Keltham wakes up and remembers where he is.

He puts on his Splendour headband so that he can cry, and hopefully maybe get that part done with for the day.

He doesn't pray.  Keltham has hardly used any of the spells he got yesterday, though he got them identified.  And also -

He's not thinking about that right now.

Keltham will go to the library, and read more catalogues of magic items, and send word to see if Merenre and Ismat want to have breakfast that morning, when dawn is past and clerics are done praying for their spells.  Does Keltham need some sort of etiquette waiver?

Also Keltham isn't quite sure where Prince Fe-Anar falls into the Osirion scheme of things, but to be explicit, Keltham is fine if Fe-Anar wants to join the breakfast and Share Language (Baseline) people and have all Keltham's and Fe-Anar's conversation be in Baseline.

Merenre and Ismat would love to get breakfast, and they're fine with Fe-Anar, who is Merenre's father, being present. Keltham can have an etiquette waiver. (Osirians are at this point under the impression that etiquette waivers are an important dath ilani political technology). 

"I guess the only thing I'm really touchy about is Khalil, who will be disappointed if the alien can't be polite but he'll live, and I don't have to bring him up in detail when he won't even be at this particular breakfast," Ismat remarks to Merenre on their way.

"The etiquette waiver does not oblige you to invite him to breakfast again if you can't stand him. I think you'll like him, though. My father does, and my father's not overawed very easily."

"He's the only speaker of his language on the planet! If it can be done easily that's how!"

"I do like Baseline and was prepared to put up with practically any personality to get it but he has other positive qualities too! He's very arrogant and very stubborn and very mad about all of Golarion all the time ...also more traumatized than I'd have thought Asmodeus would've been allowed to do. Didn't we pay for a not-traumatized cleric of Abadar to teach us."

"Asmodeus transmitted the terms to his followers who are too Chelish to really comprehend that you can damage people if you don't even torture them, is my understanding, from speaking to Abadar of this. It was in the outcomes-distribution specified."

"Well, that was a fucking stupid specification."

They arrive at breakfast.

Keltham will actually activate the glibness pin, for this, because while Fe-Anar probably doesn't count, Merenre and Ismat sound like people to whom Asmodia's last advice may apply.

Here's Keltham, looking notably more neutral than yesterday.

"Good morning! I'm Ismat, I believe you've met my husband and his father already though."

"Keltham out of dath ilan.  Not my best morning, but any morning you walk away from is a good one, to pervert an old saying.  Salutations Ismat, greetings Merenre, hi Fe-Anar did you already tag them with Baseline?"

"I did! They were not paralyzed, awed, and profoundly distracted by the magnitude of the design effort at all. Don't have children, they'll only disappoint you.[humorous]."

"It's interesting, but I'll confess not really a priority, compared to other features of dath ilan like how it doesn't have the plague."

"It'll be either a virus or a bacterium, and if you learn how to make vaccines you can plausibly shut it down.  Cheliax seemed to think that would cause a population explosion and cities would get more crowded until the level of epidemics went back into equilibrium, unless I could develop contraception, which would have to be usable by people of Intelligence 7, or I could develop better roads to enable more less-crowded cities."

"Aside Fe-Anar, that was Very Serious intonation, endaside."

"It'll cause a population increase, but on a pretty long timescale, I'd think, relative to how fast a lot of things are going to change if spellsilver's lots cheaper. I think Cheliax may have been telling you that because they're Evil."

"Possibly.  You'd think Cheliax would be interested in anything that made them stronger in the short-term, if they were thinking that short-term themselves... well, it's possible they'd have asked for anti-plague measures next, we were prioritizing spellsilver."

"You've called this meeting, have you got an agenda?"

"I really just wanted to meet you, and to introduce you to Ismat, who may actually be the most important person here if spellsilver gets cheaper, as she's developed a method of magic item making which doesn't require the creator to be a spellcaster themselves."

"Mm-hm! Cheliax has wizards but we've got me. Not many of me trained up yet though. I might have to pivot away from doing my own crafting if I need to be working on teaching a class of fifty."

"And here I thought the plot was going to call for me somehow matching Cheliax despite their purportedly vastly greater number of wizards."

"My -"

"Carissa Sevar developed a method of speeding the production of +2 and +4 headbands, like an Armillary Amulet except 2-3 times as effective because specialized, made up of individual pieces speeding up individual stages of the process so that a dozen different wizards can work on them in parallel while trading the speed boosters amongst each other.  Now that she's developed those, presumably other wizards can make them too, though they'd need higher Spellcraft than the third-circle wizards she was boosting.  It roughly quadruples their working speed, as of the prototypes.  Carissa was fourth-circle but has Spellcraft at about seventh-circle or so, she can use spellsilver from seven feet away if that means anything to people who aren't me."

"Ismat, what's your method?  And is Carissa's boosting technology likely to apply to it, or do we just have to take a different route and scale it to hugely more people?"

"I can only do jewelry, specifically, I studied the ways jewelry differs before and after being enchanted back when I did blanks for casters to have at. I - don't see an obvious reason why you couldn't divvy up the work on a pin or an earring like that? The items would take slots, but you could just have a specialized crafting getup, half what I'm wearing is crafting-aimed already." She's wearing quite a lot of jewelry.

"With wizards doing it, Carissa thought it wasn't effective to have multiple wizards working on the same item, so a single wizard works on all stages of the item, but they trade off stage-assisting items among each other as they individually reach particular stages of their work on the headband.  Each wizard only uses one assisting item at a time."

"Does your method allow nonwizards to specialize in a single aspect of a headband and move from headband to headband in the process of assembly, so that they can master that single stage of item crafting?  How does speed compare to nonwizards, are there Intelligence requirements, are there math requirements, does the person have to go through a stage of learning to sense magic the same as if they were learning to construct a spell scaffold?"

Ismat can go on about the process she uses and teaches! Her ability to scale up has been inconvenienced by moving into the Black Dome - she can craft in it, it didn't take that long to readjust, but it makes the commute between home and storefront awfully inconvenient for her or her employees, whoever's traveling. But she has a list of things that might be amenable to more optimization pressure, and can rattle off the story of how she started making blanks for casters and tried watching them when they started working on the blanks to see if there were any steps she could simplify for them, and so on and so forth.

...it probably beats trying to match Cheliax's number of wizards using Osirion's number of wizards.  The human-learning delay time on scaling this manufacturing process sounds nontrivial, but they can parallelize that with getting spellsilver manufacture set up in Osirion at all.

Merenre is the advisor to the Pharaoh on the Keltham situation.  If they don't mind Keltham asking, what is the Keltham situation?

"The Pharaoh is intended to give Abadar what the once-mortal gods have - an aspect which can comprehend and communicate directly with mortals, when it's worth the cost. Theologically speaking, we teach that the Pharaoh is Abadar, as much as any facet of a god is that god - a very specialized facet, obviously, because this particular facet is run on a mortal mind, and sometimes it's more aspirational than concrete, but the idea is that Abadar having the capacities of the mortal gods is very valuable both to Him and to us. 

As such, we learned three months ago that a mortal in Chelish custody was a very new soul with impressive knowledge and comprehension of Abadar's domain and what He cares about, a comprehension Abadar didn't think He'd seen among mortals before, and that Abadar had paid Asmodeus to not mind control that mortal and to let that mortal leave freely, and very shortly after that that a godwar had started over that mortal. The Pharaoh was subject to the interdict, as an aspect of Abadar, and while we did run a small department which could in theory have learned of your presence in Osirion via a non-Abadar route and enabled us to try an extraction, they didn't get there through information that wasn't downstream of any divine communication.

At the same time, we got a spy report out of Cheliax that was, frankly, very confusing and that we assumed was mostly made up. The claim was made that if anyone in the Palace in Egorian had anything good happen to them, a girl with vivid pink hair would show up and offer them cake. - this was among many other claims, like that every devil in Hell knew the name of the Project Lawful girls, and that Project Lawful turned people into girls, and that Project Lawful was a time travel project to convert Taldor to Asmodeanism thousands of years ago, that were similarly not credible. But the cake one was cheap to test, so we tested it. Send someone whose wife was imminently expecting a baby to an inn just outside the palace, to celebrate. Cake Girl indeed showed up, at the appointed time. - we intended to kidnap her and offer her money to defect. She was a powerful spellcaster, and shrugged that off, and ate the cake with us, and left. 

At that point we gave all the rumors of Project Lawful substantially more credence. At the same time, bidding markets in Hell were sending a specific set of souls up to extraordinary prices. We looked into it. We pieced together much of what was going on - though the group that had no knowledge of Abadar's interests here did not have enough information to conclude this was worth provoking a war with Cheliax over, and recommended against.

Abadar communicates mostly with the pharaoh. He can do so more cheaply, and there are precisions to His visions which it's best for the pharaoh to have firsthand. But one thing Abadar can do relatively cheaply, and convey relatively cheaply, is see markets. So He's been keeping me updated with the bid-ask spreads from the project's public-to-you and secret-from-you prediction markets, and I've been responsible for figuring out everything happening on Project Lawful and preparing Osirion for the time when you'd learn the truth and leave."