"Just getting advice from them where they are might be enough, too. I'll look into it, thank you."

"If we're taking this route, we don't need to take it to the Assembly yet," says Jealwind. "We'd ask to vote on a broader program only once we have the trial showing results. I'd still want to circulate a notice on what we're doing, and I'll run privately it by the President of the Assembly—or Vedrinn, if you want to?—but we can get the cart rolling sooner."

"That sounds fine to me."

Then they can spend the rest of the afternoon ironing out the details of the road between Wicess and Veiss, and catching Kiraavi up on where it is, the characteristics of the two cities, the type of traffic the road sees, and major incidents and problems reported in the last few years.

Senator Jealwind can get a vial en route to Salazsar on the gem scarcity problem, which will arrive in about two weeks, likely just before the Fissival one.

They can also get a vial on the way to Wicess; Speaker Beiscal can write the letter for it. That one will be five days. They'll probably negotiate taking over the road with the company's branch office in Pallass, and get it confirmed to Wicess over [Message], so everything will be already set up for the handover once Kiraavi gets there.

His schedule is getting crowded, in a good way. He writes it up as part of his nightly maintenance, to hopefully show to his new aide soon.

✨Trial road✨: Wicess; ETA 5 days

Gem scarcity: Salazsar; ETA 2 weeks

Magic: Mage Lord of the Teleportarium in Fissival; ETA 2-3 weeks

Income: local, ETA 1 month (sufficient funds exist for now)

 

Mystery memory effect: awaiting response from city intelligence to get an audience with [Grand Strategist] Chaldion

Road reinforcement consultant

Gnoll shaman/other environmental consultants

Priests

Alchemy? Weird materials?

Intercontinental contact

Tomorrow, the aide he's trying to hire will call back and ask if he has time today to meet.

He does! (He's looking around the city, now that the sun is back up, with plans to go to the library later.) He can be there in... probably fifteen or twenty minutes?

Sure, his schedule is free.

The Gnoll's office is small and cozy, filled with strange doodads and a painting of a city built around and into an enormous tree. The person himself is gray-furred and casually dressed. He introduces himself as Marekh, no surname. "I got some of the details from the letter, but I'd like to hear it from you."

"The short version is that I'm a god, from another world; I've written up an explanation of what that means I can do, but the most relevant things are road maintenance and security, some transportation of high-value goods, and some creation of goods that are rare here, and also that I can exist in many places at once." He materializes a copy and hands it over. "I'm working on getting established, but I'm not familiar with how things are done here or basically anything about the region, the people, magic, Skills, politics with normal people rather than gods, all of that sort of thing; I'm working with some fairly important people and I keep having questions that aren't at all appropriate to waste their time on, but that I still need answers to or advice on. I'm also used to delegating the type of work I'm doing right now - interfacing with bureaucrats - so if you're interested in picking that up or advising me on it that would be useful."

"[Read Document]... Interesting Skillset you have here."

"Managing politics. Yes, that is what people hire me for. Or hire me to consult for, these last few years, but this is interesting enough I'm inclined to get my paws dirty. What are your short-term, mid-term and long-term projects? Risks, challenges? What do your organization and relationships look like in one month, in one year, in five?"

"In the short to medium term I think I have enough going on and I want to get it under control before I do much of anything else - the main thing is that I'm taking on a road between Wicess and Veiss in a few days and I'll need to figure out how to fortify it against monsters and get the ecosystem rebalanced so there are fewer monster-related problems in the long run, and for that I need to speak to someone in Salazsar; I'm used to sometimes using gems as a building material and I'd rather not provoke a war with that. In the longer term I'd also like to start making some of the rarer and more useful gems more widely available for industrial purposes, but I understand they aren't going to take that very well, so I want to know more about that situation so I can make an informed decision about whether and how to go forward with that. It's also been recommended that I find a Gnoll Shaman to speak to about the ecological issues around my new road and I don't know how to go about finding one. 

"There's also a strange effect - someone suggested it might be a spell - that affects local people's memories when I try to talk to them about a certain topic, and I'm not sure that's not a safety issue for me; I've been advised to find someone high-level to speak to about it, and I'm waiting to hear back from the intelligence bureau about getting an appointment with [Grand Strategist] Chaldion. If that goes well, it'll open up the option for me to give my blessings here. I'm also curious about whether the local magic works for me but might not be able to safely interact with that for the same reason; I'm on my way to Fissival to ask about that.

"In the slightly longer term I'd like to make contact with as many cities as I can in the area, even if I'm not ready to expand to them yet; I don't want to accidentally destabilize things because I didn't know something was going to bother someone. In the long run I do want to expand in a sustainable way to as many places as I can, including intercontinentaly, and support and facilitate communication and trade between them all and between them and my home world.

"The main risk I'm worried about is the memory effect; depending on what that turns out to be I may need to abandon this world altogether. I also don't want to start any wars if I can help it, and I've already found one way I could have accidentally done that, so I'm worried about there being more. That's not my highest priority, if gems are useful enough to you I'll want to make them available even if Salazsar does insist on having a war over it, but I don't want to do it by accident or without sufficient preparation. As a more mundane concern, I'm not sure what it'll be like operating in a world where nobody knows how gods work; I'm going to need to keep a closer eye than usual on my energy reserves and on whether my usual approaches are working.

"As to what my organization is going to look like, I don't know yet. At home I can count on people having an idea of what it means to work for a god, which means I can look for people who have their own ideas about what they should be doing for me and mostly come out all right. That won't work here, obviously, since nobody knows what gods are. In the short term I suppose I can just hire people for specific work as I notice I need them and see how that goes. In terms of relationships - I like to be at least cordial with everyone but I'm used to there being an everyone to be cordial with, if that makes sense? Most regional politics is between gods, at home, and I'm not used to working with bureaucracies. I do still hope to have mostly good relationships with them but I'm not entirely sure if that's a reasonable way to look at it."