"Same tech that I'd use to talk to somebody on the other side of the planet.  Or get the statistics from a million runs of a game like the one we just played, without anybody playing it.  Tools to make tools to make tools, hidden orders beneath hidden orders beneath hidden orders, if it was simple you'd have figured out more of it by now on your own.  The tech ladder goes up.  You go look for bits and pieces of reality that can interact with each other from far away, you look for bits and pieces that you can arrange and rearrange into incredibly complicated dynamic patterns using advanced tools, and you take your books and turn them into patterns like that and let them interact with other people from far away.  If it wasn't for magic maybe being able to boost things in ways we couldn't do in dath ilan, I'd say that there was little chance we'd live to see it ourselves - not as mortals, maybe from the afterlife.  With magic, anything is possible so far as I know; you, of course, may know better."

"We'll need headbands," says Merixtell, very dryly.

Keltham is not really the intended audience of that statement. 

Also Meritxell must be really convinced it's worth getting in trouble for it, because there aren't a lot of continuations of the conversation that don't involve nailing down how much they're supposedly all being paid.

Carissa respects the initiative, honestly.

"Legit.  I - should maybe prioritize learning about those, more than I've been prioritizing that, previously, within my incredibly rapidly lengthening long list of priorities.  How much social credit do I need with Chelish Governance to start getting headbands for everyone, for that matter?  What does it take to impress them?  A direct price list for what it takes to rent stuff by the day would come in handy.  For that matter, I've got fourth-circle cleric spells I can potentially sell; resorting to that seems like it would reflect a process inefficiency, but it's sometimes okay to do inefficient things temporarily."

"I think it's plausible today was enough they'll loan you all the cheapest kind of headbands, which do two points; the expensive kind is four times that and does four points, and the most expensive time is four times that again and does six. I suspect the Chelish government does not have twenty, or even three, of the most expensive kind, they'd be requisitioning from adventurers, and that's much more expensive than the materials price."

"I suppose if that wasn't true, Golarion would look different from how it does... there's one metal, spellsilver, that's the limiting resource?  I would have memorized a lot more about the properties of every known kind of elemental metal and how to mine them all most efficiently, if I'd known this was how my life would go.  It's unfortunately exactly the sort of knowledge most people, such as me, are too lazy to memorize if you have access to the universal repository.  But with any luck, climbing the tech ladder on generating heat and turning heat into motion will suffice for moving and sifting greater quantities of any kind of ore."

"Spellsilver and enchanter time but the sale price is sixty percent just the price of the raw materials and if that were cheaper, in the long run more wizards would train into enchanting wondrous items."

"And with more headbands, even basic headbands, we get more wizards who can train to make more expensive headbands.  When things go well, that's why they go well, in economies."

"We should probably break soon for the day, after which I should take a brain cooldown rest, and then try studying basic wizard magic, I think?  Though before then I did have a couple of things left to say about the optimization of hereditary information, and some of those points are cautionary and shouldn't be left off."

What would you need to caution people about that's a fraction as bad as accidentally making your whole population stupider because only smart people can learn Alter Self.

They're starting to trust Keltham to know where he's going, though. They listen.

"I'll start with a probing sort of question, though if everyone's too tired, I can step back from probing questions.  On the other hand, if only some of you are too tired, that part can continue.  I'll see if I get sensible answers, I guess.  Anyhow!  Optimizing your whole population gene pool is obviously not something you'd want to make mistakes with.  How could you gain more knowledge about what you were doing, in advance of doing anything risky?"

"...do it with part of your population? One duchy, not the whole country?"

"Better than doing it with the whole country, possibly.  But heritage optimization takes time.  Every time you try something and see what happens, you have to wait one human generation to see what happens, and if you need two generations, well, that adds up very quickly.  Gonna keep the whole country waiting while you play around in that one duchy?  Doing nothing also has risks."

"Speed of discovery matters.  It's not enough to get there eventually.  How can you figure out what the ass you're doing with heritage optimization without spending twenty years every time you want to try something?  How can you learn about the sort of mistakes that only show up three generations later, in less than sixty years?"

"...do it with mice?"

"...do it in a time-dilated demiplane?"

"...ask Asmodeus?"

"Yeah, you got some resources we don't got in dath ilan.  I assume that time-dilated demiplanes are very expensive, but I nonetheless can't help but ask how much we have to prove ourselves before we get to tuck ourselves into one of those and do the rest of this faster?"

"The nearest known permanent one is in Nex, on another continent, and I don't think it's listed for rent, though maybe they have a price. It wouldn't be very surprising if we had a secret one for emergencies, but it's probably tiny, if so, they're cheaper if they're tiny, and the Queen has a necklace of adaptation so she wouldn't need it to have air, if there's one just for her and Lrilatha."

"Well, not step one then.  But you really might end up with some very nice things in a very short time, if you can scale the technology and magic to where you can get a decent-sized research team into a time-dilated demiplane."

"But I digress.  In dath ilan, sure, you could use mice.  But why limit your ambitions to just playing around with mice?  Humans aren't the only sort of biological organisms with useful heritages."

This puzzles them. "...orcs have a faster generation time than humans and are more like us than mice?" someone offers.

"Good case for starting with an orc duchy if there's one around here, but remember that I've been telling you the secrets of life itself, in general.  Do you use life for anything around here?"

"Corn?" says Tonia. "It grows every year and we do select it a lot, for not getting weevils and having big ears."

"Yep.  Corn's got two packages per package-tuple the same as humans, if I recall, though not twenty-three package tuples - I don't recall the exact number.  Wheat - if you've got that here, which I expect you do because the word translated - if it's the same wheat I know, at least - has six packages per package-tuple.  If you've been selecting plants at all, and the people who've been selecting them have already made any effort to try things systematically and observe results, there's a whole body of knowledge there that you might be able to apply to heritage optimization in general.  And if they haven't been trying things systematically and observing results, then that's the art you're here to learn; and whatever wonderful theories and strategies you come up with, why, maybe you could try them faster and cheaper on a field of corn than on a duchy."

"They're systematic," Tonia says. "Probably not the way people are in dath ilan but they know what kinds do well with what weather and how they all hybridize and they track yield per acre and they trade tips, and particularly good strains."

"Heh, that's an example of the good-news bad-news duality right there.  It's no doubt been good for Cheliax that they already know that much, but bad news that they'll have already tried a lot of obvious stuff, which makes it harder for us to stroll in and double corn yields on our first try.  Are there specialists who make particularly good strains, or do people just trade them as they randomly crop up?"

"I don't ...think there's a way to make them besides planting historically good strains and seeing how they do. Not that I heard of anyway."

"Well, if they're already doing the obvious, I think the steps beyond that are knowledge-for-sale not universal-basics.  Still, should probably get a book on that."

"But if we got that book, and after reading it, the notion of the tiny spirals and the package-tuples gave you some idea that you thought people probably hadn't tried yet - well.  What sort of precautions should you take, when trying to create new strains of corn using a clever new method nobody's tried before?  Because in real life, on really novel problems, there's no teacher telling you which precautions you need to take, or correcting you if you miss one."

"....pray for guidance? I know that's not what you're going for but it's actually - the front-line intervention for unexpected consequences, really -"

"Maybe Asmodeus is sick of saving us from mistakes we could catch ourselves."

"Starting small, like with one duchy except maybe even smaller, one cornfield."

"Checking the corn for poison, to make sure you didn't make it worse somehow."