"I think - well, Merenre thinks, he does my thinking on this kind of thing - that the most promising way to do good in the world is probably funding research, especially research into better crops and farming practices. We used to be optimistic about research into medicine but we funded some and all of it turned out to be nonsense. Improvements in farming practices, though, mean fewer people have to be on farms and more of them can try something else and then some of them come up with something good. Unfortunately I'm not sure you get any Good for that, the payoff's in the future and uncertain and the system's -" Shrug. "I could've designed a better one. I guess the gods did quite well considering at the time none of them were formerly mortals and they had only vague guesses about what was good for us. The best way to do good in the world that definitely does it right now is probably funding orphanages, when they have more staff and more food the children are much likelier to turn out functional members of society. And we think Osirion mostly does not have the moral hazard problem that some other places have, if you care about that."

Sigh. “The fact that the actual best opportunities here, and the most efficient way to try to change my alignment, are different, is so irritating. What is the state of medicine here, anyway? Something I could potentially do is lend Osirion some Healers, if there are ailments they can treat more easily than your magic can, and they could also participate in research for future opportunities. They have an Othersense for what is going on in bodies which would make it easy and reliable to check whether potential innovations are nonsense or promising.”

" - huh, we don't have anything like that at all. What we're interested in are disease treatments, really, you can just throw a lot of undirected positive energy at most injuries and you get a decent enough outcome but it does very little for sickness. There's a third-circle spell that cures any nonmagical disease but that's totally unaffordable for most of the population. So there are herbal remedies, except apparently none of them work better than patting someone with a moist cloth and assuring them they should recover soon. We would be very interested in consulting with healers from your world."

"Oh! This might be very fruitful, then, I think our Healers are actually better at many kinds of disease than at injuries, at least serious ones. And at the very least, they can get a very good sense of what is going on. Our understanding of disease processes is thus fairly advanced, even in cases where our Healing cannot necessarily address it. We have the same problem - Gifted Healers are not common enough for every town to have one - but we do have herbal remedies that are at least a little effective, if used for the specific thing where they help instead of being thrown at everything at random." 

"Then we will be very eager to meet them. 

We should talk a little bit about your operational security. I've asked everyone not to mention this. I could enforce that, with magic, but it's very unpopular, and hard to do in a way that someone can't get around if they have a mind to without interfering with their ordinary research. I wonder for how long it will be important to keep this secret."

"If you would consider enforcing it with magic anyway, that is something my magic can do - possibly with more flexibility, this is how I maintain information security for very sensitive projects back home. Though for those it is all voluntary and a prerequisite of joining a relevant team at all."

He shakes his head. "I - would prefer not to burn goodwill in that way, though, since your people have not agreed to it in advance. We are currently discussing how to open contact with Rahadoum. I expect the person in charge to be very, very suspicious and paranoid, and that it will take some time, but - perhaps a few months, and ideally I would then wish to move quickly. I am not as worried about knowledge of our existence leaking as I am about specifics, either of magic or of plans." 

Nod. "That I would not expect. I will alert you if I learn of anything, of course, and could hand over the person responsible with assurance you wouldn't interfere with their finding their way to Pharasma eventually."

Nod. "I think this addresses my other question, actually, which is - I would like to be able to return to my world, or at least bring people here from it. I could probably Gate, in theory, but it does not work when I use the usual spell, I suspect it requires some more complex routing of the search for a destination through the planes that lie between us. I know that your world's magic has options, though, and hopefully some of them are less costly than your version of Gate?" 

"Gate is the only well-established way to get to a plane to which no one has been before; once on a plane, you can attune a piece of metal to it, and use that for targeting for subsequent Plane Shifts, which are substantially less costly. Our researchers do not know of methods of attuning a piece of metal without being on the plane in question, but Abadar found it trivial. Divine spellcasters of other gods should not confidently expect to be able to prepare spells in Velgarth; Abadar can do it but it's costlier, and he considered it obvious that he ought to anyway so that people could make plans with the expectation their magic would still work, but I think that a different deity could consider an entirely different feature of the situation obvious. If you're working with Fazil it should be fine."

"Interesting. Thank you." He pauses, tries to remember if there's anything he still meant to cover while waiting to see if the pharaoh is going to jump in with any comments of his own. 

"Are you finding everything in the palace all right?"

Leareth blinks. "Yes. It is very well set up, although I am mostly not exploring anywhere other than the library." 

"It is good to know that magical researchers are the same across the worlds."

Leareth smiles, nods. Waits, eyebrows slightly raised, to see if the pharaoh has anything else to say. He's covered everything on his own agenda, but - well, he finds that he enjoys these conversations, it's refreshing to talk to someone undeniably smarter than he is. Even if it means that the pharaoh is likely extracting more from him than Leareth is getting. It's not that the man is hard to read, exactly, just - one has the impression that whatever he's showing Leareth is what he wants Leareth to see. 

Apparently what he wants Leareth to see is that he is relaxed and in a good mood and not trying anything complicated. This is probably very little information, if it's any at all. "I'm curious about Velgarth. I have only a gods-eye view of it, and they don't notice everything. What's most strikingly different, here?"

"Some of what first comes to mind is likely to be cultural differences that might also be found between two countries in your world, or in Velgarth. For more general patterns - well, there are the downstream effects of our magic being different. Things that are easy to our magic but costly and limited in yours, or vice versa. I am not sure which of us has more total practitioners of magic, actually - do you have statistics on that? Velgarth's rate of mage-gift and other Gifts in the population varies significantly by region, of course, but in a typical country - Rethwellan, say - it is about one in a thousand." 

"The country that's trying the hardest to make everyone in their population capable of being a wizard pick it up is actually Cheliax - they're supplied by Hell, they can afford educational initiatives no one else can. I think something like a third of the population can at least pick up cantrips. Here in Osirion it's more like one in four hundred - but we catch approximately none of the girls who'd have the aptitude, and the boys mostly only if their parents can afford several years of expensive lessons."

"That is a very significant difference! It sounds like it is not something anyone can learn, though, even if it is not based on any innate, inherited talent; what is the limiting factor?" 

"You have to be smart enough to hold the spell in your head. A majority of people aren't, but potentially a very slim majority, if you give all of them good instruction. I think with the crown anyone could be an accomplished wizard. - though I am actually not, myself, particularly. It also takes a lot of time and I am perpetually short on that."

"Fair enough. And, interesting - I suppose that scales with complexity of spell, so many people could learn the simplest but no further, and only with very careful instruction? And here they probably do not bother to teach anyone who is not both high in potential and wealthy. That does make a significant difference, I think; Gifts in my world are obviously more useful with advanced training, but they can be used even without." 

"Yes, exactly. It is not that valuable to be capable of only the simplest spells, and there are significant costs to reach that point. We've considered scholarship programs but on purely economic grounds they don't actually pay for themselves. Of course, there are other reasons - national defense, the benefits of being known as a place full of magical scholars, the hope that wizards will invent better spells and better spell-optimizations - that might make it worth it all the same. Certainly if you have Hell's resources."

Nod. "I would expect a merit-based scholarship program to be worth it economically, if there were reliable standardized tests that could single out the most talented children, but maybe the testing is too much overhead?" Pause. "Why does Hell have so much in the way of resources, anyway." 

"Well, they can force everyone there to work continually with no need for rest or food on whatever project they are commanded to. Axis is probably richer but - rich in the sense of people making things other people there will buy from them, very few people in Axis want money enough to labor in a mine or a textile mill for it."

Sigh. "I see. That does make sense." 

"It may actually not be possible with the resources anyone else has, to maintain that standard of living without Hell. Which - means I don't know that an invasion force would have popular support, even though one thinks of overthrowing Hell as one of the more sympathetic motivations for one."