Carissa Sevar: "You'll be protecting them from getting good."
Keltham: "My offer stands."
lintamande: "I'll keep that in mind," Jacme says, not at all like Keltham's offering to defend her from her actual superior, which he cannot do.
Keltham: "That was all I had to say to the whole original group forming Project Lawful. You're not obligated to stick around here for even an additional five seconds, if you don't want to; so far as reporting goes, you're back to Maillol, or I think that's how it would go, and you're no longer answerable to my suggestions at all. That said, Project Lawful itself is going back on its schedule for today in 10 minutes and reconvening in Breakout Room 4, so if you all want to hang out more as a group - which, to be clear, I don't know one way or the other whether you'd actually want to do - I'd suggest setting that up for evening hours."
Message to Carissa: Do you have anything to say to the Ostensos? If not, let's go off and leave them some time to themselves, I think is the polite thing to do, or it would be in Civilization? Also I want to talk with you about how I'm supposed to react to Asmodia on this as her new boss. Let me know if any of that was stupid.
Carissa Sevar: Message: None of that seemed stupid except I don't understand why Conspiracy implies Asmodia having a fake headband. They probably do want time to themselves.
And she can go off with Keltham out of earshot of everyone else.
Keltham: "So, for example, suppose Asmodia just traveled back in time by four months, either in her mind or in her body, and we are not allowed to know this because Time Shenanigans. Then she does not need a real headband, the headband is just there to explain why she suddenly knows the Law of Probability and her personality got more mature. A +6 headband is supposedly difficult to obtain, if people have been telling me the truth about that part; but maybe you can, for example, much more cheaply get a fake headband that looks like a +6 one to magical detection, maybe even one that makes the wearer detect as having an additional 6 Wisdom to Detect Anxieties."
"Anyways, I mostly do not think that's what happened, especially since her headband was real and that would be a pretty expensive solution for covering up a generic augmentation or personality change, which was why I tested that."
"Which leaves the question of how I, as her boss, am supposed to react to what she did. Ferrer Maillol thinks she's supposed to get yelled at, and I should tell him to do that on my behalf if I won't do it myself, and if I don't she'll misbehave further in order to further test her limits. Civilization would basically say that what she and Manohar did was their own business and I get zero say in it except insofar as to decide whether I want to hire the person she ended up as, which I do?"
Carissa Sevar: "- so I don't think that last bit is quite true, though I admit that I would've probably taken the offer if I'd gotten it and didn't have a headband yet, it's an insanely tempting offer. But - but Manohar does things that are a bad idea, and you're supposed to punish people on secret projects who do things that look to be a bad idea, regardless of whether they actually turned out to be a bad idea, rather than - locating all the punishment in the actual failure which is luck rather than in the decision process - does that make sense -"
Keltham: "Yeah, I have no idea how the rules on Civilization's actual secret projects work, is the thing. I know various suggestions for conduct and rules on secret projects that commonly appear in fiction, which rules, one would assume, are optimized to sound totally reasonable to readers while also allowing for convenient drama and disasters to happen anyways. I have been trying not to let any of those enter my mind."
"I'm also not sure I should just do things the Chelish way, what with, for example, it not being obvious to people from Cheliax that whether Yaisa and I end up fucking is something that should not be mentioned in employee retention conversations."
"What's the reasoning behind the notion that somebody in my position, in general, should have an expectation that Asmodia not do this thing that was legal for her to do, and hold himself injured by her having done it?"
Carissa Sevar: "So the military has the concept of - depriving your organizational superiors of decision power and steering power for your own benefit or out of carelessness. Does dath ilan have that concept."
Keltham: "Probably not... exactly, in whatever form it is? For every decision there's one clearly identifiable person who's supposed to make that decision. If, in the military, or in a corporation, somebody else was supposed to make that decision, and they did, and then you did it differently and not by throwing an exception either, then sure you get fired."
Carissa Sevar: "That's close and the ways it's only close might be important but to a first approximation the argument here is just that Maillol was the identifiable person supposed to make this decision and Asmodia did it differently and didn't throw an exception."
Keltham: "Well, you see, in a Lawful place, we'd... sort of have an expectation that the law was... why do you use the same word for that and math. Law. Law. Regulation. Oh good you do have more than one word. We'd have an expectation that the regulations, like... meant anything, if they said that Asmodia was entitled to make this decision, legally."
"I am open to hearing that it works differently here and will only die inside a little."
Carissa Sevar: "- I actually just kind of don't know what we're talking about, all the sudden. If Asmodia were a random Chelish citizen then what headbands she wore would be her business, unless they made her into a serial killer or something. Since she's on a project, any major decisions she might make that are project-relevant are Maillol's job, and she should have asked him."
Keltham: "So there's a law - regulation - that says that if Manohar visits your secret project, any agreements you make with him about maniacal experiments are strictly the business of the two of you, but there's a shadow regulation which isn't written down anywhere and isn't really legible thereby preventing it from being overridden by the sort of contracts Cheliax can sign with Manohar, which says that if Asmodia thinks her decision is going to potentially have an impact on the project, she should ask Maillol first. Like, if they'd been friends or if they had a private understanding that was separate from the government of Cheliax, except, this isn't because they're friends, it does proceed from an expectation of how whole secret projects always work."
Carissa Sevar: " - so I don't think Asmodia could possibly have known about Manohar's special exception to the normal expectation she inform Maillol, which is - not a shadow regulation, it's written law and everything. If she knew, then she was following the law and shouldn't get in trouble. But if she had no idea that he had a special exception, then she should've informed Maillol. And her telling was that she didn't know who Manohar was let alone that he had a special exception."
Keltham: "I think the way I'd been modeling it in my head was, Manohar shows up and says, hey you should try on my headband, Asmodia says something like 'um but' and Manohar tells Security to confirm that it's legal for her to make her own agreement there without consulting anyone else, Security nods to this, Asmodia asks if she can ask another Security, the other Security nods to it, and then Asmodia is like 'okay then'. I could ask her if it was like that. If she says it was like that - and Security backs her, come to think, if that's something I'm allowed to ask - then do you think she still wronged Maillol?"
Carissa Sevar: " - no, then she's in the clear and I think Maillol would think so too."
Keltham: "My model is that Maillol will not think she's in the clear, because he's grandfather-'gendertrope'ed and that's not how grandfathers work. But that can be tested, and in any case, I think I have an adequate model of how to proceed from here - next step being, ask Asmodia what she thinks happened, then see if Security agrees with that. Which I should not do right now."
"Thanks."
"Wanna head to Breakout 4 so we're not late to reconvene?"
Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, sounds good. Are you okay, you fired people and then this happened."
Keltham: "Eh, I just had a rest day... two... possibly three days ago... well, whatever. Asmodia's allegedly going to be running my morning lecture anyways."
"Let's go."
Iarwain: Breakout Room 4 is the one with the large circular table where up to 16 people can sit and all readily see one another. It's got a beach-becoming-forest view instead of an ocean view because the ocean has waves and waves can be more hypnotizing and distracting than looking at a forest.
Keltham: At some point they will need to give all the rooms silly names; Keltham has never thought to inquire as to the why of this tradition, but it is so universally practiced in Civilization that it cannot possibly fail to be important somehow. This being the case, the job is too weighty to be undertaken lightly and for now he's just numbered them.
"So," Keltham says to the eight remaining Project researchers - plus, apparently, Broom, who's taken a chair off to a corner, but okay fine - "before proceeding, I'd like everyone - well except Broom, Carissa, and Asmodia - to consider what minimum weekly salary would make you cheerful. Not just, that's enough money and you're getting your due and fair share, but the least amount that first makes you feel definitely noticeably happy. If you're not sure whether you're feeling cheerful yet, when you imagine getting paid that amount, increase the amount until you're sure."
"Oh, try not to anchor off Asmodia, because her psychology is hers and not yours. I actually wish in retrospect we hadn't had that visible conversation at all, but oh well."
"Once you know the amount, write it down on a scrap, fold it up. Don't include your name. Intended use, I'll collect the amounts afterwards and that'll give me a picture of how the situation generally looks."
"If no possible sum of money could make you cheerful even if it was a billion gold pieces per minute, but you are grimly and darkly determined to succeed on the Project anyways, you can just not put anything on the scrap and leave it blank. It doesn't have to be possible for money to make somebody happy, even in Civilization, and definitely not here."
lintamande: Gregoria gives this some consideration before indeed deciding to leave her piece of paper blank. Money can't buy most of the things that she wants, and the Project might in fact be able to get her them anyway but not via money. Also it makes her more deep and mysterious which is apparently required for a romance with Keltham.
Meritxell puts down 50 gold a week because it's enough money for everything you could dream of except magic items and she isn't sure she'd stop if she started thinking of salaries that let you afford magic items.
Iarwain: Ione is legit not that materialistic, she wants knowledge and to see all of reality. Being paid over twice what she's worth is enough to make her happy, she thinks? Ione also thinks of herself as less insane than Asmodia. 25gp/week.
Pilar starts to put down 0gp/week because she is not a heretic, is stopped by a prompt from her curse reminding her that her superiors ordered her not to lie to Keltham and that this may include lying just to avoid being heretical, Keltham may notice and that wouldn't serve Lord Asmodeus would it, and after some internal fighting puts down 5gp/week.
Peranza would have been cheerful with 25gp/week a few days earlier, but has been through a couple of fairly traumatic experiences on Project Lawful since then (the previous one being told to train her own impersonator). Now Peranza finds that to actually be cheerful, in her imagination,* she'd need Asmodia 4th-circle-wizard money... but that would still do it. Peranza's brain has had some time to recover and notice that nobody has killed her for heresy yet. She agonizes a bit about whether to lie about the result, once obtained, but concludes that she's under orders not to tell unauthorized lies and hasn't been authorized or told otherwise by Security. 75gp/week.
(*) Peranza may not have a good internal referent for what it would actually feel like to be cheerful. She felt differently about something at 75gp, anyways.
lintamande: Tonia would be cheerful at 5gp/week because that's more money than anyone she met in her entire childhood has had at one time. That's what cheerfulness is, she's pretty sure.
Asmodia: Asmodia would be more nervous if she hadn't remembered that Keltham was a cleric of Abadar and also, like, that she has ever met Keltham. She started writing something down on a piece of paper shortly after Keltham spoke; it's clearly too long to be a price.
Keltham: Keltham waited an appropriately long time after Asmodia started that, so it wouldn't look like he was being prompted into action by Asmodia, then looked thoughtful, took a long look at everyone present, and then started writing his own long statement. "Predictions," he says.
He writes quickly and gets done before everybody else has arrived at their cheerful price, and folds up the result himself.
Carissa Sevar: Keltham has the bluff of a five year old. She wishes he also had the credulity of a five year old, her life would be so much easier.
Keltham: When everyone is done, Keltham collects the paper scraps, looks through them, and smiles.
"Right, then. Well, I expect that most of your real compensation will be in resellable shares of the future income of the Project, which will vest in you over time as you work here; that's how it's done in Civilization. But it's highly uncertain how much those end up being worth, and also people need to buy things now and then. So it's also considered good practice in Civilization to pay researchers some reasonable core salaries in regular money, meant to be less volatile."
"The basic schema I'm working with here is that we have tier-1 and tier-2 researcher employees, with myself the sole member of tier-0, following some standard schemes in Civilization for compensating people working on projects like these. The tier-1s are, currently, this is potentially something that changes over time, Carissa, Asmodia, Meritxell, and Ione, all of whom have displayed rapid learning speed on Law. Ione also warns this site about incoming military attacks, which is worth some significant bonus pay, and Carissa is currently operating as my de facto second-in-command and ops person and general Keltham maintainer. Tonia, Peranza, Gregoria, and Pilar are tier-2, except that Pilar is providing snacks catering and may possibly turn out to be incredibly important somehow in the same fashion as Ione; the expectation of Pilar maybe being important later is worth its own bonus."
"Basic salaries for a Project Lawful researcher - now, I realize that this isn't as much as a Security wizard makes, even though you're more valuable to Cheliax than they are - but again, most of your real compensation will be in resellable shares of future Project income vesting over time - are 100 gold per week at tier-2, 200 gold per week at tier-1, and 500 gold per week at tier-0."
"Ione, you saved Cheliax way more than two Raise Deads at the cost of some potential and maybe actual damage to yourself, but Maillol says he can't politically swing a 10,000 gold bonus, so for now I'm putting you down as having a secondary role as special forecaster which pays an additional 200 gold per week. Pilar, you get an additional 50 gold per week for Cayden Cailean services that just might be much more important than they look, with an expectation of further payment if they are, plus a 1000 gold bonus for taking a sword that might possibly have led into some further and disastrous plot by Nidal if it had been allowed to kill me. Carissa is tier-0.9, you might say, and receives 300 gold per week, and should be considered to have authority here as my second."
"Oh, and Asmodia obviously receives 75 gold per week, since she did say out loud that was enough to make her cheerful."
"Any questions."
Carissa Sevar: There was something of Hell in that. Not very much, but. More than she's seen from Keltham before.
Carissa Sevar: She tries to look a totally reasonable amount of delighted and not a ridiculous amount of delighted.
Carissa Sevar: Except probably he's joking and that's what the Asmodia and Keltham writing each other notes is about.
lintamande: Tonia starts nervously giggling, she can't help herself. ....she can help herself but it'd be difficult.
lintamande: Meritxell is pretty sure this is the best thing that has ever happened. Maybe that's what's meant by an amount of money you're cheerful about, it should feel like the best thing that ever happened, except it wouldn't without Asmodia also getting put in her place. ...if Keltham is serious about that. A Chelish person would be deadly serious but it's Keltham, and she's pretty sure he's, what's the word, trolling.
Ione Sala: Is that actually the first time in her life that Ione has ever been appreciated for anything? Possibly. She's not sure.
She's oracle of Nethys and it shouldn't be possible to buy her loyalty with, like, money, instead of knowledge or what serves Nethys or at least incredibly rare and irreplaceable books. But what with Cheliax having not even bothered to bid, they're not exactly making it difficult for Keltham to straight-up buy her loyalty with money. She doesn't even know what she's going to do with that money. It's just working on her anyways. She can feel her loyalties shifting as she thinks. Even though the money in this case is coming directly from Cheliax. Some Asmodeans really need to rethink some of their strategies here.
Pilar : Pilar is in a state of existential panic, not that this shows on her face.
She's a slave of Asmodeus. Slave. What do slaves of Asmodeus do with this amount of money? Can she - is she supposed to - donate it to the Church of Asmodeus?
Project Lawful: Pilar.
This is how Lawful Good paladins think, Pilar.
Do you actually know how Asmodean theology works literally at all, Pilar.
Pilar : AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
lintamande: Gregoria thinks this is very generous and in line with the enormous benefits the Queen promised a night ago. She is grateful to Her Imperial Majestrix.
Asmodia: Asmodia silently unfolds and then holds up a sheet of paper saying:
PREDICTION: Keltham tries to torment me by claiming he'll only pay me 75gp/week, which is less than he's planning to pay anyone else here.Probability: 95%.
Keltham: It's practically like being back in Civilization.
Keltham partially unfolds and holds up his own scrap of paper, still half-folded.
Col 1: Ordinary AsmodiaCol 2: Conspiracy AsmodiaCol 3: Time-traveling Asmodia (1 loop only)
Probability that:
- Her sheet of paper predicts I troll her: .90 | .70 | .90- If so, that her sheet of paper estimates a probability: .40 | .60 | .90
Carissa Sevar: Carissa attempts some quick math in her head to figure out whether Keltham net updated in favor of Conspiracy off this and therefore whether she needs to punish Asmodia. She is quickly coming to despise both of them, which is probably not the most helpful attitude to have about this, put a pin in that and come back to it later.
Asmodia's sheet of paper predicting the outcome is a 9/7 update for regular over Conspiracy, the inclusion of a number is 6/4 in favor of Conspiracy, so on net an update for Conspiracy, ha, she'll get to punish Asmodia for it. Though it'd be better if she'd thought to predict in advance that Asmodia's paper-writing spree of excessive cleverness whatever the details would net persuade Keltham towards Conspiracy.
Keltham: "Planning to turn around the sheet of paper and show us anything else?"
Asmodia: Asmodia slowly turns around her sheet of paper to reveal...
Asmodia: ...that the other side is blank.
Asmodia: "I'm going to hold off on conceding anything until you show us the probability you assigned that I'd have a second side to my sheet of paper," says Asmodia.
Keltham: "Of course."
Keltham unfolds his own sheet of paper.
...and that she predicts my prediction of her: .60 | .10 | .80
Keltham: "Conspiracy Asmodia would love to have me believe that I'm thinking one level ahead of her while she's actually thinking one level ahead of me," Keltham says.
Asmodia: SHE WAS FUCKING THINKING THAT. AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH SHE NEEDS TO LEARN THIS FASTER.
Nothing shows on her face. She cannot pause in horror she must be alterAsmodia now and she has the headband to enforce that on herself. "Or I, you know, have literally been doing this less than a day. Now what's on the other side of your paper? Some way of tormenting me yet more, 75%, nothing, 25%."
Carissa Sevar: And THIS is why you don't try to get into cleverness contests with Keltham, you fucking idiot - actually, Security, communicate to Asmodia straight up orders that the next time she comes up with something incredibly clever to do, she does not do it literally regardless of the details of what it is.
....and communicate the same thing to Ione.
Keltham: Keltham flips his paper all the way over.
Actual probabilities:
Predicts: .80 | .40 | .90Probability: .50 | .60 | .90Predicts 2nd: .40 | .20 | .80
"Conspiracy Asmodia mostly wouldn't try playing this game against me in the first place, it's too potentially revealing. Unless she's already sure of how I'd update off her not playing, of course, but she probably hasn't seen enough of me to be sure what level I'd think on here."
"Welcome to Civilization, Asmodia. You'll do just fine."
Carissa Sevar: The order stands even though Carissa's going to have to recalculate the actual change in Keltham's predictions to figure out whether she can punish Asmodia or not.
Also, she notes that the path to Evil for Keltham plainly lies in his conviction that lying to and manipulating people is completely fine and in fact hilarious as long as you are trolling them. Some people should start thinking about lies and manipulations that are satisfactorily Evil even with the apparent constraint that you later declare them to have been 'trolling'.
lintamande: "I am confused about what we are supposed to believe at this point," says Gregoria, "unless being confused about what we're supposed to believe is part of this lesson?"
Keltham: "Asmodia can explain it during her lecture!"
Asmodia: AlterAsmodia has not been scared at any point during this conversation and speaks accordingly. "I'm confident in my new ability to explain the Law of Probability in words. What the two of us just did, not so much."
Ione Sala: "Flirting, Asmodia. It's called flirting."
Keltham: "Yeah, I wouldn't have done that to a boy. The first two layers, maybe, not the third one."
lintamande: Gregoria is in fact pretty sure that Asmodia cannot explain 1) whether the announcement of their pay was real or was part of an elaborate manipulative/flirtatious game with Asmodia 2) whether the announcement of Asmodia's pay was real or part of an elaborate manipulative/flirtatious game with Asmodia 3) what share of the lessons in general are manipulative/flirtatious games.
Which - honestly manipulative/flirtatious games seem way more Asmodean than everything they were doing last week but she'd gotten used to doing a different thing and now she needs to switch back?
She conceals her distress about this, obviously.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is at this point incredibly confused about what dath ilanis believe about mixing sex and work but....in a positive direction, she thinks? The more incredibly unprofessional Keltham is being the more they can get past him? Probably?
lintamande: Meritxell at no point thought they were not playing manipulative/flirtatious games at least ten times as much as they are 'building Civilization' but she's incredibly upset that she didn't get a +6 headband to master probability and comprehend everything! She could have done it! And she's far more loyal than Asmodia!
Asmodia: "So."
"Were those your actual probabilities."
Keltham: "Yep."
Asmodia: "...I'm not sure what reward you're supposed to get if I'm not fucking you about this, given that we were apparently flirting."
Keltham: "Eh, we'll work out something."
Asmodia: Security, please copy to Sevar that, if Keltham is telling the truth about his probabilities there, there would've been a threefold shift upward in his Conspiracy ratio if I hadn't played this game. Though that doesn't make sense to me, maybe his numbers were conditional on his having observed me starting to write... but still.
We don't get to back off and play safe because we're scared. He's predicting that too.
Carissa Sevar: The problem isn't doing any things ever, it's unilaterally doing Excessively Clever Things because you're pleased with yourself for having thought them up, a tendency which in the last two days took a literal divine intervention to get you to stop in one case, and caused this morning which was a net loss if an unavoidable one because you no longer had the acting ability to be normal Asmodia, and now caused this event, which is an unsustainable pace of Excessive Cleverness.
But noted.
If Keltham's not lying about his latest set of probabilities, which is what he'd obviously be doing, if he in fact updated strongly towards Conspiracy off the events of this morning.
lintamande: Gregoria takes a deep breath and decides that, well, she's on the low-punishment regimen and they said it looks bad when only Ione argues. "Keltham, do you want to call the rest of us back when you're done flirting and want to present salary offers?"
Keltham: "Yes. Sorry about that."
"The basic salary offers are as described. All amounts in gold per week, 100 Gregoria, 100 Tonia, 100 Peranza, Pilar 100 base plus 50 divine candy services plus one-time bonus 1000, Meritxell 200, Asmodia 200, Ione 200 base plus 200 divine forecasting services, Carissa 300. Everyone fine with that part, pending what's going to be a more complicated discussion of sellable shares of future income that vest over time and how those work?"
lintamande: He is greeted with suspicious silence.
Carissa Sevar: "In dath ilan is there some phrase that communicates 'okay actually I'm being serious now'?"
Keltham: "One would say, outside quotes, quote Meta, I'm being serious now dequote. Sorry."
"Meta, I'm being serious now. Please indicate clearly if you're okay with the nonvolatile core salary that you've just been offered, pending acceptable shares of income. Which, to be clear, I am pretty much assuming that I'm going to offer and you're all going to stare blankly at and then trust that I was being fair and take it, but I can truthspell myself about that and use the fair-division spell too if you'd like. In fact I'm going to do that anyways, before we sign a final contract, it's just good practice. Anyways, hands up if you were okay with the core salary part of your offer pending satisfactory shares."
lintamande: Up go hands.
Asmodia: Even Asmodia's hand goes up. "I'll register that if I end up proving my ability to teach in your place and subsequently end up contributing more than base tier-1s, I'll expect a relative pay increase. But as I haven't proven any such thing yet, this is fine to start."
AlterAsmodia definitely has a rivalry going with alterMeritxell too. And alterMeritxell needs to be put on notice of impendingly becoming the least valuable tier-1 with nothing special about her.
Keltham: "Remember the lesson of the jellychip-production game that disintegrated because each child, even out of dath ilan, decided that the kind of token they held must be the most important and valuable kind of token."
"With that, said, sure, if I decide you're contributing substantially more than other tier-1s, you'll get appropriately higher compensation."
"But not to make that sound too easy, a good threshold for that is whether the difference is so substantial that even the other tier-1s notice and are like, yep, Asmodia sure is doing more for the Project than we are, yep. I assume, perhaps falsely, that this difference is apparent to all with respect to what Carissa contributes, and what Ione saved the Project when Nidal attacked. Make it that obvious, and sure."
lintamande: "Carissa's fourth circle," says Gregoria, cautiously, because it hasn't gone wrong yet and if you leave all the pushback to heretics then it'll all be heresy flavored. "...we're mostly not actually doing magic, though?"
Keltham: "She's a fourth-circle who can use spellsilver from seven feet away, but if that was all we needed we could go grab a seventh-circle wizard whenever. It's more that while the rest of you are doing whatever it is you do when I'm not looking, Carissa is spending a bunch of her time maintaining the critical Keltham component of the Project, and that whenever I have a task like 'so how do I actually get two hundred mice plus their living supplies if I need those' Carissa is the one who I talk to in order to translate that idea to more Golarion-standard terms, she's the one who worked with me on figuring out requirements for the fortress you're now living in, etcetera."
"To translate to what I conjecture to be your own more Golarion-standard terms: Compensation is based on the negotiating power you have, and the negotiating power you have is based on your irreplaceability. Carissa is the person other than myself whom it'd be most crippling for the Project to lose and most impossible to replace."
lintamande: Gregoria nods, satisfied. That's kind of just 'you're sleeping with her' but not entirely.
Keltham: "Again to be clear: If you're wondering why that doesn't come out of my own share, to whatever extent Carissa is maintaining me and I'm putting inputs into the project, the answer is that in ideal terms that should give you the same end result. I may not have Keeper levels of coherence about that, but that just means there's residual error, it doesn't mean I'm terrible when I try. If Carissa and myself aggregated into one entity, I'd award that entity 800 gold per month plus the combined profit share I haven't got to, then I'd pay Carissa with 300 gold per month and part of my profit share. My profit share is going to be much larger than Carissa's, not in the same proportions as 500 to 300. Salary is what we use to make sure we have nice things now, and 800 gold is what would make sure that Carissa and myself could both have nice things now, where Carissa does not get anything like three-fifths of my ownership of the Project."
lintamande: "That makes sense."
Keltham: Keltham will now explain, in all grim determination, the basic concepts that:
- They are also going to own part of the Project themselves, in the form of 'shares', fractions of the Project that they own.
- The Project will generate profits, which the Project reinvests in more subprojects that generate more profits, mostly, but eventually the Project will start using profits to buy back its own shares, once it runs out of better things to invest in.
- As a simplified example, there's supposedly a billion people in Golarion. Imagine that the Project figured out how to build a widget that costs 1gp to make, but could sell for 2gp, and was worth 3gp to the buyer, and the Project managed to sell one widget like that to everyone in Golarion, but then had nothing else to do with itself so it bought back all its shares and closed down. The total profits would then be a billion gold pieces. Owning 1/10,000th of that Project now is then like owning something that will be worth 100,000gp later, but only if that Project actually succeeds.
- People don't get this share right away, any more than you get paid up front for the next 10 years of salary; it vests over time, though usually not on quite the same schedule that a salary gets paid out.
- You can, according to the contract to be signed, sell your profit-share to somebody else, but you probably shouldn't and definitely not without consulting Keltham... you know, actually, given the Manohar thing, Keltham's just going to write into the contract that he must legally be allowed to have a consultation session with any of the researchers before they sell any of their shares.
- Cheliax is investing a bunch of money in this project, and receives 'convertible debt' that can either get paid back at face value plus high interest before the Project buys back anything else, or convert into regular Project income shares at a discount that grows with but not as fast as the Project grows.
- One billion gold pieces, or one gold piece per person, which in unskilled labor is? - ten days of unskilled labor outside Cheliax, or five days within it, thanks - yeah, he'll stick with that wild-guess-round-number, that sounds like roughly the right ballpark figure for where the Project could end up. In general, Keltham is looking to increase the wealth of Golarion by much more than just 2 gold pieces per person; he is definitely looking to save more than 20 days of labor for everyone. But to get to that point, some of the work will be done by spinoff corporations that need to pay income shares to their own investors and researchers, though the Project might still take a share in those spinoffs if the Project is providing key ideas or training their people. You can't actually realistically capture half the gains to a whole planet of a technological revolution like this one, even in just the more material aspects. Keltham is going to try to grab a relatively larger share of gains at first, because he expects to have so many other projects that he needs to reinvest in, but in the longer run where the really large profits start to come in, no, it won't be half the gains. There comes a point past which it's sorta silly to try.
- So although it is a very wild figure, Keltham is guessing that the ten-year or fifteen-year profits of the Project should end up at somewhere near a billion gold. Could be a hundred million gold, could be zero. For it to be ten billion gold probably requires looking far enough in the future that people are wealthy enough to have that much to pay.
- The Project doesn't need to have started buying back its shares for you to get paid. The idea would usually be that somebody else buys those shares from you in the expectation that the Project will buy them back later, at an increased price that looks a lot like whatever interest rates are like around here. The share you get is usually one where, for you to sell right now, to somebody who didn't really believe in the Project, would not be worth too much compared to your regular salary. If you want to get incredibly rich this way, you need the Project to succeed and convince its skeptics so they want to buy your shares at some reasonable fraction of what they'll be worth after 15 years since Project start.
Carissa Sevar: Eight days ago Carissa would have said that being wealthy beyond her wildest dreams and safe was all she wanted in life.
However, Carissa eight days ago was small and unambitious, and at this point her to-do list is so daunting that she's not totally sure a million gold makes much of a dent in it. She needs to figure out how Chelish people can be dath ilani without exploding, and that might require some fundamental revisions to Asmodeanism as taught to humans, because Asmodeanism as taught to Lawful beings is necessarily very different and no one is willing to just sit her down and tell her what it is. It is possible it will also require revisions to Hell, which - she's aware that objectively her odds of success at that can't look very high, but it's not like who rules the various layers of Hell never changes, or like the archdevils don't have a great deal of power within their own domains.
(It occurred to her yesterday, uncomfortably so, that an easier way to get what she wants might in fact be to donate her vast sums of money and go to Axis with Keltham. It's not tempting. Ironically it's not tempting because of Good impulses she's indulging as much as because of Evil ones; going to Axis might be an all right way for Carissa to go about her work having lost a part of herself but not all the parts of herself, but most people who try to do things in the world and don't end up with a billion gold about it will go to Hell, and so Hell needs to be able to use them. She doesn't actually want to escape eternal torment, she wants the eternal torment to be shaped right, and if that requires impressing Asmodeus enough to have the resources to displace an archdevil then -
- well, she isn't sure it's an insane ambition. She isn't sure it isn't, but she isn't sure it is. But a million gold pieces is barely even the first step.
Everything will be so much easier if she corrupts Keltham and then he can work on this with her.)
Irori: Sounds like something that is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve! Hints about how Carissa Sevar can solve her own problems for herself will be available if she prays for them, to Irori, outside the interdiction zone, though Irori realizes this is not a very likely confluence of events.
Keltham: ...has Keltham been getting any signs of understanding here or a lot of fixedly permanently cheerful expressions?
lintamande: They seem to mostly be following along. The big problem is just that you're not supposed to sign contracts you mostly understand. But on the other hand, it's Keltham.
Keltham: Well he's not going to have them sign anything now, of course, he's checking to make sure they even want the contents of the contract before he spends a lot of time drawing that up!
Equity allocations: 74% Keltham, 1.3% Carissa, 0.25% Ione, 0.2% Asmodia/Meritxell, 0.15% Pilar, 0.1% Gregoria/Peranza/Tonia, the remainder is for the Project to give its many future researchers and employees their own stakes, though they get smaller as people join later at higher base salaries and with reduced uncertainty of those shares' future values, or for Cheliax or other investors to convert its loan-shares into later.
Plans like this are generally drawn up with an intention that goes something like, if the Project is taking slower or needing larger investments and needs to sell more shares than expected, it first starts to come out of Keltham's reserve, especially if the delay looks like it's because Keltham is being less valuable or having less output than he was supposed to, but if the Project gets into bad-enough shape it may have to issue and sell additional shares that dilute everyone. This is part of the risk.
Conversely if the Project gets visibly on track to be hugely successful and starts earning early profits fast, which might be as simple as figuring out an early and general anti-plague sanitation measure that reduces the incidence of all plagues in all Chelish cities by 10% in a way that doesn't just restore to the equilibrium, they can expect that fewer total shares than Keltham currently anticipates will be issued, and their own shares will be accordingly more valuable.
Blah blah vesting schedules, these initial allocations will at their slowest vest over four years; hitting milestones can result in faster vesting, Keltham will draw up relatively informal milestones for them that he judges, and set more formal ones for himself and truthspell himself about them.
Even after shares vest, you shouldn't expect to be able to sell them to an outside buyer for what they're probably worth; people outside the Project know that people inside the Project have private information about how well the Project is likely to do over the future, and they'll discount apparent prices accordingly if the person inside the Project seems to want to sell. This difficulty in reselling causes researchers to expect to hold their shares for longer, which in turn helps to align incentives as the researchers think about how to make the Project actually be valuable in 15 years and not just look valuable at the time their shares vest. This is probably a much bigger factor here than it would be in Civilization; in Civilization any large project let alone this one would have Nemamel looking at it, if she were alive, or people only slightly worse than her if not, and people wouldn't expect apparent values to get away from actual prices by much.
It is proverbial in Civilization that no amount of clever planning can eliminate a very very large residual probability that all your Project's shares end up being worth exactly zero, which scary thought should be handled by meditating on your Cheerful-Plus base salaries that you arrived at without considering your equity.
It's also considered stupid in Civilization if the rest of your reasoning doesn't end up at a point where your valuable researchers can spend money right now in a way that gives them Slack, doesn't cause them to be distracted by silly things, buy productivity-related magic items and have somebody else organize their house for them, etcetera. Though obviously all negotiations are conducted on the basis of 'I have this valuable labor and I'm not giving it to you unless I'm paid and then once I have my money it's my own business what I do with it', not 'give me more money in the expectation that I'll spend it on myself in a way that makes me more productive'. If the Project starts needing to do the latter, it will probably indicate something wrong, but the repair algorithm would involve the Project paying for productivity things directly.
Though, in this case, there's stuff like intelligence headbands where Cheliax rents those to the Project, gets convertible debt accordingly, the Project loans headbands to people while they work, and they can use their salaries to buy those headbands if they wish so they'll still have them afterwards and then loan them to the Project themselves.
Anyways, don't get emotionally wrapped up in the sense that you'll be worth a million gold pieces in 15 years, based on your unvested equity allocations. That's not a thing that has happened to you, it's a collective plan to achieve something not yet achieved.
lintamande: The contract sounds pretty good in principle and they'll probably want it though they'll have to read it first.
Carissa Sevar: "It's - advised to go over a really serious contract with a devil, before you sign it, if it's about enough money to warrant the cost of summoning one."
lintamande: Okay, Meritxell thinks, but it'd be nice to also separately have some way to see if the contract cheats them horribly.
lintamande: Tonia is pretty sure everyone is just emitting meaningless noises at this point and she should go on having more money than she ever dreamed of and just worry about the project not falling apart completely.
Keltham: "Of course. I'm not asking you to rely on just my truth spell and my fair division spell. I'd expect Cheliax and Lrilatha to want a look at this anyways, you're still their people and they consider this project an important matter."
"Are people okay with these specific equity divisions, not just the general setup?"
lintamande: "Yes but I have no idea how you derived them and am kind of curious," Gregoria says.
Keltham: "It's derived based on the assumption that the fair and good-consequence practices for a world-reshaping company in Golarion started by one interplanar traveler, will be exactly the same as what they were for a couple of famous ultraprofitable companies in dath ilan started by individual supergeniuses. Because I have absolutely no hope of rederiving anything more sensible than that from scratch."
Asmodia: "If, hypothetically, it turns out that I'm actually better at teaching people Probability than you are, once I've learned it from you -"
Keltham: "The point at which you start getting larger allocations is when you're doing things nobody else could do, not just things nobody else is doing right now. If you start learning from me or reteaching in a way that we just can't find any other researchers to compete with, that's the point at which you have the leverage to come to the Project and say 'two percent or I'm going home'."
Ione Sala: "I would ask if Sevar is that much harder to replace than me, because, in fact, there aren't that many other people running around to whom Nethys's heralds are known to deliver prophecies. But I'm guessing from the numbers that Sevar's 1.3% is 0.3% her irreplaceability to the Project and 1% her irreplaceability to Keltham, which therefore comes out of Keltham's allocation of 75%."
Keltham: "Indeed."
Carissa Sevar: "What would all these numbers look like if we do figure out how to retrieve the dath ilani true dead to here or something."
Keltham: "If that was pulled off largely because of me, they'd immediately replace all the actual work I was doing, but I'd still fairly receive half the resulting gains they captured based on the algorithm I showed you; their decision to join doesn't accomplish anything until you add Keltham to actually retrieve them here. Though I'd just reinvest nearly all of that in whatever investment fund they built."
"If Cheliax or Asmodeus pulls that off largely without me, the incoming dath ilani form a new company and give me a small share corresponding to the role I played in letting Cheliax know that this was possible and valuable."
Carissa Sevar: - nod. "Makes sense. I think."
She wants to be MORE VALUABLE than Keltham but it sounds like he'd still get a lot of the value-capture since he's the reason she noticed she could.
Ione Sala: "This is - skipping over some things I thought I would have a chance to say to you in private, later, because I didn't realize this was coming up in quite this way - but my interest here is maybe 10% getting rich and 90% getting to go where Keltham goes and see what Keltham sees and learn what Keltham learns takaral. I suspect that's what Nethys wants too. Can we cut my share in half in exchange for an agreement like that?"
Keltham: "That sounds a biiiit more personal. Not opposed to it, but, not exactly the sort of thing that the Project settles with you. And I'm not sure I'm ready to buy half your shares from you at that price."
Ione Sala: "All right. It's just that, in reality, the money has very little to do with why I'm staying on, and I will be a little disappointed if I don't get what I was really hoping for."
"More than a little bit."
Keltham: "Well, good for expressing that, because it is not something I am currently promising you or offering to trade to you. The money is meant to be good enough that, even if I wasn't going to take you with me when I left Golarion, if that happens, you would still want to work here because in fact you're still getting paid thirty times what you could make anywhere else. And then, someday, you'd spend that money on traveling this world or traveling other planes. I'm not saying you can't have that thing you just asked for, I'm saying that I'm not offering to trade it to you for your Project work. This large amount of money now, and maybe way more future money later, is what the Project is offering to trade to you."
"Civilization does consider it a best practice to draw a sharp line whereby the founders don't offer to trade away - themselves, their things, their lives, when they're starting a company like this one. The Project isn't owed that from me."
Ione Sala: "Understood."
lintamande: "Does this mean you have worked out a contract with Cheliax where they'll be paying you enough gold for all these salaries?" asks Meritxell.
Keltham: "Maillol thinks he can swing it in terms of Project budget, but that's just Cheliax paying you, not yet Cheliax trading money to the Project for convertible debt and the Project paying you. I'm not going to make you wait on your salaries while I sort out that part."
"Next step according to Civilization best practices, is that I walk out of the room and let you discuss this among yourselves for a while. I'd say however long is needed but in dath ilan it'd be obvious that the time for this step is more like thirty minutes than half a day. You can have somebody call me back in if there's additional questions. When and if everyone thinks they're okay, if there aren't new terms requiring amendment, you tell me that, and then I go talk to Maillol about initializing the salary part of this."
"Roughly the idea is that, before you form a more load-bearing verbal assent to this plan, which I then go write up as a contract, you're supposed to talk about it among yourselves without me there in the room, in case there's some part of your brain that can't fully correct for the effect of my being there on your willingness to accept a deal I proposed. Any of you individually can and should go off and consider it quietly on your own for a few minutes, if you notice your brain being at all influenced by the others present. Carissa, you also need to leave at some point for at least five minutes of them talking without you, because you're above them in the organizational structure."
"You clear for me to head out now?"
lintamande: "Yes," they chorus.
(What are they supposed to think once he's not there?)
Carissa Sevar: "I am confused by the math Keltham's using but I think this is a good deal if we succeed," Carissa says blandly, as she would in alter Cheliax.
lintamande: Oh, are they assuming Keltham might still be listening. "I want to read my notes again," says Gregoria. "One minute, please -"
Iarwain: Security notifies everyone that Keltham is comfortably out of hearing range; he grabbed a Security and went for a walk on the fortress ramparts.
Pilar : "My curse says it wants to report somebody to her superior for non-Asmodean thought and claims that I'm obligated by standard regulations to pass that report along without delay."
"It reports Pilar Pineda for having considered donating almost all of her bonus and salary to the Church of Asmodeus without expecting to derive any personal benefit from that, which is, it asserts, heresy to Lord Asmodeus, and also to Cayden Cailean, and is what annoying Lawful Good paladins do."
Project Lawful: ...And suggests that she be corrected by a process which includes drunken revelry.
Pilar : Pilar is not saying that.
Carissa Sevar: " - I actually think I can't help you with that, Pilar, what with only the Grand High Priestess being authorized to correct you in matters of theology, though I do think I know what mistake you're making." It seems related to the secret story Maillol told her about the man who was pleasing because his only interest in slavery was in being a slave. Carissa thinks it is...not her thing, herself, actually.
Pilar : "I'll report myself to the Most High, then."
Pilar was hoping to hear 'well your curse is obviously lying to you' and not 'I think I know what mistake you're making', but she obviously isn't going to argue with the answer she got.
Asmodia: "I am... not coming up with very much for alter-Asmodia to say here, she is mostly sort of 'eh complications' and 'wow money' and scheming to get a 2% share instead of a 0.2% share, but none of that is something she has to discuss with the rest of you. Alter-Ione has established herself as not really caring. Meritxell, do you know what we could be talking about while he's gone?"
Real-Asmodia doesn't like Meritxell but is a professional about her actual job.
lintamande: Meritxell doesn't like Asmodia either but that sounds like a problem to solve once they're rich and powerful, by which time it might solve itself via Asmodia defecting, which will settle once and for all which of them is smarter. "Unless Cheliax requests pushback in some form because there's some angle on corrupting Keltham, I don't care about this and want to get to learning things and I think alterMeritxell would feel the same way."
Asmodia: "All right. I doubt Keltham will actually ask us what we discussed, I think that probably violates the Civilizational procedure he's proposing, but if he does, we tried for another few minutes after this to find something to talk about, because Keltham seemed to think we should do it, and then gave up."
"I did want to say, hopefully quickly, but it seems like the sort of thing that could blow up on us again before we reach the end of the day and have time to talk at leisure - Sevar, I think I know what I did wrong and you're not going to like my fault analysis."
Carissa Sevar: "Go ahead."
Asmodia: "When I was initially writing down my prediction I didn't process that as being especially clever. Alter-Asmodia knew exactly what Keltham was up to, she's already called out Predictions in class, it's very clear that's what alter-Asmodia would do."
"And Keltham predicted that, I think, inside his Ordinary world. Keltham - would need to be thinking in a completely different way than his latest thought transcripts show, for him to lie about his final probabilities, there. I think that it must have incorporated the information from him seeing me start to write, because, if it doesn't include that information, it's not a real prediction, so - maybe I could've done better, if I hadn't written anything at all - but that really wouldn't be what alter-Asmodia would do, why wouldn't she."
"My huge mistake was when I saw Keltham starting to write."
"Alter-Asmodia knew what he was up to. Alter-Asmodia wrote her own prediction of it. Alter-Asmodia passed Keltham's test perfectly according to the probabilities he wrote down and won a ton of Ordinary points."
"Real-Asmodia thought that she didn't want to look too clever and stopped herself from doing what Alter-Asmodia would have done. And I didn't realize, I didn't notice, that I'd suddenly started thinking in a different way, that I was making that choice a different way from the choice that came before -"
"My analysis is that we have to figure out who we are in alter-Cheliax and just fucking be those people period. Everything which isn't that is the clever part where we think we're smarter than Keltham."
Carissa Sevar: "You're right. I don't like it. But I like it better than what happened this morning."
Asmodia: "The problem we had this morning is that we tried to solve the problem of Keltham asking for a Fox's Cunning at the same time as we tried to solve the problem of figuring out what happened to alter-Asmodia in alter-Cheliax. It should've just been the simplest thing that explained what Keltham would see. If Ione had solved her riddle earlier -"
Ione Sala: "I suspect Pilar's curse of having selected that riddle to be exactly solvable enough that I wouldn't. Any comments on that, snack service?"
Pilar : "Did you just fucking call me -"
Ione Sala: "I was talking to the curse, not to Pilar. Like you asked."
Pilar : "Curse says it's not in the habit of answering such terribly personal questions, but it does observe that if you'd trusted more that the riddle was solvable and would be at a difficulty level where it'd be solved in time, you wouldn't have tried a complicated way of scaring Keltham off Fox's Cunning, like it warned you about once already."
Asmodia: "And did the curse select a riddle at the exact level of difficulty required for us to learn that valuable lesson about trust?"
Pilar : "Snack service says no comment. I say that when this is over, it dies. Somehow."