"If She had a general version of that you'd expect Her to be using it more aggressively, really. Unless that was just a test, or unless its usage in Cheliax itself runs into the interdiction in a way using it in one fortress doesn't - 

- why? Those soldiers were defending our world! Even if you could, what do you gain - "

"Does the Worldwound treaty keep working if the gods, and soon the rulers, are expecting Cheliax to conquer the world?  Why defend it so Cheliax can take it?  Maybe they just walk away from the Worldwound and leave Cheliax to defend it entirely on its own, right away, by way of slowing our rise."

Maillol says it without any visible emotion, for all he's spent half his life there, but Carissa, who spent only six years, feels a surge of emotion, and enjoys it as one of the first such feelings she's had in a while that didn't need to be carefully managed. 

"I hope, one day in Hell, they regret that specifically, on top of everything else."

PL-timestamp:  Day 84

Spellsilver production down to 2/5 usual cost!  They got here in one jump from 3/5 to beneath the 50% cost barrier.  The level where different things start to become possible in the economy, rather than you just having a sales advantage over existing sellers, even if they don't get any more improvements from here - and they're still going strong.

Though it's still 2/3 if you only use tier-2 Prestidigitators.  Or more like 90% if you use only non-core-Project Prestidigitators (Asmodia reports).

(He'd be even happier if not for that lingering, recently reactivated part of him, wondering if his improved spellsilver processes actually matter to anyone, or if they're just something that somebody dreamed up to keep Keltham busy for unguessable reasons.  Well, besides the obvious guess about 'Cheliax' or whoever only really needing him for his genetics.)

The +2 headband items are successfully employed by some average Wondrous Items enchanters to make a +2 headband at quadruple speed. Carissa hands out +2 headbands to everyone in the Project who doesn't yet have them.

He landed in a broken world, and he's fixing it.

+1sd to start, and more on the way.

PL-timestamp:  Day 85

Contessa Lrilatha comes to the fortress to deliver her proposal for a one-month massive push on production of spellsilver using Project techniques. There's accumulated demand to catch up on and some big needs that are worth meeting now even if spellsilver's going to rapidly get even cheaper than this, and to get started on some work that'll take advantage of the possibility of it getting rapidly even cheaper than this.

They want to give all the non-core-Project Prestidigitators Asmodia's working with headbands, now that Carissa's setup for rapidly producing +2 headbands is working, and try to train several hundred new ones, including moving a bunch of people over from other industries and paying them to try to pick this up instead; they want to open several new mining sites; they want to spend a very unsustainable amount of money as a one-off to encourage the transition towards a much more spellsilver focused economy, and they want to make a ton of spellsilver very fast.

Here are her projections about what next month's project financials report to Keltham will look like under various scenarios about how well the push works out. 

She has one of Carissa's glibness pins, because why not, even though her Bluff was already ludicrous. 

It's at this point that Keltham realizes that, yeah, Cheliax wasn't really taking anything seriously until he was practically finished with his entire product development phase and delivering the equivalent of a finished prototype, which is maybe just how worlds fundamentally are absent competitive venture capital markets and prediction markets.  And that he was too embarrassed about socially pushing, to correct any of that by demanding, like, ten times this budget, immediately, please.

Wow.  Imagining making that request still makes him wince, even imagining doing it over knowing how things would turn out.

...he really is not actually a mad entrepreneur by nature, apparently.

Because, yes, this is obviously how you'd do things if you were taking anything at all seriously.

Oh well.

Probably nobody really got hurt, except a bunch of children drowning in ponds because he didn't want to take off his social-comfort clothes, and they all get afterlives, right.

...It would've been nice if he'd noticed that under his Owl's Wisdom.

Keltham will nod along to everything.  He probably wants to take another hour to review in more detail, and a day before signing anything, but he is basically completely on board with this proposal.

Great; any questions he has will be conveyed to her.

She thanks him, with great sincerity, for all his work, and leaves.

PL-timestamp:  Day 86

He signs, and manages to feel some enthusiasm about it.

These dark thoughts are probably some kind of weird brain state that's terrified of actually succeeding at the thing.  Or a brain state that is having social difficulties about massive bets being made on his work, even when the prospective expectation of success is clear and materially evidenced, not resting on his personal assurance at all; if something weird goes wrong, it will still be very clear what the reasonable prospects were and that they didn't rest on his promise alone.

The next stage of the Keltham corruption plan is a very pretty set of earrings Carissa has just completed. They act as Geas, with a simple command: don't say stop. The order Keltham gave her, with the secret logic Abrogail saw - that if she ever did refuse him, he'd know the premise of the whole thing had fallen apart. So this, of course, is the way to take that certainty from him. 

They're very impressive workmanship.

She's going to wait, she thinks, until after the suspension. Things feel - fragile. Not any specific things, just things in general. Keltham seemed persuaded by Lrilatha; Security says that no one has been inspired to treason by the knowledge that Cheliax is about to win for good. Why risk breaking their momentum towards the most difficult, terrifying, lonely thing she's ever imagined commanding?

She's terrified of it. She keeps thinking of bizarre and implausible ways she might fail to wake up. What if Abrogail's deposed. What if Osirion attacks. What if Civilization is wiped off the face of the planet but Carissa, trapped in stone, can't go to Hell. 

It's the winning move, and she likes winning moves, and anyway she has to serve Asmodeus first whatever she happens to want, but she can't help it feeling like the worst thing in the world. And she can't help feeling, on some deeper level, like -

- she's gotten much better at what she's been charged with doing. She is more Asmodean. Subirachs is pleased. She has encountered no indications that Abrogail and the Most High are anything less than delighted with how she has expertly managed the falling-apart disaster of a project she inherited into the greatest triumph in Chelish history. Keltham is in love with her, and whether or not she's still in love with him she doesn't think about too much; she's trying to have less feelings these days anyway. She has a new guiding heresy, of sorts, which is that the more of the flaws in yourself you correct before Hell the more of what and who you are you get to retain in your shaping into a devil. 

The Rovagug cultists have been devoured in Abaddon, and Peranza's in Hell, and it's really a testament to human weakness and fragility that she can manage to be haunted by both of those things, but she can.

PL-timestamp:  Day 87

PL-timestamp:  Day 88

PL-timestamp:  Day 89

Okay.  It's pretty clear they're going to get spellsilver into the target range.

It's time to consider what it is he and the Project want to do next, after that.

...is he going to regret not using an Owl's Wisdom on that, he wonders.

He supposedly doesn't owe that to anyone or anything, but -

No.  He doesn't owe that to anyone or anything.

Okay, he's starting to lose patience with himself here.  What is it that he'd supposedly see, if he used an Owl's Wisdom on himself?  If he already knows what he's scared of seeing, and is going around gloomy and depressed about it, every scrap of common sense out of dath ilan says to just face it already, sheesh.

He could make sulfa drugs, Keltham thinks.  Probably.  He doesn't really know how, but he has a rough idea what sort of chemical that should be, they have all kinds of reaction-pathway tricks up their sleeves now.  That will make more people survive bacterial infections if they can't afford Remove Disease, and their population density will go up until they're more vulnerable to disease and things are brought back into equilibrium, unless he can first master contraception, or maybe roadmaking so that there can be more cities with lower density, which possibly need to be supported by better crops.

It's a big tangle and he knows this, so why is this a sad thought?

...Maybe it's that there's now an untaken option for thinking about it, which is... cast Augury on what happens if he puts on a +2 intelligence headband.  Augury isn't perfect, is the problem... but then the probability of disaster isn't that high in the first place, and he could just take the headband off if anything starts to go wrong.

While that option exists, he has not, in fact, thought as hard as possible about how to cut the medicine-sanitation-agriculture-density-contraception tangle.  So the thought isn't really quiescent inside him.  He just thought it would take a huge self-sacrifice, so then that thought got to linger around making him feel guilty about not making that sacrifice.

...the problem with that is that Augury has a 30-minute time horizon, and if an intelligence headband goes great, he's going to want to go on wearing it, judging by how much everybody on the Project is constantly wearing headbands, now.  Going around wearing one of those for the rest of his life is going to alter his personality.

Well, there comes a point, where you decide to either do the thing, or not do the thing, which you do by actually managing to evaluate it with your utilityfunction or your cheap human approximation thereof of 'wanting'.  Or, on a meta-level, you decide to either think about the thing more, or not think about the thing more, and either way you're supposed to be able to get over it, at that point.

There's the war on Nidal, too...

And this is a depressing thought, why?  What does his brain think he's supposed to do about that?  Is he possibly just supposed to be depressed because Nidal is awful?  Hm?