Leareth nods. "Do you think it would trouble people if I waited a time to find someone suitable? I suppose Aroden is going to stay for a while to transition so it is not that urgent." 

"I don't think it's urgent on the scale of months, but once Aroden has announced his successor then your population's really filtered from there, and maybe in a way you want but maybe not."

"That makes sense. How does one going about meeting people, for this purpose?" 

She raises her eyes at Aroden. "Have you held any state dinners, honey."

"Not yet. Should I start doing so?" 

"I think so. It's a little mean, because everybody's probably terrified of you, but I think they're not going to get less terrified of you until the government starts being there for them to interact with in a normal kind of way. Asmodeus wants their corruption and utter submission, Aroden-the-god-at-war wants their repentance and utter submission, they can't start picking themselves up until it's clear if anyone wants their petty magisterium admissions drama and demands to have Vanyel pave their roads."

"That makes sense to me. I think it is a good idea." It doesn't sound fun, but that isn't the point, he can go and get people used to his existence in a non-frightening or at least less frightening context. 

Parmida frowns at him. She is thinking that she's worried he will add this to his list of practical necessities to endure and endure it admirably but she doesn't know what to do about that, she isn't really sure why Aroden didn't end up doing that. She gives up this line of thought as depressing and unproductive and starts fretting about how much of a mess it's going to be to host dinner parties in Cheliax when she doesn't know any of the local etiquette and everybody who does is working for Asmodeus. Maybe with a lot of windowshopping and mindreading. Maybe the palace staff hasn't all fled in terror.

The palace staff hasn't all fled in terror, or at least only half of them did, and Leareth can slip this into the conversation at an appropriate-seeming moment.

He's a bit distracted, though, by trying to wrap his head around what Parmida is worried about. Surely no one thinks the point of state dinners as a leader is just to enjoy yourself? It's not like he'll hate it; it's a lot more pleasant and less upsetting than the entirety of the war. 

Well, if he doesn't ask she won't think much more about that, in favor of teasing Aroden and then going to track down the palace staff.

Then Leareth will put it out of his mind as well, it doesn't seem especially decision-relevant right now. 

The Tayledras are still working at the Worldwound, trying to undo the damage done to the land. They've made a lot of progress, but it's going to be the work of years, and so they're trying to help the locals figure out how to do what Moondance does.

Eventually Starwind and Moondance take a break from the work on site and head back to Osirion, to see if they can meet with the pharaoh's magic researchers to go over some possible techniques that could be done via local arcane and divine magic. Also if Leareth is planning to visit from Cheliax anyway at some point, they think he might have helpful ideas here, since he likely knows more about magic than anyone alive in Velgarth. 

Leareth has, in fact, recently sent a message for the pharaoh with some suggested dates he could come over again for their economics discussion. 

Sounds good! His magic researchers are all at the winter palace delightedly trying to pick up what Healing-Adepts do and he can bring his economics researchers over there too.

Leareth checks if Vanyel wants to come, but Vanyel is busy testing a new maybe-more-efficient variant on the diamond spell and doesn't want to leave, so Leareth Gates across to the winter palace by himself. Who should he meet with first? 

Khemet has a bunch of other clerics of Abadar including his brother Merenre; they were apparently all selected on merit for economics research they were doing, "except, presumably, me," Merenre says cheerfully enough, "I like to think I'd have managed it anyway but fully a fifth of the Forthbringer's descendents are clerics which suggests the bar is considerably lower and I had fewer citations when selected than ninety-four percent of people who are selected off academic contributions."

"You were also twelve," says Khemet. 

"Well, I had considerably more opportunity to write economics papers at age ten than most people. Anyway..." 

They want to check how many of their empirical results hold up in Velgarth! They want to propose some implementations of a national insurance scheme for Cheliax! They want to know whether various balance-of-trade and fiat-currency schemes have been tried anywhere in Velgarth because they haven't here but people are curious whether they'd work! They want to figure out whether continuing to offer all the Hell-subsidized services in Cheliax can be made viable! They have days worth of things to talk about, really, but Khemet will cut them off after a few hours so he can do some magic research help while he's here too.

It's a very enjoyable discussion. Leareth likes Merenre, unsurprisingly. 

The annoying thing about Velgarth is that whenever Leareth tried anything interesting the gods objected to it, which makes it sort of an unfair test of whether various practices work, but it's kind of possible to distinguish if something just failed right away, versus appeared to be working well for a few generations and then fell apart due to weird bad luck. Two thousand years is a lot of history and Leareth has detailed records on most of it; he makes notes of relevant bits that he should collect to send over for their perusal.

The Eastern Empire still has an interesting fiat-currency setup and a lot of complicated practices around foreign trade and investment, which seem to contribute to its unusual prosperity, but of course the Eastern Empire is weird in a lot of ways. Leareth's theory is that the gods accepted a higher level of technology and innovations of various sorts there because it was sufficiently authoritarian to be predictable to Them anyway. He doesn't actually recommend this as a scheme for getting things past the Velgarth gods, looking at it now the tradeoff doesn't seem like a good one, but the Golarion gods don't have prophecy anymore so they're probably less limited here. 

No one in Golarion thought of technological progress as being particularly slow or of the gods as opposing it - and some of them are definitely in favor of it - but it is true that the last century has had wildly more going on in terms of regime change and technological and magical progress than any of the ten before it so maybe there were incentives in that direction even if there wasn't a uniform policy. 

There's a city down in the Mana Wastes called Alkenstar that's industrializing, building big factories for mass manufacture of textiles and steel and so on, has anyone done that in Velgarth and is it promising, Osirion is intrigued but also Alkenstar is an incredibly unpleasant place where the air is basically unbreathable and everyone works long hours doing horribly tedious things on assembly lines and dies at 40 and they're not sure if this is a transitional stage or just how mass manufacturing things works.

Leareth can only offer them his theories and guesses, there, since he hasn't ever succeeded at this in Velgarth - it could be a transitional stage, also he can imagine ways of using magic to reduce the costs like unbreathable air, if not the cost of working long and tedious hours.

After that discussion, he heads off to meet Starwind and Moondance. 

They're in a shielded Work Room with a couple of Khemet's researchers, trying to demonstrate something to Detect Magic, but they duck out when Leareth arrives to catch him up on what they've been discussing so far. 

Leareth does have some ideas! He suspects Osirion divine magic can in theory replicate the Healing part of Healing-Adepts, which would at least mean they could work together with regular mages rather than indefinitely borrowing the only Healing-Adept from k'Treva. It might require inventing a new spell - he isn't sure how clerics inventing spells works, actually, do they just need to know the specifications of it and then ask their god...? 

You can do that, yes, though it's much rarer than wizards inventing spells because it's nonzero costly for gods to add more to the ones they offer. But Abadar has His own first-circle truth spell, for example, because He felt truth spells were really important for commerce and the existing second-circle one wasn't good enough, and similarly you could probably request something like this if you came up with it.

Leareth thinks he should be able to give them a pretty clear specification of what to request, then. He makes notes and asks Moondance to demonstrate part of a technique and makes more notes and pauses to think and requests a different demonstration. 

Moondance can do that but it'd be safer in the Work Room. 

Sure, if it's high-power or something that does seem safer. Leareth ducks into the Work Room with Starwind and Moondance.