"There's a very obvious thing a dath ilani thinks immediately after hearing that.  Can you guess what it is?"

"...that it's worth it?"

"What's worth it depends on what you can afford.  Do you even have that many clerics who can cast spells from a high enough circle, to get your whole population that way?  It's not the first thing a dath ilani thinks, either.  Try again?"

"...that we should at least check?"

"Check what?  How?"

"Try a Restoration on a number of random farmers that we can afford and check if their intelligence goes up afterwards? If you tried it on five of them and it didn't do anything for any of them then it's probably not a big deal, at least."

"Why yes, that is indeed something that this advisory panel might tell the Chelish government to do, in order to help estimate the probable value of the alien visitor to their heritage-optimization program, and also, you know, check on general principles if there is anything that might be lowering your entire population's intelligence.  Since you figured that out on your own from being told the basics, I will not charge for that advice in that form; though there are some further refinements for sale if you would like your results to be more precise and more meaningful.  The other thing to keep in mind is that intelligence develops over time; even if Restoration immediately fixes nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants, it may not fix the way that intelligence already developed as a result of those nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants.  So the other thing a dath ilani thinks of immediately is to try giving some children a Restoration once every three months, and seeing if on average those children grow up with higher measured Intelligence than would be predicted from the measured Intelligence of their parents.  There are precise subtleties we think of, in the design of the investigation procedure," like having any control group at all, and any grasp of quantitative statistics, and the required number of experimental subjects to produce enough expected evidence between possible effect sizes, "though I haven't yet decided if those are for sale or free.  There are also ways we think of to start getting preliminary results faster, earlier, saving on time," like experiments on rats, followed by experiments on monkeys, who have shorter development times, and aren't protected by sapient rights the same way as chimpanzees or humans.  "But, again, I haven't decided if specifics like that are free, and they probably aren't."

"And then, if tests like that show an effect of routine Restoration on intelligence development, you know that the general population has any kind of significant problem that Restoration cures, and you can start trying to narrow down what the problem is and how to cure it without needing to spend precious cleric spells on Restorationing every member of the population."

"The larger attitude I want to teach you is that everything around you is an investigative tool.  There's a famous dath ilani fictional character who spent too much time fighting and now thinks in terms of how every object in a room could be used as a weapon.  This is that, but for figuring things out.  Your first thought was that, since Restoration cured people, maybe you could use it to solve your problem and cure everybody in the Chelish population.  Before solving problems comes figuring out problems, and the first step there is to open your eyes and look.  Everything around you is a tool for investigation, it is a potential way to poke other things and reveal facts about them.  Restoration isn't just a way of curing people of a set of problems, it's an investigation tool for seeing whether observable qualities of people are being affected by things that Restoration cures.  First, open your eyes and look; and ask how every resource you have and everything in the world around you can be an eye."

Ione Sala has never deliberately tried to learn anything more about Nethys, or any other gods who aren't Asmodeus - why run even a slightly increased chance of seeming heretical? - but even she knows that this is the most Nethys thing that has been said inside the borders of Cheliax since the change of administration.  She wonders if this was enough to catch Nethys's attention, and if Nethys is now looking at this very library and will try to - well, no, Nethys can't make Keltham a cleric, Keltham's already some other god's cleric.

But, let us return to this advisory board and its report to the Chelish government on the potential value of the alien visitor.  The board has recommended some experiments that might shed light on the general state of the entire Chelish gene pool which perhaps should have been done already - assuming they haven't been, Chelish Governance does seem to contain some smart people and Lawful beings - but if not, the alien visitor can sell some further refinements in those regards.  Anyways, leave that part aside.  How is the advisory board thinking about the basic question of whether it's especially useful to set up matches with an alien with 18 Intelligence?  Is it more useful than a match with an 18-Intelligence local?  Why or why not?  What are the different theories there, what is there to say for and against those theories?

It depends on which produces smarter children and grandchildren. Presumably the government already has some sense of how valuable it is to them to have people of a given intelligence, so if you know which match produces smarter children and grandchildren, and by how much, you know how valuable it is.

You could maybe, Tonia ventures, compare marriages between Chelish INT-18 people to a marriage to, say, a Tian INT-18 person, and if marrying out produces smarter (or stupider) offspring, it ought to show up in that.

An interesting thought!  Especially since, if marriages like that already exist, you could go look at those marriages already, without needing to wait years to produce your advisory report.  But before you look at a result like that, you should try to come up with some prior idea of which ways reality could be that could produce which results.  What are the different things that might be true?  What different results would they produce for Chelish-Tian marriages?

Well, people hybridize with some other humanoid species by getting traits from both, and hybridize with some species by getting traits from just one, and hybridize with some by not turning out at all. So it might be true that hybridization across ethnicities is like that, where you get a mix, or you might get something that's not quite in between, like you get if you fuck a polymorphed air elemental, the kid isn't half air, they're just something else entirely. You'd be checking to see how people hybridize, more or less.

"I can tell you the result of that one, if a Chelish-Tian mating is a human one and the human matings work anything like they do in dath ilan.  Twenty-three package-pairs of heritable information, remember, with each child getting their two packages one from each parent package-pair, selected at random?  So most things in a human mating will be a mix, unless a trait is being determined all at once in a single package-pair location, the way that sex is determined by the sex package-pair.  Intelligence is not determined all in one spot, if it's determined here anything at all like it is in dath ilan.  There'll be bits of heritage all over the twenty-three package-pairs that affect it, positively, negatively, and subtly."

"Well, and now that I've told you that, is there still anything you could find out from observing Chelish-Tian matings?  What could you observe differently, where you're not already sure of what you might observe?  What could those possible observations say about the package-pairs and the heritable-information coding for Intelligence?  What could it be saying about what's going on inside of those package-pairs, in Cheliax, in Tian, and in your guesses extrapolated from distant Tian to the far more distant dath ilan?"

"...variance," says Meritxell. "If you mix two eighteens you probably get an eighteen, on average, but - but it's much more valuable to get a sixteen and a twenty than two eighteens, because the twenty can end up running the country - if Chelish people and Tian people have the same bits making them smarter, then they'll have the same variance mixed, but if they have different bits then they'll have higher variance."

"You have slightly impressed me.  Be justly proud of this."

She beams at him fiercely.

Oh, good.  After he said that, Keltham started to worry that some dath ilani flirting tropes wouldn't make it across the vast cultural gap, but at least that one seems to have landed.

"Now here's a harder question.  How valuable is higher variance in the intelligence of offspring, if the alien visitor has mostly different bits in his package-pairs that increase and decrease intelligence?  How much can the Chelish government gain from using that variance, how much should they be willing to pay?"

"Well, depends how valuable smart people are. But I think - I mean, one person with native-born INT 20 is itself something they'd pay a lot for, and the variance thing probably applies for a couple generations until it's all diluted..."

"Hm, yes, how much you're willing to pay for one Intelligence 20 offspring does depend on what use you can make of them, which in turn depends on how clever you are in thinking up potential uses.  This advisory panel of the greatest native experts in Cheliax on heritage optimization has been convened to make expert recommendations about heritage-optimization to the Chelish government, since that is what this advisory panel knows more about than anybody else in Cheliax, or Golarion for that matter.  This may now actually be true about you in real life, by the way.  Anyhow, the rest of Governance will decide for itself how valuable an Intelligence 20 person will be for purposes of fighting at the Worldwound and such.  What can this advisory panel say to Governance - or wildly guess with appropriate qualifiers - about the clever use of any Intelligence 20 children from the alien, for the purposes of heritage-optimization in particular?"

"- you probably shouldn't pair them off with their half-siblings, you get weird genetic defects that way, and there aren't any native twenties...that I've ever heard of -"

"And now I know you actually do have the package-pair system around here!  The pairs of packages carry duplicates of a lot of the same genetic information for constructing a person - that is, if a package is carrying some of the instructions for building, like, fingers, you've got the same information on both packages in the pair, usually.  If one of the package-pairs gets damaged, in that particular, the other element of the pair can often take over and make sure your fingers still get built.  If a brother and a sister mate, their offspring has a one-fourth probability of ending up with the same package twice, for each of the twenty-three pairs.  You are a lot more likely to end up with no information for building fingers that way.  In dath ilan, the corresponding equilibrium is that people usually aren't sexually attracted to other people they grew up with.  If people here weren't also built from package-pairs, they wouldn't get the same deleterious effects from mating with half-siblings."

"Anyways, yes, you shouldn't pair off my kids with each other in the first or second generations, unless you've already developed other magic or technology for telling who got which packages from me.  Still, what are they worth to the Chelish government?  Ignore the part for the moment about whether any of my kids are smarter than any other kids in this world - they may not be, for reasons I'll get into - that's a fighting-at-the-Worldwound issue anyways.  How would you guess the value of intelligence variance for the heritage-optimization program, or the value of having different bits of heritage that are increasing and lowering intelligence?"

They are pretty stumped by this. You could have smarter kids, but that's been said already. You can't directly try to use the best bits because they have no magic that refers to things on the level of bits.

It's not occurring to them that they could just... "Ah, what kind of - intelligence-training games, you don't have a word for them, that's not a good sign - what kind of complicated games do Chelish children play, if any, at all?"

People play Knights, which is a two player board game with pieces that move in different ways, and Spy, which is a group game where some children are spies and some are soldiers and they have to figure out who's sabotaging their operations, and it takes them a suggestive while to come up with a third, though someone eventually offers that there are spelling bees.

HOW DOES EVERYTHING MANAGE TO BE THIS BROKEN SIMULTANEOUSLY WOULDN'T THE KIDS THEMSELVES SPONTANEOUSLY INVENT BETTER GAMES THAN -