"So."

"Were those your actual probabilities."

"Yep."

"...I'm not sure what reward you're supposed to get if I'm not fucking you about this, given that we were apparently flirting."

"Eh, we'll work out something."

Security, please copy to Sevar that, if Keltham is telling the truth about his probabilities there, there would've been a threefold shift upward in his Conspiracy ratio if I hadn't played this game.  Though that doesn't make sense to me, maybe his numbers were conditional on his having observed me starting to write... but still.

We don't get to back off and play safe because we're scared.  He's predicting that too.

The problem isn't doing any things ever, it's unilaterally doing Excessively Clever Things because you're pleased with yourself for having thought them up, a tendency which in the last two days took a literal divine intervention to get you to stop in one case, and caused this morning which was a net loss if an unavoidable one because you no longer had the acting ability to be normal Asmodia, and now caused this event, which is an unsustainable pace of Excessive Cleverness.

But noted.

If Keltham's not lying about his latest set of probabilities, which is what he'd obviously be doing, if he in fact updated strongly towards Conspiracy off the events of this morning.

Gregoria takes a deep breath and decides that, well, she's on the low-punishment regimen and they said it looks bad when only Ione argues. "Keltham, do you want to call the rest of us back when you're done flirting and want to present salary offers?"

"Yes.  Sorry about that."

"The basic salary offers are as described.  All amounts in gold per week, 100 Gregoria, 100 Tonia, 100 Peranza, Pilar 100 base plus 50 divine candy services plus one-time bonus 1000, Meritxell 200, Asmodia 200, Ione 200 base plus 200 divine forecasting services, Carissa 300.  Everyone fine with that part, pending what's going to be a more complicated discussion of sellable shares of future income that vest over time and how those work?"

He is greeted with suspicious silence.

"In dath ilan is there some phrase that communicates 'okay actually I'm being serious now'?"

"One would say, outside quotes, quote Meta, I'm being serious now dequote.  Sorry."

"Meta, I'm being serious now.  Please indicate clearly if you're okay with the nonvolatile core salary that you've just been offered, pending acceptable shares of income.  Which, to be clear, I am pretty much assuming that I'm going to offer and you're all going to stare blankly at and then trust that I was being fair and take it, but I can truthspell myself about that and use the fair-division spell too if you'd like.  In fact I'm going to do that anyways, before we sign a final contract, it's just good practice.  Anyways, hands up if you were okay with the core salary part of your offer pending satisfactory shares."

Up go hands.

Even Asmodia's hand goes up.  "I'll register that if I end up proving my ability to teach in your place and subsequently end up contributing more than base tier-1s, I'll expect a relative pay increase.  But as I haven't proven any such thing yet, this is fine to start."

AlterAsmodia definitely has a rivalry going with alterMeritxell too.  And alterMeritxell needs to be put on notice of impendingly becoming the least valuable tier-1 with nothing special about her.

"Remember the lesson of the jellychip-production game that disintegrated because each child, even out of dath ilan, decided that the kind of token they held must be the most important and valuable kind of token."

"With that, said, sure, if I decide you're contributing substantially more than other tier-1s, you'll get appropriately higher compensation."

"But not to make that sound too easy, a good threshold for that is whether the difference is so substantial that even the other tier-1s notice and are like, yep, Asmodia sure is doing more for the Project than we are, yep.  I assume, perhaps falsely, that this difference is apparent to all with respect to what Carissa contributes, and what Ione saved the Project when Nidal attacked.  Make it that obvious, and sure."

"Carissa's fourth circle," says Gregoria, cautiously, because it hasn't gone wrong yet and if you leave all the pushback to heretics then it'll all be heresy flavored. "...we're mostly not actually doing magic, though?"

"She's a fourth-circle who can use spellsilver from seven feet away, but if that was all we needed we could go grab a seventh-circle wizard whenever.  It's more that while the rest of you are doing whatever it is you do when I'm not looking, Carissa is spending a bunch of her time maintaining the critical Keltham component of the Project, and that whenever I have a task like 'so how do I actually get two hundred mice plus their living supplies if I need those' Carissa is the one who I talk to in order to translate that idea to more Golarion-standard terms, she's the one who worked with me on figuring out requirements for the fortress you're now living in, etcetera."

"To translate to what I conjecture to be your own more Golarion-standard terms:  Compensation is based on the negotiating power you have, and the negotiating power you have is based on your irreplaceability.  Carissa is the person other than myself whom it'd be most crippling for the Project to lose and most impossible to replace."

Gregoria nods, satisfied. That's kind of just 'you're sleeping with her' but not entirely. 

"Again to be clear:  If you're wondering why that doesn't come out of my own share, to whatever extent Carissa is maintaining me and I'm putting inputs into the project, the answer is that in ideal terms that should give you the same end result.  I may not have Keeper levels of coherence about that, but that just means there's residual error, it doesn't mean I'm terrible when I try.  If Carissa and myself aggregated into one entity, I'd award that entity 800 gold per month plus the combined profit share I haven't got to, then I'd pay Carissa with 300 gold per month and part of my profit share.  My profit share is going to be much larger than Carissa's, not in the same proportions as 500 to 300.  Salary is what we use to make sure we have nice things now, and 800 gold is what would make sure that Carissa and myself could both have nice things now, where Carissa does not get anything like three-fifths of my ownership of the Project."

"That makes sense."

Keltham will now explain, in all grim determination, the basic concepts that:

- They are also going to own part of the Project themselves, in the form of 'shares', fractions of the Project that they own.

- The Project will generate profits, which the Project reinvests in more subprojects that generate more profits, mostly, but eventually the Project will start using profits to buy back its own shares, once it runs out of better things to invest in.

- As a simplified example, there's supposedly a billion people in Golarion.  Imagine that the Project figured out how to build a widget that costs 1gp to make, but could sell for 2gp, and was worth 3gp to the buyer, and the Project managed to sell one widget like that to everyone in Golarion, but then had nothing else to do with itself so it bought back all its shares and closed down.  The total profits would then be a billion gold pieces.  Owning 1/10,000th of that Project now is then like owning something that will be worth 100,000gp later, but only if that Project actually succeeds.

- People don't get this share right away, any more than you get paid up front for the next 10 years of salary; it vests over time, though usually not on quite the same schedule that a salary gets paid out.

- You can, according to the contract to be signed, sell your profit-share to somebody else, but you probably shouldn't and definitely not without consulting Keltham... you know, actually, given the Manohar thing, Keltham's just going to write into the contract that he must legally be allowed to have a consultation session with any of the researchers before they sell any of their shares.

- Cheliax is investing a bunch of money in this project, and receives 'convertible debt' that can either get paid back at face value plus high interest before the Project buys back anything else, or convert into regular Project income shares at a discount that grows with but not as fast as the Project grows.

- One billion gold pieces, or one gold piece per person, which in unskilled labor is? - ten days of unskilled labor outside Cheliax, or five days within it, thanks - yeah, he'll stick with that wild-guess-round-number, that sounds like roughly the right ballpark figure for where the Project could end up.  In general, Keltham is looking to increase the wealth of Golarion by much more than just 2 gold pieces per person; he is definitely looking to save more than 20 days of labor for everyone.  But to get to that point, some of the work will be done by spinoff corporations that need to pay income shares to their own investors and researchers, though the Project might still take a share in those spinoffs if the Project is providing key ideas or training their people.  You can't actually realistically capture half the gains to a whole planet of a technological revolution like this one, even in just the more material aspects.  Keltham is going to try to grab a relatively larger share of gains at first, because he expects to have so many other projects that he needs to reinvest in, but in the longer run where the really large profits start to come in, no, it won't be half the gains.  There comes a point past which it's sorta silly to try.

- So although it is a very wild figure, Keltham is guessing that the ten-year or fifteen-year profits of the Project should end up at somewhere near a billion gold.  Could be a hundred million gold, could be zero.  For it to be ten billion gold probably requires looking far enough in the future that people are wealthy enough to have that much to pay.

- The Project doesn't need to have started buying back its shares for you to get paid.  The idea would usually be that somebody else buys those shares from you in the expectation that the Project will buy them back later, at an increased price that looks a lot like whatever interest rates are like around here.  The share you get is usually one where, for you to sell right now, to somebody who didn't really believe in the Project, would not be worth too much compared to your regular salary.  If you want to get incredibly rich this way, you need the Project to succeed and convince its skeptics so they want to buy your shares at some reasonable fraction of what they'll be worth after 15 years since Project start.

Eight days ago Carissa would have said that being wealthy beyond her wildest dreams and safe was all she wanted in life.

However, Carissa eight days ago was small and unambitious, and at this point her to-do list is so daunting that she's not totally sure a million gold makes much of a dent in it. She needs to figure out how Chelish people can be dath ilani without exploding, and that might require some fundamental revisions to Asmodeanism as taught to humans, because Asmodeanism as taught to Lawful beings is necessarily very different and no one is willing to just sit her down and tell her what it is. It is possible it will also require revisions to Hell, which - she's aware that objectively her odds of success at that can't look very high, but it's not like who rules the various layers of Hell never changes, or like the archdevils don't have a great deal of power within their own domains. 

(It occurred to her yesterday, uncomfortably so, that an easier way to get what she wants might in fact be to donate her vast sums of money and go to Axis with Keltham. It's not tempting. Ironically it's not tempting because of Good impulses she's indulging as much as because of Evil ones; going to Axis might be an all right way for Carissa to go about her work having lost a part of herself but not all the parts of herself, but most people who try to do things in the world and don't end up with a billion gold about it will go to Hell, and so Hell needs to be able to use them. She doesn't actually want to escape eternal torment, she wants the eternal torment to be shaped right, and if that requires impressing Asmodeus enough to have the resources to displace an archdevil then -

- well, she isn't sure it's an insane ambition. She isn't sure it isn't, but she isn't sure it is. But a million gold pieces is barely even the first step.

Everything will be so much easier if she corrupts Keltham and then he can work on this with her.)

Sounds like something that is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve!  Hints about how Carissa Sevar can solve her own problems for herself will be available if she prays for them, to Irori, outside the interdiction zone, though Irori realizes this is not a very likely confluence of events.

...has Keltham been getting any signs of understanding here or a lot of fixedly permanently cheerful expressions?

They seem to mostly be following along. The big problem is just that you're not supposed to sign contracts you mostly understand. But on the other hand, it's Keltham.

Well he's not going to have them sign anything now, of course, he's checking to make sure they even want the contents of the contract before he spends a lot of time drawing that up!

Equity allocations:  74% Keltham, 1.3% Carissa, 0.25% Ione, 0.2% Asmodia/Meritxell, 0.15% Pilar, 0.1% Gregoria/Peranza/Tonia, the remainder is for the Project to give its many future researchers and employees their own stakes, though they get smaller as people join later at higher base salaries and with reduced uncertainty of those shares' future values, or for Cheliax or other investors to convert its loan-shares into later.

Plans like this are generally drawn up with an intention that goes something like, if the Project is taking slower or needing larger investments and needs to sell more shares than expected, it first starts to come out of Keltham's reserve, especially if the delay looks like it's because Keltham is being less valuable or having less output than he was supposed to, but if the Project gets into bad-enough shape it may have to issue and sell additional shares that dilute everyone.  This is part of the risk.

Conversely if the Project gets visibly on track to be hugely successful and starts earning early profits fast, which might be as simple as figuring out an early and general anti-plague sanitation measure that reduces the incidence of all plagues in all Chelish cities by 10% in a way that doesn't just restore to the equilibrium, they can expect that fewer total shares than Keltham currently anticipates will be issued, and their own shares will be accordingly more valuable.

Blah blah vesting schedules, these initial allocations will at their slowest vest over four years; hitting milestones can result in faster vesting, Keltham will draw up relatively informal milestones for them that he judges, and set more formal ones for himself and truthspell himself about them.

Even after shares vest, you shouldn't expect to be able to sell them to an outside buyer for what they're probably worth; people outside the Project know that people inside the Project have private information about how well the Project is likely to do over the future, and they'll discount apparent prices accordingly if the person inside the Project seems to want to sell.  This difficulty in reselling causes researchers to expect to hold their shares for longer, which in turn helps to align incentives as the researchers think about how to make the Project actually be valuable in 15 years and not just look valuable at the time their shares vest.  This is probably a much bigger factor here than it would be in Civilization; in Civilization any large project let alone this one would have Nemamel looking at it, if she were alive, or people only slightly worse than her if not, and people wouldn't expect apparent values to get away from actual prices by much.

It is proverbial in Civilization that no amount of clever planning can eliminate a very very large residual probability that all your Project's shares end up being worth exactly zero, which scary thought should be handled by meditating on your Cheerful-Plus base salaries that you arrived at without considering your equity.

It's also considered stupid in Civilization if the rest of your reasoning doesn't end up at a point where your valuable researchers can spend money right now in a way that gives them Slack, doesn't cause them to be distracted by silly things, buy productivity-related magic items and have somebody else organize their house for them, etcetera.  Though obviously all negotiations are conducted on the basis of 'I have this valuable labor and I'm not giving it to you unless I'm paid and then once I have my money it's my own business what I do with it', not 'give me more money in the expectation that I'll spend it on myself in a way that makes me more productive'.  If the Project starts needing to do the latter, it will probably indicate something wrong, but the repair algorithm would involve the Project paying for productivity things directly.

Though, in this case, there's stuff like intelligence headbands where Cheliax rents those to the Project, gets convertible debt accordingly, the Project loans headbands to people while they work, and they can use their salaries to buy those headbands if they wish so they'll still have them afterwards and then loan them to the Project themselves.

Anyways, don't get emotionally wrapped up in the sense that you'll be worth a million gold pieces in 15 years, based on your unvested equity allocations.  That's not a thing that has happened to you, it's a collective plan to achieve something not yet achieved.