Carissa is aware that Ferrar Maillol, if he's noticed that she likes him quite a lot, would think this contemptible, but she does. He has such good Bluff of a very different flavor from everyone else she interacts with regularly. And he was at the Worldwound like a sensible person, not in Egorian which she increasingly suspects is poisonous to sense.

"Good to see we're being frank here.  I admit, I'd been wondering if there was a reason the actual site management was being hidden from me."

"First couple of days, I was more or less hiding from you, yes.  There was a vast amount of chaos to order, after this project had to be established completely from scratch at Asmodeus's will with no existing command hierarchy responsible for originating it.  We had several different - factions in Governance, I suppose you could term them - trying to grab control of what they saw as a potential source of future influence and funding.  It took direct intervention from both the Queen and the Grand High Priestess to make that even mostly not happen.  I wasn't just busy, I was entirely unsure of what sort of person you were and what would happen if you did storm into my office, ask strange questions, develop some very alien picture of what was going on, and start trying to make your own moves or demands inside a frankly volatile situation."

"Then, of course, Nidal attacked, and three-quarters of the government went off to fight."

"I'm still not caught up on transcripts and reports and I'm not sure I ever will be, at this rate.  But it sounds like you've had some long conversations about Golarion, and what I'm saying now should not be so absolutely strange to you as it would have been on day one.  Dare I so hope?"

"Again, keeping it frank, my reaction is that you're considerably underestimating how well I would have taken on day one to being told that I did not understand what was really going on, and that it would have been a bad idea for me to interfere in something.  But I will concede that this, itself, was something you had no way of knowing, if your" prior "mental image before the evidence was something more like a random Intelligence 18 person from Golarion."

"Maybe a year later when you're much more used to things, we'll get together on the Project anniversary and laugh about what might've happened if Keltham had come into this office on day one, and heard what was going on, and decided that it was very reasonable to ask to speak himself with some of those ambitious bureaucrats that the Queen and Grand High Priestess were trying to gently shoo away.  Or perhaps we'll have a laugh about how they couldn't possibly have managed to confuse you, even then."

"I think it's more that you're underestimating the degree to which, if you'd told me I was about to cause a disaster, and Carissa nodded along and said yes that sure sounded like a disaster to her too, I would have exercised my vast capacities of inaction and just not done that thing.  Civilization is made out of both negative and positive spaces, its shape is as much what it doesn't do as what it does.  But, fine, you had no way of knowing."

"I admit that even on day six - letting my Worldwound arrival in the evening be day zero - I am still dismayed to hear about the actual hierarchical structure of Chelish mini-governments, as I did only a few moments ago.  And more dismayed to hear now, that the job of a project manager in Golarion includes managing not just the people under the project, but the people above the project having fights about it."

"You don't have that in dath ilan," Maillol says.  He lets some of his real shock into his voice; it can be a bad habit to adopt, but if you do have the relevant skills not to overuse it, there's no point in faking an emotion when the real emotion is ready to hand.

"Not more than momentarily in any healthy organization.  It would require that something go very visibly wrong, in a way that would cause the one person responsible for having that not happen to notice using their organizational eyes, and they'd come in and rearrange things using their organizational hands."

"So I've been at this a while, which you might guess, they wouldn't have put somebody inexperienced on this, divine vision or not.  I've been running projects, smaller ones admittedly, since seventeen years before our Queen took power in Asmodeus's name fifteen years ago."

"If someday you worry that you're feeling too cheerful, or just that it's way too easy for you to fall asleep at night, come into my office and I'll tell you about what project management was like in Cheliax before."

"Oh, so you are the priest from the Worldwound, then, the one I originally asked to pray to Asmodeus.  I was wondering if that was real or if I just hadn't seen any other grandfather-'gendertroped' people since then and couldn't tell the difference."

"Clerics of Asmodeus were project managers even before Asmodeus and the current Queen took over?"

"Better than having your project managed by someone who's not a priest of Asmodeus."

"I stayed out of the revolution, of course.  Don't think I need to explain to you why I had to stay neutral."

Carissa isn't actually sure she understands why. Is it the Lawful thing to do? Maybe if you're committed on another project?

"I think it's obvious, but why trust what you can verify:  If clerics of Asmodeus worked against employer interests to help Asmodeus take over countries, nobody would hire them."

"Yep."

If you manage a Worldwound installation, you have met clerics of Abadar.

"I am frankly, not totally happy with things having gone the way they did.  I suspect I'll estimate later that there are processes I could've set in motion a few days earlier if you'd risked a conversation, as would in fact have been safe.  But, you didn't know, so fine."

"So.  Basic questions.  Who's your own manager and what's their role in Chelish Governance, what's the further line of reporting to the Queen or the Grand High Priestess or whichever of the two is slightly more in charge, what's this project's budget and what's the, series of concentric enclosing budgets above that up to Governance's budget."

"For that matter, what is Governance's budget?"

"Don't panic."

"Nobody knows."

"Why exactly should I not panic?"

"Because it won't actually help."

"Very sensible."

Ferrer Maillol can give rough guesses for various quantities, and does.

By far the largest expense on Project Lawful so far would've been Raise Dead on the Security killed in the Nidal assault, at 5000gp per Raise.  But that doesn't actually get paid by Project Lawful, it gets paid by the part of the government that Raises people.

De facto, the largest recurring expense on Project Lawful is by far the senior wizards making up Security.  They'll run around 500gp/week apiece, and while it's not considered good practice for anyone including Maillol to know exactly how many Security there are, there'd be more than six and less than thirty.  That doesn't get paid out of Project Lawful's budget proper, it's a military expenditure by the branch of the military that got authorized by Governance to post Security here; after taking into account considerations that included a request, and payment, by Broom's faction, for there to be better protection here.

The actual Project Lawful, be it clear, has not yet at this point been assigned that kind of money flow.  In part, because Maillol hasn't requested that kind of money flow apart from particular expenses, because it would have weakened his negotiating and political combat position in trying to keep lines of Governance above relatively simple and clear and prevent anybody else from swallowing Project Lawful; which, to be clear, the Queen could prevent, if it came to that, but only by expending her own political capital, which wouldn't be a good career move for Maillol himself unless there was a reason.

Things are now a bit clearer, but not to the point that somebody from dath ilan should get their hopes up.

Keltham heard an estimate on 100gp for a fourth-circle wizard's per-seven-days earning potential; from there to 500gp for fifth-circle wizards seems like quite a jump.

Why he jumps on that part... well, it's a true-in-Taldor fact so perfectly safe so far as Maillol knows.

"5th-circle is when you become able to Teleport, which is massively more in demand than most things someone can do at 4th-circle.  Also, I'm guessing it was Sevar who told you the figure of 100gp/week for her own earnings; she's right, but most 4th-circle wizards wouldn't make that.  Not every 5th-circle wizard is qualified to be Security either."

Right then.

Does it happen to be true at all, that Cheliax has a concept of the standard cost of a high-potential young researcher exceptionally good at math?

Nope.

Also right then.  Keltham is thinking of retaining eight out of the current twelve job candidates past their first contracted week.  He'll need to talk options for the remaining four compatible with Governance security considerations, and make sure those options are good enough.

Keltham is pretty sure that Asmodia, Meritxell, and Ione all now have expected value to Chelish Governance exceeding that of a 5th-circle Security wizard, but for purposes of aligning incentives, Keltham intends to offer them most of their real compensation in the form of small shares of future Project Lawful income, which is considered the very standard best practice of Civilization.  His plan is 200gp/week for the three, plus a 10,000gp bonus for Ione in respect for her special, hazardous, possibly long-term damaging, and highly useful service in delivering advance warning on the Nidal assault and maybe actually timing that assault so Keltham would be safer.  Carissa gets 300gp/week in respect of her status as being something like Keltham's de facto ops officer or second-in-command.

Pilar, Peranza, Tonia, and Gregoria aren't obviously going to end up irreplaceably valuable, but are still in the running for being less brilliant researchers, or maybe brilliant ones if the intelligence headbands ever come through and are any good.  100gp/week for each of them except Pilar.  Pilar gets 150gp/week in token of her higher-than-obvious expected value and a future promotion if it turns out that Cayden Cailean has more in mind than snacks, and Pilar should also get 1000gp for taking a sword in place of Keltham, which would not obviously have been a terrible thing if it had happened, but key word 'obviously'.

Keltham realizes that no actual agreement has been reached on how Chelish funding of the Project will be compensated.  Keltham will compose a suggested interim compact on what counts as Project revenue, pending some more difficult working-out of the basic question of how to measure the Project's benefit to Cheliax (including the counterfactual on Keltham having started elsewhere instead), and fire that back as a suggestion.  But people do need their nonvolatile portion of their salaries in the meanwhile; possibly they wouldn't starve if unpaid, but it is considered a core good practice in Civilization that if you can't pay basic salaries it's time to shut down the company.

Keltham's current plan is to request 500gp/week nominal salary for now, but with the understanding that Keltham might come back and ask for an increase if it turns out that there are magic items he can't get on a Governance budget and that would substantially increase his own effectiveness.  If it's a better look if Keltham gets 100gp/week instead, he's potentially open to that for now or to start, since he doesn't currently know how he'd actually spend the money on much.

No other project members have particularly expressed agreement with any of these offers, and the four core members, in Keltham's view, would have considerable leverage over him to demand higher nonvolatile incomes, though Keltham would in that case reduce their share of future Project income.  Keltham is nonetheless interested in hearing if these budget quantities sound feasible.