I was under the impression that the lottery was something separate from the magic competition.  While I could come up with a justification for Dask to enter the competition if necessary, I was thinking that Dask would consider it, then discard the entire thing as being too showy and public and ask around to see if there were any other opportunities to acquire an Alluran in the city.  Dask actually has several ranks in Gather Information, so it would be feasible for them to find out about the lottery and its special prize from there, at which point they'd purchase a ticket and wait for the winning numbers to be announced.<br/><br/>Having thought about it a bit more, Dask could actually just use<em>Silent Image</em>to alter the numbers displayed on whatever random drawing method they use and win the lottery that way.  It's a concentration spell, so they'd need to hire another person to actually redeem the winning ticket, and that assumes that there isn't any sort of magical security designed to prevent that sort of tampering, but it would be the simplest and most straightforward plan.<br/><br/>That said, if the lottery is taking place at the magic competition, then there most definitely would be magical security around to prevent that sort of thing, and if you'd rather have Dask participate in the competition, I can come up with a reason for Dask to join.  Maybe they used divination magic to find the number of the winning ticket and learned that it's in possession of one of the mages participating in the competition, for example, and so Dask enters the contest not to win, but to get a chance to covertly steal his ticket during the competition.<br/><br/>Actually, now that I think about it, that would probably work best.  The Movanic Deva that Dask got as a cohort even has<em>Divination</em>3/day as a spell-like ability, and could probably be convinced to use it, since it's for the sake of getting somebody to have sex with while her Master is asleep.  There's a 79% chance of success at her caster level and you get to know if the spell fails, so I'll include the rolls for two castings of the spell in my intro post.