"The schools cost almost nothing and are attended  exclusively by children whose families desperately want them to go, which we ensured by the decision to charge nominal tuition. This is stupid. We're searching for grains of wheat in this schedule, while the neighbors ignore their entire harvest. If Élie wants to drag Cheliax kicking and screaming through a constitutional convention it doesn't want, make him come up with the money for it."

"He's trying."

"He absolutely is not! This is trying! If Élie makes less money than you do, it's only because he hasn't bothered to optimize his schedule or his spell usage. One fabricate is worth more than a resurrection. I don't know how many he gets a day, but it's more than two, and we all know he can get more by spending two and a half hours in the demiplane. I know he can get at least six of them off in one go. If he did it as many times as he could for one day, refreshing in the demiplane every two hours, we'd have everything we needed to make up the shortfall, and half of it over again."

"And if he did it every day for a year, he would be forty-three by the end of it. Anyway, I thought the bottleneck on fabricate was raw materials."

" - no, actually. It was last year. This year, the farmers in the Junira river valley took the higher prices from fabricate shipping into account when planting their crops. At Élie's current productivity, they badly overshot the mark. We have at least two years of cotton, flax, and papyrus in the warehouses in Alexandria alone, to say nothing of the warehouse in Sothis and the new ones in Almas and Westcrown. Speaking of -"

"I checked them, the Westcrown warehouses were untouched. And nearly empty anyway, the harvests here won't really begin for another month and a half. They'll fill right up when it happens, though, planned production or not."

"I doubt we can quadruple Élie's output, but - he was already in the next room when we arrived here, yes? Who plane shifted him?"

"...he did."

"I understand today was an emergency, but that really shouldn't be happening. We could have a fifth-circle cleric on staff entirely to plane shift him back and forth once a day, and it would still obviously be worth it."

"Not exactly a lot of those going spare."

"That is false frugality. You could pay a cleric five hundred a day for the service, and make more than ten times that with the saved spell slots. It isn't as if we need an Iomedan. This is Abadaran work."

"Or Kofusachi's! Abadar's church is strained, and charging exorbitant prices for simple things. Kofusachi's is strong, and eager to expand."

"I don't think it's possible for prices set by auction to be exorbitant."

"So you say. And then Chelish people catch cholera because the Abadarans charged for water, and then charged more to remove the diseases from a handful of the sick. Bad as a rat catcher who keeps his own rats."

"That was one time, and the cleric was hardly making things worse -"

"Your gods both look nice, okay? Zhi is right about manpower, if not about Abadaran theories of value. We haven't asked the church of Kofusachi for very much at all, and we have plenty to offer. A silk warehouse, for one, in whatever city can best support it."

"We're already behind on production, we shouldn't promise more."

She smiles at Naima. "He doesn't make clothes."

"Silk is thinner, Ishani. When Élie picks up the craft, we can do twice the work in it."

"I will ask in Goka and in Xiwu, later in the week. They are traveling merchants, and may be difficult to find, but they will come."

"It's probably also worth thinking about additional markets for fabricate goods, particularly interplanar ones. I understand attempts to trade with the Abyss have run into the fact that they don't, ah, have anything, apart from an endless supply of tiefling slaves who only speak Abyssal. But I think we should particularly consider whether we can make anything that would be found useful on the planes of earth or air. Fabrics shouldn't be immediately destroyed in either, and the plane of Earth has what we most need. I'm sure it must be easier to come by precious metals there than here."

"And diamonds. This applies to increasing trade with the drow, as well. I understand that's considered significantly less hopeless than trade with the Abyss, but I don't know what the political considerations are."

"I don't think they can conquer more people using extra pairs of pants, but I'm not an economist. Or a general. I do know quite a bit about pants."

"...look. I get all of this. I'll bug Élie about hiring more people to at least optimize his fabricate output in ways that merely annoy him, and we can hire adventurers to help us expand to new markets. But - asking Élie to step further out of temporal alignment with everyone else, and age two or three times faster than me, is - look, Ishani, you're about to be a father, would you do it?"

"No. I wouldn't give up on trying to match his schedule and that of your children more closely, even if the demiplane is a work in progress, but there's no way to get around the fact that your own work has to happen out there. That is genuinely costly, and absolutely no one has the right to ask you to pay that cost, if the cost isn't worth it to you."

"...but I do think that if your plan is to slowly martyr yourself anyway, you should do it in a way that is useful, and not one that isn't."

Hamideh taps the chalkboard, loudly.

Five hundred million humans in the world, with an estimated average life expectancy of thirty-five. To maintain this number, nearly fifteen million must be born and die each year. She estimates that seventy-five percent ultimately die of infectious diseases, most of those as children. Supposing that a trained remedy alchemist can achieve a fifty percent successful treatment rate, equivalent to that of a third-circle cleric's remove disease, fully developed and deployed remedy alchemy can therefore prevent -

Hamideh has written 5.4 million deaths per year of delay, and circled it.

"Our currency is not gold," she says, quietly.