"Well, there's the problem, isn't it? I give you good steel mills and fertilizer and that's everything the Henderthanes are missing."

"...fertilizer?"

"Yeah it turns out the same things that help plants grow make all the best explosives. A factory that makes fertilizer is very easy to turn into a factory that makes smokeless powder and bombs."

That seems very odd to him but he's not the expert. And he trusts this Alfirin not to be making it up just to have an excuse to not give Cheliax fertilizer. "I see. The Henderthanes are probably going to get themselves established if I can't get your help or enough people from Vigil. I really don't think this is the best way to advance your interests."

"Well then you'd better get started planning those elections… if it makes you feel any better I'll see about buying the Henderthanes out."

"That might make the situation stable a little longer.  Thank you." Working with chaotic good people is such a hassle.

"Yep, that's me, selflessly consolidating a monopoly on arms manufacture for the good of the world. The hypothetical Marxists are going to love it."

"If you hold elections I will resign," Lilia tells Cansellarion. She cares about Cheliax, after a fashion, and has no desire to stick around watching it turn into Galt except without anyone involved being idealistic at any point.

"If I hold elections, so will I… Maybe some day it would be wise to try democracy here, but certainly not now."

She is enormously relieved to hear that. "What, you wouldn't even try to win them? …I don't really see the merit of holding elections at any point but there's probably some point where it wouldn't do much damage."

"Well, I'd resign first. And then… maybe run, depending on who else was. Probably run. Unless I was done running countries and ready for Heaven. But while I'm still the best person to be running the country I really don't see what's gained by holding elections and trying to win them, instead of just...running the country. So for now I'm not holding them and I'm not stepping down and I hope you aren't either."

"I intend to be here long after you've run off to Heaven. We'll find some other way to get your allies' cooperation."

"Or we try to assemble a team from Vigil who can do it without her help."

Lilia assembles her team in Westcrown mostly from people who had the sense to flee during the war but can be lured back with amnesty and assurances the new government is not going to fold like a house of cards nor start executing everyone with an Evil aura. She prefers working with Chelish people to working with paladins and anyway she knows who the most impressive and competent Chelish people are and not who the most impressive and competent Reclamation people are. And the latter are mostly spoken for, while Cheliax's best and brightest are all presently underutilized. 

She adapts her leadership style. Barely. When people under Lilia's command made stupid mistakes under the old regime, she would direct them to kneel, and then she would hurt them, and assuming they possessed the competence to not resist or cry and be disruptive, she'd let the spell wear off a few minutes later and let them return to their business. Everyone who worked for her knew you'd only be dragged off to a torture chamber for willful misconduct or for being totally unable to take a punishment like an adult. 

When people make mistakes under her new leadership, she directs them to kneel, and she says to them, "Iomedae believes that Her people are capable of learning competence without being punished for incompetence. Do you think She's right?"

They invariably profess a conviction that Iomedae is right. She permits them to return to their business. It seems to work about as well as the old method did. The only downside is that once she does hire some Reclamation people they make such faces.

"I've been getting some… interesting reports about how you treat the people under you."

In old Cheliax no one in Lilia's employ would ever dare go complain about her to her superiors. Unless they were suicidal - even if they were suicidal, really. Lilia suppresses the flare of fury because Lawful Good people do not shove their subordinates into a demiplane through which they'll fall infinitely until they starve for complaining about them to their superiors. Lawful Good people probably don't even have that demiplane.

She blinks patiently at the Lord Marshal. "I've reviewed all relevant laws and had my employees do so as well."

"If what you were doing was actually illegal we'd be having a different conversation. Or if it were definitely evil. What I'm hearing is that you are responding to mistakes by having your subordinates kneel before you and tell you that Iomedae holds that people can become competent without being tortured for incompetence, which is… in other circumstances I would just call it strange and confused but it also seems very reminiscent of the old regime." And he would like the new regime to not be reminiscent of the old one.

"Yes, it's about how I used to handle people without the part where Iomedae objects before I hurt them. …have you had a lot of luck, employing Chelish people in the new government?"

"Some. A lot of problems where people stop working and have to be fired, most Chelish people hired into positions like yours with people working under them punish their subordinates more harshly than we allow… Your approach is more…creative…"

"In Infernal Cheliax the kind of employer who didn't punish mistakes was not nice. He was incompetent, or he was keeping tabs silently and going to explode unpredictably in the future, or he cared about something entirely unrelated to results. By default if you are nice, you cannot thereby communicate that your motives are niceness. You will instead communicate that you do not care about results or cannot distinguish good ones from bad ones or are powerless to elicit good ones rather than bad ones or are keeping people on their toes and will blow up and murder three of them any day now.

...there are multiple options stylistically but you have to convey - yes, I care about the quality of your work, yes I can tell the difference between good work and bad work, and you're not getting hurt because I do not believe hurting you to be the best way to get what I want. Ideally you also want to do something they can imitate with their own subordinates without feeling like they are being obliged to embarrass themselves."

"We have elsewhere been considering an explicit policy of reducing pay for poor results, but there are concerns that giving supervisors discretion over their subordinates' pay would be a temptation to corruption."

"What's wrong with corruption?" asks Lilia, straightfaced. She is joking but she's going to get a facial expression out of Cansellarion before she actually answers him. 

" - I think you have two problems. One is that very few people in Cheliax know how to get any useful work out of anyone who isn't frightened of them. The other is that they're all frightened of you, and not in a productive way where they'll try to figure out how to accomplish your goals, in the annoying way where they'll try to figure out how not to do anything you can reasonably blame them for unless they have a plan to flee the country before being discovered. It's not that docking pay is an unreasonable policy in principle but I don't think it solves either of those.

You don't like my solution. Just - aesthetically, or do you think it's going to create problems in the future, if it spreads?"

"I think it's effective mostly because it fits in with people's expectations from the old Cheliax, and is not very effective with people who did not grow up in the old Cheliax… which means if it becomes widespread it's going to be more out of place and less effective as time goes by. I'm not confident it will cause problems later but I wouldn't be surprised."