For stuff like improved sanitation technology or anti-pandemic measures, Keltham is getting a certain impression that you can't just ask the insurers to pay for those.  So this is going to be an issue of Cheliax offering the Project a price for outcomes, basically, and Keltham deciding how that gets prioritized relative to other tech based on that price.  The price should take into account that other countries may adopt the same measures, because Keltham is not actually going to slow down adoption there at all; that's something where you just broadcast the knowledge, dath ilan that taught him would have wished it so.  Cheliax should offer the Project a price that reflects how much they'd want to see that happen, and can maybe negotiate with other Lawful countries about upping that price.

This part can also fold into the general economic increase business, after which Cheliax and other Lawful countries can again be invited to bid on the Project inventing further sanitation tech.

Cheliax requests that, during this initial period pending a replacement contract, while things are all happening inside Cheliax anyways, two-thirds of the Project's profits go into a Cheliax-internal investment fund, which Keltham promises to actually use for investments that he expects to boost the Chelish economy, including via spending on subprojects of the Project or Project employees and infrastructure; if Keltham at some point wants to relinquish this responsibility he can hand it back to Governance.  Profits of the fund go back into the fund itself.  They're willing to trust Keltham's promise that the Project won't pay out in salary more than is fair.

There's an attached note in different handwriting saying that parts of Governance aligned to old nobility will be more on board if this fund structure exists, for reasons that are probably not going to be legible to Keltham for a while - to give a not-particularly-accurate summary, they're incentivized to talk as if Keltham will take anything he's given and run to a neighboring country unfriendly to Cheliax, even though this is not true, and adding this fund structure placates them and shows their concerns are being listened-to and they're being respected about this.  Keltham should not worry much about this and should leave these factions in Governance to their own delusions, so long as it doesn't actually affect the way anything goes, which they're hoping this structure accomplishes.

...right then.  They're correct that this doesn't sound to him like a consistent agent equilibrium.  Possibly some predictor in Governance is bidding up the price on Keltham deciding to take his early profits and go invest in some other country instead?  Keltham will ponder whether this reflects some actual state of affairs they aren't telling him about.  For the interim contract he'll send back to have the amount be half rather than two-thirds, but otherwise, okay, they're yielding to him enough on other stuff.

Cheliax is pretty sure it can find a million gold pieces in actual gold to redeem money owable to the Project, without that doing anything strange to their economy.  If it's more than that, they want to be able to repay him in other valuables that Keltham approves, with a fallback to a guarantee to pay in standard valuables that would be available to somebody requesting to redeem currency at the Chelish central bank.  At the same value in those valuables per face-value gold-piece instrument as would have existed at the time of signing this contract, if Keltham is worried about currency devaluation.

Keltham adds a note that the key date will actually be a day before Keltham's arrival, so they can't just drop all those valuations by a factor of 100 for one minute while signing the contract, but otherwise sure.  Also just to be sure, can somebody give him three examples of standard redeemables and prices and available volumes as they were on that day?

Somebody in Chelish Governance has ever heard of joint-stock corporations, there's just no general market in their shares, which makes them less popular than a dath ilani might otherwise expect.  Insurance basically seems not to exist at scale, which Keltham would have expected to imply a huge obstacle towards having there be limited liability for owners and officers of those joint-stock corporations.  But given that Keltham regards this issue as a blocker for obvious reasons of sanity, apparently Cheliax is willing to just say that Keltham doesn't have passthrough personal liability for the Project if somebody sues the Project for more than it's worth?  Apparently this is usual for Golarion, in other countries that have corporations recognized by local governments as entities?  And the excess liability doesn't have to overflow to an insurer, it can just cease to exist with nobody responsible??  This seems like a huge implicit subsidy for corporations that are doing anything risky and like it would create all kinds of awful incentives???  Keltham supposes that he can just accept this implicit gift and then not do anything awful with it.

They're basically on board with the Project's corporate structure otherwise.  Though there's a note from a seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus specializing in contracts, who reviewed the whole thing, that he doesn't understand why three-quarters of this stuff has the exact form that it does.  The Church bids 2000 gold on Keltham explaining it, in case it's theologically important to Asmodeus's domain of contracts.

Keltham tilts his head slightly on reading this price; he can't tell if they're weirdly undervaluing his other opportunities, or just deliberately saying that this issue is not actually important but should get done eventually.  He'll ask Maillol about that, maybe.

Cheliax is actually pretty unhappy about Keltham's request to have disputes arbitrated by a priest of the Lawful Neutral banking god 'Abadar'?  Abadar can be kind of weird about some things.  Osirion has a terrible record on women's rights, including, for example, their ability to own their own property not in a man's name.  Abadar may be into banking but he's obviously not into fairness.  A priest of the Lawful Neutral goddess Erecura, who lives in the center of a giant interdimensional trading city and market, would be much better for this.  Subject to that part, they're fine about mutual approval of the priest, or failing that the arbitrating priest being selected by the Golarion head of Erecura's church.

Keltham writes back that he can't just take Cheliax's choice of Lawful Neutral god here for obvious reasons, but he's fine with it being Irori instead.

Finally, Governance notes for the record that they would usually hammer things out a lot more painstakingly than this, but they also want to actually get started on that tech transfer stuff.  Their unusual pliability is to be understood as a request for haste.

Keltham again tilts his head and writes back that Civilization is also not in the habit of trying to design planet-affecting contracts this quickly.  Cheliax obviously knows more than him about how local law, or a Lawful Neutral god's priest, is liable to interpret contracts like this.  Cheliax presumably has professional lawyers they can actually trust to help.  Keltham's rapid composition of these interim contracts is to be understood as a favor for Cheliax.  He's a fourth-circle cleric, and not especially likely to get sick with plague in the next month if there's a one-month delay in Project work.

Sort of weirdly reminiscent of his interaction with Abrogail about a favor owed to her for her pride?  It sounds like maybe that's a Chelish thing, you look out for your interests and point out your concessions and leave the other side to point out theirs.  Matches some things Carissa said about sexual interactions, or for that matter Yaisa at lunchtime, how a Chelish woman wouldn't expect reciprocation owed if it wasn't spelled out.  As a social practice it doesn't necessarily strike Keltham as that great of an idea, but it's the sort of thing where he could see it being easier on the feelings of Kelthams in the Kelthamverse than on the feelings of dath ilani.  You can still trade with aliens like that.

(Asmodia will later get a copy of this stuff.  Asmodia, who would again never dare do this if not on a low-punishment regime, will go through it and add many angry notes about terms that wouldn't have actually been suggested in alterCheliax, and how she now has to make the rest of her universe look like that was a totally sensible thing for alterCheliax to say, and next time she needs to review anything like this 'brilliant' idea for a Cheliax-internal-only investment fund before anybody says that to Keltham.  This isn't about avoiding dead giveaways, this is about Keltham doing reasoning of a form that only he and Asmodia understand, and Keltham will have updated off somebody's brilliant idea for cutting Cheliax's future losses here.  Somebody should get flayed about this.)

...it's actually somewhat refreshing?  Abrogail usually only hears this kind of honesty from people she has managed to bring to very extreme emotional states, and has some pleasant associations about that.

And time to go meet with Carissa about potential new employees!  What've they got for him?

The amount of Splendour needed to lie to Keltham on most topics? Like, twelve. The amount of Splendour needed to get Keltham to agree to a contract that's slightly unfair? Apparently thirty or something. That's not quite true; there are bits he didn't think to question. But he's good at this, and instinctively so, and Hell is supposed to be incredibly clever when it comes to these things and it's sort of concerning how the servants of the god whose domain is tricky contracts are mostly playing even with a random dath ilani teenager and that's despite them having played fast and loose with the alter-Cheliax rules. 

No, not concerning, it's great news; it is part of why her value in Dis is so high. Hell will get better at this, and serve Asmodeus better. 

Project management has a dozen candidate files for Keltham, all of them reasonably promising, prescreened for meeting security clearances. Five of them are boys; Carissa ended up deciding on enough boys that it was only bleeding a bit of evidence towards their having disproportionately done a search for girls, but few enough that if Keltham rejects them all he'll still have lots of options and it won't take up much of his time. The ones that looked superficially the most promising to Project management are on top which is intended to save him time but he can go in some other order if he'd rather.

Keltham quizzically observes his actual level of internal surprise and maybe even slight dismay at male candidates being included, neither of which he would've expected himself to feel.  Probably worth a pretty serious chunk of probability mass out of Conspiracy... should've thought to predict that in advance, but the amount of surprise he's feeling would seem to indicate that he wasn't putting a lot of probability mass on male candidates being included.

Well, makes sense though, Ordinary was thinking something like 'there's an alien, we don't know his gendertrope or how well he can do research with a bunch of boys his age, also we want him to feel very welcome in Cheliax, also we want all his genes, also we may not have a lot of time here, let's send him 11 girls from a wizard academy'.  And then now they're like 'well he's doing pretty okay and we ran out of great female candidates so send him some males'.  Conspiracy, you would think more on priors, would have some Dark Plan that looked something like 'lull Keltham with a harem' and then not want to modify that plan based on how things went on Project Lawful so far.  Factor of 2?  Factor of 3?  Call it 2.5 maybe.  And don't neglect to note that remaining probability mass in Conspiracy is narrowing more towards 'the Conspiracy is improvising and modifying their plans as they go'.

Moving on from that!

Two of the male candidates and three of the female candidates look too good to pass up.  One of the female candidates looks like a why-would-they-include-this case.

The remaining three men and three women seem to be in basically the same bin so far as Keltham's ability to tell who would work out.  Given that Keltham has a demonstrated ability to successfully interact with Chelish girls and less such demonstrated ability to interact with any boys his age, he feels a certain impulse to take the three female candidates in this round, and let more male candidates wait pending seeing what happens with the first two?

...Is that blatant rationalization?

Possibly?  He'd kind of expect to end up saturated on romantic options either way?  It's just that Keltham doesn't feel like he actually has much of a basis on which to make more decisions here aside from noticing his own nervousness about what young-adult masculine gendertropes are like around here.

Keltham has arrived at his opinions; what does Carissa think about these dozen?

"Do you in fact want boys?" asks Carissa, who predicted internally a seventy percent chance he takes them. "Many wizard schools don't do mixed-sex classes because girls behave differently around boys and vice versa."

"There's two men who look incredibly promising and Civilization sure wouldn't exclude them on that basis.  Having them sent as candidates at all implies that at least somebody in Governance doesn't consider that a blocker problem?  How much of a problem is it liable to be in Cheliax?"

"Not a huge one, not all wizard schools do that and I don't think anyone has noticed one way or the other being resoundingly better. But, you know, Governance just wants metals as fast as possible, you can want other stuff, if you think it'll make your life harder."

"In Civilization I'd have more faith in my ability to determine after the first week of candidacy whether anything grimdark was happening or not... seems like a dumb thing not to test at some point, though, the Project isn't going to stay a one-male operation forever."

"Suppose we ignore that part, what's your opinions on the twelve?  I've got mine."

She has ranked them by suitability in an order that's nearly the same as his. "If the project weren't so top secret I'd be inclined to take them all knowing we might fire half in a week but firing people is really inconvenient with all this top-secretness."

"Think I wouldn't want this one in the next round," taps the weakest female candidate, "and given the inconvenience of turning people down, I feel inclined not to try more candidates than I want to hire if they all work out, so that there isn't anyone I have to tell that they were good but not good enough... am I being too Evil there, in your opinion?  This is kind of important and maybe I should do the Good thing and tell them to suck it up."

"Personally I would be as Evil as I wanted. You don't owe it to Golarion to make your job stressful for the sake of inventing sanitation faster, even if that worked in the long run."

...he kind of does owe it?  He's not that absolutely devoid of Good and everything he has to trade is given him by grace of dath ilan.

Okay, maybe the amount of internal stress that thought generated was a warning sign.  There's also penalties if he feels pressured into hiring too many people; that is also a wisdom out of Civilization.

What's the next-best alternative to going with only eight candidates such that he could in principle hire all of them if all of them performed well enough?  Asking for eleven candidates but warning them that there's only eight seats, they might end up stuck in Secret Project Limbo for years if not selected, warning the male candidates that they may be slightly more at risk than female candidates...

"Let's go with eight, the two most promising men and all women except the unpromising one.  Warn everyone except the top two men and top three women that they're starting from a slightly less favored position for a permanent job, if anybody doesn't want to show up given that, go to the alternate male candidates.  If as expected the gendertropes mix okay, then we'll consider men and women on an even basis in future hiring rounds."

"I'd be tempted to only go with the five most promising candidates, except that I don't know if we can get more, and I also wouldn't get to check my sense of who's more or less promising. In Civilization - where expanding quickly wasn't that urgent, and people wouldn't need time-consuming Law lectures just to get up to speed on basic thinking, and you could just go on looking for more candidates, and I actually trusted at all my sense of who seems promising - the common wisdom would strongly say to only try the five really promising candidates at this stage of expansion, and beg Cheliax to please provide more like those."

"I don't know whether to expect Cheliax could find more like these if you told them to or not. The age range and Intelligence scores loosely suggest to me they looked at every known intelligent person who is hireable for something like this and there's not a much deeper pool to keep searching."

That's a frankly terrifying thought about a country of twenty million people.  He might have to expand his hiring search outside Cheliax sooner than any person would have considered sane from a Security standpoint.

"All right, you know, if this is basically the best hiring pool we're ever going to get, let's go with trying all eleven except the bottom woman, and if all eleven seem to be working out great I'll suck up the rapid expansion and tell Maillol I'm sorry about having failed to correctly forecast my hiring needs."

"Actually, maybe ask the woman on the bottom of the ordering if she wants to try too, despite my prior prediction being that she'll fail quickly and despite what happens to her if she fails?  Maybe I'm just wrong about who's promising and somebody in Governance is right."

"Seems worth letting her take the chance if she's not costing us anything. If someone thought she was worth passing along they might've had reason that wasn't in the file. Of course, the reason might've been 'as a personal favor', that is how things sometimes work around here."

"Are you shitting kidding me?  Now I'm wondering if I should truthspell everyone on this list about whether that happened."

"...which seems like a huge act of tyranny, wow, short word for that, but flaming shit Carissa that's not a good thing to have to worry about."

"I'm sorry! I hope that's not what happened! But I live on this planet so I'm telling you sometimes that's what happens! People get in trouble for it if they get caught but they don't always get caught!"

"I wasn't blaming you!"

"...I'll check with Maillol about whether anything seems suspicious, try to get a sense of how bad it would be to truthspell everyone coming in, or if I could ask Security to add a question to their usual screens about whether they fiddled the application process or if their competence is being exaggerated.  If Maillol doesn't flag anything, I'll go ahead with the plan to invite all twelve but with varying degrees of warning about how doomed they might be.  Sound like a plan?"