In that case he'll offer her the hand not holding a tuning fork, and after a brief moment where it feels like she could effortlessly resist the tug they arrive.

Unlike Kenabres, Brenda's first view of Axis is enough to make it clear that she's in an actual city. Skyscrapers shoot up from the ground in search of the distant sky, and if they don't stretch as far vertically as some of the ones in downtown Manhattan, they make up for it in the alien architecture made possible by copious portals, flying citizens, and the ability to use magic to tell gravity to take a back seat in places mere material engineering struggles to suffice. Regular trolleys transport people along elevated railways, while others elect to simply get to their destination on foot or wing. A sizable portion of the crowd around her appear mostly humanoid, but they're outnumbered by the natives; some of them bear the metallic skin common amongst ex-mortal Axiomites, while the tall blue skinned individuals with numerous eyes match the descriptions of the mercanes and the glittering of golden dust serves to identify the Aphorites. Among them in smaller numbers walk other species - with her eyesight, in it's possible for Brenda to pick out on the various causeways and overlooks about half the species she's heard of on Golarion and a handful that don't match anything in the texts she's read.

Despite all this, she's not crowded in; the plane shift brought them to a platform empty of other people, and the streets outside seem to have been designed to handle their present traffic at a reasonable density.

Brenda gawks like the tourist she is! She saw New York City once on vacation and it was amazing and this is better. She wants to go through the portals and ride the trolleys and meet the locals and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch them, but most of all she wants to get a scroll of Plane Shift. It takes her several seconds to get focused again and follow Rathimus to where they're going.

Rathimus smiles slightly. It's a common reaction for first time visitors to the city of cities, and he wasn't any different; something about seeing this and knowing they can build it if they try is as inspiring as any sermon. He's not familiar enough with Aktun to navigate the place effortlessly, but thankfully getting to the heart of Abadar's realm is an easy matter from almost anywhere. He leads Brenda to a disk surrounded by railings that levitates them up to the next level, and from there it's only a few a minute until they can board the next trolley.

(When he had first encountered the system, Rathimus had been rather baffled at how un-Abadaran it was that using the transportation didn't require payment. The fact that it turns out when transportation is cheap enough the economic benefit of getting to vendors being lower friction more than offsets the cost of upkeep was an immensely cheering thing to learn.)

The trolleys in Aktun are only moderately fast, particularly by the standards of trains, but the extent of the city's portal network is enough to ensure that distance is rarely the deciding factor in how long a journey takes. Before long the near future magitech construction gives way to the older architecture surrounding the First Vault; though they are headed for a nearby structure rather than the immense dome of the first vault itself, there is a tingle like static on Brenda's skin from the presence of Abadar. Theft is simply not an available action; unless she overcomes the weight of the very world around her, she can no more take something that doesn't belong to her than she can draw a four-sided triangle.

Brenda isn't thinking about the transit being free because she's too busy trying to figure out how it works! She can tell which parts are magic and which parts aren't and from there she can put together some hypotheses and oooh that's a neat environmental effect. Can she tell without trying it whether DFEWing someone without permission would count as theft? She isn't going to try it regardless; she goes back to speculating about the elevator either way.

It's not inherently banned, but some edge cases of using it might be.

The building Rathimus leads her towards has a pair of inevitables standing watch by the entrance.

"Only authorized personnel are permitted beyond this point. Identify yourself."

"Vassiliy Rathimus, Cleric of Abadar, and guest Brenda Banner, here by the invitation of the Master of the First Vault to engage in mutually-beneficial-trade*."

*A one syllable word in Utopian.

"Identification confirmed. You may proceed."

Follow follow she can offer to pay them for the use of their species bonuses on the way out maybe. She wonders if they're more like biology or engineering on the inside. If Lawful outsiders have the equivalent of backwards retinas and detouring recurrent laryngeal nerves that's a ripoff on a cosmic scale. 

Inside their path opens up to a well appointed meeting room, where an elderly woman with dark skin and a middle aged man who appears approximately south asian are seated. Standing at a desk by the wall is another inevitable, this time with paper and what is probably a pen.

"Those are Archbankers Maron and Sevandivasen, here to negotiate on behalf of the church. The Kolyarut is primarily here to take the minutes and write up the contract once there's an agreement, but if you have any questions that you'd rather not ask of your counterparty or points you need additional clarification on they're much better at interacting with mortals than most inevitables."

"Pleased to meet you all. Is there already a precise agenda, or shall I start listing things I think should be on one?"

Temos Sevandivasen takes the lead in responding.

“Our primary goal here is to make a deal for purchasing diamonds that’s agreeable to you now, would still be agreeable to you if you exhaustively reviewed the contract with the help of lawyers and oversaw the sales we make, fairly divides the gains from trade, and ideally does not at any point in the future cause you to regret dealing with us. Towards this end we would also like to ensure you are on the same page on tradeoffs between profit, secrecy, rate, resale, and so forth. We also want to make sure you understand all of what you are agreeing to.

“If there is anything that you think you want that even might not be included in that or that you want clarified before we start, like the details on our agreement of confidentiality, it would be a good idea to talk about it now. We can renegotiate things after, but it’s almost always better to get things right the first time.”

"That's a good set of things; talking about the confidentiality agreement would be good too. I'd also like to talk about how open you are to making this a recurring transaction, with or without a commitment to any particular schedule, and the question of whether it's possible to arrange things so that Good individuals and institutions have more access to the new diamond supply than Evil ones or if diamonds are too interchangeable for that to make sense. Also whether I should be investing somehow instead of getting paid completely in cash? I'm not sure whether Golarion has a stock market or what I'm supposed to do if it does and maybe you aren't even the right people to be talking to about that, it just occurred to me just now and I figured I'd ask." Brenda runs a hand through her hair nervously. She'd wish she had talked to her parents more about finances before leaving Earth except she's pretty sure her finances are about to be more complicated than theirs were.

Kalit Maron nods.

"Confidentiality, future purchases, outcomes of the trading, and how you'll be paid. Those seem like good additions, and I think the obvious place to start is confidentiality. The first thing I'd like to make clear is that there's no such thing as perfect secrecy; things you tell Abadar in confidence come very close, but for anything short of that there's always a way around it if someone powerful enough is willing to spend enough. This means there are two concepts to keep in mind; what we'll be keeping hidden, and what is being done to ensure that. The three of us are all fairly powerful clerics of Abadar, and have a number of magic items and spells dedicated to our defense, but we're not invincible. If you have something to say that you need to keep secret from archmages - that is, wizards capable of 8th circle spells - you should probably only tell me, and if something you need to share has to be kept secret at all costs we would need to find an inevitable willing to remain in Abadar's domain indefinitely.

"As for what is being kept secret: without your explicit prior permission, we will not reveal your identity, how you obtained the diamonds, how many there were, what price they were sold for, what conditions you ask for, or anything you ask us to keep secret to anyone not currently in the meeting. We will not speak of it amongst ourselves it in a way that we expect to spread the information, purposefully fail to secure it, or otherwise act in a way that we expect might cause someone who heard that promise to feel mislead. We will also default to not publicly spreading details not kept secret, but you should expect that to be less thorough a guarantee. Some outcomes are also largely impossible to keep secret in their entirety; we cannot both sell diamonds and completely hide that we have them, for instance, or make our customers agree not to resell them to demons via any intermediary without telling them that's requested of them.

"Is there any part of this that needs more clarification before we continue?"

"That all seemed quite clear, and like it will do as well as can be reasonably expected at achieving my concrete goal, which is that I not be attacked by powerful entities looking to get diamonds or prevent me from selling them. Can you also agree to try to warn me if you believe someone has gotten past your defenses and found out?"

"Yes, certainly. That would be considered as part of the normal terms regardless, but we can lower the threshold of certainty for reports as well if you would prefer more complete coverage to not having false alarms.

"For recurring transactions, we currently anticipate that there will still be a large demand for diamonds after we complete this deal, so we're certainly not opposed to performing it again. With that said, if you want to lock in the price for those trades now instead of negotiating it then, we would have to set our price point lower to account for tail risks like someone crashing the price between then and now. Trades at a specific known time are more valuable than at some indefinite point, but both are certainly possible."

She wants a bit more info about their usual thresholds for reporting possible leaks and the frequency of false alarms and ends up settling on a threshold somewhat lower than the default (most people with similar arrangements are mostly running the risk of having their trade secrets stolen rather than the risk of e.g. the Black Triune getting interested in them, and have fewer options for reacting to this than Brenda has for getting away from civilians).

She's open to doing this trade repeatedly at scheduled times a few times a year at whatever market rates happen to be at those times if both parties are still interested; they can also renegotiate the product mix if e.g. the price of diamond dust crashes and the price of larger stones doesn't. Mostly she wants the bureaucratic framework in place for making this a regularly scheduled thing without having to renegotiate everything every time, plus the ability to turn spot diamond prices at time T into a rough prediction about her revenue at time T+a couple months.

Can they talk a bit more about what options are available for asymmetrically funneling the diamonds to Good users or at least away from Evil ones, and what they trade off against other than the aforementioned secrecy concerns?

(Abadarans, as it turns out, are very pleasant to negotiate with. They never complain that she's asking too many questions or offering too many details or that she doesn't share some unspoken assumption. Friends in Places is basically backing off and letting her be her unmodified self, almost as much as when she's with Nenio.)

Much like with security, there’s not really a way to make sure diamonds are only easier to obtain for good people; even if you exclusively sold to lawful good churches who agreed not to resell them, the fact that there is then less competition for buying other diamonds would still drive the price down a little for everyone else. With that said, though, there’s no reason the change has to be the same, for all parties, and depending on how much potential profit she wants to trade for it there are a number of options she could take. At the lower end of obviousness, they could strike private deals with good churches and adventurers to offer rights of first refusal on certain bids or discount those sales, while at the more obvious end they could set up a blacklist or refuse to sell to anyone who wasn’t detectably good and force anyone evil to also be paying a good middleman. She could also just try and maximize her profits and then donate part of the proceeds to organizations of her choice, which they could then decide for themselves if the optimal strategy was using that to buy more diamonds or spend it on their goals directly.

In terms of how payment is distributed, the usual answer is to make payments in a mixture of Aktun’s currency, Absalom pounds, and balance with the church of Abadar, but they can also do the currency conversion for her if she decides she would prefer Taldane solidi or Mendevian crowns or any of the other myriad currencies on Golarion. They sincerely recommend allocating her offering loans and purchasing shares in shipping companies and investing in adventuring parties and buying land and ownership in businesses. Putting your money to work is better for both your account balance and the economy than just keeping it in a vault, but how much of it she wants locked up like that depends on how much liquidity she expects to need. The church of Abadar has a number of portfolios with different expected risk if she wants that handled for her, but there are also a number of companies in Aktun she could try out or just interface with the markets directly.

Brenda can see the logic behind maximizing her profits and donating, but the problem is that then she would have to decide how much to donate to the Crusade versus other causes, and what those causes should be, and every possible outcome is going to involve letting someone down, and Brenda is Wise enough to know that that isn't a good reason for not doing it but not quite Wise enough to do it anyway. 

She doesn't say any of that out loud, obviously. What she says is that she wonders if "not selling to anyone delectably Evil" is any less obvious or more profitable than "selling only to people who detect Good". She's fine with random rich people who aren't particularly heroic getting diamonds to resurrect their dead relatives or whatever; all else equal people getting things they want is great. If that isn't a good happy medium for whatever reason, selling to Good people first and at a discount makes sense to her.

On the (much less fraught) subject of currencies and investments: she'd like to start out with a relatively low-risk/low-reward investment mix and a relatively high level of liquidity for the first couple months while she figures out what her expenses look like and gets through all the big one-time expenses of launching a Crusade, and then reevaluate from there. She probably wants at least a bit of the payment in Mendevian crowns, especially if she's going to need to pay Mendevian taxes.

Uh. Speaking of which. Does Rathimus know what her tax situation is, and is there any way for her to stay on the right side of the law without telling anyone in the Mendevian government where the money came from.

Income tax? Of course not, they're not Galt. Mendev has a number of taxes on commoners engaging in commerce (and nobles have feudal responsibilities and land taxes of their own to make up for them being relatively less encumbered on those), but they certainly don't regulate exchanges made in Axis about objects that never even passed through Mendev. Bringing them into the country's borders for sale would require paying tariffs, but there are a host of exemptions for use by adventurers and for military purposes that she'll qualify for in most circumstances, and the ones she sold to him are covered by his own arrangements. Mendev does desperately want more income sources, but not at the expense of high level people refusing to stop by and help out.

It sounds like they can move on to talking price, then! Temos Sevandivasen is much more tapped into the international diamond trade, which means he knows that Rathimus was substantially underrating how valuable miracle diamonds are. Thirty thousand is about what you can get for a gem like that if you're trying to liquidate it in a hurry, but if you've got connections and are willing to wait while people with lower liquidity put the funds together for the rare opportunity to increase their emergency stockpile you can do significantly better. He thinks if he uses his contacts in Tian Xia and taps into the Arcadian and Garundi markets he could get a stable income of about five million pounds a month indefinitely after the church's cut, though that would drop depending on how much she wants to discount and at what price. If she wants to risk the current suppliers all having an incentive to go for her head and considers the added attempts at finding out her identity from him worth it, he could do ten or twenty times that now, or if she thinks she'll want to do it later let him know so he can make preparations.

Yay for not having to pay taxes! Especially when nearly all the money is going to a government project anyway and she'd potentially be getting taxed to fund herself. At this point she feels like she's competing to see how far she can get without ending up on both sides of the same transaction. Five million pounds a month is a lot more than she needs, so she can offer a substantial discount to the forces of Good out of her share and not take the extra risk of making enemies.

She thinks that's everything she wanted to sort out, so--time for her to deliver the goods!

She has been thinking for a while about how to do this.  As soon as she's unobserved, she makes a pair of shoes with built-in detachable buckets, followed by a lot of variants on Miranda Jones's dress from "Is There In Truth No Beauty", with all the beads replaced with poorly-attached diamonds. Gems pour from her arms and body like a waterfall. Several sets of buckets later (each filled with a single size of gem or in one case neat little capsules of diamond dust), she lets the Abadarans know they're good to turn back around.