"Let's just say all of it."

"Say again?"

"I want all of it.  All of the authorization."

"Lady Pineda, I don't think the system really has an option for that."

Mora inspects her glass of beer.  The beer served in this tavern is piss, fundamentally, but usually tastes better than most of what passes for beer in Westcrown, unless Mora wants to put on nice clothes that make her a target and trudge over to the nice part of town and pay ten times as much per glass.

"Cayden Cailean must have cursed this city," she mutters to herself, and takes a reluctant sip.

Yep.  Piss.

"I doubt it," says the hooded figure sitting next to Mora at the bar of the tavern.  She'd already been sitting there, next to the only open seat, before Mora had arrived.

Her voice is that of a relatively younger woman.

Yep.  Cloaked person is a melodramatic teenager.  Mora had privately thought as much, which was why she'd sat down there instead of turning around to go home.

"You don't think Cayden Cailean would curse a Chelish city so that all the affordable beer there is terrible?"

"I don't think he has to.  All he needs to do is withhold his blessing."

"Everything goes to shit unless somebody is constantly monitoring it.  One person, who's clearly responsible for it and gets held accountable for it.  There's no one person in Cheliax whose job is to ensure that there's affordable beer in Westcrown, and who gets their pay reduced if it's terrible."

"I will fucking drink to that," Mora snarls.  She takes a swallow of her awful piss, slams her beer stein back onto the bar.  "I notice you're using mortal pronouns for Cayden Cailean.  Because you don't want to use god-pronouns for a god hated of Asmodeus, or because you're claiming sufficient personal acquaintance with Cayden Cailean to not need those?"

"Yes."

"Fucking wizard apprentice who thinks she's clever, got it.  And here I was thinking for a second that you might work in project management."

"Not exactly.  I know a project that's looking for an excellent manager, though."

"What happened to the last one?"

"Tortured-beyond-the-point-of-usefulness by someone who is... no longer with us."

"Best luck finding a good project manager who'll take that job, at least voluntarily."

"What would it take to get you to take a position like that?"

"I flatly wouldn't.  I stay out of the way of that sort of thing.  I work as an assistant to project managers who've heard of me, who have enough reputation that I know they'll keep a compact not to put the blame on me, in exchange for my services.  I serve them loyally.  I watch them get broken and discarded over minor shit.  I move on to the next project manager who took on a job too big for them."

"That's fair."  The hooded figure sips from its full beer glass, though Mora notes the level doesn't seem to have gotten any lower after several sips.  "I expect there's some part of you that chafes at never really being in charge, though.  Watching somebody else finally fuck up, refuse your advice, and crash and burn and take all your own hard work down with them."

"That's half the cases.  The other half are people getting fired, or as the case may be, executed, over things that weren't their fault and where I wouldn't have done any better.  That's why I work the way I work.  Probably, any really sensible person in Cheliax with a talent for project management does the same."

"There should be some amount of pay that'd get you to step up to it."

"Not even for a million gold pieces.  I mean that literally."

"I've known - three different people, in my life - who'd probably, if they were here, be able to prove there was something incoherent about that.  Some sort of mathematical proof about how, for any action there must be some number of gold pieces that'd make you do it, otherwise you'd be able to prove some weird inconsistency..."

"Trust me on this one, wizard apprentice, you don't want to go believing everything that somebody's proven to you mathematically."

"You know, I'm pretty sure there's some way to get you to do this.  But, again just guessing here, you're the sort of person who'd be immensely offended if somebody used... a series of Auguries, say, or Commune, to figure out any more than being in the right tavern at the right time."

"Oh.  Claiming to be a fifth-circle cleric, then?"