Directly challenging Worldwound-fighting sounds like it would take weapons; weapons take trust.

Keltham is not very calibrated on how well they do at fighting epidemics, here, but if that's their second-worst problem...

"About how much would the government pay to avoid one epidemic from whichever is the worst class of epidemic, and how often does that happen?"

"And suppose that I ask somebody to come by tomorrow who's an expert on epidemics and current countermeasures, so I can quiz them.  I don't particularly expect this result, but suppose it turns out I can tell you something on the spot, that, combined with your other magical capabilities, completely wipes 'smallpox' or 'flu'.  What could I expect in return, and how would the project scale from there?"

"I expect we would pay fifty thousand gold pieces to avoid one epidemic, noting that delaying one in one city through very good precautions usually just means it hits there later because no one developed immunity through infection. I expect we would pay something like a million gold pieces that completely made a major cause of epidemics go away if that didn't just mean all the same people die but of other things through some mechanism. I don't know what higher-budget project items you'd want - more of Contessa Lrilatha's time? More students? More miscellaneous magic items? - but we could arrange any of them, if you achieved that."

Keltham nods; that's grim-but-true.  If plagues reduce population density to make future plagues less likely, or if people starve until their immune systems weaken and after a plague the survivors get more food per capita, those are both equilibria that will get restored around the variation of particular causes.  "I'll think more toward generalizable measures that will shift long-term equilibria of epidemic levels, rather than on specifics of one epidemic, then; if your impression is that naively eliminating one particular source of epidemic would say cause urban density or food per person to increase or decrease until the remaining epidemics became more virulent."

"I'll obviously also want a contract before solving particular things, and it'd be nice if there was some generalizing way to assess that value, rather than my constantly interrupting myself to negotiate and sign new contracts.  That's part of why it would have been useful to have a schedule of how much value the government assigns to things; we could then negotiate general percentages covering what I and other project members would capture of the value we create."

"We will try to come up with such a schedule for you, and a proposed general contract along the same lines as the one you negotiated for general intellectual concepts with Contessa Lrilatha. If you would like I can lay out approximately the terms we'd expect that to have, though I don't have authorization to make commitments on that scale on the Crown's behalf." 

"Understood.  Go ahead, then."

Cheliax expects to request most of the gains, maybe 80% or 90%, of Keltham's inventions while he is repaying them for the loan of this villa and a full-time research staff and a full-time security staff; the loan will accumulate interest at the same rates any devil in Hell gets if they get a loan in Hell, usually humans have to pay higher interest rates than that but that's because, frankly, lots of humans will run away and not pay, and they both trust and can verify Keltham's assurances on that front. Cheliax expects to request much less of the gains, perhaps half, once the loans are repaid. A complication they are keeping in mind is that, uh, Cheliax doesn't have a systematic way of collecting benefits that don't literally directly accrue to the state in the form of higher tax revenues from various dukes, and it sounds like Keltham's society would have such a method. 

Keltham's reportedly distracted again in equity negotiations! That's great, because Carissa has decided the entire harem needs to read a bunch of Taldane romance novels so that if they can't stop themselves from thinking in romance novels they'll at least be whatever kind the King in Taldor has commissioned to develop appropriate attributes in Taldane young women. 

.... it turns out romance novels in Taldor are not commissioned by an Imperial office at all, which is itself the kind of useful thing you only learn by pretending to be Taldor.

"The women depicted here," Ione says after flipping through and rapidly skimming some of the books, "would sit around waiting for Keltham to pursue them, because they are so attractive they can't help rich nobles falling for them even if they pretend they don't want it.  I think what we've learned today is that when you don't have an Imperial office commissioning romance novels, they're written to appeal to the most self-indulgent aspects of the reader, because nobody's making the authors do anything else."

"The women depicted here," Paxti says, "are passive, weak, stupid, lifeless, ambitionless trophies.  Somebody remind me why we haven't already conquered Taldor in real life."

"I've known Keltham for a day and a half and I can already guess these women are not his type," says Peranza.

"Your parents grew up reading stories like these, in our timeline," Carissa says tiredly. "You grew up after Hell took Cheliax to straighten us out and you got to read normal modern romance novels in which girls win the boy. Though none of the ones in which the girl wins the boy by cleverly getting all her romantic rivals' eyes gouged out, or in which the girl wins the boy by leaving him under the impression she's an important noble considering executing him unless he wins her over, and not The Damnation of Sir Nicholau. ...actually I don't know what romance tropes the slightly gentler Cheliax we're going for has. ...maybe there's a version of The Damnation of Sir Nicholau where she's trying to teach him to enjoy himself, instead of having perfunctory sex he doesn't really like, and he goes to Hell once he realizes that he wants things for himself instead of only wanting whatever's best for other people, and in every disguise she's happy and fine because she, unlike him, has been raised competent to understand what she wants and to go get it."

"Wouldn't work as a story," Ione responds immediately.  "If she's happy and fine then there's not enough conflict from the standpoint of the viewpoint character.  She needs to be struggling with her own need for violent sex, say, at the same time as she's trying to get him to want things for himself.  Her character needs to develop to where she's competent to understand what she wants, and the end of the novel should show her successfully going after it and getting it."

"Which, again, was basically the plotline of Perverting Adan -"

"It's the plotline of any young adult novel with a female protagonist, who will, at some point, have to learn the darkness of her own desires," Ione snaps at Paxti.  "As you'd know if you read more than one book a year -"

"We can work with this, though," Paxti says.  "Give me and Ione twenty minutes, and we'll come up with new plots for everyone's favorite romance books, with storylines that fit the new Cheliax."

"I'll slit her throat before we get two minutes in," says Ione.  Ione also sees a much bigger problem with that idea, but she's curious whether Sevar will spot it on her own.

Carissa is thinking that possibly she should ever have read a romance novel. "Sounds like keeping track of a lot of lies. I'd rather have one or two good ones that are very appropriate for what we're trying to accomplish."

Ione nods.  It's going to be interesting to see whether, or rather, how fast, Sevar gets executed for heresy once she gets into the habit of noticing all the constant lies.

"Actually, if I can get an authorized lie on this, none of us much like reading fiction at all," Ione says.  "Cheliax has been devoting too many resources to the Worldwound, and the books written before Hell took over are trash.  If we talk about any fiction we've read, in front of Keltham, he's going to ask to see it.  Remixing fiction isn't like redoing a spellbook with Glimpse of Truth renamed to Glimpse of Beyond.  Maybe we can rush some better books from Absalom, and read one apiece before Keltham gets around to asking about that, so that we can have ever read a novel.  But if he asks before then, you tried reading novels from old Cheliax and quickly gave up."

"- yeah, all right. In that case let's give this up as a useful reminder of how grateful we are to live in Cheliax and get back to the histories."

They're not going to have all that much time for it.  Keltham may not be very trained to handle potential lies and gaslighting, but he was planning to be a Mad Investor, and hails from a vastly more financially sophisticated Civilization.  He's not going to negotiate and compromise with Marta, and then sit down in front of an actual authorized negotiator who takes their final compromise as Keltham's starting point and negotiates a new set of moves in Cheliax's favor.

This wouldn't usually happen in dath ilan - firstly because dath ilan would just seat both real negotiators directly, and second because the principles behind bargaining positions are better understood, such that they'd try to have bargaining outcomes be invariant to the order in which considerations are introduced.  But dath ilan does have the concept of hiding an unusually high willingness-to-pay so that sellers can't price-discriminate against you, and sending in a 'negotiator' who doesn't actually have the power to make commitments is a standard known-failure-mode-to-avoid.

Keltham will, of course say all this to Marta directly; none of that meta-information has any obvious rationale for keeping it secret.

After that, he'll ask Marta more detailed questions about terms and conditions on Cheliax's starting offer, and more questions about the current size of Cheliax's economy, and what kind of measurement difficulties they expect to run into, and Governance's likely willingness-to-pay for various goods.  But he won't negotiate; except insofar as offering his own starting remark that the offered percentages of generated value seem acceptable, if there's no gotchas in how profits or expenses are measured, and sufficient for quick agreement from there; but he wants to understand the terms and conditions before he says for sure that the starting offer is generous.

At some point, Keltham thinks, he needs to give Cheliax a lecture on fairly dividing gains from trade anyways.  If he can run through it quickly, he might as well do it today and see if that saves some time on negotiating.  If they know that dath ilani approach fairness in a very structured way, maybe he can just tap himself with his own Truthspell and the Fair Division of Gains from Trade spell, say what the fair price would be, and have them accept that.

Keltham wraps up with Marta - having hardly exhausted his unending sequence of Additional Questions, of course, but that's just what life is like for your first few weeks in another dimension - and heads over to the library.

If Keltham is teaching again, Broom should be there to make sure Keltham does not teach anything which is obviously going to destroy the world.

Visibly or invisibly?  Broom is still within Keltham's one-day deadline for replying to Keltham's original terms.  Do the great wizards know if Keltham will be able to detect Broom again today?  Does Cheliax want Broom to be visible regardless?  Broom goes to ask a great wizard about this.

They have Keltham's spells and he doesn't have Invisibility Purge but it seems likely that's in anticipation of Cheliax not trying to sneak any invisibility past him. They don't bother explaining that to Broom, obviously, but they tell him to be visible. If he needs to stab someone he can go invisible for that to make him harder to stop.

Broom catches up to Keltham before he reaches the library.  He doesn't say anything, as he falls into step behind Keltham; the less he says, the less chances there are for him to fail.

Why is Keltham's life like this?  He hopes the research harem is okay with brief explanations because he sure doesn't know what exactly is classified.

Keltham walks into the library with a very short, armed person walking behind him.  "Hi," Keltham says.  "This is Broom."

SHIT did he learn about slavery and now he's upset about it???

"Hello, Broom," says Carissa, sounding bored. 

"Broom will be listening in on my lectures from now on.  Further questions should be directed to Broom, because I don't even know what anyone is supposed to think about this."

Well he doesn't sound as mad as he'll be when he finds out about slavery????

No one says anything.

He would have questions in their shoes.  "Have you, like... not noticed that you are confused about this."

"I'm confused!" says Meritxell. "But you just said not to ask you questions and, uh, Broom hasn't said he'll take questions. And I assume Projects also isn't taking questions about this or they'd have told us about it."

"Right.  Sorry.  Not your fault.  It's just -"

"Never mind.  For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run.  Before things go much... further."  Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now.  It's probably just a silly worry.  But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest.  It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean.  Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling.  You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent.  It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them.  Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering.  Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what.  He really does want them to write down an honest answer, though, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.

The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"