Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn needed to check over Cayden Cailean's oracle anyways.

As long as she has to visit, goes the reasoning, she might as well visit Keltham right after he gets morning spells and run Spell Gauge over him to avoid further surprises.

As long as she's doing that, she might as well use her personal Detect Thoughts tool, which adopts the user's strength for purposes of determining Will saves of the target, on Keltham.

Aspexia informs the agent of what Keltham is trying.  She doesn't bother explaining who's sending the message; the agent doesn't need the distraction.  Also, somebody had better have been on the ball about matching writing styles very perfectly with real archives, or else they're going to have to fake all the other archives Keltham ever looks at.

lintamande: "Generally, a geographically bounded god's interventions happen within a specific region, and most of their attention is allocated there. To pick a geographically bounded god we know more about, Mazludeh is the goddess of sacrifice and stewardship - Neutral Good. She's active in Holomog, a country south of here. She tends to have about twelve clerics at a time, most of them selected when they first visit one of her temples in Holomog; on some occasions she's chosen someone elsewhere, but always someone who had been near her clerics when they travelled - suggesting that Her attention was following their cleric. I've written to the Worldwound to ask if Yaezhing's priests are there right now, as that's the likeliest mechanism; our representative there didn't know offhand, but they probably are. Even small Lawful countries usually send a couple of representatives to the Worldwound on general principle. Or Yaezhing might not be a geographically bounded god at all! Our references are too limited to be sure."

Keltham: Keltham notes down this exact response to his unspoken question as a slight bit of evidence that they're reading his mind or talking to devils smart enough to model it eerily perfectly, but it's only slight evidence; if Keltham can think of it, so can they, Keltham supposes.  There hasn't been very much other evidence of his hosts reading his mind, not counting Lrilatha seeming to know exactly how to talk to him, and Lrilatha is a more plausible big special case.

"I would have expected more for there to be a systematic compendium of entities that have clerics, if there's only a few hundred of them, and especially entities with clerics at the Worldwound..."  Keltham says.  "Any simple way of getting a count on all the Lawful Neutral gods with clerics there, or even asking them all for a one-paragraph summary of what their gods are about?"  It is really bizarre to Keltham that info like this has not already been collected.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia isn't out of range yet; she warns the agent to be more careful with using information from subjects who don't know mind-reading exists.

lintamande: Noted. (He'd be much more panicked if he knew who was talking to him.) "We have a list of all the churches that are signatories to the treaty. For a list more comprehensive than that...there's not really a way to get one? The Worldwound is a hundred miles across; the perimeter is therefore 650. There are three hundred forty-four different heavily warded fortresses on the perimeter. Eighty one of them are ours, and we host some foreign adventurers, and probably have records of any weird clerics who've stayed at one of our fortresses. But the Tian nations are mostly on the other side, and it's not traversable except by teleport, and civilians aren't really welcome, so you'd have to convince some of the soldiers to do it."

Keltham: People can count to 344.  If you divide up the work among 43 people they only need to census 8 fortresses apiece.

Keltham doesn't pursue this further, though; it matches too much other strangely missing competence to seem relatively anomalous.  He just needs to keep better track of whether the incompetence tends to get in the way of anything that might possibly maybe incentivize him to be anywhere but Cheliax.

"Sorry for even more basic questions but remind me of how many hours, or days, of unskilled labor, it takes to buy a teleport to the Worldwound from Tian."  Does the basic picture on international trade even make sense here.

lintamande: "...in Cheliax it'll run you 1400gp, which is twenty unskilled labor-years, double that for a round trip. I don't know Tian prices and they probably vary a lot country-to-country by how many high level wizards there are and by how far you are from the Worldwound - a single teleport can only travel up to about 1000miles - it varies by caster circle -- so that price reflects needing two Teleports. In, say, Irrisen, you can do it in one jump so the price is probably around half that, not that I've been to Irrisen."

Keltham: Okay, it taking twenty labor-years just to get him here from the Worldwound is not actually a thing that Keltham had previously known was the case.  He supposes that degree of scarcity rhymes with Carissa saying that a thousand people are the country's effective real military power.  Golarion's economy is insane, like, not literally inconsistent with itself, but it is going to go on being really weird until Keltham figures out the internal rhythm that makes all the different facts be predictable from premises smaller than themselves.  Also his implied startup debt is bigger than he thought and he should be less worried about adding small bits to it and more worried about paying back the startup debt sooner.

"Excuse me a second, recalculating entire probable state of all international trade," Keltham says absently.

When Keltham is done, "Have you ever heard of a Lawful Neutral god that tries to prevent... giant messes, disasters?"

lintamande: "No? I mean, lots of them probably do, but I've never heard of one who had that specifically in their portfolio. Which means they don't openly have a church in Cheliax or any of our neighbors."

Keltham: Worth a shot, but either he's been warned off answering, or the Broomgod really is that secretive.

"What factors control how, when, and where clericing entities can communicate with or influence clerics?"

lintamande: "I think the general consensus about gods is that they are primarily constrained by treaty with one another and by very general resource constraints - so they can do most things, but some things are very costly, and some things they've promised not to. A smaller god would be more resource-constrained and the Lawful gods are more treaty-constrained."

Keltham: "I'm really hoping for a lot more detail than that.  All the other facts along the lines of 'they can see where their clerics go, so can use that to pick new clerics'.  Has anyone measured the distance a cleric can move away before a god stops hearing prayers directed at them from nonclerics nearby the cleric?  Does it vary with other measurables about the god that you can use to infer a central strength-factor with which both cleric sight distance and other factors vary?"

lintamande: "....no?"

Keltham: the number one thing that is IMPLAUSIBLE about this place is how much supposedly NOBODY HAS EVER TRIED TO FIGURE OUT ANYTHING IMPORTANT but nobody would LIE using THAT LIE they would make up FAKE DATA so it didn't look like AN ENDLESS STREAM OF HIDDEN INFORMATION and maybe they are playing one ply deeper than him and KNOW THIS IS HOW HE'LL FEEL and WANT HIM TO FEEL THIS CONFUSED but nonetheless AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

Keltham: Keltham gives up on subtlety; if that was what somebody was hoping for, they have gauged him perfectly.  "My god can't seem to contact me.  I can tell they want to, I can tell they can't, what's going wrong and how do I fix it."

lintamande: " - huh. Possibilities: there's some treaty prohibiting them from doing so. If there is I don't know anything about it. They are a localized god and you're too far away for them to do something as costly as that. They don't know how to talk to mortals without overwriting their brain, Nethys is known to have that problem."

Keltham: "Overwriting -"

Ione, says a part of himself in sudden horror.

"Does that - destroy their mind-state?  Overwrite their soul, nothing left for the afterlife but a copy or a fragment of Nethys?"

lintamande: "He did it a couple of times thousands of years ago when He was a new god and then stopped. We have records of how the people all went irretrievably insane including when dead but we don't know very many details on the nature of the irretrievable insanity. And now He drops levels on people but doesn't talk to them. He's an extreme case, but Asmodeus also doesn't ever talk directly to mortals, He communicates to devils who then attempt to translate for us."

Keltham: "Who else doesn't talk directly to mortals?  What do Asmodeus and Nethys have in common?"

lintamande: "I think most of the gods that aren't ascended humans talk to mortals rarely if at all. - the gods that ascended via the Starstone are Norgorber, Iomedae, Aroden, and Cayden Cailean, and the general understanding is that they're better at talking to mortals because they can use an internal copy of their mortal mind as an interface of sorts. Nethys is also technically said to be an ascended human god but His ascension process was different and drove Him mad, reportedly. And then there are scattered other ex-mortals: Irori, Lawful Neutral, who ascended through attaining perfection; Erecura, a Lawful Neutral god of secrets and soothsayers and the Queen of Dis, in Hell; Milani, Chaotic Good goddess of bloody revolutions."

Keltham: "Remind me of the alignments and interests of the Starstoners?"  Keltham remembers that Norgorber is the god of crime, but was pretending not to be carefully memorizing that at the time.

lintamande: "Norgorber, Neutral Evil, god of crime; Iomedae, Lawful Good, god of fighting Evil, particularly Abaddon and the Worldwound and Zon Kuthon but She's not best friends with us either; Cayden Cailean, Chaotic Good god of drink - uh, of mind-altering substances, and freedom and adventure. Aroden, dead Lawful Neutral god of colonization and population growth, sometimes glossed as 'god of humanity' because He was strongly in favor of more of us."

Keltham: "Oh right, I've been told not everyone here is human."  Which did seem potentially kinda important, especially the species that supposedly couldn't interbreed with humans, and might therefore be actual different species instead of heritably shapechanged humans.  But there were just too many important things at once and Keltham didn't want to interrupt his lesson to ask.  "Who are the nonhuman ascended gods?  Could those gods talk to humans after they ascended?"

lintamande: "Uh, the elves have their own pantheon, I don't think it has any ascended former elves in it. Milani was a half-elf. There is a god who is an ascended rat, Lao Shu Po, but I've never heard of anyone successfully talking to Her. Sarenrae's an ascended angel but She doesn't directly talk to Her followers, She sends heralds."

Keltham: "How... did the rat manage that.  This drastically contradicts my fragile picture of how I thought anything did or possibly could work."

lintamande: "Ours too. I do not know the answer to that question. The conventional one is that She ate the corpse of a Tian god and thereby ascended, but that's hardly more satisfying."

Keltham: Keltham spends more time attempting to acquire knowledge and debug his current theological problems, sort of losing track of time actually, not least because he does not have a wristwatch or any other means of keeping time, and taking away a dath ilani's wristwatch when they're already in the middle of asking Additional Questions is sort of like yanking the breathing tube out of somebody who already wasn't breathing.

He acquires a slightly better and still incredibly confusing picture of Golarion theology, with certain selective omissions and alterations.

lintamande: And it absorbs lots of time, which is good, because hopefully downstairs everyone is all briefed on Taldor. 

Carissa Sevar: No plan survives first contact with the enemy but they're as prepared as they can be.

Keltham: What do you mean it's already lunchtime!?  Somebody should have informed Keltham before this!  Now he doesn't have time to prioritize his remaining Additional Questions and ask those before he has to go!  Oh no, has Carissa been waiting patiently in her bedroom for him to show up and get his shirt laundered this whole time?

lintamande: This researcher doesn't know that but he can take letters, if Keltham thinks of further questions.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa even had enough time to prepare spells and she's delighted about it. (She prepared the ones for the Improbable Escape, mostly.) She's sitting alone by the window in the dining room, looking through a book about The Year of Four Kings, from when Taldor and Cheliax were unified, that they decided didn't require any modification.

Keltham: "Good morning well not morning any more but same essential principle!"

Carissa Sevar: "It's morning somewhere! ...is it all right with you if I convey the information needed to settle the sadism bets, which is just 'yes' or 'no', or should I not do that, it occurred to me this morning that you might have privacy intuitions or something."

Keltham: "Oh, yeah, it's fine.  I mean, maybe run it past me before you release exact details of what we did together, not saying no, just saying not sure how I'd feel, but the general fact is fine."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa gives a table across the room a thumbs-up. There are giggles. "I'm not planning to say anything else," she assures him. "I don't quite understand the whole concept of spoilers but that seems like it might fall under it."

Keltham: Keltham tries a new question, gets a surprising internal blip.  "Though - if it's not somebody planning on sleeping with me at some point - actually I seem to have emotional reservations about you telling all of the exact details to Security and Governance?  But I'm also aware that this may not be reasonable or the most important consideration.  So, maybe ask me if they need all the exact details, and I can decide in more detail what to feel about it.  Also happy about routing it to any entities with no sexuality, but don't assume that's necessary if it's incredibly expensive."

Carissa Sevar: "That describes lots of devils but they're probably pretty expensive, yeah. I don't think they should need the exact details, rather than broad things like 'no I'm not pregnant, no you don't have such extremely narrow tastes that we need to start a nationwide search'. If they ask more than that I'll ask you."

Keltham: Keltham knows he is probably supposed to find something flirtatious to say but his mind is coming up blank and it's still blank and it goes on being blank and finally Keltham gives up and says, "Well, for whatever it's worth, your attractiveness remains a stable aspect of yourself between yesterday and today.  Oh, and I've got the notes for some of the sexual questions and topics I managed not to talk about while we were in the middle of fucking.  But I probably shouldn't hand all of those to you right now, should probably be more of an evening thing."

Carissa Sevar: "For notes on sexual questions I can make some time in my busy evening schedule. Anyway, I'll have a headband by then, maybe it'll make me better at explaining things."

Keltham: "Oh, that's good news!  Project resources coming through?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, actually! I tromped over to Acquisitions this morning once it seemed like you were occupied and asked what the delay is and they were still like 'eh, couple of weeks, we don't think it'd be beneficial to rush', so I said, fine, I've been at the Worldwound for six years, I nearly had a headband amount of money saved up anyway, I'm getting paid much more now, how much of a loan on my future salary are we talking about, and it was six days, so I bought one."

Keltham: Keltham almost asks how much she is getting paid, but the financial amounts are conspicuous in their absence from her sentence and there might be some reason for that; he'll ask later in private.  Or he'll just ask - "I should probably go talk to somebody about, like, project resources, rushes or not rushes, whether Governance has any priorities, and all that.  Though before then - I don't need Share Language until tonight, and could arguably wait until morning depending on timing, but can you wizardboop my clothing at some point before I talk to any Serious People."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes." And she does that. 

Keltham: So long as that's happening anyways, can Keltham feel the magic at all, while it's going on next to him?

lintamande: No. 

Keltham: Keltham hopes he is not cursed to just remain a cleric.  Keltham also wants to be a wizard!

Well, Keltham can spend some additional time trying to learn that, but Keltham should talk to project management before he sets his day's schedule, and before then, he should eat lunch, having failed at breakfast.  What does the menu look like today in Cheliax?

lintamande: Stuffed pheasant, rolls, various kinds of fish in various kinds of sauces, fruit tart things.

Keltham: Fat, protein, carbs, cool.  Simple low-tech fare, but the novelty of it hasn't worn off.

Keltham fills up a plate and stops by Carissa's spot to inquire about Golarion's pre-existing people-who-just-had-sex etiquette, if any, w/r/t his eating lunch with Carissa the day after, vs. eating lunch at the more populous table.

Carissa Sevar: "It is that you should do what makes you happy."

Keltham: "I suspected you were going to say that, and I already predecided what I would do regardless of the object-level etiquette answer if that was your meta-answer, so I would be able to tell you that your etiquette answer definitely wouldn't influence me, but I still want to know what the etiquette is, if there is one."

Carissa Sevar: "Eating lunch with the girl you just slept with implies you are inclined to get attached one at a time - not monogamy, but, like, one developing-relationship gotten to a certain point before you pick up a new one - and eating lunch with all the other girls implies not-that, and there isn't etiquette about which one to imply and in this case there isn't even really the risk you'll mislead people since everyone knows you are an alien and nothing you do will have the normal implications."

Keltham: "Whether I can get attached to more than one girl at a time is an interesting question I guess I'll find out the answer to.  But I expect I can be attracted to more than one girl at a time."

Keltham goes to sit down by the other girls.  He's not quite sure what to say to Carissa, feels pressure to have clever and intelligent things to say to Carissa, and it's easier to be part of a larger conversation with people he's seen less immediately.

That this is a stereotypical dath ilan Boy Thing To Do doesn't change that Keltham is, in fact, a boy, and doesn't want to expend the mental overhead on defying his gendertrope doomfate right now.

Carissa Sevar: He's so bad at being Evil!!! This is going to be such an uphill battle!

lintamande: "Hi Keltham!" Meritxell says brightly. "Are there lessons today?"

Keltham: "Good question!  Probably!  What specifically the lessons are is something I'll know better after I talk project priorities with project management which I really need to go actually do.  Oh, by the way, point of curiosity, how much are you currently being paid, and then whatever the quantity is can you translate it into hours of unskilled labor?"

lintamande: Well shit. 

If anyone has an established answer to that they need to tell Meritxell immediately. "My contract's just for the week, I'm going to have to renegotiate it afterwards," she says. No one has told her. Aaaaargh. "It's for 300gold, which is...I think around four unskilled-labor-years?" And if she gets in trouble for that it can just be less on an ongoing basis. It being a lot less than that would be weird if Keltham knows anything about what wizards go for generally.

Keltham: "Your economy makes no sense.  None.  It does not make any sense at all.  All of the sense was surgically extracted from it by advanced medical technology."

"Or are you just getting, like, 'come down here for a very strange and possibly dangerous week and then we'll renegotiate' Exception Handling Money."

lintamande: Shoot, is it too low or too high. She has no idea what Keltham's calibrated off. "The latter? When they grabbed us I don't think anyone knew exactly what we were being hired to do besides, uh, hang around an alien our age who Asmodeus had said to be helpful to."

Keltham: "What does a regular wizard of - whichever circle you are - get paid?"

lintamande: "Like, a tenth of that, if they're spending most of their time on things that make money."

Keltham: 0.4 years / week, week is 1/50 year or so... "So twenty times more than unskilled labor.  Okay, that's not too bad, that's a relatively well-paid person in dath ilan but not mad superboss money."

dath ilan: (Very little labor remaining in dath ilan is labor that requires no prior skill, practice, or native talent.  But the fact that there are a few things like that which need to be bid into any market, and that everybody has that particular resource to offer, makes it a reasonable-sounding sort of thing to use for a unit of account; assuming that you are otherwise the sort of people who just refuse to accept downward price stickiness and will instead repeatedly scream at everyone to adjust their damn prices more often, instead of going for an inflationary unit of account that means a different thing each year and would require adjusting all the graphs.  Some Very Serious People think this was the wrong decision, but it's got a lot of civilizational inertia behind it.)

lintamande: Good, because it is true! Meritxell really sees the merits of saying true things to Keltham. "Wizards don't start making what I think you'd call 'mad superboss money' until fifth circle."

Keltham: "And that's 1/32 of wizards, who are 1% of the population... so that checks out, you are not having most of the wage income going to a small fraction of all the people."

lintamande: "One in thirty two wizards will eventually make fifth circle but fewer than that are fifth circle at any given moment, since it takes decades," says Meritxell. "It's like....one in sixty? One in a hundred? I think it's changing now in Cheliax since we have way more people training to be wizards than we did a generation ago but I don't remember the exact numbers offhand."

Keltham: "Somebody who's already eaten a bit want to try, like, introducing themselves and their life story?" says Keltham.  "Since I actually need to eat, having missed breakfast while distracted.  Uh, feel free not to if that's not a thing here."

Keltham does start eating though.

lintamande: The girls glance at each other. 

"I'll go," says Meritxell cheerfully. "I was born here in Ostenso; my father's a wizard and my mother is a cleric of Asmodeus. She picked him out because she wanted smart children. I have eight half-siblings. My elementary school was in the temple so I didn't actually leave it until I was ...ten? It was a big temple, though, endless courtyards and secret passages and so on, and it had an orphanage, so I had lots of peers, though I was smarter than them. I had more toys than them so I traded them toys for doing all my chores. When I was nine I tested into wizard school and was absurdly excited mostly because it was all the way down the big street. When I was twelve my mother decided all this was embarrassingly uncosmopolitan and so she took me on a trip around the country by boat and that is how I discovered I get very seasick, and declared I wasn't leaving Ostenso again until I'm a high-level wizard and can Teleport. A declaration that was about to be falsified, since I've enlisted, but now here I am instead of going to the Worldwound so maybe it'll come true, who knows."

Keltham: "Huh.  That sounds a lot more normal for a genius's childhood than I think I would've expected for Golarion.  Unusually smart mom who can afford childcare for lots of kids picks out smart dads, spends part of her life having eight kids, they all live in a huge group house with lots of secret passageways, one of those kids is even smarter and ends up getting hired by a weird important project.  That could basically be the early biography of any dath ilani who's as smart for that world as you are for this one.  Except for the part where you literally didn't leave the enormous temple, which I guess makes more sense if travel is more expensive and dangerous, and the children get centralized to a particular part of the city where they don't get attacked by mind-altering cornfields...?  How many horrible Golarion things are you leaving out from that story because you don't want to embark on very long explanations of them?  Not asking for a list, just a rough quantity."

lintamande: "...none on purpose for that reason, probably several because they didn't occur to me as horrible, such as, yes, the fact it's dangerous for children to wander around outside alone, or...I had more would-be siblings who died? Probably four or five things like that if I think about it."

Keltham: Keltham's brain does automatically generate the question 'How many dead siblings?' but it doesn't make it to mouth.

"I had an odd childhood for a dath ilani," Keltham says.  "A lot less optimized than most childhoods are.  My parents weren't driven to make my life as perfect as possible, just substantially better than not existing.  I agree with them about that, to be clear, but still, a lot of dath ilani would be - well, actually were - politely horrified about it.  Like, lots of moving between different parts of Default - uh, that's the biggest city in Civilization where you live if you want to live around lots of options, and you don't have any particular reason to live anywhere else.  Other parents would've been worried about frequent moves disrupting my childhood relationships.  On their philosophy, maybe that wasn't literally optimal for me, but I'd probably be basically fine, so they went ahead and moved any time they got bored.  Single-family house-module with only a couple of secret passages, one of which was in the house library and just went around a corner from one bookcase to another bookcase in the same library.  I am currently making an error and my error is that I am not eating."

Keltham resumes eating.

lintamande: "That doesn't sound very odd for Golarion but usually it'd be because the family had a job that required moving, not because they got frequently bored."

Keltham: “How do people move around here, when their job requires it?  This villa seems like it’d be very hard to pick up intact and move somewhere else by nonmagical means, and most people can’t afford teleports so that’s not it.  Do you just swap houses and all your stuff with another family of similar size that happens to live in the right place?  Doesn’t seem like that should happen at the same time often enough, unless you have a monthly Moving Day, and Golarion seems too uncoordinated for - shutting up now, eating.”

lintamande: Everyone looks incredibly confused at him.

"...if you're a priest, there's housing in the temples for priests assigned there and children they're raising," says Meritxell. "And if you're anyone else you look at apartments in the new place and sign a contract with a landlord for an apartment that has features you want and then move your possessions there. In a wagon if you have a lot of possessions."

Keltham: That really sounds like something that would sound superficially plausible but then turn out to not work quantitatively, once you started running numbers on how many empty houses you needed all over to always have the right subtype of house available for people to randomly move into…

"So even at the cleric or wizard level, houses must not have... expensive, non-modularly-removable features that only a few people want, because you can't take it with you if you leave the house?  Just features that everybody wants, or stuff only you want that you can take with you when you leave?"

lintamande: "Or features that are common enough there'll be a vacancy that has it," says Meritxell. "It doesn't have to be universal. But if you want something absurdly specific you'll have to rebuild it if you leave."

Keltham: "Wait, how do houses get to places in the first place if you can't move them once they're built?  Like, this house looks to be way out in the middle of nowhere, if you can't move it, how did it get here after somebody built it?"

lintamande: "....they built it here."

Keltham: "So, like... there's a place that makes sections of walls and floors that are small enough to be easy to move, and they ship the sections of walls here, and a local crew assembles those into a house using tools that are also small and easy to ship around...?"

lintamande: "....you cut stone and lumber and ship them down the river and then have mules drag them to the site, and then at the site you build the stone and lumber into walls, using, uh, stonemasonry tools and saws and so on."

Keltham: "Mules drag them to the site.  Do you not have wheels."  Keltham quickly tries to recall whether he's seen anything with a wheel built into it.  He hasn't.

lintamande: "Yes, we do! Mules drag wagons to the site if it's not too steep or rocky for that."

Keltham: "Is it, like... not particularly more cost effective, the way your economy usually runs, to have one place that makes lots and lots of something; instead of making a single copy of something, wherever it gets used?"

lintamande: "Definitely not for houses, the transport costs would kill you. It...makes more sense to have one shipyard than a dozen small shipyards?"

Keltham: "Okay, good.  When I heard that you were assembling single copies of houses, from raw materials, in individual places, without even trying to build pieces of houses in a single place and assemble those pieces, I was wondering if your whole world just didn't have centralized manufacturing for some reason."

Ione Sala: Ione has never done anything in her life like what she's about to do, not since she was old enough to remember, and if her soul belonged to Asmodeus she probably still wouldn't have done it.

"Keltham, you're supposed to be eating," she says.

Keltham: "Right."  More food.

Ione Sala: ...actually, even if it's relatively safer now, Ione is not entirely sure why she did that.

lintamande: No one else gives her an odd glance about it because they're too well trained. "Laborers' time isn't very valuable so for most things it's more worthwhile to send the laborers to wherever you want them laboring than to figure out how to send a bunch of pieces of something across the country," Meritxell says. "For shipbuilding it makes sense to do it all in one place because you always want your ships in the one place and you have a harbor right there to send all the materials your laborers will need and also it's quite specialized."

Keltham: Keltham nods; his not eating error having gotten so bad that even other people have started to notice, he does not reply per se.

lintamande: "Most people build their own houses," Tonia offers. "Or their neighbors come over and they all raise a new barn together, from trees they felled from the forest right there and shingles they baked in the kiln right there."

Keltham: Swallow.  "Don't hire specialized housebuilder because?"  +Nom.

lintamande: "The village has a hundred people in it and there's a specialized priest and blacksmith and tanner but that's it. Someone in the village needs a new barn raised or house built maybe once every couple years, and that's not often enough to be the only thing someone does. And you don't get visitors often enough to tell them 'oh, you should send a team of housebuilders from the city, I'm going to want a house in the spring', and if they did come you couldn't afford them. And people are idle, when it's not planting or harvesting season, so they may as well improve their land."

Keltham: Keltham bumps up the priority of 'cheaper travel' on his list, for causing people to, like...

...trade with each other instead of doing things they're not specialized in.

"How do nonwizards get between a smalltown and the nearest mediumcity to the smalltown?"

lintamande: "By boat, if it's on a river, or riding a horse, if it's not and they have a riding horse, or walking, if it's not on a river and they don't have a horse, and poor people don't have riding horses," says Tonia.

Keltham: Horse sounds like an animal and those aren't cheap, yeah.

So basic alternatives to walking, without combustion engines.  Bicycles... take relatively smooth surfaces to bike on.  "Are there roads between towns?"

lintamande: "...no?"

"There's a road from Westcrown to Egorian and it's new and cost the Crown - I have no idea how much money but only the Crown could've done it," says Meritxell. "Most places you travel by river or you mostly don't travel."

Keltham: So the key step on the tech tree is probably cheaper roads, then, to enable more professional specialization and trade between towns...

Keltham wishes he'd read more novels about people going to other dimensions and rebuilding Civilization from scratch, he's read like two and neither author recursed into roadbuilding.

Swallow.  "Saturated on road tech research, or not really trying it?"  Nom.

lintamande: "I don't know of any road tech research projects though probably the people who built the one from Westcrown to Egorian would've gotten very rich if they figured out some better way to do it."

Ione Sala: "You spent practically your whole life in a temple and then a wizard academy," Ione says, slightly scathingly.  "You wouldn't know if there was a road tech research project any more than I would.  How would any of us know?"

Meritxell, watch yourself, we're not supposed to know too much.

lintamande: Meritxell DOES know everything though. She smiles at Ione. "Fair enough."

Keltham: Something about that interaction that just happened would never have happened in dath ilan and Keltham is having difficulty putting a finger on what it is exactly.

Ione Sala: Ione Sala has a slight nervous feeling like she just muffed something.  Needs to cover, distract.  "Well, I might as well go next," she says.  "I was born in a middling city at the junction of two minor rivers.  My parents were a couple of low-level city bureaucrats.  Intelligent enough not to be farmers, but, not really a lot smarter than that."  Incompetent, failed, filled with searing resentment at the world for it.  "I was noticeably a lot smarter than they were, so they," hated me and did what they could to make my life more miserable without that affecting how much they could sell me for, "didn't know what to do with me, really, and wizard-tracked me," sold me like the farm animal I was, "as soon as it became clear that I was going to be a bookish wizard type.  My life is just that city, then Ostenso academy.   I also would've expected to see the larger world for the first time when I went to the Worldwound, not that I'm complaining."

lintamande: "I grew up on a farm where the nearest village was a couple hours of walking away and the nearest city much farther than that, far enough no one had been," Tonia says. "When I was seven the village got a priest and the priest said everyone had to come into the temple for school, so I went, and I hadn't seen reading or writing before but I picked them up right away, and after a couple of months I was studying with the older kids, and after a year he said I should go into the city where I could get a proper education, and the church would house me and feed me while I did, so the next time he reported back to a big city he took me with him, and I came here, and did a bunch of tests and then got put in wizard classes."

Keltham: Keltham is getting this weird feeling like he may, at some future point, predictably first-order update towards wishing he'd started industrializing Golarion slightly sooner, even if it was just by a day, or an hour.

Keltham isn't a perfect Bayesian, but he's a passable one.  By dath ilani standards.

He finishes his last two bites of food quickly and says, "So can somebody direct me to, like, office of project management?"

lintamande: None of the girls are sure where that is!

"When I talked to them they were working out of the temple but that was really temporary."

"Carissa must've talked to them this morning, she said she asked about headbands," says Meritxell.

Keltham: Rise.  Move to Carissa location.  "Should probably go talk to project management now.  Where to?"

Carissa Sevar: "One of the parlors, I can walk you there. How was lunch."

Keltham: "Tasty enough and filled with slightly disturbing accounts of houses.  Houses which, if this is considered a rich person's fancy incredibly impressive house, I should probably try to avoid imagining in any concrete detail."

Well, he should be avoiding imagining it, but in fact he is not.  Keltham is imagining people, otherwise specialized in farming, pulling down entire trees and then gluing them together - it's probably some form of chemical glue, not fasteners, metal is expensive here - until the result looks like it has walls and mostly keeps out the wind.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, good, what a safe topic that doesn't require any lying about. "Maybe someday soon they'll have nicer houses." Left down this hallway and down these stairs.

Keltham: "As near as I can currently guess, this is going to require figuring out how to build cheaper roads, onto which one can put unpowered small machines that will let housebuilders quickly get back and forth from medium cities to small towns, in order to build nicer houses, without their specialized labor being very expensive because of travel costs, which, I thought to myself, maybe I should go talk to somebody about all that."

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds great." She finds him the sitting room. 

lintamande: "Keltham," says a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun who is looking through the report on who Keltham's god might be.

Keltham: "So my parents told me.  Yourself?"

lintamande: "Marta. How can I help you."

Keltham: "I'd like to talk project resources and Chelish Governance's priorities.  Before then, do you mind if I ask what's the local larger organizational structure that embeds this project, and your place in it?"

lintamande: "Yes. My job is to track project spending, track project revenue once it has any, solicit project revenue estimates, approve briefing on the project for new people it becomes necessary to involve, and authorize acquisitions. I report to Maillol, who is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and the site director. Maillol reports to his superiors in the church, and ultimately to the High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, and to Her Imperial Majesty's staff including Contessa Lrilatha, who you've met."

Keltham: "Among my top questions is to discuss what Governance wants, in what order, where any and all particulars may be rapidly revised in the face of particular avenues proving more or less tractable.  Is Governance's value function over outcomes there sufficiently understandable to you that you're confident of your own ability to predict it with only rare referrals upward, or should I be moving upward in the management tree to have that conversation?"

lintamande: Governance is reasonably liable to change its mind a bunch in the next few weeks but probably the easiest way to give the Crown and Church more flexibility is to have as low-importance a person as possible give an explanation now which it'll then be possible for her superiors to override later if they change their minds. "That depends a little on your questions but Governance's priorities have been communicated to me and I can do my best to convey them."

Keltham: "I'll... try asking my questions, but if you don't correctly predict Management Above's answer to them, the result would be incorrectly prioritized outcomes that are potentially expensive for Governance relative to Governance's optimally obtainable outcomes, if there's anyone who can predict answers better... I'm sorry, I'm probably saying things that don't make sense for Golarion somehow."

Though - even if they don't have the dath ilani idiom of lower deciders registering their predictions of upper deciders' predictions, until you finally get to whoever in Management or whoever in the judicial courts or wherever is supposedly the gold standard for that issue - 'Don't have junior people decide macro project priorities, refer them to the top manager specialized on that project or in those priorities' is a notion that Keltham would've thought projected down to the simpler case.

Keltham is also noticing that if you try to do sensible Project Management while speaking in Taldane, this is even harder than speaking other sensible thoughts in Taldane.  Should he ask Marta if she can Comprehend Languages?  No, let's try pushing through for now.

"Before I go on, around how much of what I've already discussed with project members has been recounted to you by project members?  Or by Security or other observers?"

lintamande: "We have detailed notes on your presentation yesterday to your researchers. Some of your researchers also individually came to Projects with questions or predictions based on class conversation and also mealtime conversations; all of them are expected to do that at least by the end of the week when we'll renegotiate their salaries, but not all of them have done it yet, so you shouldn't assume we know everything you said in public to any of them."

Keltham: "So as to be clear on how much of yesterday's presentation got successfully preserved, do you mean you've got imperfect but cross-referenced notes from students afterwards, or was there an invisible wizard writing everything down verbatim as fast as I said it?"

lintamande: "A transcription spell, rather than an invisible wizard, was employed, but we believe the notes to be complete. You may look at them and issue corrections if you'd like." 

Keltham: "I'd like to review my improvised extemporaneous lectures in case I made errors or omissions that stand out as needing correction, yeah.  Thanks to whichever person for their hopefully routine competence in having set that up."

"Governance then should now have a specific, rather than abstract or secondhand, notion of what I know and what that knowledge can do.  It's built on a base level of trained skills of thinking, that work together effectively because of overlapping coherence and direction inspired by explicit mathematical structure, which were applied by my Civilization of a billion wealthier people of much higher average Intelligence to systematically decode and exploit reality to a far greater distance than Golarion appears to have traversed, leaving also incomplete traces in my personal memory of specific facts, techniques, and methodologies that I encountered in systematic or unsystematic passing."

"I know why snowflakes have sixfold symmetry.  I can turn mechanical motion into cold without a Snowball spell, but I don't know yet how much motion for how much cold.  I knew how to build a faster kind of unpowered sailing ship but it sounded like you have those already.  I know how to make an unpowered mechanical device that will let people move between cities faster than a person can run, but only if there are roads between those cities.  I know how I'd go about figuring out how to make cheaper roads, but I don't know how long that research will take or how good the end results would be.  The books in the library here are written in ways that reflect patterns of thinking that I know are invalid, and I remember some things about how to train a person as intelligent as I am so that they'll think effectively.  I know the foundational math that structured the kinds of thinking that I learned.  There is an attractor, an overlap, a center in everything, whose structure is that math, and by far the most important question is whether Golarion can be started down the path leading into that attractor and learn for itself what Civilization learned, but there remains the question of what Governance wants to see first for scaling up investment in this."

lintamande: "Many of those things are of interest to us but what we currently predict will be most immediately valuable is the habits of thought for intelligent people that make them competent to discover all the rest. For any given solution, there are often going to be a lot of Golarion-specific reasons why it's not easy to implement, and our current prediction is that little - not none - of dath Ilan's direct technologies will easily translate. But if we understand the basics of how the gods reason, and how human-level intelligences can use the reasoning patterns of the gods, then we can overcome any given complication that is due to dragons or Charybdis or the fae or whatever."

Keltham: Keltham doesn't know enough to be impressed by the sensibility of a crown-boosted Abrogail Thrune because Keltham has no reference point for the usual sensibility levels of pseudo-medieval governments.

"I suspect you underestimate how much would translate if we had the books in front of us, but we don't, and that means non-Keltham people need to know how to fill in the gaps regardless."

"Such techniques are meant to be used, however.  They are best taught as they are applied, not as pure abstractions.  In Civilization, children are not spoiled for a number of elementary physical truths and inventions so that they can learn underlying mental forms in the course of inventing them.  This regime is optimized for the final quality of the resulting adults, however, not for speed in rapidly retraining adults to the same techniques.  The point is, we will, at some point, need a starting application."

"I haven't hurried my attempts to ask for a starting project, because it would be exhausting to produce an exhaustive list of everything I might possibly be able to do, and so far it has seemed like it makes more sense to keep asking questions about local conditions until I orient, so I can understand myself which of your largest problems I can probably solve quickly.  It will still help if I have -"

"Uh -"

"Your language doesn't have a word for the thing I want, which is not an encouraging sign.  Does Cheliax have a central list of how much monetary value Governance puts on everything it usually pursues?  Like, amount of gold it's worth to cure an otherwise fatal disease in a one-year-old infant, or the amount it's worth to produce one more second-circle wizard?"

lintamande: "No. We could try to produce a partial one for you."

Keltham: "Do you have a different solution for why your government... is, like, capable of coherently wanting or planning anything, given that it's made up of more than one person?  For not having one person decide that it's not worth 10,000 gold to produce three wizards and somebody else deciding that it's worth 15,000 gold to produce one of them?"