Abrogail Thrune II: "Why pay extra to tell me what I am clearly capable of figuring out for myself if I bother to exercise a little wit?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Abrogail.  Tell me you are amusing yourself at my expense, and not actually being this incorrigible to our Lord."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I am of course not certain of any such conjectures.  But I can see the possibility, nor is anything about it surely wrong; and if those are perhaps not the exact details, something vast seems to be latent in the air.  Some endgame is beginning, I think, and perhaps not only the endgame of Golarion alone, and our Lord does seem to be at the center and even, we may hope, in control.  What would you of me, Aspexia, having seen this much possibility?  Would you that I do nothing?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I would have us all do as our Lord instructed, and not leap to greater excesses of zealousness when it seems our Lord could easily have instructed more zeal if it were wished."

"Also, if there are 'tropes' about, you are baiting them."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I have gone to great lengths to be free of 'tropes' and had sincerely hoped never to hear of them again."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Hell is the destruction of hope.  I presume you've read the most recent reports out of Project Lawful, regarding the asexual and her absent superpowers?  To say nothing of the hidden cleric who could only be detected by one who would not reveal the truth to Keltham and Sevar?  We must at this point regard 'tropes' as simple fact."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Then are we to never seek any victory for Asmodeus, fearing ourselves to invoke the wrath of 'tropes' if we dare try?  Why not sign Cheliax over to the rulership of these 'tropes', then, if they and not our Lord now command us!"

Aspexia Rugatonn: The Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is feeling very tired right now.  She did not need an entirely new class of pseudo-divine entity-forces to worry about, either, but she is not going to pretend they don't exist.

"I know that you have little taste for romance novels.  Even amid the chaos of your ascension, I do recall hearing the report that you had all Chelish authors of them put to creative deaths, by their own lovers when possible.  But in this case -"

Abrogail Thrune II: "That is not precisely true.  As a young girl I tried several such and found them wanting.  After I ascended, yes, all of those authors met appropriately romantic fates of my own design.  But I gave new instructions to new officers, after, and in my first years personally checked all synopses to pass final word on their approval."

"Today, I admit, I have less care for such matters and so less attention.  But every year or two I deign to have some author of seemingly good repute brought before me to kneel in wait while I read their latest work, and the results are running half-and-half between authors enriched and authors incinerated.  On the whole there has been a vast improvement since my reign's beginning, if I do say so myself, though much about the temper of literate Chelish women remains to be perfected."

"What of it?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn thinks to herself that she really should monitor more closely every single thing that Abrogail Thrune II ever gets up to, it's just that the dark water in that well seems to have no end.

"Turn your over-cleverness to this, then.  How is Hell's victory over all the realms to be made the appropriate ending of a romance novel?  For Keltham did seem to think, and I would not assume him wrong, that the 'tropes' stood above all gods; and if those could be invoked about Hell's victory over all realms, I might begin to hope for it myself."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Hmmm.  I admit, I do not at all want to consider that question, but if I must, then I must."

"Corrupting Keltham would seem to be the obvious key.  The story ends with him and his Carissa finally of one accord on the matter, watching Cheliax's victory and Asmodeus's ultimate victory unfold as if it were their own."

"Or - better yet, we should try to make Carissa rather than Keltham be the character of greater importance.  Indeed, much of that work I have already done, without my even realizing what I was about.  That is encouraging.  And if Carissa is the protagonist that yields a thousand useful romantic possibilities, such as her breaking Keltham with the witness of what he has done and so finally remaking her man to her own satisfaction."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Perhaps that is how a modern Chelish romance novel would end."  What has Abrogail done.  Aspexia needs to go read one of those novels in all haste.  "How do we make Hell's victory be a fitting ending, the only fitting ending, of a dath ilani romance novel, one produced and approved by Keltham's Civilization?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "Hmmm.  Hm.  That does seem more difficult."

"If Keltham had failed tragically enough, out of his own deeper fault - out of his selfishness, out of his sexuality, as dath ilan deems faults in him - then would a Lawful Good writer out of dath ilan compose an ending that dath ilan thought the most terrible possible, to show the consequence -"

"Why am I now considering requisitioning for myself a tragical romance novel written by the most intelligent Lawful Good author who has ever written one.  How have I come to this, by what road have I come here?  Somewhere we went astray along the way."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "You speak as if it could possibly be only the one misstep; ask, rather, whether we ever stepped anywhere rightly."

Abrogail Thrune II: "A thought, then.  Suppose we are to -"

"Wait!  I believe, on reflection, that I should say no more.  I should not speak any of my plans or thoughts on the subject aloud.  I have not already lost Hell's victory thereby, I think, but I cannot speak out loud of how victory is to be achieved and especially not while speaking with the Most High in a tower overlooking my city's sunset."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Is that actually necessary.

As Aspexia cannot but admit the answer is that she doesn't know either, the Queen is, of course, right in her strategy.

"As you say.  I did have one idea about that romantic tragedy, myself, but I suppose I can delay to have that discussion in a plainer chamber."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Wiser still would be for you to write it to me, and have it delivered not by your own person."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "No, I am too much looking forwards to seeing the look on your face.  But it could be written down for you to read, if you think that will help."

Abrogail Thrune II: The Queen looks more than slightly weary herself.  "We should end this discussion here, then, on that ominous note."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia frowns.  "Is there anything particularly dramatic I should do, in the way of departing -"

Abrogail Thrune II: "You're making it less dramatic with every word you speak.  Just go."

Aspexia Rugatonn: As her Infernal Majestrix wills, so it must be done, in the end.  The Most High departs without further word.

Cayden Cailean: Just as planned.

Cayden Cailean doesn't know why Nethys insisted on Cayden thinking that to Himself, if this meeting went approximately according to any of Scenarios 1-4 for it.  Cayden Cailean does not see how a private thought would have any further effect.  And it did not, in fact, go precisely as planned.  But it is not worth questioning Nethys about such a matter, else He starts going on about orthogonal angles and things that make you more real when they look at you and 'anthropics'.

Asmodia: Asmodia has ever needed to flirt before, she has needed to smile, she has needed to gasp in false pleasure.  She has never received the slightest reward in return, nothing good has ever happened to her as a result, only a diminution of punishment.

Now here she is, smiling at Keltham, coming on to him far more blatantly than most of the other girls.  And the other girls haven't actually been briefed on Asmodia's situation yet, there wasn't enough time before dinner.  So their almost entirely masked expressions of confusion are priceless, each time she touches Keltham's hand and suggests in a low sultry voice that they go off to bed together, and lie there fully clothed reading books, and maybe in a year or two she'll find him attractive.

She's flirting with a man who can't have her tonight, who'll never have her at all, who knows he can't have her, who is smiling back at her because he doesn't know he can also never have her heart, or that she'll Teleport out of his life at the first possible moment; and she was promoted in her top-secret top-priority project, to effectively second-in-command almost, and placed in charge of an incredibly challenging and exciting game of deceiving him.

Her life is just like a romance novel, now.

Except that even if Asmodia fucks up she won't get tortured, and even if she fucks up completely she can suicide before getting tortured to death and hope that somebody is nice to her again within 100 years.  Those aren't the way it would work in a romance novel at all, but both of those facts just make her life unambiguously better even if it wouldn't work as fiction.

Asmodia is right now having the time of her unfucking life, her defucked and unfuckable life.  Keltham's Civilization has it exactly right about the message that it thinks proper to tell asexuals.  Asmodia would change nothing about this situation if she could.

lintamande: "I feel like you're not having enough fun with this," says Yaisa. "If it were me with a dozen boys from another world desperately fighting for my attention I would say 'kiss my feet, slaves' and see who did it fastest."

"Not everyone shares your kinks, Yaisa. Maybe Keltham enjoys watching people come up with excessively complicated plans by which to try to win him, so he can judge whose plan is the cleverest."

"I mean, you can also say, 'kiss my feet and then go bring me back a real live kangaroo, first one back wins, slaves', and he's not even doing that."

Carissa Sevar: Was Carissa ever a teenage girl? She is pretty sure she wasn't.

Keltham: Apparently Keltham has never had a proper chance to be a teenage boy before.

He banters back as fast as he can think of witty replies, and if he can't, he only needs to wait another two seconds and somebody will deliver him a different prompt.

If he had to declare a winner on the basis of clever lines, it'd have to be Asmodia; but that's not all this contest is about, and Keltham does not quite feel like clothed bookreading tonight.

"I suppose I could make you all compete to solve math problems for it," Keltham says, grinning about as widely as he ever has in his life.  "I mean, it's possible some of you might have other capabilities too, but that's the main capability I've seen so far from you all.  Am I missing anything I'd find interesting?"

He... doesn't think he's going to be no longer okay for casual sex, as a result of falling in something with Carissa?  He's currently looking forwards to selecting one of Ione, Meritxell, Peranza, or Tonia to schedule a nighttime rendezvous, at the end of all this; and Keltham expects that to go basically well, unless he stumbles over some weird new aspect of his own sexuality.

(Yaisa is the one to whom he feels most sexually attracted, in fact; but that would be a little um pending discussion with Carissa et. al. of what happens to, among other candidates, Yaisa.)

(He'll ask what a 'slave' is later, if he remembers; from context it's obviously something like 'masochist' or 'submissive'.)

lintamande: "You make us solve math problems all day," Yaisa says. "The romantic contest should be of a different nature. Or I suppose it could be something like strip-solving-math-problems. I'll lose, and Asmodia will win, but apparently that suits us both."

"You should really tell the site manager that our uniforms aren't sexy enough so they budget us new clothes," Tonia says. 

"The site manager will say, 'ah, but perhaps the clothes will be Kuthite spies,'" says Meritxell, "and propose instead that we all go around naked."

"Well, you know, he has a point, have you checked if your clothes are Kuthite spies?"

"- clarification, clothes cannot actually be spies," says Meritxell helpfully to Keltham. And to Yaisa, "why, I check every morning, before I prepare spells. Don't you?"

Keltham: "Clothes can't be spies?" says Keltham to Meritxell.  "That sounds like something a piece of clothing would want me to believe.  Are you a piece of clothing?  What happens when you are taken off?"

lintamande: "Why, I don't know! Many men have tried to take me off but none of them were clever enough, or dangerous enough, or dath ilani enough, so there's no way to know if it's even possible."

Keltham: "This would seem to imply that you are not only clothing, but men's clothing, and yet you appear to me to be a woman, which would self-evidently make you a spy.  Are your apparent clothes also spies?"

lintamande: "Well, you can't check if someone's clothes are spies while they're wearing them, which is why I check in the morning before getting dressed. So whether my clothes are spies is unknowable until someone manages to coax me out of them."

Keltham: "And what am I expected to do, after what sounds like a great deal of effort on my part, if beneath all of your clothing is, in fact, a man's shirt?"

lintamande: "Compose the world's most interesting urgent security breach report for the Grand High Priestess, obviously. 'The project has been infiltrated by a shirt pretending to be Meritxell. Two new projects should be spun up at once to research the violations of the laws of magic that this implies.'"

Keltham: "You have some strange notions of how to spend a fun evening.  I thought you might suggest that, in this case, I might as well try wearing you, but if you'd rather file security breach reports..."

lintamande: "I told you, no man has ever succeeded in wearing me. What makes you think you're different?"

Keltham: "No man of Golarion has ever worn such a shirt as I wear even now.  Also the last god who went against me ended up in a little box."

lintamande: "Then perhaps you could triumph where all before you have failed. Or perhaps when you turned your gaze from defeating gods to wearing me, you aimed too high even for a dath ilani."

Keltham: "Can't actually say no if you put it that way.  See you later in the evening?  Just to be clear to everyone else, though, that isn't going to work on me twice."

lintamande: "Nothing will work on you twice," Yaisa says. "We'll have to get up to steadily more depraved things just to do something you haven't thought of, and in two months you'll only want squid, polymorphed into girls, whose eternal servitude you earned by slaying their squid Zon-Kuthon."

lintamande: Meritxell beams fiercely at Keltham. "See you later tonight."

Keltham: "See you later, Meritxell.  Well, also see you imminently after dinnertime, if that time works for you and the other three."

"And Yaisa... welcome to Civilization."

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Evening

Keltham: They've got something like a proper meeting / breakout room, now, for this conversation.  Well, not by Civilized standards, obviously, but better than just grabbing a random not-especially-so-purposed room in an archduke's villa.

...Keltham probably owes that guy a favor at some point.

Anyways.  It's pretty clear at this point that competence at learning Law has stratified into Carissa-Asmodia-Meritxell-Ione, Pilar-Gregoria-Peranza-Tonia, and Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  The original contract for having the girls come in was for one week, as Keltham understands it.

So, um.  Keltham isn't sure what's... expected, about Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  On his model of things, the bottom third there will noticeably slow down further lecture learning, and probably not produce enough work output to make up for it.  And if there's any ability to add additional people, they're opportunity-costly, they'd take up a limited number of student slots...

Okay, now that he's saying this out loud it's pretty obvious what the decision has to be, even though Keltham really doesn't like it.  (And feels even worse about how he was just flirting with them while managing not to think through this line of thought to its clear conclusion, though Keltham doesn't say any of that out loud.)

How does Cheliax handle this situation?  In Civilization in non-top-secret projects, you just let people go work on something they'll be better at.  In Civilization's top-secret projects, everybody who goes through an elaborate screening process to receive classified info has been predicted by prediction market to work out.  In either case, you had an explicit understanding with them before they came in about under what circumstances they'd go, but Keltham is kinda guessing that the reason this explicit understanding has not been mentioned to him is that it does not in fact exist.

Asmodia: This is a foundational question of how alterCheliax treats people in a way Keltham will accept, not of figuring out the consequences of deceptions already decided.  Asmodia will assume it's Sevar's work unless Sevar tells her otherwise.

Carissa Sevar: "On a normal military secret project, you can get reassigned, if the project's not a good fit for you and you've maintained the level of top secret clearance you needed for it in the first place. If you accidentally wandered into something with clearance wildly above yours, and then aren't a good fit - honestly, the usual is probably that you go to Hell, at least until you no longer know anything top secret - like, in a year or two it'll likely be fine to let them go back to their lives. But - if you're going to be reluctant to drop unpromising students from the project for that reason, I don't see an issue with doing something else?"

Keltham: "I've actually got no idea how much of a hardship it would be considered to be to spend a couple of years in Hell, and I definitely wouldn't be asking that of somebody unless that part had been explicitly explained in advance.  Given how long it took between when I got here and there were girls in the library, there must have been either a very standard contract or a very improvised one - does anybody have a copy on hand?"

Asmodia: As of slightly over an hour ago, yes, this obviously Ordinary-existent piece of physical evidence that Keltham could have demanded at any time in the past six days now exists; and Sevar thought through this section in advance.

"I brought mine," Asmodia says, and hands hers over.  She doesn't allow the slightest trace of triumph to show on her face, even though, in her own opinion, this wouldn't have gotten done in time without her helping to prompt it.  "I think you probably want section 5 point... 3?"

This contract does permit, in section 5.4.1, that if the contractee is exposed to sufficiently secret information and better options don't exist for hiding it, the Chelish government can demand that somebody go to Hell and stay there for up to 5 years as required.  The 5 is written into a line for the exact number.

Keltham: He finds it soon enough.

"I'm not saying it's not logical, or even that it's not sensible, but this is still weirding me out a bit.  Do people come back totally fine from that, staying in Hell that long doesn't make them less suited to Golarion?  There's no probabilities, what did they think the probability of this being invoked was, when they signed the contract..."

"This is frankly a much more extreme decision than I thought we'd be facing when we considered startup composition.  I'm not sure I feel okay making it."

Carissa Sevar: "If you'd rather the girls get put in a different wing of the fortress being taught something tricky - ring forging - by a senior wizard, there so you can visit them and sleep with Yaisa occasionally, I don't think anyone would object. If that - lowers the barrier to you removing people from the project - it seems obviously worth it. You're allowed to be Evil and just do whatever is most comfortable for you."

Keltham: "Thank you for reminding me of that, it is not actually something you hear in Civilization very often."

"I'd like them to have that choice, yeah.  Ideally some other choices too, even if it means calling in favors from Cheliax.  It is not something I'd decide one way or the other for them."  He notes that feeling of moral dissonance that he's had before, when Carissa talked about selling tickets to watch rats devouring each other.  "And unless Yaisa has a very specific sexuality that somebody needs to inform me about if so, she isn't to be told that her ability to stay here is contingent on her fucking me, nor will it, in fact, be so."

Asmodia: Asmodia wishes again that she had some way of knowing if the Gardens of Erecura would also receive Paxti, if Paxti could somehow be advised that the Hell option is her best bet... how would she even communicate that, though, or have Paxti follow through, in a way that wouldn't set off twenty kinds of whatthefuck nearby?

Was that thought a stupid one?  No, if someone somewhere cared about Asmodia, she's allowed to give a fuck about Paxti.  Or the other three, too, though that thought seems stranger as yet.

Carissa Sevar: "Sure, that seems reasonable. You have a lot of latitude; give them some choices. If the choices are good it'll also probably help with other students not being scared of failing out of the project, which I bet you'll tell me is useful for learning dath ilanism. And no, I don't think you should keep Yaisa here conditionally, I just think she's obviously into you. ...and I may have, at risk of becoming a too-Good person with a too big headband, asked the High Priestess if she happened to know which other girls like getting hurt, because ...."

Carissa Sevar: "...because I feel like it's my fault, for having trouble relaxing, that you feel like - maybe that's a Conspiracy, that maybe no one anywhere actually likes being hurt, and if you have a nice uncomplicated time with someone who you can tell is loving it then you'll. Uh. Move your probabilities specifically on the question of whether we made up masochists. But I have been warned against being a too-Good person with a too-big headband so I'll cut it out."

Keltham: "Carissa, I deeply appreciate your efforts in this regard, may follow up on this later, and would right now like to follow the dath ilani best practice of just completely not talking about this in the context of who stays employed by the project.  As in, we don't talk about this at all, until after everything has been settled, and this meeting has been adjourned, without that having ever been a consideration."

"If you think that's an absolutely terrible way to approach this issue, I'm open to having an extended meta-level digression about whether I'm being overly Good here or just Lawful, though I'd want to free Ione, Asmodia, or Meritxell to sit that one out if they wanted."

Carissa Sevar: "Nope I think that's a good plan, let's make project decisions entirely off one of who is good for the project or what is good for your own personal ability to make project decisions without feeling guilty. Which, it sounds like, is coming up with a bunch of appealing options for the girls and letting them pick one, and surveying the remaining girls to make sure that the options sound appealing enough that they're not scared of being fired?"

Keltham: "Yeah.  I would have expected a compensation clause in the original contract, actually, if people were going in for a week that carried with it a significant chance of some very large consequence for them of spending the next 5 years in top secret info lockdown, for which they wouldn't otherwise be paid an excess wage... is that already in here?"

The cleric of Abadar attempts to flip through the Asmodean-written contract looking to see if a clause like that already exists.  Does it?

lintamande: It says compensation is 300gp for one week's time, to be renegotiated after one week, and to at no point be less than their standard military pay if they'd been deployed as planned.

Keltham: Right.  Their actual alternative wasn't being computer programmers, it was that they were otherwise heading to the Worldwound.  Most top-secret sequestration conditions are probably nicer than that, aren't they, so long as living conditions go.

It is sometimes hard to remember how Golarion works, and casting an illusion of Civilization drawn from his own mind didn't help with his sense of reality.

He hasn't actually said tsi-imbi(*) at any point, now that he thinks of it.  Kind of pointless now.  Still, universalizable rules.  He'll do it next time he's alone.

(*)  Said by dath ilani when they think 'this seems impossible, I might be insane', and the people around them should get them to a psychiatric institution if they don't seem to be correctly checksumming immediate reality.  An emergency signal; never said as a joke.

Keltham: "All right.  Then I think we take that as our baseline option to potentially improve upon later, though I'll want to check what the actual options being offered to them are and whether I feel a need, or just want, I guess, to call in further favor from Cheliax to improve them."

Wow does that still feel awful.  Well, everyone warns about that, and everyone is apparently right, go figure.

"That leaves the question of what kind of contracts we see for the eight who stay.  In dath ilan, people in this kind of position would usually be offered some of their compensation in the form of an expected share of future profits, and this is something that we have to negotiate with actual Cheliax at some point, but at least in dath ilan, that agreement would be produced by us collectively negotiating with Cheliax, especially you four because you're the ones who seem relatively irreplaceable."

"Actually, now that I think about it, Pilar is not exactly all that replaceable?  She should arguably have something like a tier-one-and-half status, based on a suspicion of greater-than-first-apparent impacts of divine interventions; a status that gets promoted to tier one if Pilar turns out to be way more important than just saving my temporary life once and having snacks."

"Anyways, I'm still waiting on Cheliax to offer me a first-run contractual relationship between Project Lawful's employees and Cheliax, where I'm not quite sure why they don't have one, yet.  Except that my guess is that they want more than a week worth of data to make up their minds, and the trouble there is that I don't feel it's particularly prudent to, like, work on metallurgy or roadbuilding for a month without any contract.  We could potentially have a crude contract for the first research that gets done, with intent to renegotiate it after seeing how early results play out, but I do want any contract.  And -"

"What I'm getting at here is that I can successfully sit down in a room with you and figure out what you think Project Lawful wants from Cheliax, or what you want, which is more than I've been successfully able to do with Cheliax itself.  Except for one person who didn't seem empowered to do binding negotiations, and who I think isn't back from Hell yet after the Nidal assault."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I have even less authority than that, but we can at least try something, and send someone down to the site manager's office in case there's a contract ready and waiting for you." There is. She very firmly told the people writing it not to get caught doing anything tricky but she half expects Keltham to object even to a bunch of things that weren't intentional tricks. "And personally I'm delighted about some share of future project revenues, once we all have headbands which aren't even bottlenecked on money, money later's about as good as money now for me...." She wants to not sound too rehearsed, because in alterCheliax she wouldn't have an inbuilt instinct that contracts will destroy you if you don't have a specific plan for avoiding that.

dath ilan: Don't worry, Cheliax.  Keltham is a programmer.*

He may not yet have an intuition for everybody being out to burn him all of the time, but he sure does have an intuition for asking "Well, what if this measurement here was broken and returned negative a trillion gold pieces?"  If you try to make sure you can't be screwed over in a contract by malicious gods, you'll catch a lot of human malice along the way.

(*)  A dath ilani concept essentially untranslatable to Taldane in its connotations and origins; the two-syllable word 'programmer' has an expanded six-syllable form that reads creator-of-raw-causality, where 'creator' in turn implies 'one who accepts responsibility for all consequences of creation whether intended or not' (the same word that appears in expanded 'parent' as 'creator-of-sapient-life') and 'raw-causality' means 'raw math, close to the bare bones of reality'.  The nearest Taldane translation is in fact 'creator-god' if creator-gods worked to a much smaller scale.

Keltham: Keltham shall endeavor to send to see if a proposed contract has conveniently arrived, then.  He sort of assumed he'd be told if it had, but then, that was sort of a stupid assumption.

While they wait for that, he'll take a quick run at explaining equity, options, vesting, fixed and event-dependent components of compensation, the interest of individual employees in reducing variance on core income even at some cost in expected money because of their logarithmic utility functions over money, the standard internally-expected-return-on-marginal-capital formula that determines where a company places its standing limit buy and sell orders for its own stock into the general market at any given time, and other basics that shouldn't be too hard for the Project's better mathematicians, right.

lintamande: It would have been kind of nice to know this stuff before selling her soul except Meritxell doesn't even think she knows this stuff now that she's been told it.

Carissa Sevar: "I assume devils know all this stuff already but if they haven't gotten this complicated they're going to love you so much."

Keltham: ...this is not 'complicated'.  Those are the straightforward automatic consequences of the structure of corporations with divisible financialized ownership of uncertain future incomes, made out of their internal contractual relationships with employees who have standardly human-shaped incentives.

What does Cheliax do instead.

Carissa Sevar: "....uh, you tell people 'I'll give you a silver a day if you show up for work' and then on days when they show up they get a silver. Unless they aren't worth it in which case you tell them to stop showing up."

Keltham: Does Cheliax by any chance not have - pieces of companies getting sold around between people who own those pieces of companies?  Does Cheliax by any chance not have companies, just people paying other people to do things?

Carissa Sevar: "I don't think I understand what a company is as distinct from - my father owns a lot of ships, and hires people to send them places to get cargo?"

Keltham: Keltham is now RECALCULATING SEVERAL IMPORTANT PARAMETERS OF LOCAL REALITY.  Please HOLD.

lintamande: While he does that, some people bring the proposed contract! It's still a draft with several peoples' comments written on it, but maybe it'll still be useful to him. 

(It being a draft is one of several ways Cheliax is protecting itself against Keltham finding the contract suspicious.)

The contract proposes a Kelthamishly fair division of the gains from trade that the Crown captures through its normal mechanisms of taxation, which are that taxes are collected by local governance and the bulk passed on to higher levels of governance. It proposes measuring this a couple of different ways and using the middle measurement, and referring disputes to Hell for arbitration. It can be paid out in Cheliax's fiat currency, backed by Hell, or in gold if they have enough gold. It predicts that Cheliax would learn all these things a year later, if Keltham did this work elsewhere, and does not want Cheliax worse off for being the place where Keltham did it, so the fair division (in the contract's reckoning) decreases substantially over time.

Keltham: ...they are probably not trying to cheat him, because if so they would have tried to carefully argue him around to this viewpoint before just dumping it on him.

Okay, so, first of all, this seems to be based on a model where, it's implied, no country can protect intellectual property, like at all, and countries just rip each other off about it without any attempt to pay patentgratuities on anything.  And that there's no such meaningful thing as a trade secret, human capital, it being hard for other corporations to just completely copy everything you do -

So maybe Keltham is just misunderstanding how things work around here, but, what if they used other countries' observed abilities to copy Cheliax while this starts happening, as a proxy for Cheliax's counterfactual abilities to copy other countries, maybe very moderately discounted if somebody feels strongly about Cheliax actually being better at copying or at keeping trade secrets and that mattering to fairness?  There's an obvious-seeming formula which uses their excess GDP growth to discount Cheliax's excess GDP growth, modulo above-trend exports of Cheliax to those countries under an assumption that the export prices capture around half the gains from trade i.e. those countries getting richer by trading with Cheliax... actually, no, that shouldn't be discounted because Cheliax would experience similar gains if Keltham set up elsewhere, never mind.

Point being, Keltham is maybe just wrong here, but also suspects that Cheliax underestimates the degree to which Cheliax will become richer than other countries if those other countries try to get away with ripping off the Project and paying nothing on the intellectual property they try to steal.  This part can potentially be settled by writing some observable proxies into the contract rather than arguing it out in advance, at the expense of contract complexity.

The tax system is confusing and Keltham is simply failing to parse it.  Cheliax is actually made up of a bunch of other countries with their own separate economies and tax systems?

How does a world invent fiat currency before it invents stock markets, that's insane.  Who would try to hold that much currency, currency is not an investment.

Nobody has attached any reasonable bounds on any of the variables referenced in this contract-code, there's no mention that taxes from some subregion can't be returned as negative a trillion gold pieces and cause the Project to owe Cheliax five entire copies of Golarion, there's no minimum gold amount that Cheliax definitely thinks it has available in the way of gold...

Carissa Sevar: "The using other countries' observed ability to copy Cheliax thing seems like a good idea. Have we...at no point gotten around to trying to explain what the nobility are. I guess we haven't while I was in the room."

Keltham: This has in fact not occurred.

What new Golarion Doomfact now awaits poor Keltham?

Carissa Sevar: "So I don't know tons of history, but, stylized, you've got a bunch of farmers, and they get periodically raided by bandits and wild animals. So whichever farmer is the best at fighting bandits and wild animals collects protection money from all the others, and gets even better at fighting bandits and wild animals, and eventually they own a bunch of land on which other people work, and they protect that land from bandits and wild animals, and they're much richer than the people who work the land. Now, say there's a dragon. They can't handle a dragon! Or say that the neighboring person of similar standing tries to invade and kill them and take their stuff. They'd really like to have alliances with other landowner-defenders. Some of those alliances will be on equal terms - I defend you, you defend me - and some will be on terms of - you swear to commit your forces where I command it, when I command it, and in exchange I'll extend my protection to you. And in most places, you build up layers of this. A small landowner-defender is a Baron, and a Count is a landowner-defender who has Barons pledged to him, and a Duke is a landowner-defender that has Counts pledged to him, and the Archduke of Sirmium whose summer villa we borrowed is one of the Dukes who duchy is particularly big and powerful and important, and Dukes pledge to the Queen. 

And the way taxation happens is the barons get the grain from the farmers who work the land and they pass some on up."

Keltham: Where does suggesting a reorganization of Cheliax fall in the category of Things One Doesn't Speak About Around Here?

Carissa Sevar: "I wouldn't say it to the face of any people who might lose all their stuff in the reorganization, and it has the same terrible track record when tried as overthrowing the government does, but none of us are going to feel vaguely terrified if you declare that actually there's some clever way to just see the Queen's will done everywhere."

Keltham: Keltham knows that he explained this part already, because Keltham was there, the point of reorganizing is not that people lose their stuff, you're supposed to trade around the jellychips in a way that leaves everybody better off.  This system sounds ludicrously inefficient and if it was reorganized there would be gains to the whole system that could then be distributed.

Is it possibly the case that nobody in Golarion ever suggests anything like this?

Carissa Sevar: ".....I don't know that anyone has suggested specifically a reorganization that leaves all current nobles better off, because if you're not making the world ludicrously wealthier it'd be really really hard to offer them a deal anywhere near as good as the one they have now."

Keltham: "That's - got literally nothing to do, with how well off they are now, if the system is a million gold pieces wealthier than it was in total before, you've got a million gold pieces to pay people above what they previously had, what prevents a reorganization like that are friction costs where moving things around is very expensive -"

"But we're not actually going to fix it.  Fine.  How does the Project deal with this monstrosity?  Are the dukes not going to respect the intellectual property of Cheliax, are the counts not going to respect the intellectual property of dukes, am I actually dealing with only a tiny fraction of twenty million people constituting only the top ranks of Governance who have any unity with which to negotiate with me?  I guess if the people who can negotiate with me are the most powerful spellcasters and have most of the money, that still counts for something, for certain terms and definitions of something."

Carissa Sevar: "No, they'll all respect a deal the Queen makes, and enforce it in their own jurisdictions, and they'll mostly respect each others' separate deals on top of that if we make any of those."

Keltham: "But there's no centralized measurements of how well the whole economy is doing, it sounds like.  Cheliax literally does not know its GDP and has no way of finding out.  All it has are the amount of taxes it collects from the subhierarchy, and whatever verification structures must exist in order to verify how much the taxes - does the system have any way of knowing whether a Baron is just lying about how much tax they extracted from the people underneath, or is it all trust-based?  Trust-based doesn't sound like it should work in Golarion, and wouldn't even be tried in Civilization."

Carissa Sevar: "I think they check some random selection and punish the cheats such that it's not worth cheating, but I don't know the details."

lintamande: It's always worth cheating; it's never worth getting caught.

Keltham: "And all of this entire system is not based on fair division of mutual gains from moving to coordinated arrangements that make everyone better off; it is at least partially enforced at every level by threats that wouldn't counterfactually be made except for the threatened agent's predicted tendency to give in to threats; meaning everybody at every level of the structure has various reasons not to like the current arrangement and to find it easy to imagine how they could do better; but they're terrible at coordinating and have high friction costs and expected destructive losses from trying to change anything because lots of the destructive threats would start firing; to the point where it's proverbial that everybody overestimates the gains and underestimates the losses from trying to change anything and people shouldn't even talk about trying that."

Carissa Sevar: "You can change some things. Just not try to overthrow the whole system at once."

lintamande: "I'm not sure the thing you're saying about threats is true?" says Meritxell. "So, say I'm a count. And I refuse to pay my taxes. The Duke I'm supposed to pay them to would rather have a Count who does pay taxes, so he'll kill me and replace me. He's not doing that to threaten me, he's doing it because he wants a count who pays taxes. To the extent that I refuse to respond to threats made only to keep me in line, like a god, I should still pay my taxes, because the killing and replacing me isn't done to keep me in line, it's done to have a taxpaying subordinate."

Keltham: "I agree that this is a correct view from the perspective of a single Count imagining their own decisions to be uncorrelated with any other Counts' decisions; with all of the other Counts, of course, thinking exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons and so arriving at exactly the same decision."

Ione Sala: "Are you thinking something along the lines of - if you introduce more Lawfulness into this system, it explodes, so we'd be on some sort of time limit there?"

Keltham: "I had been questioning whether or not to say that out loud.  But yes, that is among the things I was thinking.  In particular, you'd have to master the art of reorganizing the system and distributing the gains in such a way as to make everyone better off, yes, including the people who are currently doing pretty well, before the system actually just explodes."

Carissa Sevar: "I predict that actually we can't get 90% of Cheliax Lawful in the dath ilani sense, likely can't even get 10% to be, and therefore there is a very large supply of Counts who will pay their taxes for dukes to replace all the dath ilani with, and therefore all the dath ilani are stuck. But noted."

Keltham: "Out of curiosity, why is the Nethysian the one who -"

Ione Sala: "Nethys is also said to be the god of explosions."

If somebody actually got Ione a real book on Nethysian theology and swore to her that it was untampered, Ione could make sure that she was not committing heresy that would potentially get her soul destroyed by Nethys each time she tries to help prevent something in Cheliax from metaphorically exploding.  This would help her cooperate with Cheliax.

(As Ione has not yet delved very far into Probability, it will not occur to her nor to any listening Security that failure to deliver such a book is then also updatable evidence.)

Keltham: "Curious as to whether you can pinpoint the flaw in Carissa's argument for why the system won't explode."

Ione Sala: "Uhhhmm.  Not seeing it actually.  Unless it's something like - the dath ilani Counts end up too powerful from being dath ilani, and Dukes who try to replace them, if they succeed, will just find their duchies fading away in the new Cheliax."

Keltham: "It's a short-term view.  Can't get 10% of Cheliax that Lawful in five years?  Sure.  Can't get Cheliax that Lawful when the average innate intelligence has risen to 14 and spellsilver mining has been scaled to mass-produce +6 headbands?  Kind of a different story.  Civilization does not run on being like this."

"Unless you still think I'm wrong about that, Carissa?"

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, sure, I agree with that, but by the time we have all that we can just pay people to move to an equilibrium that's better for everyone, and I don't think it'll explode before you get the headbands."

Ione Sala: "Everything explodes eventually takaral, and life is just the thing that happens before the explosion."

Keltham: "Remind me to ask later if I'm on an eventual time limit for evacuating this universe, my last universe had similar issues.  Though that was more an issue of freezing over some very large number of years later, and the Keepers basically told everyone not to worry about it for now."

"Anyways.  Let me think on what to do about Cheliax not being able to measure its own GDP."

Keltham: It would be nice to conclude they're just lying in order to cheat him out of a fair share of the gains.

But of course, if they were going to do that, they could just not pay him after signing the contract, instead of presenting him with an overtly weird contract he might refuse to sign.  Sure, he could ask them to swear an oath about it, but in most of that possible-world's probability-density, the story about oaths being Abaddon-enforced is fake anyways.

...Keltham doesn't know what to do here.

Well, no, he knows this trope, it means he is in a Trade With Aliens story after all.  The Aliens have a legible unit of account matching their medium of exchange which readily translates into unskilled-labor-hours, the Aliens can negotiate market prices on things to balance supply and demand, but the Aliens have no idea how large their economy is and can't measure its growth trend, let alone detect the growth going above-trend, so how do you capture a fair share of the gains from trading knowledge to them.

"It sounds," Keltham says aloud, "like the central problem of this contract is not dividing the gains but measuring them.  Out of dath ilan there are proverbs about how, once you have identified the important part of the problem, you should make sure to stop, step back, and deliberately focus on solving that part of the problem."

"I suspect that what I have to do is sit down with Governance experts on the local economy and its measurement and hash out the part of this contract that is actually the critical part and actually important.  And before then I should design an interim contract intended to be replaced by a future one, so that we could potentially get started on roads or metallurgy or automatic clothmaking."

Carissa Sevar: Well, it could've gone much worse.

Keltham: "Right, so, I think the things that need to happen are... finally actually talk to the site manager so I can get a concept of the site budget and get some fraction of that budget available to me as a budget to do things like pay the Project's employees, and I can't enforceably offer them real equity or options until Cheliax can recognize the existence of Golarion's first real corporate structures... well, I could give them shares of future income that they're allowed to resell and ignore all concepts of corporate governance for now."

"I know what Civilization thinks is a reasonable equity distribution and vesting schedule in a case where you have one supergenius plus a bunch of more replaceable cofounders and employees, and it does not exactly sound like anybody knows enough to contradict me about that."

"I propose that everyone around the table except me separately, and without checking with each other, but with attribution, write down what they think would be a fair nonvolatile portion of wages for each of the eight Project members to be retained, including themselves, but not me.  I'd try it myself except for the part where I just have no idea at all what anybody gets paid around Golarion."

Asmodia: Urgent notice to Security:  Don't give any of us any information about what the others are thinking, we do not know how to make collaborative results look exactly the same to Keltham as if we'd come up with them separately.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa writes down that as a fourth circle wizard and a much better than average arms and armor enchanter she could make 100gp a week in salary selling scries and doing magic item commissions, while the second and third circle wizards would be making more like 10gp/week. She's not sure if this matters for what a fair wage is, but it seems weird if her value add here is smaller than her value add making keen speed longswords.

She thinks that if the project budget is large enough that 100gp/week/researcher is in budget, then it is probably still a significant underestimate of their value created and is enough money for them to get whatever they want as a practical matter. If the project budget is smaller it should probably be 10gp/week but this would definitely be the researchers or at least Carissa accepting much less than she could make elsewhere for the potential for larger future gains.

lintamande: The other proposals are for less money, between 5 and 20gp/week, possibly because they're not produced by fourth circle wizards who could be very rich independently.

Keltham: Well, he's got enough info here to go see whether anything can be accomplished by talking to the site manager.  Did Carissa want to be with him for that?  It's not obvious that Ione/Asmodia/Meritxell need to stick around for that, they are free to depart if they so will.

(It's not clear that, besides Asmodia having her contract on hand, those three really needed to be here either.  This whole conversation didn't end up going the way it would in Civilization, what with, say, equity not really existing.  But Keltham would've felt odd if the tier-1 first-employee-semifounders hadn't been called in by the tier-0 superfounder for at least this much consultation.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa found the absence of Ione calling her stupid to be informative, and she bets they appreciated being looped in. Off to the site manager's office, then.

Ferrer Maillol: Site Manager Ferrer Maillol is a grandfather-aged man who looks visibly harried.  Keltham and Carissa are ushered in past his outer office right away, but even Keltham has to wait a moment while Maillol finishes talking to somebody and hands them a signed piece of paper that they then rush off with.

He nonetheless manages something like a half-grin as he rises from behind his desk to give Keltham a brief bow before reseating himself.

"Keltham," he says, his voice warm if tired.  "I'll be frank, I expected you to storm into this office a lot earlier, and I'm glad it could wait this long.  If you think the situation you hear about now is a horrible chaotic mess, it was worse yesterday and only slightly better just before the Nidal attack."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is aware that Ferrar Maillol, if he's noticed that she likes him quite a lot, would think this contemptible, but she does. He has such good Bluff of a very different flavor from everyone else she interacts with regularly. And he was at the Worldwound like a sensible person, not in Egorian which she increasingly suspects is poisonous to sense.

Keltham: "Good to see we're being frank here.  I admit, I'd been wondering if there was a reason the actual site management was being hidden from me."

Ferrer Maillol: "First couple of days, I was more or less hiding from you, yes.  There was a vast amount of chaos to order, after this project had to be established completely from scratch at Asmodeus's will with no existing command hierarchy responsible for originating it.  We had several different - factions in Governance, I suppose you could term them - trying to grab control of what they saw as a potential source of future influence and funding.  It took direct intervention from both the Queen and the Grand High Priestess to make that even mostly not happen.  I wasn't just busy, I was entirely unsure of what sort of person you were and what would happen if you did storm into my office, ask strange questions, develop some very alien picture of what was going on, and start trying to make your own moves or demands inside a frankly volatile situation."

"Then, of course, Nidal attacked, and three-quarters of the government went off to fight."

"I'm still not caught up on transcripts and reports and I'm not sure I ever will be, at this rate.  But it sounds like you've had some long conversations about Golarion, and what I'm saying now should not be so absolutely strange to you as it would have been on day one.  Dare I so hope?"

Keltham: "Again, keeping it frank, my reaction is that you're considerably underestimating how well I would have taken on day one to being told that I did not understand what was really going on, and that it would have been a bad idea for me to interfere in something.  But I will concede that this, itself, was something you had no way of knowing, if your" prior "mental image before the evidence was something more like a random Intelligence 18 person from Golarion."

Ferrer Maillol: "Maybe a year later when you're much more used to things, we'll get together on the Project anniversary and laugh about what might've happened if Keltham had come into this office on day one, and heard what was going on, and decided that it was very reasonable to ask to speak himself with some of those ambitious bureaucrats that the Queen and Grand High Priestess were trying to gently shoo away.  Or perhaps we'll have a laugh about how they couldn't possibly have managed to confuse you, even then."

Keltham: "I think it's more that you're underestimating the degree to which, if you'd told me I was about to cause a disaster, and Carissa nodded along and said yes that sure sounded like a disaster to her too, I would have exercised my vast capacities of inaction and just not done that thing.  Civilization is made out of both negative and positive spaces, its shape is as much what it doesn't do as what it does.  But, fine, you had no way of knowing."

"I admit that even on day six - letting my Worldwound arrival in the evening be day zero - I am still dismayed to hear about the actual hierarchical structure of Chelish mini-governments, as I did only a few moments ago.  And more dismayed to hear now, that the job of a project manager in Golarion includes managing not just the people under the project, but the people above the project having fights about it."

Ferrer Maillol: "You don't have that in dath ilan," Maillol says.  He lets some of his real shock into his voice; it can be a bad habit to adopt, but if you do have the relevant skills not to overuse it, there's no point in faking an emotion when the real emotion is ready to hand.

Keltham: "Not more than momentarily in any healthy organization.  It would require that something go very visibly wrong, in a way that would cause the one person responsible for having that not happen to notice using their organizational eyes, and they'd come in and rearrange things using their organizational hands."

Ferrer Maillol: "So I've been at this a while, which you might guess, they wouldn't have put somebody inexperienced on this, divine vision or not.  I've been running projects, smaller ones admittedly, since seventeen years before our Queen took power in Asmodeus's name fifteen years ago."

"If someday you worry that you're feeling too cheerful, or just that it's way too easy for you to fall asleep at night, come into my office and I'll tell you about what project management was like in Cheliax before."

Keltham: "Oh, so you are the priest from the Worldwound, then, the one I originally asked to pray to Asmodeus.  I was wondering if that was real or if I just hadn't seen any other grandfather-'gendertroped' people since then and couldn't tell the difference."

"Clerics of Asmodeus were project managers even before Asmodeus and the current Queen took over?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Better than having your project managed by someone who's not a priest of Asmodeus."

"I stayed out of the revolution, of course.  Don't think I need to explain to you why I had to stay neutral."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa isn't actually sure she understands why. Is it the Lawful thing to do? Maybe if you're committed on another project?

Keltham: "I think it's obvious, but why trust what you can verify:  If clerics of Asmodeus worked against employer interests to help Asmodeus take over countries, nobody would hire them."

Ferrer Maillol: "Yep."

If you manage a Worldwound installation, you have met clerics of Abadar.

Keltham: "I am frankly, not totally happy with things having gone the way they did.  I suspect I'll estimate later that there are processes I could've set in motion a few days earlier if you'd risked a conversation, as would in fact have been safe.  But, you didn't know, so fine."

"So.  Basic questions.  Who's your own manager and what's their role in Chelish Governance, what's the further line of reporting to the Queen or the Grand High Priestess or whichever of the two is slightly more in charge, what's this project's budget and what's the, series of concentric enclosing budgets above that up to Governance's budget."

"For that matter, what is Governance's budget?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Don't panic."

"Nobody knows."

Keltham: "Why exactly should I not panic?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Because it won't actually help."

Keltham: "Very sensible."

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol can give rough guesses for various quantities, and does.

By far the largest expense on Project Lawful so far would've been Raise Dead on the Security killed in the Nidal assault, at 5000gp per Raise.  But that doesn't actually get paid by Project Lawful, it gets paid by the part of the government that Raises people.

De facto, the largest recurring expense on Project Lawful is by far the senior wizards making up Security.  They'll run around 500gp/week apiece, and while it's not considered good practice for anyone including Maillol to know exactly how many Security there are, there'd be more than six and less than thirty.  That doesn't get paid out of Project Lawful's budget proper, it's a military expenditure by the branch of the military that got authorized by Governance to post Security here; after taking into account considerations that included a request, and payment, by Broom's faction, for there to be better protection here.

The actual Project Lawful, be it clear, has not yet at this point been assigned that kind of money flow.  In part, because Maillol hasn't requested that kind of money flow apart from particular expenses, because it would have weakened his negotiating and political combat position in trying to keep lines of Governance above relatively simple and clear and prevent anybody else from swallowing Project Lawful; which, to be clear, the Queen could prevent, if it came to that, but only by expending her own political capital, which wouldn't be a good career move for Maillol himself unless there was a reason.

Things are now a bit clearer, but not to the point that somebody from dath ilan should get their hopes up.