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He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
Aram Zey is the highest-circle wizard the Pathfinders have in Korvosa; there was a 7th-circle sorcerer who was here earlier and will be again tomorrow - he teleported home - but he can't do magnificent mansions.
Zey can, however, get a sending sent to Toff Ornelos, and if that fails they can see about hiring a 7th-circle from out of town.
Toff should research a spell to trace back a sending and ignite the idiot caster
"For this you woke me? Breakfast on bile, sup on stone to flesh. I will return in the fullness of time. Do not wake me."
And back to sleep.
Gods.
Stone to Flesh
School transmutation; Level sorcerer/wizard 6
Target one petrified creature or a cylinder of stone from 1 ft. to 3 t. in diameter and up to 10 ft. long
Duration instantaneous
Stone to flesh is a sixth-circle spell that creates a 4,413.8 lbs cylinder of flesh.
More than enough to feed all of Korvosa.
Wait, then why do people raise livestock at all? The average weight of a bull sold for slaughter is between 400 and 800 lbs[1], sixty percent of which is edible, or about 360 lbs. One casting of stone to flesh creates as much meat as, what, 12 cattle?
Cattle sell for 10 sails a head, or 120 gp, compared to stone to flesh that costs... 660 gp. Hm. She does wonder what spell sets the price for 6th-circle slots, and how great the demand is for it... she knows that 6th circle wizards don't earn 600 gp a day...
No, no, sanity check here. A pound of meat has got to be worth at least the price of a poor meal, most people can't eat meat every day. 4,414 lbs of flesh is 4,414 silver is 440 gp. Is the value add of an abattoir really triple that of the animal? That can't be right, cattle are assets, they produce milk and plow fields. Probably she just has the wrong number for how much a head of cattle sells for? Yeah, that's probably it.
So stone to flesh produces at least 440 sails' worth of food.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding#History ↩
(660 is a bigger number than 440, so this whole economy all makes perfect sense. Certainly 6th-circle wizards wouldn't lower their prices if they had the opportunity to mint hundreds of gp every single day for three seconds of work. That's not the number printed in the book.)
660 is a bigger number than 440, but not by all that much. That feels like the sort of explanation that would fall apart if she looked more closely at it, too fragile for a lasting equilibrium.
...A widened stone to flesh would create, hm, more than 35,300 lbs of flesh, equivalent to a herd of 98 cattle. You'd pay off the metamagic rod in 16 castings of the spell, and thereafter make 3,530 gp per casting, up to like 10600 gp per day.
Not in practice, in practice you'd exhaust demand in the big cities and have to lower your prices and/or move on, chasing smaller and smaller margins - but surely you'd still make more than 660 gp per casting.
Should Cressida take out a loan from the Bank of Abadar right this very second and set out printing social utility and cold hard cash? Is Toff's offhand comment the most important thing to happen on the 14th of Neth 4707 AR, and the fall of Korvosa but the second?
If Lyvina wanted to start poking holes in the campaign setting or, heaven forbid, outperforming the Wealth By Level chart, stone to flesh of all places is not where she'd begin. That's not even where she'd start if she were on a tight budget and specifically wanted to totally deprecate hunting and gathering and agriculture.
Like, Cressida, have you ever read the Bestiaries and taken note of which creatures can Regenerate? If not, you should do that now, just in case you ever need to bootstrap post-scarcity with stone-age technology.
If Lyvina knew what Kroft was thinking about, she'd find it somewhat funny and more than a little charming. It's like Cressida Kroft woke up one day and suddenly realized that she lives in a world without thermodynamics; a little baby munchkin that discovered their first exploit. But after you've discovered a few more, it's hard to dodge the realization that in a world of magic it requires an active and heroic effort from everyone involved to keep a campaign setting from imploding.
In many ways it would be easier to not. By Lyvina's lights the default thing for a wizard to do is devour their lightcone.
Not that this Exponential Wizard would so much as dream of going Full Henderson on Pharasma's fragile little bubble!
Unless she somehow came to believe it must either be remade or destroyed.
And yet hunting and gathering and agriculture sure do look non-deprecated, as yet.
The spells that are known to wizards produced the world which she knows, so if it looks to her like the world can't hang together this way clearly there's something she's missing.
It all has to add up to normality.
Right?
Okay, then someone needs to tell Toff Ornelos this and to get his ass back to Korvosa.
I'm certain he already knows. The man is one of the greatest wizards alive.
I don't know him well but from context clues I think he only said it to be mean.
Cressida Kroft needs sleep.
She tries to think if there's anything else she needs with the Pathfinders, decides that if there is she'll just come back (the Pathfinder wizard probably got his 2 hours of sleep earlier today, right?) and for now she'll go talk to Julaei Cangi, and come back to talk with Aram if there's a reason to come back and talk with Aram. She thanks the mercenary for his bravery and beneficence, as well as his time.
Dean of Abjuration Julaei Cangi (LG female human abjurer 12): As head of the Hall of Wards, Master Cangi is ever concerned with the protection of the school grounds and the students, teachers, and staff within, and takes her job very seriously.[1]
Cangi is one of the mightiest wizards in Korvosa and far and away the most powerful of the Academae's Good aligned faculty. As Field Marshall, Cressida Kroft preferred to go through Cangi when she needed something of Korvosa's wizarding school or its wizards. Unfortunately, ever since Master Cangi brought to light Toff's tampering with the Breaching Festival, and after the ensuing investigation revealed (among so, so many other things) a conspiracy of devils abducting students under the Headmaster's own nose, the embarrassed Lord Ornelos has largely shut his Dean of Abjuration out of decision making and done everything he legally could to persuade the tenured professor to quit.
-
1. Academy of Secrets, page 30. ↩
But Headmaster Ornelos isn't here right now, and to the people of the Vault, Master Cangi is perhaps the single person most audibly responsible for saving their lives.
The grandmotherly old schoolteacher has emerged among the wizards of the Vault as a natural person to look towards for leadership.
Many of the same wizards who can reshape reality with a standard action need to be handheld through things like sharing their rope tricks with each other. In some ways coordinating Korvosa's spellcasters isn't that different from how she spends her office hours typically; the wizards skew older than her students but are approximately as likely to all-on-their-own think up out-of-the-box strategies like asking whether, if they need sleep so badly, and their spellbook is upstairs, they can prepare the spell out of someone else's spellbook.
The Dean of Abjuration doesn't know where her own spellbook is, it's being passed around. Some people don't turn pages by the corner and she thought it better for her heart if she didn't watch.
There is a type of person who can survive any hardship and set aside any level of mental anguish as long as people are relying on them.
Julaei Cangi is, by nature, emphatically not one of those people.
But at her level when she casts the spell heroism it lasts two hours, which works nearly as well.
After the Breaching Festival Julaei found herself sliding into a place where she cast heroism on herself six or seven times a day. And then she went a month where she stopped preparing it altogether, because the temptation to cast it was too great if she did. And then she made a rule for herself that she could prepare heroism as long as she never prepared it in a fourth-circle slot, and that's worked for her so far.
So it is that Julaei Cangi meets Cressida Kroft with the brave face turned on. She has 700 rounds left on the spell, and hopes to be asleep when it wears off. Hello Cressida Kroft I'm so sorry about Ileosa none of this is your fault no one thinks it is Ileosa is unreasonable what can I do for you?
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