They happy to buy his gold and silver! It needs to be 99.9% pure, and they get it from their current supplier at twenty-five gold pieces per hundred grams of gold, one gold piece per hundred grams of silver. Across all their production processes, they use a kilogram of gold and ten kilograms of silver per day. Their current supply contract lasts for another two months, but if Kiraavi can undercut their current prices by more than 15%, they can cancel the contract at the end of this month and tank the penalty clause.

He can do that; he's not familiar enough with their haggling norms here to want to push too hard, but 275 gold a day is plenty for his current needs and a nice discount compared to their current supplier. He'll leave them a bowl rather than bother with the logistics of safely transporting the metal through the city, and he can receive his payments there as well.

With that taken care of he just needs to get some coin together to support himself for the next month; that seems like a reasonable use of the rest of his morning, and he'll check with senator Jealwind about where he should send his avatar for the meeting in the afternoon.

They're going to want at least a two-month contract—with exit clauses, of course—but that's perfectly satisfactory.

The senator refers him to where the city treasury office is; if he tells the reception he's there for the 2pm on roads with Secretary Vedrinn, they'll point him the right way.

There is a chance - not a big one, at this point - that he'll need to leave suddenly, but unless something catastrophic happens he'll have plenty of time to make a couple months' worth of metal for them before he goes, and if he's leaving anyway he'll have no reason to charge for it, which he suspects will easily make up for the inconvenience.

He gets to the treasury office with half an hour to spare and will go where he's directed.

Vedrinn Silverscale, the Secretary of the Treasury, is a... silver-scaled Drake with a cane and a monocle hanging from his tailored vest. It's his office, but he's seated at the lounge area around a glass-surfaced table, together with Senator Jealwind and a Drake with mottled lime-and-green scales, whom the Senator introduces as Beiscal Swifttail, the Speaker of Roads.

"Hello! It's good to meet you both. I assume the Senator has explained at least the basics of my situation, did you have any questions for me about that before we get started?"

"We've heard the summary from Senator Jealwind, yes," Secretary Vedrinn says. "I'm not sure I understand the exact parameters of your abilities, still, but perhaps that's something you mean to cover now?"

        The Speaker of Roads, Beiscal, nods in agreement.

"Mmhmm. So one of the most fundamental ones is that I'm not embodied in the same way you are; I am roads, including bridges and other features of roads, and I can take a number of other forms but that's what comes most naturally to me. I'm also specific roads; I can take over an existing road but not all roads are part of me. For roads that are me, I can make them into whatever sort of road I like, and I'll naturally maintain them, and I can see and hear what's happening on them and nearby, and I can speak to and understand anyone there regardless of their language. I can also create things that are normal to find on or near roads, for example trade goods or reinforcements to nearby terrain, and I can teleport things that are mine from one part of myself to another. I also have some offensive powers that I generally reserve for bandits; that's primarily an ability to produce lightning bolts but I can also cause a minor earthquake if that's somehow called for. I can also grant blessings - these are minor improvements to various aspects of a person, and I offer direction sense, weather sense, improved endurance, improved memory, poison resistance, and improved understanding of body language - but I'm not offering them yet, as they metaphysically tie me to the people I bless and I'm not sure yet that this world is safe for me to operate in, but I'm hoping I'll be able to figure that out soon. There's also a stronger sensory power that I might eventually give out to people who have decided to work with me in the long term, with the same problem with giving it out right now. I can give up a road I've claimed, but there's rarely a good reason to do that - I don't get back any of the energy I spent claiming it. If I do anyway, the land stays in the same condition I left it in and will weather naturally from there.

"The energy for all of this comes in the form of attention paid to me by normal people, which in the part of my world I'm most established in is traditionally given in the form of physical offerings - the person giving the offering picks something they want to give, figures out what makes it a good offering, and brings it to a location I've set up for offerings to give it to me and tell me why they think it suits me. The object itself isn't the important part of that, it's the time spent thinking about why the object is a good offering for me that matters. I do like offerings that are useful to travelers, though, since it's useful to be able to pass them along to people who need them, and moving things around is much less expensive than making them. Attention being the thing that powers me has some implications for the types of things I can and can't do, too - it probably sounds tempting to ask me to take over your shipping and teleport all your goods from one place to another, but that's ultimately unsustainable; moving things around isn't expensive but it's not costless, either, and it means I lose all the traffic from the traders who'd usually be carrying it, which would cut into my budget pretty sharply. I am willing to do some moving of goods, though, especially in cases where they can't usefully be transported the usual way - urgent letters, fragile plants, that sort of thing.

"In terms of my usual policies for my roads - anyone can travel them, and giving an offering is optional. I don't base any help I give on whether someone has given me an offering, either - the attention I get from people knowing I'm there and available to help them, and from the memory of it afterward, is enough to make that worthwhile even without one. I'm not in the habit of interfering with armies on my roads but the political situation is very different at home, and I may do things differently here. I am in the habit of helping people displaced by various disasters, and coordinating the efforts to do that with other gods, but hopefully that won't come up here and it's not my primary area of concern in any case.

"Do you have any questions?"

Speaker Beiscal says, "Are you able to pay attention to and protect all roads that are part of you, at the same time? Is there a limit to how much roadway you can be, separate from how much it costs at the time of claiming?"

Secretary Vedrinn asks, "How total is your operational support for any given road which you are? More concretely, let's say: How many times in ten will a lost traveler ask for directions on one of your roads, and receive a response? How many times in ten will a bandit attempting to rob someone on your road be noticed by you, and how reliably are you able to stop them?"

Senator Jealwind: "Is there a rough... exchange rate, or rules of thumb, for how often you can do teleportation and what offerings or compensationyou would need to make up for it? I won't hold you to any exact numbers, but just to get a picture of the relevant factors, the moving parts of the problem."

"I'm able to pay a moderate amount of attention to all of myself, but attention is one of the things I'm constrained on - I have an amount of it available proportionate to my size, so it's not that I'll outgrow myself, but if I grow into a particularly difficult area I might have to pick some other areas to pay less attention to so I can deal with it. Under what I consider normal circumstances I'm able to notice whenever someone asks for me, and somewhere around one time in five I'll need to ask them to wait for a few minutes so I can pay enough attention to them, but I can choose where I'm doing that and I'll prioritize people with something urgent like a bandit attack. The chance of me noticing an attack when I'm not asked for is lower, and of course it's hard for me to figure out how many cases I'm missing, but it's not many once I'm familiar with an area and know how much of my attention it needs, especially since I like to proactively deal with banditry. We also don't have Skills in my home world, so I'm not sure what your bandits will be capable of compared to mine; I do expect to be useful but I don't want to promise that I can handle them in every case or even most of them yet. At home I don't get them every time but enough that it's a nonissue on most of my roads.

"For the road claims themselves, there is an upkeep cost; it's minor compared to the cost of the claim and I don't expect it to be noticeable to you on any scale smaller than a continent, but it could happen that I lose part of my claim if I don't get enough attention to keep it. I haven't had that happen in millennia and I'm really not worried about it, but if it does I'll be able to choose which parts I lose.

"For teleportation, the teleportation itself is all but free, the cost there is in the attention needed for it and the secondary effects. If you don't mind waiting until times I'm otherwise idle I expect to be generally willing to transport things that can't travel normally for two or three times the cost of normal transportation - I don't want to undercut anyone who might figure out a better way to transport things. For things that can be transported normally... I'd ballpark that each person in a normal caravan at home spends an hour to an hour and a half each day thinking distinctly enough about me for it to be useful to me, and with guards and scouts and so on that's more than one person per wagon, so roughly two or two and a half hours of time per wagonload per day it would have otherwise traveled, plus any extra from travel issues or time spent thinking about me before or after a trip. Of actual attention; in some places they have traditions that would be more suitable for this than the offerings but they don't have perfect efficiency. I'd still prefer to see people traveling, I think that has benefits above and beyond just being useful to me personally, but that would be the starting point for me to not obviously lose out."

Beiscal nods. "The threshold I'm looking for is whether it'll be safe to travel without guard, and it sounds like the answer is—eventually yes, but not immediately because you'll need time to adapt to the local conditions? That's good as anything, since travelers and merchants won't immediately trust us if we tell them they don't need to hire guards anymore."

Vedrinn puts on a thinking face. "Most bandits are low-level. If you're a high-level fighter, you make better money as an adventurer or hired sword. A lightning bolt will take care of them easily. The other thing I'm worried about is monsters, which don't follow the same rules. Goblins usually go down easily, even Hobgoblins can't take a [Lightning Bolt], and they respond to deterrence, but when it comes to Hollowstone Deceivers, Shield Spiders, or hells forbid, Crelers... some of them will go down to lightning, but they can swarm."

"In those cases, your average hired guards won't help," Beiscal observes.

"True enough; from a traveler's perspective, they can save the coin. But from the army's perspective, monster culling is still relevant."

Senator Jealwind is mapping out some figures on teleportation costs and not responding yet.

"They'll get to watch me figure out the bandit situation, yes - by the time I'm telling them I haven't seen a bandit in six months and they and everyone they talk to haven't seen one in a year I expect us to be in agreement about how safe things are.

"For monsters, it's a bit more expensive for me to fortify the roads but I can do it, engineering projects like that are one of my strengths. Bridges, too, if I didn't mention that earlier."

"Bridges—those would be very exciting to have cheaply, but we don't actually have that many rivers," admits Beiscal. "If you get to talk to Oteslia, they'll be over the moon about that."

"I'm don't have a good picture of how you'd fortify the roads," says Vedrinn. "So Hollowstone Deceivers—Rock Crabs, they're also known as—are ten feet tall and wide, with rock shells, and pincer claws that can break unenchanted stone. They're rare this far south, but some of them migrate here when the summer rains hit the Floodplains. They don't often attack travelers, but when they do, their guards don't often win, which is why the 3rd Army follows up on all reports of them."

"I'll want to talk to someone who knows about more than just one monster and has had more than a minute to think about it, but my first thought against Rock Crabs would be some kind of bollard situation made out of a material harder than they can crack, probably diamond with a shell of something less unpleasant to look at in the sun, with roof struts to stop them from getting in on top and fortified shelters at regular intervals."

"You can make fortifications out of diamond?"

        "Salazsar's not going to like that."

Senator Jealwind snorts. "What are they going to do?" To Kiraavi, "Salazsar exports a lot of gemstones."

"...oh, naturally occurring diamonds are rare, aren't they." He chuckles. "Yes, we can make them, they're nothing special at home. Please don't get into a war over it."

"It's not that much up to us," Jealwind says. "I don't know what they'll do about it. Try to trap you in an agreement not to resell any gems you make, I suspect. But if we end up with roads paved with real diamond but no one is allowed to dig them up—it's stupid, for one, and second it'll tank the value of gems just with the knowledge that this exists out there."

        "If they want war, let us have war," says Vedrinn. "...Is what Thrissiam would say. I'd normally call him a fool, but in this case..."

                "We're not compromising road safety just so Salazsar can keep their tidy monopoly," Beiscal says.

"Not only that. If Kiraavi is willing to sell gems and metals," Jealwind turns to the god, "they're immensely valuable in enchanted goods, or simply ordinary construction."

"It sounds like I should get a courier on the way to Salazsar to speak to them about it. I hadn't been planning on selling gems, but if they're useful for enchanting - I do like technological progress, I'm still not sure it's worth having a war over but it seems worth looking into."

"I have a contact there," Jealwind says. "I'll write another letter for you after this."

        "We can untangle that knot later," Vedrinn agrees.

Beiscal says, "It sounds like between the unknowns of the monster problem, the bandit problem, the jurisdiction problem and the attention budget topic—I'm not certain people will spend an hour to an hour and a half every day on the road thinking about you, or maybe I'm not imagining what "thinking about you" means correctly—we probably want to start with a trial area, and a non-unique road—that is, a road between two places which have other connecting routes—and see how that goes." 

"It's not an hour and a half consecutively; a few seconds or minutes here and there adds up over the course of the day. I do expect it'll be less until they're used to the idea of me, and that's fine, I'm willing to operate at a loss here for a while as long as I'm making progress toward sustainability. A trial road sounds reasonable, in any case - ideally one that needs improvements, so I can show off how I'm useful."

"There's a privately operated road between Veiss and Wicess run by the Hothorn Mining Company," says Beiscal. "They built it to transport marble from their quarry forty years ago, but a city popped up around the site, and now it's used by travelers and merchants for ordinary travel, with tolls that go to the Company to pay for the road. It runs through swampland, and the place is infested with burrowers and monsters, so there's a lot of upkeep required and it's not always done well. It's not the only road to Wicess, but it's the shortest one, and popular for that. The Company has been making noises about handing it over to the city of Wicess, and Wicess wants Pallass to take over; but nobody wants it because it's a money sink.

"They'd pay you to take it off their hands, if you commit to keeping it running well, and you'll have fairly broad and uncontested control over it because it's non-unique was already privately operated before, not like if you wanted to claim a public highway. Which will let us defer the questions about jurisdiction and war response."

"That sounds perfect, yes. Are any of the monsters ecologically important that you know of?"

"Ecologically... important?" Vedrinn repeats.

        "As in, how you can't hunt out all the predators in an area, or the prey population will go out of control?" Jealwind says.

"One of the reports suggested that the original roadbuilding work which drained parts of the swamp and flooded others is one of the reasons why the monster situation has been getting worse in the last decades," Beiscal offers.

"Or if you get rid of an annoying herbivore you might lose the valuable predator that eats it, yeah. I don't have much experience with that sort of thing compared to most gods but I can see if someone is willing to give me advice about getting things back under control there."

"You want a Gnoll shaman for that," Jealwind says, "but you'll be hard-pressed to find someone willing to leave their tribe and travel up to Wicess to consult... maybe less hard-pressed, if you can shower them in riches."