"If it expends significant social capital relative to what I currently have, I'll try things the regular way first for a day or two.  Gotta do that anyways, unless it can be here instantly."

Keltham turns his attention back to the question of arranging his remaining day's schedule.  Should he try to negotiate equity allocations today, or...  "Can you guess how likely it is that a god of individuals individually playing positive-sum games with each other would have magic for... symmetrically fair negotiations?  Like a spell that forces everybody in a room, including the caster, to be honest about how much they're gaining from a trade?"

" - it sounds like the kind of thing that some clerics have. I - uh, crash course in spellcraft, so you can recognize it if you've got it - spells have schools, school is one of the easiest things to identify about a spell from its structure. That'd be enchantment, which is the category for magic that affects the minds of other intelligent creatures. Enchantment looks like it's interfacing with something obscenely complicated, it'll have a weird sort of surface -" She does another illustrative illusion. It's her last for the day but maybe she can borrow a pearl of power off the security guys. "Enchantments break into charms and compulsions. Charms form a two-way connection, and look like this; compulsions oblige or prevent a course of action, and there's no connection between two minds - so you'd be looking for an enchantment (compulsion) and if you have one that's not in the book it could be something for fair negotiation."

He's got four first-circle spells with that look, one copy of one, three copies of another.

Keltham considers the possibility that this structure, in fact, denotes something completely different which Carissa very much wants to know whether Keltham has, for some reason.  But if Keltham goes ahead and casts them, and they do something very different from what Carissa suggested, that would give her game away, so she wouldn't do that... right?

Keltham wishes he had played more alternate-universe master-criminal-detective LARPs, which no doubt exist somewhere on his home planet.  This level of paranoia is exhausting when you have to do it for real, and you don't have much experience doing it for real.

"If I look through my spells and see one like that, are people likely to be okay with my casting it during negotiations when I don't know in advance exactly what it does?" Keltham asks temporizingly.  If the answer is no, then Carissa could be fishing for information in a case where her deception wouldn't be found out immediately...

"I mean, on the Queen no, on me yes."

"Fair..."  Keltham closes his eyes, pretends to concentrate.  "Okay, huh, yeah, I've got at least one first-circle spell like that.  But it sounds like I might need to figure out what they do first, today, and then put them into negotiations for real, later.  Which I think implies... that today is maybe not best spent on equity and pay negotiations... so I could spend it learning about Golarion, learning about wizardry, or communicating really basic stuff of the sort where you can't plausibly industrialize a planet while keeping that stuff secret.  Experimental method, formal epistemology for communicating results, the less complicated tiny bits that complicated substances are made of, that sort of thing.  Where I'm not selling that part, but by giving it to you, I'm expecting to garner informal social capital of the sort that lets me put in requests for headbands and Detect Magic equipment on loan from the government.  Your government can trade the information on for more informal social capital, but they need to credit me with some of that social gain, and can't copyright that information or declare it a trade secret.  Oh, and besides learning wizardry, I should take a look at whatever your local heritage-optimization setup is, in case you're somehow doing something drastically wrong that explains why the average intelligence here is so low."  He has no idea how to negotiate selling his genetic material right now, and certain aspects of him are in favor of doing that sooner rather than later.

"Sure, all of that sounds good. Uh, unless the experimental method or epistemology things run into things our government has already declared secret for reasons like that they make it really easy to blow up the world, or summon gods, or that Asmodeus says would cause those sorts of problems, I assume you'd understand in that case that they'd go right on considering it secret. - if you made a god then that seems neat but it only takes one god who wants to let Rovagug out."

"Yeah, understood.  Not destroying the world is everybody's problem."

"I would hope. So which of those things do you want to do first? Lots of people can make you smarter for five minutes at some point, probably learning wizardry's the best use of it, and security can Haste you at the end of the day if they haven't gotten into a fight by then. Other than that I don't think I have any particular reason to think one thing should come first."

"I would've otherwise wanted to prioritize learning wizardry first, while my brain is fresher, but if we only get the Haste spell at the end of the day and we want to stack all the boosts together - what does Haste do, and can you stack everything together, and also what does the make-smarter spell look like?"

"Make-smarter's transmutation." Here's its structure. "You almost certainly won't have it, though - the gods never give that one, for some reason. Boosts to different kinds of ability stack, boosts to the same kind usually don't unless they're specially engineered to. Haste improves reflexes and cognition speed but primarily from a physical angle, your brain working better; Fox's Cunning - that's the make-smarter - improves working memory and spatial memory and also cognition speed but from a different angle that does stack with Haste."

"Oh, good.  Two second-circle spells look similar to that one."  Seems relatively innocuous to say, and if he's too reticent he'll learn a lot more slowly.  "The headbands do the same thing as Fox's Cunning but permanently in magic-item form?  That's also something I'm very interested in reading about, any books that mention it," so he can maybe learn enough to know if putting one on is actually a good idea, but it would be better to present a different reason for his wanting those books - "Your planet needs those to be much cheaper, as soon as possible, heritage optimization takes time."

"You'd have to invent a better way to mine spellsilver. It's in the ground but there's only a little of it in a whole acre of earth, and you need it for all magic items. It's why they're rare. Headbands can be Fox's Cunning in an item, yes, or they can be Owl's Wisdom, which does the same thing but enhances - intuition, noticing-things, letting your beliefs spool out and have all their implications - or Eagle's Splendour, which enhances interpersonal and verbal skill."

"If those are the only three and the gods don't give Fox's Cunning, I've presumably got the other two.  Sounds like Eagle's Splendour wouldn't be that useful for learning magic, trouble is, I don't know which is which, so I'll save both for the end of the day."

He can think of all sorts of angles on the spellsilver stuff - off the top of his head, there's figuring out why there isn't a Mine Spellsilver that teleports it all in from a cubic distanceunit of earth and if any obstacle to that can be fixed, seeing if there's ways to anchor spells with stuff other than spellsilver but it requires much more precise engineering or something like that, rebroadcasting the spell from a central anchor over an area.  Yada yada too many ideas and he doesn't know which ones are at all possible or something that the locals wouldn't have already tried.  Might be wiser to stick with the innovations that he knows will work, if physics is at all locally similar on the chemistry level, which does need to be verified beyond just snowflakes.

"Anyways, if wizardry is end of day - then probably the most thought-intensive thing I can do early is ad-libbing a lecture on basic Experimentation and Engineering for my research haaaargroup.  My research group.  Just to check my understanding, I'm assuming I'll get more experienced domain-specific engineers later, but the research group I was already assigned is full of young minds who are supposed to pick up my general methods and apply those?"

Carissa should really have thought through in advance whether she wanted to lie about this. "I think probably the girls are meant to be whatever ratio of entertainment to research help to low-level magic access is best for your productivity. Once you have accomplished some concrete stuff it should be easier to consult anyone you think it's worth consulting."

'Entertainment.'  Ha.  Nice try, you blatant sperm harvesters.  "Going on the absolute garbage quality of inference in the books in the library, I do not anticipate any difficulty in describing how to reason more clearly than that.  And the math is self-evidently correct once you see it, so I can provide verifiable value quickly from the informal-social-capital noncopyrightable basic knowledge stores.  Hm, would be nice to have some official representative sign a thing formalizing the information's provision under conditions of nonclassifiability, though.  With an exception for not destroying the world."

"I told them that you said you wanted a hundred forty four children and they probably took that into account when figuring out what a nice work environment for you would probably look like. If that is not how dath ilani have children and instead you do some very enlightened thing that happens entirely over carrier pigeon correspondence, my apologies. You can request a representative of the Queen, if you want to hammer something out formally for the - quality of inference lessons - but I bet they'll want something a bit broader than 'not destroying the world', like 'not destroying the world or any of the other worlds and none of the gods firmly tell us to STOP THAT'."

Apparently they're having this discussion right now!  And it is of course entirely plausible that Keltham, new to this world, misinterpreted some things.  "I wanted 144 children in dath ilan under dath ilani circumstances, like none of my beneficial - elementary units of heritage - being unique to that world.  Here, I've got a lot of intelligence heritage-carrying-units that I'd expect wouldn't exist in this world at all, which you all desperately need, and should, I think, provide a noticeable small boost to your entire heritage optimization program, though I haven't actually run any math on that?  I should probably have more than 144 kids, with many different otherwise unrelated smart women, spread out all over the world.  But I do want any compensation for that.  And some understanding of the conditions under which my kids will grow up, I suppose.  That said, it is a very nice prospective work environment and I'm not objecting to that part, seems like it could be good for research too if the interpersonal stuff works out."

"The girls mostly don't have very much money, they'll be still in school, but I am sure the government would be happy to compensate you for efforts in Cheliax, and probably competent governments elsewhere would be similarly happy to compensate you there, though - in most places it would be complicated for reasons of a sort of social equilibrium that I am betting dath ilan does not have."

"Say more?"

"- so, uh, in most countries women cannot legally own property in their own right, it belongs to their father until they're married and their husband's after they are. And in those countries, getting an advantageous or at least a healthy and extant husband for their daughters is a family's highest priority with respect to her. They don't teach girls to read and they only teach them skills that husbands will want and one thing husbands care about a lot is that their wives have never been with another man, so women who aren't married go to great lengths to avoid the perception they've had sex. And once married, a man can leave his wife, or kill her, if she betrays him for someone else. And children born to unmarried parents don't have their parents' social standing. And so in those countries - and I can only think of five or six countries this doesn't describe - you're going to have a difficult time finding smart women who'll go for it, because they would have to get paid a lot of money to compensate them for the hit to all of their life options.

Cheliax isn't like this, because Cheliax is Asmodeus's and Asmodeus isn't stupid. But it's how most places work."

"Why do the women go along with that?  I - don't understand how this describes a stable multiplayer equilibrium.  I had that reaction to a lot of your world, actually."

"What are they going to do about it? If you refuse to get married, then maybe your parents grudgingly support a useless woman who is embarrassing them all, or maybe they kick you out and you become a prostitute, or starve. No one's going to teach you magic for free, and you can't take out a loan against your potential future commercial value because everyone knows you won't be allowed to have any. You can, you know, play the game, murder your husband eventually and be a widow with more options, unless you're in a place that kills widows, which some do! Where would you expect it to break down?"

It doesn't feel real.  "The women move to Cheliax, or one of the other five or six countries where they can get loans and be people."

"Well, we'd take them. But - most people don't have a way to get to other countries, it's so far, you'd need money for the passage, you wouldn't speak the language - and also their religions probably teach that Hell is horrible and Cheliax is full of Evildoers - which, it is, but there's nothing wrong with that -"