"That's close and the ways it's only close might be important but to a first approximation the argument here is just that Maillol was the identifiable person supposed to make this decision and Asmodia did it differently and didn't throw an exception."

"Well, you see, in a Lawful place, we'd... sort of have an expectation that the law was... why do you use the same word for that and math.  Law.  Law.  Regulation.  Oh good you do have more than one word.  We'd have an expectation that the regulations, like... meant anything, if they said that Asmodia was entitled to make this decision, legally."

"I am open to hearing that it works differently here and will only die inside a little."

"- I actually just kind of don't know what we're talking about, all the sudden. If Asmodia were a random Chelish citizen then what headbands she wore would be her business, unless they made her into a serial killer or something. Since she's on a project, any major decisions she might make that are project-relevant are Maillol's job, and she should have asked him."

"So there's a law - regulation - that says that if Manohar visits your secret project, any agreements you make with him about maniacal experiments are strictly the business of the two of you, but there's a shadow regulation which isn't written down anywhere and isn't really legible thereby preventing it from being overridden by the sort of contracts Cheliax can sign with Manohar, which says that if Asmodia thinks her decision is going to potentially have an impact on the project, she should ask Maillol first.  Like, if they'd been friends or if they had a private understanding that was separate from the government of Cheliax, except, this isn't because they're friends, it does proceed from an expectation of how whole secret projects always work."

" - so I don't think Asmodia could possibly have known about Manohar's special exception to the normal expectation she inform Maillol, which is - not a shadow regulation, it's written law and everything. If she knew, then she was following the law and shouldn't get in trouble. But if she had no idea that he had a special exception, then she should've informed Maillol. And her telling was that she didn't know who Manohar was let alone that he had a special exception."

"I think the way I'd been modeling it in my head was, Manohar shows up and says, hey you should try on my headband, Asmodia says something like 'um but' and Manohar tells Security to confirm that it's legal for her to make her own agreement there without consulting anyone else, Security nods to this, Asmodia asks if she can ask another Security, the other Security nods to it, and then Asmodia is like 'okay then'.  I could ask her if it was like that.  If she says it was like that - and Security backs her, come to think, if that's something I'm allowed to ask - then do you think she still wronged Maillol?"

" - no, then she's in the clear and I think Maillol would think so too."

"My model is that Maillol will not think she's in the clear, because he's grandfather-'gendertrope'ed and that's not how grandfathers work.  But that can be tested, and in any case, I think I have an adequate model of how to proceed from here - next step being, ask Asmodia what she thinks happened, then see if Security agrees with that.  Which I should not do right now."

"Thanks."

"Wanna head to Breakout 4 so we're not late to reconvene?"

" - yeah, sounds good. Are you okay, you fired people and then this happened."

"Eh, I just had a rest day... two... possibly three days ago... well, whatever.  Asmodia's allegedly going to be running my morning lecture anyways."

"Let's go."

Breakout Room 4 is the one with the large circular table where up to 16 people can sit and all readily see one another.  It's got a beach-becoming-forest view instead of an ocean view because the ocean has waves and waves can be more hypnotizing and distracting than looking at a forest.

At some point they will need to give all the rooms silly names; Keltham has never thought to inquire as to the why of this tradition, but it is so universally practiced in Civilization that it cannot possibly fail to be important somehow.  This being the case, the job is too weighty to be undertaken lightly and for now he's just numbered them.

"So," Keltham says to the eight remaining Project researchers - plus, apparently, Broom, who's taken a chair off to a corner, but okay fine - "before proceeding, I'd like everyone - well except Broom, Carissa, and Asmodia - to consider what minimum weekly salary would make you cheerful.  Not just, that's enough money and you're getting your due and fair share, but the least amount that first makes you feel definitely noticeably happy.  If you're not sure whether you're feeling cheerful yet, when you imagine getting paid that amount, increase the amount until you're sure."

"Oh, try not to anchor off Asmodia, because her psychology is hers and not yours.  I actually wish in retrospect we hadn't had that visible conversation at all, but oh well."

"Once you know the amount, write it down on a scrap, fold it up.  Don't include your name.  Intended use, I'll collect the amounts afterwards and that'll give me a picture of how the situation generally looks."

"If no possible sum of money could make you cheerful even if it was a billion gold pieces per minute, but you are grimly and darkly determined to succeed on the Project anyways, you can just not put anything on the scrap and leave it blank.  It doesn't have to be possible for money to make somebody happy, even in Civilization, and definitely not here."

Gregoria gives this some consideration before indeed deciding to leave her piece of paper blank. Money can't buy most of the things that she wants, and the Project might in fact be able to get her them anyway but not via money. Also it makes her more deep and mysterious which is apparently required for a romance with Keltham.

Meritxell puts down 50 gold a week because it's enough money for everything you could dream of except magic items and she isn't sure she'd stop if she started thinking of salaries that let you afford magic items.

Ione is legit not that materialistic, she wants knowledge and to see all of reality.  Being paid over twice what she's worth is enough to make her happy, she thinks?  Ione also thinks of herself as less insane than Asmodia.  25gp/week.

Pilar starts to put down 0gp/week because she is not a heretic, is stopped by a prompt from her curse reminding her that her superiors ordered her not to lie to Keltham and that this may include lying just to avoid being heretical, Keltham may notice and that wouldn't serve Lord Asmodeus would it, and after some internal fighting puts down 5gp/week.

Peranza would have been cheerful with 25gp/week a few days earlier, but has been through a couple of fairly traumatic experiences on Project Lawful since then (the previous one being told to train her own impersonator).  Now Peranza finds that to actually be cheerful, in her imagination,* she'd need Asmodia 4th-circle-wizard money... but that would still do it.  Peranza's brain has had some time to recover and notice that nobody has killed her for heresy yet.  She agonizes a bit about whether to lie about the result, once obtained, but concludes that she's under orders not to tell unauthorized lies and hasn't been authorized or told otherwise by Security.  75gp/week.

(*)  Peranza may not have a good internal referent for what it would actually feel like to be cheerful.  She felt differently about something at 75gp, anyways.

Tonia would be cheerful at 5gp/week because that's more money than anyone she met in her entire childhood has had at one time. That's what cheerfulness is, she's pretty sure.

Asmodia would be more nervous if she hadn't remembered that Keltham was a cleric of Abadar and also, like, that she has ever met Keltham.  She started writing something down on a piece of paper shortly after Keltham spoke; it's clearly too long to be a price.

Keltham waited an appropriately long time after Asmodia started that, so it wouldn't look like he was being prompted into action by Asmodia, then looked thoughtful, took a long look at everyone present, and then started writing his own long statement.  "Predictions," he says.

He writes quickly and gets done before everybody else has arrived at their cheerful price, and folds up the result himself.

Keltham has the bluff of a five year old. She wishes he also had the credulity of a five year old, her life would be so much easier.

When everyone is done, Keltham collects the paper scraps, looks through them, and smiles.

"Right, then.  Well, I expect that most of your real compensation will be in resellable shares of the future income of the Project, which will vest in you over time as you work here; that's how it's done in Civilization.  But it's highly uncertain how much those end up being worth, and also people need to buy things now and then.  So it's also considered good practice in Civilization to pay researchers some reasonable core salaries in regular money, meant to be less volatile."

"The basic schema I'm working with here is that we have tier-1 and tier-2 researcher employees, with myself the sole member of tier-0, following some standard schemes in Civilization for compensating people working on projects like these.  The tier-1s are, currently, this is potentially something that changes over time, Carissa, Asmodia, Meritxell, and Ione, all of whom have displayed rapid learning speed on Law.  Ione also warns this site about incoming military attacks, which is worth some significant bonus pay, and Carissa is currently operating as my de facto second-in-command and ops person and general Keltham maintainer.  Tonia, Peranza, Gregoria, and Pilar are tier-2, except that Pilar is providing snacks catering and may possibly turn out to be incredibly important somehow in the same fashion as Ione; the expectation of Pilar maybe being important later is worth its own bonus."

"Basic salaries for a Project Lawful researcher - now, I realize that this isn't as much as a Security wizard makes, even though you're more valuable to Cheliax than they are - but again, most of your real compensation will be in resellable shares of future Project income vesting over time - are 100 gold per week at tier-2, 200 gold per week at tier-1, and 500 gold per week at tier-0."

"Ione, you saved Cheliax way more than two Raise Deads at the cost of some potential and maybe actual damage to yourself, but Maillol says he can't politically swing a 10,000 gold bonus, so for now I'm putting you down as having a secondary role as special forecaster which pays an additional 200 gold per week.  Pilar, you get an additional 50 gold per week for Cayden Cailean services that just might be much more important than they look, with an expectation of further payment if they are, plus a 1000 gold bonus for taking a sword that might possibly have led into some further and disastrous plot by Nidal if it had been allowed to kill me.  Carissa is tier-0.9, you might say, and receives 300 gold per week, and should be considered to have authority here as my second."

"Oh, and Asmodia obviously receives 75 gold per week, since she did say out loud that was enough to make her cheerful."

"Any questions."

There was something of Hell in that. Not very much, but. More than she's seen from Keltham before. 

She tries to look a totally reasonable amount of delighted and not a ridiculous amount of delighted.

Except probably he's joking and that's what the Asmodia and Keltham writing each other notes is about.

Tonia starts nervously giggling, she can't help herself.  ....she can help herself but it'd be difficult. 

Meritxell is pretty sure this is the best thing that has ever happened. Maybe that's what's meant by an amount of money you're cheerful about, it should feel like the best thing that ever happened, except it wouldn't without Asmodia also getting put in her place. ...if Keltham is serious about that. A Chelish person would be deadly serious but it's Keltham, and she's pretty sure he's, what's the word, trolling.

Is that actually the first time in her life that Ione has ever been appreciated for anything?  Possibly.  She's not sure.

She's oracle of Nethys and it shouldn't be possible to buy her loyalty with, like, money, instead of knowledge or what serves Nethys or at least incredibly rare and irreplaceable books.  But what with Cheliax having not even bothered to bid, they're not exactly making it difficult for Keltham to straight-up buy her loyalty with money.  She doesn't even know what she's going to do with that money.  It's just working on her anyways.  She can feel her loyalties shifting as she thinks.  Even though the money in this case is coming directly from Cheliax.  Some Asmodeans really need to rethink some of their strategies here.