"Alright. Do you want to take this and get back to us when you have amendments or are ready to sign?"

"That seems prudent."

He doesn't, really, have a lot of amendments he wants to make. It's a good and generous contract. Just a couple places he wants to clarify the language, especially in the things that are escape-clause shaped, he doesn't want to wind up held to specific performance if it turns out that actually he's been massively deceived about the undead being not too evil or something. The main structure remains intact. He prays about it a bit, not expecting any answer but organizing his thoughts to present to his goddess anyway because then they're more presentable to him too. Then he walks the amended contract over.

Casts Aura Sight on the way. He has it prepared.

Maybe 40% of the adult population just walking about the street manages a faint reading; fewer have anything stronger than that, but still more than you'd expect in a Golarion town. Of those, it's mostly Neutral Good, some Chaotic Neutral or Lawful Neutral, very few corner alignments. Evil is rare. Except the skeletons, which are still Evil.

In the palace, there's more Lawful, but still not that much.

King Fetohep is present for the signing. Strong Lawful Good.

- oh!

As they are not reading his mind, they cannot determine the cause of any body language expressed or not expressed! They can review and approve his amendments and send them off for a scribe to make copies for everyone to keep.

He'll mention it when there's a good moment for it.

Not entirely expected, not because he doesn't think he's good, but because most spells and Skills of similar theme discriminate the undead as evil or unnatural, and Blai already identified other undead and the magic of necromancy as such. He's pleased, though he doesn't deliberately indicate it and his withered flesh makes his mood hard to read.

"We do endeavour to rule goodly and justly, but we suppose it would be hypocritical to claim overmuch credit by this now, when we only recently asserted distrust in your alignment system," he acknowledges. "It is nonetheless useful to know."

"It is likely to make it easier to work with some of the outsiders if I can tell them that you read Lawful Good, if nothing else."

Regal nod.

Then they can get their i's dotted and t's crossed?

Yes they can! Do they want Blai to sign in the Taldane script or transliterate his name?

Transliteration preferred, but either way is fine!

He can go find the registrar of the Scholarium to get his accommodations and orientation afterwards.

He will carefully pick out and write down local characters to spell out his name. ("Select" is a title and it is appropriate to translate it outright.)

And then yes, accommodations and orientation.

The Royal Scholarium and the office of the registrar thereof is palace-adjacent, both literally and in a more conceptual sense. The registrar is a bird person! Humanoid bird, not human-with-wings. (Most of Khelt appears to be human.)

He can explain some of the things about Royal Scholarium and Blai's relationship to it. The Scholarium is the institution that manages research, teaching and study sponsored by the Crown, and in particular runs the programs for recruited foreign talent. It has partnerships with the universities of Khelt but is not in itself a university, in the sense that it doesn't run courses that grant academic degrees.

For his stay, Blai is a member of the Scholarium but not an employee of it, so he has the ability to book halls and work rooms, or use their libraries, and all the other services and facilities they provide, but doesn't report to anyone here.

Blai will get a program manager to work with him on organizing lectures, recruiting and screening students, resource procurement. They're not his boss and he's not their boss, and he can request a replacement if he wants and they can quit any time they want. There are a few candidates interested and Blai can interview them and get his pick.

He also gets his pick of accommodation. The Scholarium has on-campus housing, or he can rent something in the city within a reasonable price range and expense it. The on-campus option comes with cleaning services.

Cleaning services are good, short commutes are good. Are the program manager candidates available for interview now?

They'll have to send for them but most likely yes... yep, one of them's happy to come up now?

He can interview one now!

She's a short-haired woman with calluses and a hint of working muscle.

"Select Artigas? I didn't expect to hear back so soon; I see you don't waste time."

Why would he waste time. That would be a weird thing to do. "Pleased to meet you. What is your name?"

"Erja. I have to admit I haven't learned enough about what you're doing to develop a sales pitch, here."

"I'm going to be trying to establish the beginnings of institutions that attract the patronage of some entities popular on my plane for, among other things, giving out magic." He'll cast a Light as an example. "I expect figuring out who is a good candidate to be a major part of the process here. Good candidates would be Wise - that's a particular mental attribute; if not all of the people interested in this job are available to interview today I have a couple of castings of a spell to boost it prepared, so you can identify what attribute I mean by having it enhanced in yourself, and guess how you'd see it crop up in hopefuls. - I also have them if everyone is available to interview today but in that case some of you will have to wait until tomorrow. And they'd align well with the patron they're shooting for. I expect here in Khelt to have the best results with Shelyn, who is concerned with art - and also love and redemption but you have really a lot of art and artists here."

"I don't think of Khelt as a very art-focused nation," is the first thing that comes to Erja's mind, "but I can see how you might come to that conclusion, certainly by comparison with our neighbors."

Then she thinks about the rest of what he said.

"It makes things a lot easier if you have specific and measurable criteria for what makes a good candidate, but harder if that criterion is an abstract attribute. As you say, there'll be some work to figure out measurable correlates or good talent pools, and from that what the recruitment funnel will have to look like.

"I have experience running professional development programs for the Ministry of Agriculture, which are less selective than what I'm hearing from you, and experimental studies on irrigation systems, which rely on existing partners. By the sound of it you might be looking for someone with a stronger specialization in recruitment—though if there are enough challenges it may be worth finding a separate [Recruiting Director], even if part-time, in addition to a general program manager.

"What does the day-to-day of institution-establishing look like, after you have your candidates, any challenges there? Needs for resourcing, coordination, interfacing?"

"You may not be very art-focused but nor do you seem to be a nation of travelers, warriors, charity workers, or people who do their own farming. We'll see. If I manage to get more than one or two clerics for any given patron I expect to be able to turn over a lot of the followon institution-building to them. The choice of clerics, and the timing of that choice, is a lot of information by the standards of these entities, who find it costly to communicate with mortals. Three newly minted Abadarans working together will know more about how to operate an Abadaran bank than I will, though of course I can give them hints about how it has happened to work out in parts of my world that I have seen and save them some time. And I have had more exposure to Abadarans than to most of the other religions I will be attempting to promulgate here for personal background reasons.

"But once there are clerics they're going to want buildings, probably, to be based out of when offering their services - big ones to allow a channeling radius, something like eighty feet across in case leveling up increases that radius, perhaps with several floors and a bridge. They might all share if there are few enough but one per patron is standard. If I'm bringing in a lot of outsiders - I don't yet know if I will do that very much, I will do it once and ask the first outsider I get for an estimate of how costly it is and whether Khelt can compensate for it effectively - then they will need to be paid, with the nature of that payment potentially varying a lot, potentially involving work performed outside Khelt, though were I forced to simply make my single best guess I'd recommend just having a lot of large diamonds on hand. And before there are clerics once there's a pool of interested parties I guess I'll - give an overview lecture and let them self-sort by who sounds most interesting to them, so I guess there will need to be the logistics to support several classes."

"If it's likely they'll be used, we can get a head start on diamond procurement and the buildings; I know you're here for a limited time. Lectures and classes will be straightforward to arrange and standard for a program manager to cover.

"So to restate my understanding of what you've said so far: short term, you need design and execution on a recruiting process primarily filtering for Wisdom; mid term, you're educating the filtered candidates, matchmaking them with a patron, and ideally getting them patronized; long-term, establishing permanent institutions which may be significantly a self-directed activity by the new [Clerics], with features including dedicated bases of operation and service provision.

"In parallel, you're—bringing in outsiders? Sorry, I'm assuming you don't just mean random people from outside Khelt, you mean people from your world? That will be able to offer domain-specific advice?

"Actually, should have asked this first—what are the specific obligations in your contract?"

He can show her his copy. "'Outsider' is a technical term for some types of creature, in this case ones native to planes that have inherent alignment with Law, Good, or both - I can summon neutral elementals but they won't know much of relevance."