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some dath ilani are more Chaotic than others, but
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Keltham hopes he is not cursed to just remain a cleric.  Keltham also wants to be a wizard!

Well, Keltham can spend some additional time trying to learn that, but Keltham should talk to project management before he sets his day's schedule, and before then, he should eat lunch, having failed at breakfast.  What does the menu look like today in Cheliax?

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Stuffed pheasant, rolls, various kinds of fish in various kinds of sauces, fruit tart things.

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Fat, protein, carbs, cool.  Simple low-tech fare, but the novelty of it hasn't worn off.

Keltham fills up a plate and stops by Carissa's spot to inquire about Golarion's pre-existing people-who-just-had-sex etiquette, if any, w/r/t his eating lunch with Carissa the day after, vs. eating lunch at the more populous table.

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"It is that you should do what makes you happy."

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"I suspected you were going to say that, and I already predecided what I would do regardless of the object-level etiquette answer if that was your meta-answer, so I would be able to tell you that your etiquette answer definitely wouldn't influence me, but I still want to know what the etiquette is, if there is one."

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"Eating lunch with the girl you just slept with implies you are inclined to get attached one at a time - not monogamy, but, like, one developing-relationship gotten to a certain point before you pick up a new one - and eating lunch with all the other girls implies not-that, and there isn't etiquette about which one to imply and in this case there isn't even really the risk you'll mislead people since everyone knows you are an alien and nothing you do will have the normal implications."

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"Whether I can get attached to more than one girl at a time is an interesting question I guess I'll find out the answer to.  But I expect I can be attracted to more than one girl at a time."

Keltham goes to sit down by the other girls.  He's not quite sure what to say to Carissa, feels pressure to have clever and intelligent things to say to Carissa, and it's easier to be part of a larger conversation with people he's seen less immediately.

That this is a stereotypical dath ilan Boy Thing To Do doesn't change that Keltham is, in fact, a boy, and doesn't want to expend the mental overhead on defying his gendertrope doomfate right now.

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He's so bad at being Evil!!! This is going to be such an uphill battle!

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"Hi Keltham!" Meritxell says brightly. "Are there lessons today?"

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"Good question!  Probably!  What specifically the lessons are is something I'll know better after I talk project priorities with project management which I really need to go actually do.  Oh, by the way, point of curiosity, how much are you currently being paid, and then whatever the quantity is can you translate it into hours of unskilled labor?"

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Well shit. 

 

If anyone has an established answer to that they need to tell Meritxell immediately. "My contract's just for the week, I'm going to have to renegotiate it afterwards," she says. No one has told her. Aaaaargh. "It's for 300gold, which is...I think around four unskilled-labor-years?" And if she gets in trouble for that it can just be less on an ongoing basis. It being a lot less than that would be weird if Keltham knows anything about what wizards go for generally.

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"Your economy makes no sense.  None.  It does not make any sense at all.  All of the sense was surgically extracted from it by advanced medical technology."

"Or are you just getting, like, 'come down here for a very strange and possibly dangerous week and then we'll renegotiate' Exception Handling Money."

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Shoot, is it too low or too high. She has no idea what Keltham's calibrated off. "The latter? When they grabbed us I don't think anyone knew exactly what we were being hired to do besides, uh, hang around an alien our age who Asmodeus had said to be helpful to."

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"What does a regular wizard of - whichever circle you are - get paid?"

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"Like, a tenth of that, if they're spending most of their time on things that make money."

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0.4 years / week, week is 1/50 year or so... "So twenty times more than unskilled labor.  Okay, that's not too bad, that's a relatively well-paid person in dath ilan but not mad superboss money."

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(Very little labor remaining in dath ilan is labor that requires no prior skill, practice, or native talent.  But the fact that there are a few things like that which need to be bid into any market, and that everybody has that particular resource to offer, makes it a reasonable-sounding sort of thing to use for a unit of account; assuming that you are otherwise the sort of people who just refuse to accept downward price stickiness and will instead repeatedly scream at everyone to adjust their damn prices more often, instead of going for an inflationary unit of account that means a different thing each year and would require adjusting all the graphs.  Some Very Serious People think this was the wrong decision, but it's got a lot of civilizational inertia behind it.)

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Good, because it is true! Meritxell really sees the merits of saying true things to Keltham. "Wizards don't start making what I think you'd call 'mad superboss money' until fifth circle."

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"And that's 1/32 of wizards, who are 1% of the population... so that checks out, you are not having most of the wage income going to a small fraction of all the people."

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"One in thirty two wizards will eventually make fifth circle but fewer than that are fifth circle at any given moment, since it takes decades," says Meritxell. "It's like....one in sixty? One in a hundred? I think it's changing now in Cheliax since we have way more people training to be wizards than we did a generation ago but I don't remember the exact numbers offhand."

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"Somebody who's already eaten a bit want to try, like, introducing themselves and their life story?" says Keltham.  "Since I actually need to eat, having missed breakfast while distracted.  Uh, feel free not to if that's not a thing here."

Keltham does start eating though.

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The girls glance at each other. 

"I'll go," says Meritxell cheerfully. "I was born here in Ostenso; my father's a wizard and my mother is a cleric of Asmodeus. She picked him out because she wanted smart children. I have eight half-siblings. My elementary school was in the temple so I didn't actually leave it until I was ...ten? It was a big temple, though, endless courtyards and secret passages and so on, and it had an orphanage, so I had lots of peers, though I was smarter than them. I had more toys than them so I traded them toys for doing all my chores. When I was nine I tested into wizard school and was absurdly excited mostly because it was all the way down the big street. When I was twelve my mother decided all this was embarrassingly uncosmopolitan and so she took me on a trip around the country by boat and that is how I discovered I get very seasick, and declared I wasn't leaving Ostenso again until I'm a high-level wizard and can Teleport. A declaration that was about to be falsified, since I've enlisted, but now here I am instead of going to the Worldwound so maybe it'll come true, who knows."

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"Huh.  That sounds a lot more normal for a genius's childhood than I think I would've expected for Golarion.  Unusually smart mom who can afford childcare for lots of kids picks out smart dads, spends part of her life having eight kids, they all live in a huge group house with lots of secret passageways, one of those kids is even smarter and ends up getting hired by a weird important project.  That could basically be the early biography of any dath ilani who's as smart for that world as you are for this one.  Except for the part where you literally didn't leave the enormous temple, which I guess makes more sense if travel is more expensive and dangerous, and the children get centralized to a particular part of the city where they don't get attacked by mind-altering cornfields...?  How many horrible Golarion things are you leaving out from that story because you don't want to embark on very long explanations of them?  Not asking for a list, just a rough quantity."

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"...none on purpose for that reason, probably several because they didn't occur to me as horrible, such as, yes, the fact it's dangerous for children to wander around outside alone, or...I had more would-be siblings who died? Probably four or five things like that if I think about it."

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