They would totally beat actual Cheliax. Carissa would advise the Queen to just immediately surrender. 

"Meritxell, I could beat actual Nidal, given time to scale up in Cheliax, that's why the god-war started."

"With the ability to learn magic and a bunch of allied Golarion nations! I think it'd really be very hard to win a war if the other side had magic and you didn't. But I don't know what your Governance secretly has in store and I'd guess it's kind of a lot."

"Civilization would cheat.  They'd figure out exactly what mental state somebody had to be in to absorb extra magic like Carissa did during her date with Abrogail, and then some sixth-rank Keepers would go into that exact mental state on purpose because they could just do that, and very very quickly Civilization would have its own powerful wizards.  Or ninth-rank Keepers would talk-control Nidal's ninth-circle wizards, who would be under the mistaken impression that their magical shielding prevented them from being mind-controlled by people who knew vastly vastly more about how their own minds worked than they did."

"Seriously, Nidal is not at all the issue here, the question is whether Civilization without local allies can take Zon-Kuthon."

Gregoria is pretty sure she would in fact ask this question here but is she, like, allowed to?

- yes. If she's sure she would in alter-Cheliax. 

"Her Majestrix tortured Carissa, right, which - worked because of the kind of person Carissa is, and might not work on a non-masochistic person at all. But - if it does, in fact, work on anybody - dath ilan would do that, to win a war?"

"It's very unlikely they'd have to, they'd just analyze the real phenomenon underlying all that and figure out how to reproduce the same effect more simply, quickly, powerfully.  But also yes.  There'd be - probably at least a hundred thousand people in Civilization who'd volunteer for that, to save Civilization, or for that matter, just to save Nidal?  Even in a Lawful Good civilization, you're going to throw some people as Evil and Chaotic as me.  Well, if you go looking in the other direction, you're also going to find some people completely off the deep end of Lawful Goodness."

"Also keep in mind that depending on what spellsilver is, exactly, it's not improbable that somebody can make a call and get a million pounds of it delivered in three hours."

"I'm not sure you've grasped the sheer distinction of scale between one young slightly-above-average kid from Civilization getting tossed into Golarion with no prior preparation, and what would happen if actual Civilization got a two-way portal to Golarion.  There might be a war with Zon-Kuthon.  There would not be a war with Nidal.  There would be a rescue operation on Nidal."

"Too bad we don't have the portal, then," Meritxell says.

Carissa is briefly incredibly curious how far off the deep end of Lawful Goodness one can go and what those people are like. She doesn't really want to know, except she totally does.

Back to lecturing.  How might his young apprentices defend themselves against such a dastardly assault as that showcased in his recent experiment, assuming some more refined version of that experiment which would actually work?

Gregoria: "Think what price would strike you as fair for each item separately, rather than comparing them? Except I did try to do that."

"And what'd results you get?"

"Uh, mostly it's hard to think what price would seem fair without seeing the actual book."

"Standard technique when you're interrogating yourself about something is to make up average-sounding details, any time your internal query blocks on a lack of detail.  It's not like you'd be committing to buying the actual item, sight unseen."

"It would have taken me a lot longer to figure out my sexuality after getting to Golarion, if, considering questions like 'Am I okay renting Carissa to the Queen?', I had been, 'Oh, but I know so little at this point about what the Queen is like, or what will happen to Carissa', and let that stop me there.  Instead I filled in all unknown details with conditions that felt relatively friendly to my sexuality, to check if there were any possible conditions I was okay with at all."

"I'll actually go ahead and tell everyone to try putting prices on both items they considered, now, and any time your brain says 'I don't know' you just fill in something plausible and keep going until it produces a price."

Sure, they'll try that, and mostly end up valuing all the books between 1 and 3 gold with some individual differences.

"One book costs upwards of half a day's wages for a very well-paid second-circle wizard.  Right then.  I need to check your book manufacturing technology at some point and see if the bottleneck is printing or papermaking or human labor to operate the machines or if there's some downstream distribution issue or what, because that is not a sustainable book price for a civilization that's trying to own a reasonable number of books."

"Anyways.  The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves.  First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things.  In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, closer to myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I'd spend to get something - including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money."

"The fact that I don't actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead own a completely unfamiliar valuable called 'gold pieces', is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind.  I'll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again."

"Your next question is why my salary of 500 gold pieces per week doesn't establish a value for my time of 71 gold pieces per day.  Because that's a trivial side payment compared to the expected worth of my future share of Project income, is why, more or less.  I could spend a day describing the reasons for the Project's exact contract structure to the Church of Asmodeus, which is something I've now been requested to do at some point, and earn 2000 gold that way.  I'm not running off to do it because it's obvious that a one-day delay in Cheliax achieving a larger economy costs much more than 2000 gold.  If at any point I found myself even considering spending a week of my time to avoid spending 500 gold pieces on something, it would be obvious that I needed a higher salary, what with, for example, all the Security wizards here also costing 500 gold a week each."

"So how much is my time actually worth in gold pieces?  What are gold pieces worth to me in terms of anything else I want?  I have no idea.  Thankfully there's a pretrained reflex and habit in my brain that already knows how to assign quantities to anything it wants, and it can go on assigning those quantities even though they're currently meaningless to me in terms of money, and so I can go on pretending to be a functional human being."

"Wizards usually want a lot of money so they can have more expensive headbands," says Tonia, "but I'm actually not sure what other people want money for, past the amount of rich that we are, such that they could - think about things in terms of money -"

"You just got a lot richer.  It would not be terribly surprising if whatever skills you do have for figuring out how much you want things, measured in gold pieces, also spend the next several weeks going haywire.  Being tossed from Ostenso wizard academy into Project Lawful is not that unlike going from dath ilan to Golarion in terms of how much financial disorientation I'd expect that to produce."

"As an interim measure, consider asking yourself how much you value things in terms of time - how much of your limited personal time per day you'd spend to get various things that you want - until money starts making sense to you again."

Tonia nods seriously.

If at some point Keltham ends up busy on contract work again, and they don't want to just take that time off, the class might consider a collective project to probe variations on what Keltham tried, to see if they can hone some version of that - maybe not involving books about magic, it might have to be something more common - into a form that reliably produces incoherent preferences in Golarionites.  Obvious locally available test subjects: the four departed Ostensos, Securities, cooks and other local support personnel.

Then they get to be like little tiny Keepers relative to the rest of Golarion, having refined for themselves a piece of knowledge that they can use to make other people's brains produce financial errors!  Further exercise, come up with your own list of ethical restrictions about how this very very very mildly terrifying knowledge should be used by Project students.

Is that an actual assignment or was he joking, Gregoria asks after a little while.

He's not sure 'assignment' is translating correctly to concepts he already has?  It's a way where somebody on this project with excess time that they want to convert into practice-at-this-sort-of-thing could, at their own option, choose to do that?  And if so, all of the people doing that should coordinate among themselves, so that they don't trip over each other in using up their limited supply of local experimental subjects.

...okay.  It sounds fun, she might try it.

Great!  Just don't use your dangerous and powerful knowledge for purposes that Asmodeus would disapprove, or Pilar and Meritxell will suddenly be standing next to you one day looking sad.