"Sure. Put it up and we can talk about massive geopolitical favors next week."

"Telepathic bond." And she teleports out to pick up Novella and begin tapping early in Almas.

No, no, actually the massive geopolitical favors are part of the conversation. So I was talking to Elie last night, and - well, he's very upset, obviously, and I guess I came at things with the attitude that the problem I was interested in helping with was the one where he wasn't okay, and this really just upset him more. Apparently the thing he needs is for the people of Cheliax to be safe and free, which I really should have realized but I didn't, exactly, and didn't take rebuilding nearly as seriously as I would have if I'd thought of it as being something he really really needed.

Oh. Yeah, I can see why that - 

It's that Galt isn't. Free. Or, the Galtans aren't. And obviously if they were that doesn't mean it would be ok if the Chelish weren't, but - Cheliax is another chance to do it right. Kind of.

Exactly. The only apparent chance in the foreseeable future, really, especially if it goes poorly here. It's not that I didn't know this, but - I didn't think about it being possibly his only chance to have one of the things that he most wants, and how much I should be trying to make it go well.

...so naturally when I realized this I told him that while I can't fix the convention, there are a bunch of things I can do to place Cheliax in a much better position to recover and actually appear to be a success in ten years, regardless of how good or bad its constitution is, not in the sense that we'd be fooling anyone but in the sense that there are actually lots of other inputs, right, in whether a people is crawling and suffering or whether it's making rapid progress and building new things and growing more equipped to make its own decisions. There's an entire planet full of people unaffected by this situation who owe me favors, and would probably be overjoyed if the Archmage Naima were to beg them for resources, and in many cases we can offer something to make it worth their while. I just - wasn't thinking about using any of that, right? I was thinking about making each place stronger on its own terms, not trying to pull wealth from places that could afford it to the places that needed it. But I can!

Oh, and you're - upset you didn't notice sooner? It is really great that you can pull on all those resources, and it's not too late or anything -

No! Well, yes, actually, I was really upset about that for about thirty seconds. But no.

The problem is that he was also really upset by that and told me that I shouldn't do anything for him, because the last thing he needed was to know that the cost of his mistakes was that I was making more sacrifices. Which doesn't even make sense? Noticing that I can do this has nothing to do with the riots or any of the decisions that went into the convention, or anything that he did at all, except for the fact that because he was upset I actually thought to ask him about what he actually needed? But I tried to explain a bunch of different ways why he didn't have to feel guilty about this, and it just made him more upset, and ultimately he said that things were probably going to go terribly and the convention would - deserve his grief, when it happened, and I shouldn't be looking at his emotional state as a problem to be solved in that situation. Which I suppose I can respect without being too upset about it.

...anyway, he told me not to do anything for Cheliax, or maybe make any sacrifices, or something, if I was doing it for him, and that I should only do it if I thought it was the right thing to do. Which is a horrible thing to say! I hate making sacrifices because it's the right thing to do! I spend twelve hours a day doing it, and I don't especially want to do any more! If I can do a bunch of organizational work, and then fairly humiliate myself in front of the Emperor of Kelesh, and get a thousand Sarenites out of it, and then Elie is really impressed and relieved and grateful, that's extremely satisfying! That's one of my favorite things to do! Not specifically with the Emperor of Kelesh. But if I have to suffer through it because it's the right thing to do and I'm so generous that everybody has gotten into the habit of thinking of everything I do as public property, that's completely awful!!

.....I have in the process realized that it is the right thing to do, though. But I can't do it for Elie, because he won't be impressed or relieved or grateful, he'll just be stressed and upset about it. Luckily I have thought of one other possible source of satisfaction from this potentially extremely satisfying thing, which is that you're also my friend and I understand you to also probably be very stressed out about the current state of Cheliax, such that you might be very impressed and relieved and grateful if someone were to swoop in and solve - oh, I don't know. I think I could probably direct the rest of the world to solve a good twenty percent of the problems.

Oh! Well, for that I am very happy to be of service. Solving twenty percent of the problems would be huge and important and I promise to be very grateful and not mope about you doing me favors at all. What plans have you got, besides a thousand Sarenites - we could really use a thousand Sarenites, gods these people need more exposure to the concepts of forgiveness and redemption. And clean water and healing.

I'm not completely sure we can get a thousand, of course. I bet we can get a lot, though, if we're asking the Emperor and not the Church directly. Of course I'd have to frame it as the backward people of Avistan throwing themselves upon the wisdom and mercy of the Keleshites and begging them to teach us the ways of civilization, and anything we can offer in exchange is but a humble token of our gratitude that can never compare to wealth of the Empire - but as humble tokens go, and as sources of money in general, I suppose, Cheliax has a massive number of underemployed wizards, and they don't, so a lot of priests have to spend their time making copies of books. Have the Keleshite priests all bring ten books with them, and we can send them back in a few years with some large number of copies to take home.

I think the Keleshites are the biggest no-brainer, but I think we can also pull some Irorites off of Vudra, and I'm sure there's another sort of person who would find that kind of direction very useful. Harder to obtain translators for, though. I bet we can find some druids more amenable to helping before the harvest than the local ones, though I'm not immediately sure where. Rahadoum, maybe, Rahadoum in particular owes me quite a lot, and I think the ones in northern Garund tend to be much more amenable to assisting civilization, though druids will have more particular priorities and I'll need to talk to them and see what they are. After that - there are a lot of places with spare resources, but I'm not completely sure which ones we most need, or which things can best be solved via massive favors from other countries. I know the orphanages are awful and underfunded, but that one seems like really very purely a money issue, at least at the current level of awful. A bunch of places in Tian Xia are doing quite well, but I'm not sure what work to put them to given the difficulties we'll have sourcing translators.