"Yeah, uh, but... suppose we get an ordinary third-circle wizard who is not Carissa Sevar to try it.  What steps are they going to fall down on?  And can you make a magic item - potentially a very expensive one, that takes you a while to craft - that lets the third-circle wizard get past those?"

"Where making ten +4 headbands is probably a more important goal than making one +6 headband, I think, though it's a tough call... actually, I shouldn't even try to guess that, my actual motive here is that I suspect that building the Item of +4 Headband Creation is going to be noticeably easier than crafting the Item that boosts making anything other people consider difficult, and even you should try doing the easier difficult unprecedented thing first."

"Armillary amulets are that, they get people past a bunch of the obvious blocks in magic item creation - I think you could probably invent one that was narrower, that just had the structure for Fox's Cunning in particular, and more useful for that - or maybe a series of them, for individual places-where-people-get-stuck - I would probably have to watch a mediocre enchanter work, to see at what points they don't understand what they're supposed to do or don't do it with enough precision -"

"Heh.  I was going to raise the clever-sounding idea of making lots of little items that helped on particular difficult steps of the manufacturing process, instead of one big item, but I see you're already there."

"Make it so, Carissa.  I'll approve the budget requisition for one mediocre enchanter.  About as good as you think we can afford to put on mass-producing +4 headbands, if we want to produce lots and lots of those at a tenth of the current cost and sell at one-fifth the current price."

"We're doing the thing."

" - yeah. Yeah, we are. We're going to - be the most important thing that's ever happened. And be very, very rich."

"For the revolution of the world!" Keltham says.

Nobody in Golarion is gonna get that reference, but he says it anyways.

PL-timestamp:  Day 47

PL-timestamp:  Day 48

PL-timestamp:  Day 49

Well, going on their increasing mastery of the Periodic Table, it seems increasingly clear that what Golarion calls by the name 'lead' is in fact Element-82.

WHICH GOLARION IS USING IN PIPES THAT CARRY DRINKING WATER.

AND IN MAKEUP.

AND IN PAINT.

INSIDE HOUSES THAT CONTAIN CHILDREN.

AND SOME PEOPLE APPARENTLY USE IT IN COOKING POTS.

That could be half an Intelligence point off the entire planetary average, right there.

Carissa, you know what else Golarion is going to need besides a lot of Intelligence headbands?  A lot of items that cast Neutralize Poison, multiple times per day so that they can sweep all the affected populations.  If that even works against Element-82 poisoning - he guesses they'll have to test that first -

...how is this going to get announced.  They have to tell literally everyone in the world immediately but Keltham's presence is still mostly a secret, how will people - know it's true - how does that sort of thing work in Golarion, there's no prediction markets, how does this civilization end up collectively knowing anything -

Mostly this civilization doesn't. However if Cheliax starts a sudden initiative to replace all their lead things and explains that a clever Chelish wizard figured this out and convincingly demonstrated it, then probably the places that think Cheliax's government is basically competent will consider it themselves and do it if it's cheap enough.

Maybe they can pitch some paladin orders on paying for all the Neutralize Poison items to be distributed in the countries where the government can't afford to.

No.

No, chickenshit, this is too important, this is Worldwound-grade catastrophic.  Even in Golarion, there has to be a better way to communicate that warning than by example.

Start by informing all the Worldwound-signatory countries at the top level.  Cheliax doesn't need to explain how it knows, it just needs to make it visible that it's immediately banned Element-82 coming into contact with human biology mortal biology, they don't know how it generalizes to races that don't interbreed with humans but there's no point in taking chances until they do -

There's something horribly wrong here and Carissa doesn't have words for it.

It's not just that Cheliax's interests are probably not served by the people in other countries being smarter, though that's true; alter-Carissa is still feeling some of this sense that there's something horribly wrong here, she thinks. 

"Keltham - 

- how expensive would it have to be, to make human biology not come into contact with Element-82, before it'd seem reasonable to you for Cheliax to not make that law?"

Element-82 makes people violent, not just stupid.  Keltham would say "Chaotic" except that he suspects Golarion's "Chaotic" at least as practiced by Chaotic gods is just a different fragment of math, and Element-82 is not that.  Just dropping intelligence headbands on people wouldn't be enough to make up for what it does - maybe boosted Wisdom would do it, Keltham doesn't know -

Element-82 does damage that Civilization thinks it can't cure.  Maybe Golarion can cure it.

...Keltham doesn't know.  He doesn't know what's too expensive for a country where people earn 10 or 20 gold pieces per year.

They've got to at least stop making more lead pipes, stop making more lead paint.

Get those cooking pots away from children.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm not - arguing with that - I feel sick, actually, to think that we're all just - worse - than we have to be - that I'm worse than I have to be - and it might be that even once they know, most places don't replace their pipes, because they're too poor -"

"Maybe Hell will pay to do it everywhere," she says, and the difference between alter-Carissa and normal-Carissa feels more acute than it has in a long time, and she has no idea why.

Keltham sends a priority message to Lrilatha.

Keltham is going to be more vigilant about checking this Interaction Outside Cheliax than he's been vigilant about a lot of other things happening outside the Project's bounds.

What kind of summit will be held.  What kind of announcement will be made, given that Keltham is being kept secret.  He wants to know how other countries react, when they react, what they're doing inside and outside Cheliax.

...Asmodia is going to put her own voice down as pleading very strongly that they just actually do this and don't try to elaborately fake it.  No, they're not going to be able to tell Keltham about countries' actual reactions to Cheliax, the Infernal Empire, making an announcement like that, but they can tell Keltham honestly how much progress is being made in which countries.  Contessa Lrilatha can swear things to Keltham about it.

None of this is going to matter on the sort of military timescales that they're heading for with spellsilver production.  It may matter to keeping Keltham contained another week.  They don't want him looking outward from the Fortress like this.  Everything else should be secondary to Contessa Lrilatha being able to swear things to Keltham, and the progress reports they give him making sense, and there not being any delays while people try to figure out what to fake.  They cannot afford a repeat of the Pilar candy curse incident, the Asmodia headband incident, not when Keltham is looking outward like this, it all has to be real.

- the Chelish government is in fact against its citizenry being violent and stupid. Not uncomplicatedly so - there are certainly advantages to violent stupid people -- but on the whole, less violence and less stupidity is an improvement, and one they'd probably make all concerns of Project secrecy aside. 

The Chelish government is probably in favor of people in other places being more violent and more stupid; it wouldn't necessarily be expected to send them to Hell, but it weakens them. But it weakens them much, much less than a Chelish advantage on the Project does. 

That makes the most important consideration here what it conveys to Osirion, in particular, which is suspected to have guessed much of what's going on, and who it's probably going to be necessary to go to war with at some point.

Well, Osirion will either try to devote resources to fighting lead, and devote less to its military, which serves Cheliax; or it'll not do that, which they can swear to to Keltham.

Lrilatha's recommendation to the Crown is to make the announcement, and start replacing all the pipes and pots, and let her sit down with Keltham and talk him through what they're trying so far. 

Also they should try lead poisoning some villages much more aggressively than is presently being done, to see if against expectations more violent and stupider humans are good to have. It's the ilani thing to do.

PL-timestamp:  Day 50

"We have looked into this before, though I don't doubt that another world might have finer measuring instruments and more information."

"Findings when we looked into it?"

"Pots seem bad, pipes seem fine. - and it's really hard to make pipes without lead, it's by far the best cheap metal for it. We're not doing anything about pots because I don't really have a principled account of what we should do. We could warn people in classes in the temple. We haven't really any grounds to take their pots away just because they're poisoning themselves. We could give out free not-lead pots, or swap them for leaded ones -"

"How sure would we have to be that Keltham has more information than us, for it to be worth spending the money to swap everyone's pots - say we fund it by delaying the expansion of schools -"