"I don't think it's a fixed number, it just has to look commensurate with how much business we're doing," Daron says. "We could take in laundry from Twiceharbor, start selling druid services, have the bards over there put on a performance with spells thrown in and sell tickets -"

"Ooh, fun," says Nilare, and Kytar kisses her.

"Which cuts down on our extracurriculars, but we don't have to actually tell anyone how long it takes to do laundry with magic, we get some wiggle room," Daron concludes.

"Sounds good. I think I wanna make the next one, if that's okay with everyone. Not yet, we'll think of more stuff we want them to know, but I can start putting notes together."

"We're getting to the group size where we're going to need to think about social dynamics more complicated than 'the new person knows and likes everyone'," says Nilare. "We don't want to wind up breaking into cliques or not knowing who to clear what sorts of plans with."

"Yeah. I think we should maybe make a leader. We have the ability to make people while the maker has Wisdom and Cunning, now, so we're not going to get better at making people for a while, and we're - settled on what we broadly want to do. And if we have a leader early we can make subsequent people loyal to them."

"It doesn't necessarily have to be a social dynamic that bottoms out in a single leader," Kytar says. "We could be a democracy or something. I mean, if we think we can all agree on leader traits, I'm not objecting to doing it that way, but it's not the only option."

"I feel like a democracy makes making new people very fraught, we'd have people maybe motivated to get new people on their side - and we're doing something that might be illegal and might be dangerous and it'd be really bad to schism. I think that probably a single leader makes for the group dynamic where that is least likely though I admit I don't know for sure. Obviously we can be democratic among ourselves about working out leader traits and priorities."

"If we can all agree that's fine," Kytar says. "I don't have a good guess how hard that will be till we try."

She nods. "The main thing that is influencing my thinking here is that - I am expecting this to, at some point, go badly? Something we do might anger the locals, or there might be a war that has nothing to do with us or only indirectly has things to do with us, like because introducing magic changed the balance of power somewhere. Or Asmodia will find out that there's a way to get home from here and act on that. Or Asmodeus'll find her. And - in lots of situations democracy works great? We can have a very low-key leader who mostly lets us do our own pieces of this thing. But if something goes really wrong, you want a chain of command. And - this is a really big ambitious unprecedented project that probably breaks a bunch of local laws and something is going to go wrong."

"Emergency backup leadership," says Nilare.

"Mmm, no, not just emergency backup, there's only so much you can verify how well somebody's turned out at something till they actually do it, and leadership's not like making them speak Soskat - you should learn Soskat for real, Carissa - it involves a lot of very specific interpersonal moving parts we might not ourselves have a good model of and therefore might not be able to squish into somebody perfectly on the first try. So they should do non-emergency leadership, both to see if they're any good at it and for practice."

"That makes sense," agrees Kytar.

"I'm really bad at learning languages. But - yeah, I think we should try for actual day-to-day leadership and then if it seems to be working we can relax it from there and think of it more as emergency leadership at that point. And if we don't like their day-to-day leadership, then maybe we'll at least know what didn't work and we can fix it in the next person."

"You live on Ivory and you need your higher level slots, you should learn Soskat," says Daron. "Even if you're never going to write poems in it."

"If we might have to demote them they shouldn't be very attached to the idea of being the leader," Nilare says.

"In school they whipped kids, for being worst in the class, and I was top of everything except languages and usually solidly worst at that. I have retained about twenty words of Hallit and I know barely enough Infernal to not be suspected of being some kind of dissident, and only that because I started at three. I can give it a shot but I think I mostly just shouldn't be doing our communications with the outside world. Maybe once we have the materials for magic item crafting I can make myself a headband with a language in it, I think I can see how you'd do that.

I think we want a leader who - cares entirely about the mission. Saving everybody in the world from dissolving and making a god and figuring out which if any factions in Golarion ought to have this - thing we've found - for themselves. And they'll be the leader if that's the best way to do that but if it turns out not to be they aren't intrinsically invested in leading, just in doing whatever it takes to get this done."

"That works for me," says Daron.

"Sounds good in principle but I'm not sure how well that holds together in practice so you'll want to watch your prioritization," Kytar says.

"Yeah, definitely. I want to think a bunch this week about - what it'd be like to be that person, figure out how it best holds together. I think - I could imagine feeling that way? If I'd been - raised a little differently? So I bet I can swing it.

They should definitely be not interested in sex except instrumentally, less drama that way and no weird things about the command structure."

"We're going to look weird," sighs Daron.

"It can be a magic people quirk or something," says Kytar. "Trot out me and Nilare if you need to."

"They can claim to be monogamous. There might be a version of 'not interested except instrumentally' that's a little less total than yours, and allows for 'if it's useful for not looking weird to hook up with the neighbors occasionally it's not an imposition'?"

"Maybe. I mean, I could hook up with a neighbor to look less weird, but it would at some point be conspicuous that that was why I was doing it unless I undertook a really elaborate campaign of deception, which I can also do but it would be so time-consuming."

" - yeah, I guess that makes sense. I do think it's more important than usual for a leader, though, a main way leaders are stupid in the contexts I know of is being partisan towards people they're sleeping with. ...I guess we could do a normal sexuality and put in that they are not partisan towards people they're sleeping with, if you guys would feel more comfortable with that."

"I'm not nearly as worried as Daron is about looking weird for having, what, two asexuals in a group of what will be five people, I don't think that's going to summon the police," says Kytar.

Carissa nods. Looks to Nilare in case she has any input. (She has a secret prejudice against democracy here which is that it means you have to make lots of high-stakes efforts to persuade people of things. Obedience is easier.)

"I agree that it can be a weird magic people quirk if a lot of our bunch happen to be asexual," Nilare says agreeably. "As far as I know nobody here has been propositioned for some sort of regular Lemondale community spirit building orgy event so Daron may be self-consciously overestimating the importance or something."

"I can try for a - less black-box asexual than you got," she says to Daron. "And maybe a bit flexibler in case it does cause problems. It might work to say, like, asexual by default but introspective and able to change things like that if there's good reason? We'll want that anyway for all the person's other traits."

"That does sound convenient," says Daron.

She's also going to put in combat skill, because the leader should be able to kill people if he needs to, but she doesn't feel like democratically discussing this with everyone else. "Other stuff? Not that we have to think of it now, we can brainstorm all week."

"Let's do the asynchronous notes thing instead of scheduling a lot of meetings," says Kytar.

"I want to go practice bard stuff and find a venue for the performance idea," Nilare says. They traipse off to wander through the ex-lemon-grove toward central Lemondale, holding hands, singing bits of things at each other.