"We have detailed notes on your presentation yesterday to your researchers. Some of your researchers also individually came to Projects with questions or predictions based on class conversation and also mealtime conversations; all of them are expected to do that at least by the end of the week when we'll renegotiate their salaries, but not all of them have done it yet, so you shouldn't assume we know everything you said in public to any of them."

"So as to be clear on how much of yesterday's presentation got successfully preserved, do you mean you've got imperfect but cross-referenced notes from students afterwards, or was there an invisible wizard writing everything down verbatim as fast as I said it?"

"A transcription spell, rather than an invisible wizard, was employed, but we believe the notes to be complete. You may look at them and issue corrections if you'd like." 

"I'd like to review my improvised extemporaneous lectures in case I made errors or omissions that stand out as needing correction, yeah.  Thanks to whichever person for their hopefully routine competence in having set that up."

"Governance then should now have a specific, rather than abstract or secondhand, notion of what I know and what that knowledge can do.  It's built on a base level of trained skills of thinking, that work together effectively because of overlapping coherence and direction inspired by explicit mathematical structure, which were applied by my Civilization of a billion wealthier people of much higher average Intelligence to systematically decode and exploit reality to a far greater distance than Golarion appears to have traversed, leaving also incomplete traces in my personal memory of specific facts, techniques, and methodologies that I encountered in systematic or unsystematic passing."

"I know why snowflakes have sixfold symmetry.  I can turn mechanical motion into cold without a Snowball spell, but I don't know yet how much motion for how much cold.  I knew how to build a faster kind of unpowered sailing ship but it sounded like you have those already.  I know how to make an unpowered mechanical device that will let people move between cities faster than a person can run, but only if there are roads between those cities.  I know how I'd go about figuring out how to make cheaper roads, but I don't know how long that research will take or how good the end results would be.  The books in the library here are written in ways that reflect patterns of thinking that I know are invalid, and I remember some things about how to train a person as intelligent as I am so that they'll think effectively.  I know the foundational math that structured the kinds of thinking that I learned.  There is an attractor, an overlap, a center in everything, whose structure is that math, and by far the most important question is whether Golarion can be started down the path leading into that attractor and learn for itself what Civilization learned, but there remains the question of what Governance wants to see first for scaling up investment in this."

"Many of those things are of interest to us but what we currently predict will be most immediately valuable is the habits of thought for intelligent people that make them competent to discover all the rest. For any given solution, there are often going to be a lot of Golarion-specific reasons why it's not easy to implement, and our current prediction is that little - not none - of dath Ilan's direct technologies will easily translate. But if we understand the basics of how the gods reason, and how human-level intelligences can use the reasoning patterns of the gods, then we can overcome any given complication that is due to dragons or Charybdis or the fae or whatever."

Keltham doesn't know enough to be impressed by the sensibility of a crown-boosted Abrogail Thrune because Keltham has no reference point for the usual sensibility levels of pseudo-medieval governments.

"I suspect you underestimate how much would translate if we had the books in front of us, but we don't, and that means non-Keltham people need to know how to fill in the gaps regardless."

"Such techniques are meant to be used, however.  They are best taught as they are applied, not as pure abstractions.  In Civilization, children are not spoiled for a number of elementary physical truths and inventions so that they can learn underlying mental forms in the course of inventing them.  This regime is optimized for the final quality of the resulting adults, however, not for speed in rapidly retraining adults to the same techniques.  The point is, we will, at some point, need a starting application."

"I haven't hurried my attempts to ask for a starting project, because it would be exhausting to produce an exhaustive list of everything I might possibly be able to do, and so far it has seemed like it makes more sense to keep asking questions about local conditions until I orient, so I can understand myself which of your largest problems I can probably solve quickly.  It will still help if I have -"

"Uh -"

"Your language doesn't have a word for the thing I want, which is not an encouraging sign.  Does Cheliax have a central list of how much monetary value Governance puts on everything it usually pursues?  Like, amount of gold it's worth to cure an otherwise fatal disease in a one-year-old infant, or the amount it's worth to produce one more second-circle wizard?"

"No. We could try to produce a partial one for you."

"Do you have a different solution for why your government... is, like, capable of coherently wanting or planning anything, given that it's made up of more than one person?  For not having one person decide that it's not worth 10,000 gold to produce three wizards and somebody else deciding that it's worth 15,000 gold to produce one of them?"

"The operation of wizarding schools is delegated to different people who can make whatever tradeoffs strike them as correct and then the ones who get good results for the resources the Crown has offered them get promoted. Budgets for wizarding schools are set off what recent successful people spent."

Is that actually as horrifyingly ad-hoc as it sounds for an entire-ass government.

"I would find a partial list useful, of things Governance has previously spent money on, how much money for what results, in a way that struck upper Governance as being just barely good ideas, but good ideas nonetheless.  Where the 'just barely' qualifier tells me that the outcome was worth around that much money and not at least that much money."

"I would also suggest that Governance at some point take the time to reflect on its own operations and figure out how much it relatively wants different things..."  Keltham reflects on the techniques he got taught as a kid for carefully extracting that info, checking if it made sense, checking if anything got left out, "where standard techniques for doing that correctly and not screwing it up, are, again, something I can try to teach.  It's really not just about better forging techniques.  Civilization also knew how to, for example, manage very large projects effectively... assuming all the managers are slightly smarter than I am, so, yes, it may require adaptation, but still."

"But I've got no idea how much something like that is worth to you, or what kind of increased project resources I could get after accomplishing that, versus inventing a more visibly successful forge process that uses 30% less fuel," and neither, apparently, does Governance itself have any collective idea what it's worth to Governance.  "I realize I may sound like I'm flailing here, but right now I'm very much trying to orient at all, to what Management wants from me and how much it's willing to pay to get it."

"I'd be happy to get you a list of projects that were just barely worth it and amounts we'd be willing to pay for different kinds of progress. Our current anticipation is that this will be things most Chelish people cannot learn, so we will benefit more from techniques that some people who have learned them can figure out how to adapt for other people who cannot."

"Yeah, the Intelligence problem is probably the severest problem you have, if not the most quickly solvable one.  I don't suppose you'd have any idea what effective price Governance puts on raising one random citizen's Intelligence from 10 to 11, or 14 to 15?"

"Well, as an upper bound, headbands of +2 Intelligence cost 4000 gold, so we're not willing to pay 2000 gold for it in the average case."

"Who's the least useful person who automatically gets assigned an intelligence headband as a matter of routine?"

"Wizards promoted into command of a unit of more than 100 soldiers, typically at fourth circle, if they haven't purchased their own years before that which they typically do."

"That's very helpful, thank you.  At what earliest point do we start looking visibly as useful collectively as a wizard in command of 100 soldiers?"

"You are already estimated to be more useful than that, and more resources than that are already ongoingly expended on this project; our plan is to deliver you headbands even if we do not upgrade our estimate of the usefulness of the project, but it will take a few weeks because of added security measures."

"Ah, okay, that makes more sense compared to what I expected an intelligence headband cost and what I expected this villa cost.  Security measures?"

"Magic items can be cursed. Usually this is not a major concern in the headband trade, because a trained wizard with specific experience in detecting enchantment and mental manipulation will notice; if we're giving them to a bunch of young students with no such training we had better be very sure."

Keltham almost asks why checking is harder than just giving them to a trained wizard to put on, but stops himself; even he can think of unlimitedly many ways to get around that test.  "Are you worried about old cursed items accidentally getting into the system, or specific adversaries targeting this project and with access to our supply network?"

"Specific adversaries targeting Cheliax's magic item supply chain, though it'd be surprising if they'd managed already to target the project specifically. - less surprising given how much divine intervention this project has already attracted, I suppose. Other countries have in the past tried slipping cursed magic items into our military supply chain for purposes of espionage or sabotage. What we're doing over the next two weeks is having the headbands made from scratch by trusted people, and observed during the manufacture process and while they're brought here so they can't be swapped out for others, and then we'll do some tests on site as well; then you can have them."

He should ask Carissa about her own reasoning, before asking project management about the safety of Carissa's bypassing the system, Keltham thinks; it is not clear that everyone's organizational-internal incentives are perfectly aligned.  But he should ask Carissa about it, soon.

...actually, wouldn't another obvious reason to take a few weeks to carefully manufacture headbands, be if they wanted to custom-curse his headband?  Or everyone's, for that matter?  Hm.  Also a thing to inquire about, but subtly.  His next question was one that did occur to him immediately, but was at first suppressed as lower-priority, so his asking it for this other reason shouldn't be much likelihood-ratio to them.

"Maybe it's the wrong use of your time to ask, but if it can be said briefly, what are the consequences if an adversary manages to infiltrate one headband?"

"Likely ones: they are able to eavesdrop. That is the obvious multi-purpose kind of infiltration adversaries frequently attempt. Also likely: they're able to use it to track the wearer's location or to tell what spells the wearer has gotten. Less likely, more concerning ones: they're able to interfere with the fundamental function of the headband, enhancing intelligence, by making some thoughts more salient or easier to apply full intelligence to, and others less so. They're able to detect at some low granularity the wants, priorities and fears of the wearer."

Aw, crap.  Though, plus side, they would be less likely to tell him that, if they were planning to curse his headband on purpose, but still.

It's... plausible that, if Carissa can detect cursed headbands well enough not to fear them, Keltham can also detect them via sheer 'having any mental skills that even use Owl's Wisdom'; but specific training always counts for an awful lot.  And of course, Keltham only has their word that an adequate counter-training even exists.

Well, he'll figure that later.  "Back to primary topic.  What would you say if I asked you to tell me about Cheliax's most important problems, independently of whether you thought I could solve them?"

"The Worldwound is the most urgent problem. We are allocating something like fifteen percent of our resources to containing it and it is not getting worse but it is not getting better either. After that...periodic epidemics of cholera, smallpox, polio, plague, and flu, ongoing deaths from tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrheal diseases, droughts, inadequate nutrition, the threat of war, risks from random powerful wizards doing very stupid things."