"In resurrections and in other added costs to the state, I believe we're looking at something in the neighborhood of two hundred forty thousand gold." This is a terrifying amount of money to have lost overnight, but Ishani is now more or less used to numbers going that high. "The total loss in lives and property damage is of course much more than that, but in terms of what I understand the crown to be likely to pay for."

"That's delegates, families, key personnel, relief efforts, and property damage that's unambiguously our problem, like the convention hall? How much, out of curiosity, if we raised all the victims, but not the rioters?"

"Probably at least twice as much, but I don't think we have the resources to distinguish. Frederick, did you -"

"Nah. We cut the poor bastards down off the lampposts while it was still raining, after we stopped finding injured. Even if we only count them as victims and ignore anything more ambiguous, you can't keep records under those conditions. Or if you can, I sure didn't, that's my bad. I couldn't pick them out again."

"You are one of the very few people who covered yourself in glory last night. What's done is done. I don't think it's a reasonable use of money, anyway." It hurts, but when her own people were burnt by devils directly, she only got about a fifth of them back.

"Which brings us to how we're going to pay for any of this. The crown needs two and a half hundred thousand, where are we gonna find it."

"Auction the Sunday resurrections? It'll take you... half a year, that way."

"We already do that. Have been since we ran out of obviously useful nobles to resurrect. But we sell them in Westcrown, and we can discontinue that and sell them somewhere that pays gold instead."

"You want to lower the supply of resurrections when demand will be highest?"

"It's not real money! We can't buy things with it!"

"It's money, it just only buys one thing. More souls out of hell for each day of resurrections than went there last night in the rioting, which I think we all value quite a bit." Ishani is the Lawful Good kind of Abadaran.

Rasima is, in fact, also Good. It's virtually impossible to work directly with Naima every day and not end up there. This doesn't mean that she can't be exasperated. "It is not going to help us fix Westcrown, or pay for anything else we allocated money for. Frankly I'm concerned about the economic effects of pulling so much paper out of the economy without replacing it with gold, but that's a conversation for another time. We don't have resurrections going spare."

"There is Sunday itself. Two thousand an hour in Tian Xia, if we select locations well."

"I think that's optimistic for one-off locations, and you're flatly not allowed to commit your Sundays to a route. If it isn't, we should be moving more of our one-off days out of Cheliax and to Tian Xia. And Vudra, Vudra still has lots of densely populated areas we haven't touched at all."

"Leaving more Chelish farmers to die and be damned for good, instead of turning into elves."

"Look, you're very good at spinning gold out of air, but if you could do any more of it costlessly, you'd already be doing it."

"Could you schedule more one-off locations instead of of going to the hospital every day? If you put all the time towards tapping, you could make it up in two and a half months. I assume you don't want to leave it completely unsupervised -"

"It's not unsupervised."

" - sorry, are we talking about cutting the most important research project anyone in the world is doing right now down from two hours a day of the head researcher's time to none?"

"I'm sorry, I understand that it's important. But it's not time-sensitive, it doesn't make money, and there are no other significant blocks of time in the schedule."

"The fuck do you mean it's not time sensitive? Did people stop dying of anything but violence while I wasn't looking?"

Hamideh stands up and begins silently calculating something on the chalkboard at the far end of the room.

"Look, we all understand how important it is to get the remedies working." Actually she's not remotely confident that Novella does, but that can hardly be helped. Rasima and the apprentices were brought on board when remedies were the only interesting ability Naima had, and have been working with them for four years now, hoping the whole time that the skill can be learned. Novella Marino was hired by an archmage attempting to prop up the economy of an entire country with the work of her own hands.

"The fact remains that they don't make money for us, they will never make money for us, and we don't know how long it will take for either you or Kassi Aziril to crack more than a handful of individual possible treatments, to say nothing of the rest of the students."

"They won't make money because Ishani hasn't figured out a scheme that captures a half a percent of the value they'll create, not because the value isn't there."

"And you can be very smug about them when you face the Judge, if they ever actually pan out, but they're not going to fix our problem."

"We could axe the schools on the Junira."

"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.

There are lots of mathematical objections you can have to that, the most obvious being that it's wildly optimistic about penetration - but they don't touch the point, not really.

"Thank you, Hamideh. I'll talk to him."