane? Divine Providence means I don't need to worry about backlash, but even in the best case, I have a 2% chance of getting no answer, and a 10% chance of getting a bad one.  Still, 88% accuracy probably isn't bad for intelligence work, I'll just need to make sure to verify by other means before acting on the information.

I should probably do the first myself. Outer planes Greater Deity… I get nine questions…

I cast the spell and hear: "What?"

"What country is going to attack my new island nation next?" I figure it's an eventuality, every new nation is tested at some point,usually quickly.

"Iran."

"Roughly how long until they do?"

"Decades."

I have time, then. "What sort of attack will it be?"

"Violent."

So not a quiet attack, then; "How will they get to us?"

"Water."

Well yeah, island: "Submarines, boats, or airplanes?"

"More."

So go loaded for bear: "Will we win?"

"No."

That gives me the chills, still, only 88% truth… "What is our best strategy to beat them?"

"Offense."

The best defense… ugh, I should have guessed: "Who's idea is the attack on their side?"

"Leader"

Tongues translated that, and of course, mostly useless. "How can I prevent them from attacking?"

"Preempt."

… and with my ninth answer, the channel collapses.

I stop and think: So… 88% truth, 2% an honest "don't know" answer, 9% lies, and 1% random for a greater outer deity. I didn't get any "unknown" answers, so I can discount one option. Sadly, repeated questions on divinations are supposed to use the same rolls, so I can't just ask again. And with it being decades away… I don't know it will be decades. I'm told it's Iran, I'm told it's going to be decades, but I don't KNOW that. The source is unreliable. So I should start investigating now.  With nine answers there's good odds that only one or two are bad… ugh. It could be tomorrow, and France for all I know. Or the answer to the first could be "Nobody" and all the subsequent answers are random because no truth makes sense in the context of the first lie.

Still. "Investigate Iran's leadership" and "Prepare for a multi-pronged attack" aren't bad starting points. Of course, this could lead to an Oedipus Rex scenario, where my attempts to prevent a prophecy lead to it happening in the first place. A buildup of arms for defense makes it look like I'm preparing for war, and investigating Iran makes them look like the target.

…

Wow, this has me spinning my wheels. I take a breath - no, it doesn't help me calm down. Counting to ten helps, though.

So… the island is, fundamentally, meaningless. It's there to have an excuse to be recognized as a nation, and that's… really it. If they take it over, I can just collapse it and make a new one. If they blow it up? Same. I don't need to poke a sleeping bear, because it’s actually fine if the bear wakes up later and tries to eat the honey: The jar is empty anyway.  I just need to… not issue visas? Everyone's out, everyone is safe, it's just the summons.

Who may or may not count as people. Ugh.

Ah, but my time clones won't really be hurt. They simply lose their connection to this timeline if they get injured. So my front liners, in the case of an invasion, should be copies of me. That... should be pretty effective, actually. I wonder how we lose this? My copies are already distributed at the border, because that's where they're making more land.  I take a moment to mentally update their orders to include border defense and flagging me if something happens.  I’ll need to consider other possible steps.  Maybe set up some evacuation points… oh, I’m already building the citadel, and the Prismatic Walls around that require spells or similar to bypass or damage.  That’ll do for a retreat point for the summons that don’t want to go to war.  And, you know, they’re expecting combat, so it’s likely all of them will want to fight.  Still… I’ll probably end up with at least the US embassy to shelter.

Which reminds me…

I go online, and look up land in DC… it’s expensive and tiny and largely unavailable.  I end up settling on buying a 1.85 acre mostly-blank property (OK, it has a 5,500 square foot house on one of the two combined lots) technically in Arlington, VA (it doesn’t quite have river access thanks to George Washington Memorial Highway, but the only thing between the lot and the river is a road and some trees - and the river is the border for DC proper). List price is $3.6 million, and it’s been on the market for three months… I put in a “cash offer” (not financed) for four million dollars.  The extra ten percent is because I don’t want to need to negotiate or anything: I’ll write them a check.  I still need to wait for them to respond, but eh.  I probably won’t use the building for anything beyond an anchor for a portal, and I might not even do that. Admittedly, I might end up dumping the building entirely, as the “value in the land” notes on the ad make me wonder how bad it is inside.  Maybe just Disintegrate the place, build a framework from Wall of Force, and fill out the details via Shadow Terrain from Ascension Games? That should do if I don't have a spare citadel ready when the sale goes through.

Speaking of… I mentally contact a minion: Cool, the first one is ready.  I Plane Shift over to check it out.

…

It's a bit garish from outside. But that’s part and parcel from the Prismatic Screen wall augmentation, I suppose. The walls are flashing rapidly, randomly, and very brightly through all the colors of the rainbow. I'll need to put a shell around it with Wall of Stone and then clean up the appearance with Mirage Arcana. But nothing beats the sheer defensive potential of the thing. A creature going through needs to make seven saves, and will probably take damage even if they make them all. An unattended weapon simply gets noped, by the last layer if nothing else. Utterly destroyed, and it blocks line-of effect for spells and things. So it will literally soak as much artillery as you want to throw at it. Dismantling the barrier requires a specific set of seven spells - in sequence, no less - or the granddaddy of all the magic-destroying spells, Mage's Disjunction, which is a 9th.

Of course, I didn't cast this one, so Magic Immunity says I can walk straight through. It's backed by a Magically Reinforced Obdurium wall, which is harder to scratch than I am… but that's a magically enchanted metal, and the Ironguard spell lets me walk through it.  The hewn stone wall behind it I added for a discount from Stone Shape I pass via the Earth Glide spell.

The interior is luxurious: Anything stone uses Marble, anything cloth uses silk, anything wood uses polished mahogany, anything metal is trimmed with precious metals.

Ironically, I did it because it made things less expensive, which in turn madeitt faster to build.

No, seriously. It's a funny quirk of how the Stronghold Builder's Guide handles do-it-yourself spellcasting discounts and how it explicitly has them stack (two ten percent discounts make for a twenty percent discount rather than a nineteen percent discount). Of itself that's not a big deal, but the Fabricate spell makes things wonky: It grants a 50% discount on luxury spaces, 20% for fancy, and 5% for others. If you have stacked discounts up to 45% or better otherwise (which you can - a mobile stronghold (5%) in a lawless area (10%) making the skill check to keep playing a Lyre of Building (30%), and using Stone Shape to help with masonry on stone walls (5%) gets 50%) very often means that the variable discount from Fabricate can make Luxury spaces less expensive than their Fancy or even Basic counterparts. It's even possible to exceed a 100% discount on Luxury spaces sometimes. Now, the money doesn't matter to me - I can just create materials at whim - but the final price impacts the build time too, and THAT matters to me somewhat.  And as the various enchantments are paid for separately, they can be done in parallel by crafting-enabled minions, so I of course went with the manual enchantment option for that.  And this is on a fast time plane intended specifically for these kinds of shenanigans. So big, luxurious practically indestructible citadels that can fly, swim underwater, burrow through the ground, jump from plane to plane, teleport without error within a plane, are quite comfortable even in the vacuum of space, and have all sorts of other benefits can be popped out in surprisingly little time.

And this one is ready.

As I own the creation, I command it, and it obeys. The Citadel Plane Shifts to the material plane, and then Teleports to the spot I have chosen, the center of my island nation, 3,000  feet up in the air so I do not accidentally blind anyone (and because I want to claim the world's tallest structure).  I have it hover in place there.

Then I walk out the same way I came in: Straight through the walls. I didn't even have doors installed at all. This place is for me: Powerful magic is required to navigate.

I then head down to ground level and start building up with Wall of Stone. My Citadel is going to be the jewel at the top, but there's no reason not to do SOMETHING with the rest of the space.  I do cheat on the architecture: I insert Walls of Force every now and again so I don't need to worry about the structure collapsing under its own weight. Invisible Spell metamagic I use for making the exterior more transparent than glass, and Reverse Gravity allows me to make what amounts to fireman poles that go up, and stop harmlessly at a given floor.

I may want to have professionals install elevators at some point to make things practical for other people, but eh, it's fun.

It's also completely empty. And that's OK, really.  If my people need the space, we have it now.

About the time I’m done building my big show of power, I receive an alert from my builders expanding my borders:

We're under attack.