Horse sounds like an animal and those aren't cheap, yeah.

So basic alternatives to walking, without combustion engines.  Bicycles... take relatively smooth surfaces to bike on.  "Are there roads between towns?"

"...no?"

"There's a road from Westcrown to Egorian and it's new and cost the Crown - I have no idea how much money but only the Crown could've done it," says Meritxell. "Most places you travel by river or you mostly don't travel."

So the key step on the tech tree is probably cheaper roads, then, to enable more professional specialization and trade between towns...

Keltham wishes he'd read more novels about people going to other dimensions and rebuilding Civilization from scratch, he's read like two and neither author recursed into roadbuilding.

Swallow.  "Saturated on road tech research, or not really trying it?"  Nom.

"I don't know of any road tech research projects though probably the people who built the one from Westcrown to Egorian would've gotten very rich if they figured out some better way to do it."

"You spent practically your whole life in a temple and then a wizard academy," Ione says, slightly scathingly.  "You wouldn't know if there was a road tech research project any more than I would.  How would any of us know?"

Meritxell, watch yourself, we're not supposed to know too much.

Meritxell DOES know everything though. She smiles at Ione. "Fair enough."

Something about that interaction that just happened would never have happened in dath ilan and Keltham is having difficulty putting a finger on what it is exactly.

Ione Sala has a slight nervous feeling like she just muffed something.  Needs to cover, distract.  "Well, I might as well go next," she says.  "I was born in a middling city at the junction of two minor rivers.  My parents were a couple of low-level city bureaucrats.  Intelligent enough not to be farmers, but, not really a lot smarter than that."  Incompetent, failed, filled with searing resentment at the world for it.  "I was noticeably a lot smarter than they were, so they," hated me and did what they could to make my life more miserable without that affecting how much they could sell me for, "didn't know what to do with me, really, and wizard-tracked me," sold me like the farm animal I was, "as soon as it became clear that I was going to be a bookish wizard type.  My life is just that city, then Ostenso academy.   I also would've expected to see the larger world for the first time when I went to the Worldwound, not that I'm complaining."

"I grew up on a farm where the nearest village was a couple hours of walking away and the nearest city much farther than that, far enough no one had been," Tonia says. "When I was seven the village got a priest and the priest said everyone had to come into the temple for school, so I went, and I hadn't seen reading or writing before but I picked them up right away, and after a couple of months I was studying with the older kids, and after a year he said I should go into the city where I could get a proper education, and the church would house me and feed me while I did, so the next time he reported back to a big city he took me with him, and I came here, and did a bunch of tests and then got put in wizard classes."

Keltham is getting this weird feeling like he may, at some future point, predictably first-order update towards wishing he'd started industrializing Golarion slightly sooner, even if it was just by a day, or an hour.

Keltham isn't a perfect Bayesian, but he's a passable one.  By dath ilani standards.

He finishes his last two bites of food quickly and says, "So can somebody direct me to, like, office of project management?"

None of the girls are sure where that is!

"When I talked to them they were working out of the temple but that was really temporary."

"Carissa must've talked to them this morning, she said she asked about headbands," says Meritxell.

Rise.  Move to Carissa location.  "Should probably go talk to project management now.  Where to?"

"One of the parlors, I can walk you there. How was lunch."

"Tasty enough and filled with slightly disturbing accounts of houses.  Houses which, if this is considered a rich person's fancy incredibly impressive house, I should probably try to avoid imagining in any concrete detail."

Well, he should be avoiding imagining it, but in fact he is not.  Keltham is imagining people, otherwise specialized in farming, pulling down entire trees and then gluing them together - it's probably some form of chemical glue, not fasteners, metal is expensive here - until the result looks like it has walls and mostly keeps out the wind.

Oh, good, what a safe topic that doesn't require any lying about. "Maybe someday soon they'll have nicer houses." Left down this hallway and down these stairs.

"As near as I can currently guess, this is going to require figuring out how to build cheaper roads, onto which one can put unpowered small machines that will let housebuilders quickly get back and forth from medium cities to small towns, in order to build nicer houses, without their specialized labor being very expensive because of travel costs, which, I thought to myself, maybe I should go talk to somebody about all that."

"Sounds great." She finds him the sitting room. 

"Keltham," says a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun who is looking through the report on who Keltham's god might be.

"So my parents told me.  Yourself?"

"Marta. How can I help you."

"I'd like to talk project resources and Chelish Governance's priorities.  Before then, do you mind if I ask what's the local larger organizational structure that embeds this project, and your place in it?"

"Yes. My job is to track project spending, track project revenue once it has any, solicit project revenue estimates, approve briefing on the project for new people it becomes necessary to involve, and authorize acquisitions. I report to Maillol, who is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and the site director. Maillol reports to his superiors in the church, and ultimately to the High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, and to Her Imperial Majesty's staff including Contessa Lrilatha, who you've met."

"Among my top questions is to discuss what Governance wants, in what order, where any and all particulars may be rapidly revised in the face of particular avenues proving more or less tractable.  Is Governance's value function over outcomes there sufficiently understandable to you that you're confident of your own ability to predict it with only rare referrals upward, or should I be moving upward in the management tree to have that conversation?"

Governance is reasonably liable to change its mind a bunch in the next few weeks but probably the easiest way to give the Crown and Church more flexibility is to have as low-importance a person as possible give an explanation now which it'll then be possible for her superiors to override later if they change their minds. "That depends a little on your questions but Governance's priorities have been communicated to me and I can do my best to convey them."

"I'll... try asking my questions, but if you don't correctly predict Management Above's answer to them, the result would be incorrectly prioritized outcomes that are potentially expensive for Governance relative to Governance's optimally obtainable outcomes, if there's anyone who can predict answers better... I'm sorry, I'm probably saying things that don't make sense for Golarion somehow."

Though - even if they don't have the dath ilani idiom of lower deciders registering their predictions of upper deciders' predictions, until you finally get to whoever in Management or whoever in the judicial courts or wherever is supposedly the gold standard for that issue - 'Don't have junior people decide macro project priorities, refer them to the top manager specialized on that project or in those priorities' is a notion that Keltham would've thought projected down to the simpler case.

Keltham is also noticing that if you try to do sensible Project Management while speaking in Taldane, this is even harder than speaking other sensible thoughts in Taldane.  Should he ask Marta if she can Comprehend Languages?  No, let's try pushing through for now.

"Before I go on, around how much of what I've already discussed with project members has been recounted to you by project members?  Or by Security or other observers?"