WHERE DO PRICES COME FROM.  WHAT DO THEY MEAN.  WHERE DO ANY PRICES COME FROM LITERALLY AT ALL.

Prices are equalizers of supply and demand functions.  The more you offer to pay for something, the greater the supply of it you can get for that price.  The cheaper you offer to sell something, the more people want to buy it.

If you consider all the apples being sold inside a city, then the numbers of apples bought, and apples sold, are always equal.  So the price of apples is the price that causes the amount of apples wanted to equal the amount of apples that can get supplied.  Though, to have this always be true, you might need to include implicit costs, like, if you want a special kind of apple that takes an additional five minutes to get shipped to you, the cost of the apple to you is five minutes plus some copper, not just the copper.

Oh.

Hm.

Asmodia will think about this (with boosted Cunning and Splendour, she does not say) and then probably return with Additional Questions.

...it is occurring to Keltham that, if Asmodia has not previously known this, nothing to do with money or economics must have made any sense to her at all.

No it DIDN'T but that was LESS OF A PROBLEM when she was just studying to fight DEMONS and not trying to CONSTRUCT GOLARION CIVILIZATION in a way that wouldn't result in AN ENDLESS SERIES OF DISASTERS.

Asmodia.  Relax at least slightly.

Doing this in a way that doesn't produce an endless series of disasters is primarily Keltham's responsibility, plus the Very Serious People in Chelish governance.  Nobody is expecting Asmodia to handle it singlehandedly.

Asmodia keeps her eternal screaming internal.  It is internal eternal screaming.

"The curriculum at school to be a Worldwound wizard doesn't have...much else. Because you'll get a good salary as a soldier, and you're a minimum of three years away from doing anything else."

Does Carissa happen to know whether Golarion in general has the concept of 'price' == 'supply-demand equalizer'?

"I think I've heard people say things that might've been more or less the same thing as that? I doubt my father would be taken aback if you told him that."

Security, pass this thought to Sevar:

THEN SOMEBODY WHO KNOWS THIS STUFF NEEDS TO BE INSIDE THIS FORTRESS WHERE ASMODIA CAN ASK THEM QUESTIONS AND THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE FOUR DAYS EARLIER

ABADARANS. THE PEOPLE WHO COME UP WITH AND KNOW STUFF LIKE THAT ARE ABADARANS. I THINK ABADAR LITERALLY CHOOSES YOU IF YOU THINK OF IT YOURSELF.

AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Asmodia politely requests any and all available books of Abadaran theology, now, uncensored, even if they have to be teleported in from the fucking moon.

Get them to her, keep an eye on her to make sure they're not defection-inspiring somehow.

"That does make me think, though," she says, "that it shouldn't work to ban high prices for bread in times of famine, but it does work, so there's got to be something else going on."

...that sounds like literally the textbook example of something that's impossible?  If you impose a ceiling on the legible financial price of a good, it just adds on other inconveniences that are part of the full implicit price until demand decreases far enough to match supply.

Yes she noticed that implication of the thing he just said, but every famine she's heard of the country having the famine bans raising the price of bread. 

So like all the bread sells out in the first minute and then everybody who didn't order fast enough goes to the afterlife, but at least the survivors get to keep most of their money?

Or all the bread sells out in the first minute and then everybody else scrambles to illegally rebuy bread from the fastest bread buyers at the supply-demand equalizing price, and fast-bread-buying is an incredibly competitive and profitable line of criminal work?

Or people stop making bread and instead make 'wheatcake' which is totally not bread because it has a different sugar-to-salt ratio, and therefore can sell at a higher price when oops all the 'bread' they made earlier has sold out at the legal price sorry about that?

...Keltham literally does not see how someplace as uncoordinated as Golarion could do this literally at all, or why they would be trying to, for that matter.

She thinks mostly the bakers make the loaves smaller. But also they do it because otherwise people will get very angry about rising bread prices and riot, and if bread prices haven't risen they won't riot.

...and Governance is regulating the price, per 'loaf', of loaves of unregulated size, because this fools people with Intelligence 10 and Governance has Intelligence 16+headbands?

Keltham is frankly starting to see why people in Golarion would be afraid of hearing arguments from smart people.

...yeah pretty much that.

PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Night

"Um.  Hi."

"...I'm not actually very good at seductive.  Per se.  I don't know if you've already noticed this fact about me."

They're sitting in the Keltham Seduction Room, which is still mildly pretty at night.  It'd be prettier if it wasn't cloudy out, and the ocean was lit by moonlight.  As it stands, they're lit by Ione's Dancing Lights, which are good for evening quality, but still bright enough to reflect off the window and prevent the dim beach from really being seen, from here.

It's still more romantic than anywhere else in the fortress, anyways.

"It'd be easier to notice in a less romantically crowded environment."

"Civilization does have any gendertropes for people who aren't great at coming up with seductive lines, or coming up with things to say when the silence stretches.  Mostly, the gendertrope is that you declare yourself to be bad at filling silences, and then it's the other person's responsibility to come up with things to say."

"I mean I have an infinite supply of questions, just... the romantic ones aren't coming so much to mind.  Like, right now I'm wondering, what happens when two people both declare themselves to be bad at filling silences?"