The contract sounds pretty good in principle and they'll probably want it though they'll have to read it first.

"It's - advised to go over a really serious contract with a devil, before you sign it, if it's about enough money to warrant the cost of summoning one."

Okay, Meritxell thinks, but it'd be nice to also separately have some way to see if the contract cheats them horribly.

Tonia is pretty sure everyone is just emitting meaningless noises at this point and she should go on having more money than she ever dreamed of and just worry about the project not falling apart completely.

"Of course.  I'm not asking you to rely on just my truth spell and my fair division spell.  I'd expect Cheliax and Lrilatha to want a look at this anyways, you're still their people and they consider this project an important matter."

"Are people okay with these specific equity divisions, not just the general setup?"

"Yes but I have no idea how you derived them and am kind of curious," Gregoria says.

"It's derived based on the assumption that the fair and good-consequence practices for a world-reshaping company in Golarion started by one interplanar traveler, will be exactly the same as what they were for a couple of famous ultraprofitable companies in dath ilan started by individual supergeniuses.  Because I have absolutely no hope of rederiving anything more sensible than that from scratch."

"If, hypothetically, it turns out that I'm actually better at teaching people Probability than you are, once I've learned it from you -"

"The point at which you start getting larger allocations is when you're doing things nobody else could do, not just things nobody else is doing right now.  If you start learning from me or reteaching in a way that we just can't find any other researchers to compete with, that's the point at which you have the leverage to come to the Project and say 'two percent or I'm going home'."

"I would ask if Sevar is that much harder to replace than me, because, in fact, there aren't that many other people running around to whom Nethys's heralds are known to deliver prophecies.  But I'm guessing from the numbers that Sevar's 1.3% is 0.3% her irreplaceability to the Project and 1% her irreplaceability to Keltham, which therefore comes out of Keltham's allocation of 75%."

"Indeed."

"What would all these numbers look like if we do figure out how to retrieve the dath ilani true dead to here or something."

"If that was pulled off largely because of me, they'd immediately replace all the actual work I was doing, but I'd still fairly receive half the resulting gains they captured based on the algorithm I showed you; their decision to join doesn't accomplish anything until you add Keltham to actually retrieve them here.  Though I'd just reinvest nearly all of that in whatever investment fund they built."

"If Cheliax or Asmodeus pulls that off largely without me, the incoming dath ilani form a new company and give me a small share corresponding to the role I played in letting Cheliax know that this was possible and valuable."

- nod. "Makes sense. I think."

She wants to be MORE VALUABLE than Keltham but it sounds like he'd still get a lot of the value-capture since he's the reason she noticed she could.

"This is - skipping over some things I thought I would have a chance to say to you in private, later, because I didn't realize this was coming up in quite this way - but my interest here is maybe 10% getting rich and 90% getting to go where Keltham goes and see what Keltham sees and learn what Keltham learns takaral.  I suspect that's what Nethys wants too.  Can we cut my share in half in exchange for an agreement like that?"

"That sounds a biiiit more personal.  Not opposed to it, but, not exactly the sort of thing that the Project settles with you.  And I'm not sure I'm ready to buy half your shares from you at that price."

"All right.  It's just that, in reality, the money has very little to do with why I'm staying on, and I will be a little disappointed if I don't get what I was really hoping for."

"More than a little bit."

"Well, good for expressing that, because it is not something I am currently promising you or offering to trade to you.  The money is meant to be good enough that, even if I wasn't going to take you with me when I left Golarion, if that happens, you would still want to work here because in fact you're still getting paid thirty times what you could make anywhere else.  And then, someday, you'd spend that money on traveling this world or traveling other planes.  I'm not saying you can't have that thing you just asked for, I'm saying that I'm not offering to trade it to you for your Project work.  This large amount of money now, and maybe way more future money later, is what the Project is offering to trade to you."

"Civilization does consider it a best practice to draw a sharp line whereby the founders don't offer to trade away - themselves, their things, their lives, when they're starting a company like this one.  The Project isn't owed that from me."

"Understood."

"Does this mean you have worked out a contract with Cheliax where they'll be paying you enough gold for all these salaries?" asks Meritxell.

"Maillol thinks he can swing it in terms of Project budget, but that's just Cheliax paying you, not yet Cheliax trading money to the Project for convertible debt and the Project paying you.  I'm not going to make you wait on your salaries while I sort out that part."

"Next step according to Civilization best practices, is that I walk out of the room and let you discuss this among yourselves for a while.  I'd say however long is needed but in dath ilan it'd be obvious that the time for this step is more like thirty minutes than half a day.  You can have somebody call me back in if there's additional questions.  When and if everyone thinks they're okay, if there aren't new terms requiring amendment, you tell me that, and then I go talk to Maillol about initializing the salary part of this."

"Roughly the idea is that, before you form a more load-bearing verbal assent to this plan, which I then go write up as a contract, you're supposed to talk about it among yourselves without me there in the room, in case there's some part of your brain that can't fully correct for the effect of my being there on your willingness to accept a deal I proposed.  Any of you individually can and should go off and consider it quietly on your own for a few minutes, if you notice your brain being at all influenced by the others present.  Carissa, you also need to leave at some point for at least five minutes of them talking without you, because you're above them in the organizational structure."

"You clear for me to head out now?"

"Yes," they chorus. 

(What are they supposed to think once he's not there?)

"I am confused by the math Keltham's using but I think this is a good deal if we succeed," Carissa says blandly, as she would in alter Cheliax. 

Oh, are they assuming Keltham might still be listening. "I want to read my notes again," says Gregoria. "One minute, please -"

Security notifies everyone that Keltham is comfortably out of hearing range; he grabbed a Security and went for a walk on the fortress ramparts.