"Well, maybe, but I don't have to take the suggestions. I may anyway, though, and I suppose that awkwardly may make you less inclined to give them. Ugh." Cannot say anything about her reasoning process behind killing a great many dukes of Hell. "In general almost everything I do trades off against tapping. It's very useful, and very lucrative, and very boring, and I am at most times trying to carve out time for more interesting work. In the past I've been very limited in how much time is left over after tapping commitments, and committed to rather more hours of it than I probably should have - for my own sake, if not for the world's. Hence the demiplane, which is really quite new. I have been thinking, now that I have it, about what I can do that isn't mindless. The thing I would like to do for the moment is rebuild Cheliax, and if I can, make the convention go well. Not because it's the most important thing, but because it interests me and is important to my friends. It's still a side project fit in around the tapping, and around remedy research, so the time I can spend on it out there is sharply limited, but I expect there's still quite a lot to be done even with that attitude."

"I do have Sundays free. In the past they've been fairly sacred and devoted to the children, but that's a little bit less true now that I can see them here. Any hypothetical projects which the children can participate in - such as a very particular sort of dinner party, I suppose - may have a little bit of leeway there. Apart from that, I can do things late at night, and I can speak to people in my tapping locations while I tap. ...normally I use that time for public appointments, but after reading your account of the questions the Church of Iomedae is fielding I am a bit tempted to attempt to speak to the crowds as a whole, or hire a rotation of other people to do it. I'll have to think about how much it's likely to affect throughput."

"If I had advice I thought you'd want to hear I'd share it, even if you decided to do something less wildly valuable to the world as a result! It's a poor ally who tries to start by guessing what they want you to do and then feed you only the advice that gets you there. It's more that without the faintest idea what moved you to any of the things you do I expect the advice to be no good.

I do think it'd be valuable for some people to - speak to the people of Cheliax and give them examples of what being a good person is like. It seems very harmful to them to have no idea what they are supposed to do. Spending time around you and your children might be actively better than just spending time around you, for that. I think people in Cheliax don't know what is ordinary instruction of a child and what is Asmodean tyranny over them."

"Elie didn't, so in fact I know exactly how that particular thing is. I cannot imagine that personally observing me with my children is a solution that solves that sort of problem on any particular scale, though. Though it may go a little way in solving the problem where people keep thinking of Elie as a demigod."

Elie is a demigod under some of the more reasonable definitions of the phrase.

He does not say that. "I do think that social ties often allow people to learn and communicate many things they're unwilling to via formal channels."

"Well, yes, but I don't know that I have much special advantage at forming them, if the goal is to teach the people of Cheliax to be good. But it may be that a few people feeling that they know us personally and aren't petitioning a deity is still very useful, and maybe dinner parties with children will go some way in doing that."

"We were putting together a pamphlet about our marriage, actually, that being another thing the people of Cheliax seem very confused about. I don't know if it'll help at all, but it seemed worth trying."

"That does strike me as a good idea. I have worried it will take a long time for the damage done to the family in Cheliax and Andoran and Galt to be undone."

"I think it's really fantastically applicable to a Chelish case, virtuous heroine notwithstanding. A woman with a baby, unwilling to abandon him even at the cost of engaging in quite insane behavior, terribly in need of a provider and protector and advocate, and terribly suspicious of all possible men who might fill the role, apart from the one who was dead and moved on. And a man who absolutely never imagined himself as a father, but who is respectful and decent and protective when called on, and finds that he's quite happy to raise a child that isn't his by blood, if only he can be assured that the mother actually wants to be with him. And yes, granted, they do quite a bit more opening portals to Bachuan and closing portals to the Abyss than most married couples, but the core of it is - achievable, from a Chelish starting point, in a way that many models of virtuous marriage are not."

"Yes. That seems very useful to articulate to people. They are very eager to have examples to work from, and so far I do not really think anyone has provided them any."

"Oh, a few people have. There are a good handful of foreign clerics working in Cheliax these days, even without counting the flock of Abadarans that moved into the Longmarch, and people are publishing foreign books. Not enough, of course, and I admit there's little explicit direction about who to listen to, from either the church of Iomedae or the crown, which as far as I can tell are the only two sources many people in the cities recognize as worth listening to."

"The Church will likely try to publish more, but frankly it does not play to our strengths, and we'll be doing it more in defense of the interests of our allies than because it seems likely to be a successful humanitarian intervention in its own right. Maybe I am too pessimistic. If Codwin ends up feeling able to advise us that will probably help."

"Oh, I'm really quite excited about - oh, you were in Vigil, you haven't heard! They passed a censorship law today. And ended halfling slavery, of course. Anyway, they're allowing old books, and they have some complicated insurance scheme for publishing domestically without a censorship board, and I have no idea how that will go. But books approved by the censors of lawful allied countries are allowed with much less friction, and I think we ought to try to flood the market with better materials. Lastwall, I imagine, is overstretched, but I think Osirion is very well positioned to expand and begin censoring works intended for distribution in Cheliax. We'll have some trouble finding enough people fluent in Taldane, but I mean to try to hire a handful of Osirian censors tomorrow and see if I can set them up with copying houses in all the major cities. - in general I expect that publishing will be a very powerful tool for informing the people of Cheliax, much moreso than in other countries, and I'm hopeful that the experimental censorship law will make it profitable, where it wasn't before."

"I'm very glad to hear that! Lastwall's public services including the censorship offices are indeed stretched thin right now, but Osirion's laws have never struck me as unreasonable except where they touch on Osirian politically sensitive matters."

"I'm not sure I'd say never, but I think we can certainly improve on the current situation.

On the subject of what you need, if you don't mind me opining on it - you talk in here about training lay people to answer an extremely limited number of stock questions, but I think you can do much better. Firstly, in a Chelish context, a list of stock answers to stock questions ought to primarily be a small book. They can read! Nearly all of them! And they're out in the streets of Westcrown going half mad for lack of anything worthwhile to copy, right now.

Secondly, if you're fielding almost entirely questions about the basic nature of good and evil, you don't need Iomedans at all, you need people with theological training and a limited Iomedan stamp of approval. What you want is a small army of Sarenites, and their acolytes. Chelish people don't recognize them or take them seriously, and won't go to them for guidance, but it's very easy to set a handful of them up in an Iomedan temple and explain that Sarenrae is a great ally of Iomedae's, and that you should trust her clerics on matters of what actions are good and which are evil, and thereby offer individual confession even if you've only got a single Iomedan for the whole city. You don't need a trained Sarenite to stick to a handful of answers you could read in a book. At most you will want to give them some cultural guidance and some notes in the theological differences between your churches that they ought to flag, but given that much I think it will be extremely rare for talking to one for an hour to make a Chelish person worse, without you needing to limit the topics that they can talk about."

"I would be delighted to vouch for a small army of Sarenites but I do not know where I would get such a small army of Sarenites."

"Oh, I intend to beg one off the Padishah Emperor. I've never begged anything off an Emperor before - Aspexia excepted, I suppose - but given the large number of Keleshites I've saved, I expect we can get him to agree without all that much fuss. It's rather a flattering request at heart, I think. We beg him to offer the great wisdom of the Keleshite Empire to the Avistani barbarians, who don't yet know whether murder is evil. We can bribe him with copies of Keleshite books, if necessary, though I realize if you offer something to an Emperor you have to claim it's tribute and not trade, or a poor gift that doesn't compare to the splendor of what the Emperor can offer you, or something like that."

"...indeed." He's smiling broadly. "I think that's an excellent idea and we would be happy to handle the logistics of connecting an army of Sarenites with the parishoners who come to our temple seeking guidance on the Good."

Oh good. She sips her tea.

"In general I think I have built up quite a lot of potential favors from all over the world, without particularly meaning to. Under ordinary circumstances, given that I have already collected massive amounts of money for them, I would be quite content to let the benefits accrue to everyone. But given the situation in Cheliax, I think I am instead going to call in as many as can be usefully called. I'm still figuring out which ones those are, but I expect there are a lot."

"I think there are a number of situations where the need is much more dire this year than it will be in ten, which is often a good situation for calling in favors. I would not recommend compromising the preparations for Geb about it, but - I am not sure what Geb-related favors you could even be asking the Padishah Emperor instead."

"Right? This is what I said to Elie. There are some favors that one might conceivably need more for something else, but there is simply nothing in the world that the Padishah Emperor is ever going to be able to offer anyone that is more valuable than an army of Sarenites in Cheliax this year.

Anyway, I'm not an Iomedan. It's not as if I was carefully hoarding a favor from the Padishah Emperor to spend at the best possible moment in the first place. I am not carefully hoarding favors. But I have them, and if everyone is going to go around being miserable about Cheliax, I would prefer it if they didn't need to."

Is everyone going around being miserable about Cheliax? Iustin seems fairly miserable. Alexaera seems mostly tired. The Queen - he would not have been able to tell if the Queen was miserable. 

Her husband certainly is, and naturally that probably matters most to her. "Let us know if we can be of any more assistance."

"No, no! You're doing fine. I didn't call you here to - well, I called you here for help, but only in the sense that I ought to ask for advice from someone who knows what they're doing every now and again. And to argue with you about your specific view of conscription. But I intend to solve Cheliax's problems as far as I can without particularly calling on Lastwall for aid. I really prefer not to call on anyone for aid, especially not people who are already doing important work. I think quite a lot of people could be better directed right now - but despite your delightfully scathing commentary, in general Lastwall is near the bottom of the list of groups who need to be better directed. Everyone else, though -"

She has a world map on one wall. She highlights Ifsahel as the capital of the Keleshite Empire. (She uses gloves. The great Archmage Naima cannot prestidigitate things on her own.) Then she highlights other places.

"The Sarenites are the most obvious ask, I think. Rahadoum owes me personally more than perhaps anywhere else, and the primary thing we ought to ask them for is druids, if Rahadoumi druids will countenance enriching Chelish farmland. Northern Garundi druids are generally much easier to work with than any of the druids I've met in Avistan. Thuvia is still badly depopulated and has fields going untilled, which it seems there ought to be a solution to, but I'm not sure what it is. Osirion, of course, we want to direct towards scaling up their censorship bureau, so that it can handle Chelish publishing demand. 

I really am not sure that people in general have noticed how important Chelish publishing is. I wasn't thinking about it either, before today, but - in almost all societies besides Absalom and the breakaway Chelish provinces, copying books is primarily the domain of priests. Not exclusively, of course, but there just aren't very many wizards. In Cheliax, my best guess is that between two and four percent of the population is capable of copying books. In the cities it may be as high as ten or even fifteen percent. There's no organized push towards it, because of course under infernal rule publishing foreign books was generally illegal, but - Cheliax ought to be exporting an utterly massive number of copies of foreign books, undercutting clerics across the world and freeing them up to do other work. And making money through honest labor, which the Chelish population sorely needs right now."

"Are books valuable enough for that to really employ - I suppose paper is getting cheaper these days."

"It is! And will get cheaper still, now that the demiplane can increase Elie's fabricate output. I really ought to work with him on figuring out how to translate it for Wishbone, then I could do it at night, too. We actually nearly destroyed the economy of Tephu with it. I'm hoping that a donation to the scribal academy and a request to retrain large numbers of people as censors will go some way in getting them to forgive me. Assuming they don't change the law, which is the main thing I'm worried about. But assuming stability - look. Literacy is up in Osirion; in the Sphinx valley I expect more than half of the young men can read. We are experimenting with private schooling in the Junira. In many places books are luxury items, but they're sought-after ones, and Chelish teenagers can churn them out at a fraction of the price of what they cost in most places.

I expect that the ideal number of copy-wizards probably is lower than what Cheliax produced. I don't expect that it will employ all of them. But it is a valuable skill, and it will do them quite a lot of good to put it to use making ten thousand copies of the Acts and The Birth of Light and Truth. ... and then ten thousand copies of something else, because I think they can probably quite cheaply turn out ten thousand books a day, if we can supply them with paper, and I do think there's demand for it. A large chunk of the demand might be in Vudra or Po Li, but the ones who can cast comprehend languages can fulfill that, too."

"Are you planning to start this yourself or are you just suggesting the business opportunity to someone?"

"Oh, I'm planning to hire existing Osirian censors and get leave to use the old urban schools for copying centers, organize what transit I can, offer piecework pay as low as it'll go, and then watch someone else notice that they can get a piece of it if they pay the copyists more. Someone'll notice eventually, but they may need a demonstration."