Carissa writes down that as a fourth circle wizard and a much better than average arms and armor enchanter she could make 100gp a week in salary selling scries and doing magic item commissions, while the second and third circle wizards would be making more like 10gp/week. She's not sure if this matters for what a fair wage is, but it seems weird if her value add here is smaller than her value add making keen speed longswords.

She thinks that if the project budget is large enough that 100gp/week/researcher is in budget, then it is probably still a significant underestimate of their value created and is enough money for them to get whatever they want as a practical matter. If the project budget is smaller it should probably be 10gp/week but this would definitely be the researchers or at least Carissa accepting much less than she could make elsewhere for the potential for larger future gains.

The other proposals are for less money, between 5 and 20gp/week, possibly because they're not produced by fourth circle wizards who could be very rich independently.

Well, he's got enough info here to go see whether anything can be accomplished by talking to the site manager.  Did Carissa want to be with him for that?  It's not obvious that Ione/Asmodia/Meritxell need to stick around for that, they are free to depart if they so will.

(It's not clear that, besides Asmodia having her contract on hand, those three really needed to be here either.  This whole conversation didn't end up going the way it would in Civilization, what with, say, equity not really existing.  But Keltham would've felt odd if the tier-1 first-employee-semifounders hadn't been called in by the tier-0 superfounder for at least this much consultation.)

Carissa found the absence of Ione calling her stupid to be informative, and she bets they appreciated being looped in. Off to the site manager's office, then.

Site Manager Ferrer Maillol is a grandfather-aged man who looks visibly harried.  Keltham and Carissa are ushered in past his outer office right away, but even Keltham has to wait a moment while Maillol finishes talking to somebody and hands them a signed piece of paper that they then rush off with.

He nonetheless manages something like a half-grin as he rises from behind his desk to give Keltham a brief bow before reseating himself.

"Keltham," he says, his voice warm if tired.  "I'll be frank, I expected you to storm into this office a lot earlier, and I'm glad it could wait this long.  If you think the situation you hear about now is a horrible chaotic mess, it was worse yesterday and only slightly better just before the Nidal attack."

Carissa is aware that Ferrar Maillol, if he's noticed that she likes him quite a lot, would think this contemptible, but she does. He has such good Bluff of a very different flavor from everyone else she interacts with regularly. And he was at the Worldwound like a sensible person, not in Egorian which she increasingly suspects is poisonous to sense.

"Good to see we're being frank here.  I admit, I'd been wondering if there was a reason the actual site management was being hidden from me."

"First couple of days, I was more or less hiding from you, yes.  There was a vast amount of chaos to order, after this project had to be established completely from scratch at Asmodeus's will with no existing command hierarchy responsible for originating it.  We had several different - factions in Governance, I suppose you could term them - trying to grab control of what they saw as a potential source of future influence and funding.  It took direct intervention from both the Queen and the Grand High Priestess to make that even mostly not happen.  I wasn't just busy, I was entirely unsure of what sort of person you were and what would happen if you did storm into my office, ask strange questions, develop some very alien picture of what was going on, and start trying to make your own moves or demands inside a frankly volatile situation."

"Then, of course, Nidal attacked, and three-quarters of the government went off to fight."

"I'm still not caught up on transcripts and reports and I'm not sure I ever will be, at this rate.  But it sounds like you've had some long conversations about Golarion, and what I'm saying now should not be so absolutely strange to you as it would have been on day one.  Dare I so hope?"

"Again, keeping it frank, my reaction is that you're considerably underestimating how well I would have taken on day one to being told that I did not understand what was really going on, and that it would have been a bad idea for me to interfere in something.  But I will concede that this, itself, was something you had no way of knowing, if your" prior "mental image before the evidence was something more like a random Intelligence 18 person from Golarion."

"Maybe a year later when you're much more used to things, we'll get together on the Project anniversary and laugh about what might've happened if Keltham had come into this office on day one, and heard what was going on, and decided that it was very reasonable to ask to speak himself with some of those ambitious bureaucrats that the Queen and Grand High Priestess were trying to gently shoo away.  Or perhaps we'll have a laugh about how they couldn't possibly have managed to confuse you, even then."

"I think it's more that you're underestimating the degree to which, if you'd told me I was about to cause a disaster, and Carissa nodded along and said yes that sure sounded like a disaster to her too, I would have exercised my vast capacities of inaction and just not done that thing.  Civilization is made out of both negative and positive spaces, its shape is as much what it doesn't do as what it does.  But, fine, you had no way of knowing."

"I admit that even on day six - letting my Worldwound arrival in the evening be day zero - I am still dismayed to hear about the actual hierarchical structure of Chelish mini-governments, as I did only a few moments ago.  And more dismayed to hear now, that the job of a project manager in Golarion includes managing not just the people under the project, but the people above the project having fights about it."

"You don't have that in dath ilan," Maillol says.  He lets some of his real shock into his voice; it can be a bad habit to adopt, but if you do have the relevant skills not to overuse it, there's no point in faking an emotion when the real emotion is ready to hand.

"Not more than momentarily in any healthy organization.  It would require that something go very visibly wrong, in a way that would cause the one person responsible for having that not happen to notice using their organizational eyes, and they'd come in and rearrange things using their organizational hands."

"So I've been at this a while, which you might guess, they wouldn't have put somebody inexperienced on this, divine vision or not.  I've been running projects, smaller ones admittedly, since seventeen years before our Queen took power in Asmodeus's name fifteen years ago."

"If someday you worry that you're feeling too cheerful, or just that it's way too easy for you to fall asleep at night, come into my office and I'll tell you about what project management was like in Cheliax before."

"Oh, so you are the priest from the Worldwound, then, the one I originally asked to pray to Asmodeus.  I was wondering if that was real or if I just hadn't seen any other grandfather-'gendertroped' people since then and couldn't tell the difference."

"Clerics of Asmodeus were project managers even before Asmodeus and the current Queen took over?"

"Better than having your project managed by someone who's not a priest of Asmodeus."

"I stayed out of the revolution, of course.  Don't think I need to explain to you why I had to stay neutral."

Carissa isn't actually sure she understands why. Is it the Lawful thing to do? Maybe if you're committed on another project?

"I think it's obvious, but why trust what you can verify:  If clerics of Asmodeus worked against employer interests to help Asmodeus take over countries, nobody would hire them."

"Yep."

If you manage a Worldwound installation, you have met clerics of Abadar.

"I am frankly, not totally happy with things having gone the way they did.  I suspect I'll estimate later that there are processes I could've set in motion a few days earlier if you'd risked a conversation, as would in fact have been safe.  But, you didn't know, so fine."

"So.  Basic questions.  Who's your own manager and what's their role in Chelish Governance, what's the further line of reporting to the Queen or the Grand High Priestess or whichever of the two is slightly more in charge, what's this project's budget and what's the, series of concentric enclosing budgets above that up to Governance's budget."

"For that matter, what is Governance's budget?"

"Don't panic."

"Nobody knows."

"Why exactly should I not panic?"

"Because it won't actually help."

"Very sensible."

Ferrer Maillol can give rough guesses for various quantities, and does.

By far the largest expense on Project Lawful so far would've been Raise Dead on the Security killed in the Nidal assault, at 5000gp per Raise.  But that doesn't actually get paid by Project Lawful, it gets paid by the part of the government that Raises people.

De facto, the largest recurring expense on Project Lawful is by far the senior wizards making up Security.  They'll run around 500gp/week apiece, and while it's not considered good practice for anyone including Maillol to know exactly how many Security there are, there'd be more than six and less than thirty.  That doesn't get paid out of Project Lawful's budget proper, it's a military expenditure by the branch of the military that got authorized by Governance to post Security here; after taking into account considerations that included a request, and payment, by Broom's faction, for there to be better protection here.

The actual Project Lawful, be it clear, has not yet at this point been assigned that kind of money flow.  In part, because Maillol hasn't requested that kind of money flow apart from particular expenses, because it would have weakened his negotiating and political combat position in trying to keep lines of Governance above relatively simple and clear and prevent anybody else from swallowing Project Lawful; which, to be clear, the Queen could prevent, if it came to that, but only by expending her own political capital, which wouldn't be a good career move for Maillol himself unless there was a reason.

Things are now a bit clearer, but not to the point that somebody from dath ilan should get their hopes up.