In the Wake of Monsters - an Advisor's Quest

You decide to go and request invitations to the social occasions of Clan Gold first, catching several birds with one stone: building personally good relations of your own, seeing firsthand where they stand politically, and offering them first chance to hear about your plan to cycle out a great number of palace employees. As the most recent of the Great Houses, Clan Gold will no doubt appreciate their chance to get their rightful share of influence in high places, as furnished by you.

The first event you get a chance to attend is the first public performance of a new orchestra under Gold sponsorship. After thinking it over for a little while, you decide to invite Jade along. This should be pleasant as well as political.

Sadly, the orchestra proves only marginally above average. The flutists are very good. The drummers are fine. The sole mandolinist bears a constipated expression of intense concentration and distress, but manages to make no mistakes, at least none that you notice. You can't pick out the harps, which suggests that they're either quiet or fitting in very well.

The silver lining to it is that you get to only listen with half an ear and use the time for small talk. Your wife, the great socializer, is somehow familiar with half the members of the orchestra despite never having met them before, and delights in trying to familiarize you with them as well. So-and-so is her fourth cousin once removed. Such-and-such was adopted into Gold by such-and-such.
"How do you know all these people?" you ask.
She grins. "You spend your time looking at numbers. I spend my time listening to people."
"I have to make notes for all the numbers I look at. How do you remember this many people?"
"I pay attention?"
You wonder for a moment if you should perhaps be slightly offended by the implication that you do not pay attention. But then a new song begins, giving a convenient distraction.

Afterwards there are refreshments and gossip. Jade starts comparing family trees with an old woman present, and you expect she'll know the other half of the orchestra by the time she's done here. You approach the main sponsor of the orchestra and discreetly ask for suggestions on who else looks like a promising candidate for a sponsorship, then segue smoothly into the subject of upcoming empty posts at the Palace of the Portlords.

It's only afterwards you realize you've been played by someone with a sharper tongue: you were maneuvered into focusing on the hirings and firings to come, rather than your own role or any favors you sought to obtain.

[Recruiting among the clans: Diplomacy, 40+15-2=53.]
[Building connections: Diplomacy, 8+15-2=21.]

And the next time you try, word of your recruitment efforts has spread to become a two-edged sword: people are very curious about the changes to come and very eager to recommend their own relatives to you, which is all very well and good for candidates, but they're also treating it as a right they're finally due rather than a favor you're doing for them.

Well, you can't have everything. On the good side, when you finally give up on trying to inveigle yourself with Clan Gold and go recruiting elsewhere, word has run ahead of you again, giving you a very satisfactory pool of candidates indeed as promising youths are promoted to you constantly. Most of them are gainfully employed just now, of course, but they'll be made available by the time the palace shakeup goes through.

Which suits you just fine. You have new examination standards to write in the meantime, and more importantly, a Great Work which you can finally focus on.

---

You seek out the purchase of a large amount of iron for refinement. A lower quality is acceptable for this. You are going to distill it anyway and not make swords out of it.

[Acquire materials: Stewardship 28+19+2=49.]

The iron itself is easily acquired in large quantities. The good charcoal you will need for proper heat is harder, but still passable. For the higher reagents, you are very uncertain what you are doing, but eventually settle on a useful heuristic - if the price is outlandishly high, it is probably an attempt to rip you off. Swindlers charge as much as they possibly can for nonsense, after all, while professional alchemists need to have reasonable prices for actually useful components or no one will buy them.

Oils. Salts. Acids. Limes. Mercury.

And a new forge to handle the highest of heat, which takes some consultation with experts.

[Acquire personnel: Diplomacy 29+15+2=46, Stewardship 37+19+2=58, Learning 19+17+2=38.]

There's significant initial skepticism to your idea by the older and more stolid smiths you consult, but you manage to talk several younger ones around to being interested in the idea. Then you haggle down the prices they want to charge.

The alchemists prove significantly harder to win over, tending to be either skeptical of the whole idea or unwilling to be lesser partners in your project. You reject numerous attempts to buy the secret from you, glossing over the fact that you don't have a full secret, you have an idea and a plan. And when you finally find a cooperative one, and then pay a priest of the God of Forges to make sacrifices on your behalf and give consultations, she has a falling out with the alchemist over something esoteric.

The forge starts up. Chunk after chunk of iron is thrown into the crucible, pound after pound of charcoal thrown beneath to keep it hot. You cannot watch it constantly, but you try. You sit up late watching acids hiss and boil off as they are poured against the surface of glowing metal. You had hoped to boil the iron, too, refine and distill it like you hear is done with other liquids. Alas, even your new forge does not get hot enough to boil iron. Perhaps you should have been less dismissive of the smiths who were so dismissive of that idea.

You come home late one night to find Jade staring at you, a single candle lit on the table beside her. "You're setting a bad example for our children." she scolds. "Just because you aren't drinking doesn't make it any good to stumble in at this dark hour."

You promise you'll go to bed at a sensible hour. And you'll keep that promise. But you arrange for one of the servants to wake you earlier instead, and you start nibbling food on the go instead of sitting down to table for a proper meal.

In these early hours of the morning that you have stolen from the night, you visit not entirely respectable people to ask about rare and valuable artifacts they may have. There are rumormongers that charge for information, and stores that require significant bribes just to let you enter, let alone buy anything.

[Search the black markets: Stewardship, 29+19+2=50.]

But you have connections and ill-gotten wealth of your own, and there is no finer cause for it than this. You get a glimpse of a dagger whose edges are strips of starmetal. Its cost is measured in talents, more than you can hope to afford. But the sight is a strange confirmation of what you had read: it is in fact white and silver and glowing and many-hued all at once.

[Money lost: -30g materials, -15g personnel, -20g forge, -10g bribes.]

---

And then something odd happens once the forge has been in operation for about two months and the produced metal has been nudged towards the intriguingly shiny. The priest you have hired sends you an urgent summons, not to her own smithy-temple, but to the large Sun Temple. Nominally dedicated to the Most High, the Sun, the ruler of the entire Celestial Bureaucracy, it is in practice used for ecumenical rites and the worship of uncommon gods by large foreign delegations. Heaven is high and emperor is far away, after all.

When you enter, you stand frozen in shock for several seconds, then panickedly prostrate yourself full on the floor. There are two gods present! And not small gods, either, but full-on bright gods with colorful raiment and wide panoply that marks them as clearly being of high rank.

"Get up." booms the one. "We need to talk." Her voice is loud and thunderous, reminding you of a stern but loving mother.

You dare to rise to a merely kneeling position and look closer at who it is you're talking to.

There is, indeed, a motherly female one. Her skin is reddish and burnt, her hair sooty black, her body mostly covered by a smith's leather apron. Her eyes are black and red like burning coals, and when she talks, you see her teeth are metal. Her hands and feet are heavily callused. She bears a hammer in one hand and a bellows in the other. It's not hard to guess her domain.

The other one is stranger. She... he... ey? The other one has an oddly androgynous cast. Four arms, two muscular and hairy like a man's, two smooth and slim like a woman's. The faintest hint of breasts beneath a robe splattered in stains of many colors, with pockets from which protrude many strange tools and instruments. Sickly yellowish-green skin, one white and one black eye, and silvery hair cut very short. Ey isn't holding anything in eir hands, and on eir feet are odd slippers with upturned tips and gold sequins.

"May I present", and you realize with a start the priest you'd hired is sitting to one side, along with several others, "Director Shenji of the Celestial Office of Design, God of Transmutative Thaumaturgy, and Zara Metal-Mother, Southern God of Forges." Her voice is awed.

"You've created quite the little mess of paperwork for us." says Shenji, glaring at you. "The creation of starmetal, like orichalcum, and all other post-theionic superior substances, is supposed to be a thaumaturgical procedure falling under my office. But my colleague insists that it falls under her purview."

"Yes, because this man is not a thaumaturge, and is not working in accordance with any thaumaturgical procedure you have in your office, but using a forge. Which clearly means it falls under forge activity." snaps Zara.

"You haven't even studied the Book of Designs and Procedures, how would you know if he's working in accordance with a thaumaturgical procedure or not?" shouts Shenji.

"Because I'm not stupid!" Zara shouts, raising her voice even louder than Shenji's. The smell of smoke fills the air. "If he were, you'd have brought the procedure out to show me! Because you certainly have studied that book and I know you'd know if there were any matching procedure!"

"That only means whatever he's doing should be recorded as a new procedure in the book!!" shouts Shenji, and the smell of smoke is joined by a background sound like shattering glass.

"Mighty ones, please, calm down!" says one of the priests.

The two gods glare daggers at each other for a few moments longer before turning back to you.

"One of my colleagues suggested we settle the matter by asking you, instead." explains Zara.

"Easier and faster than taking it to arbitration." adds Shenji. "So. What you're doing will amount to thaumaturgy once it succeeds, right?"

Hmmm. Difficult question.

On the one hand, full-fledged alchemy such as that which creates elixir of immortality is definitely thaumaturgical in nature, you did hire an alchemist who's been making useful contributions, and if starmetal is post-theo-whatever divine material, you can see why it should be classified with the more rarefied transmutations.
On the other hand, mundane mixing and heating such as boiling soup is equally clearly not thaumaturgical in nature, everything you've done so far is relatively mundane, and harmonious geomantic arrangement of office furniture doesn't make an office magical.
And on no particular hand, you haven't actually produced any starmetal yet so it's hard to say what the final process might look like, also you might not want to get dragged into a divine jurisdictional dispute by siding with either one. Then again, having one god's favor might be better than having no god's favor.

[] Yes, thaumaturgy
[] No, not thaumaturgy
[] Dodge the question

Separately from the vote, you may post questions you want the PC to ask the gods.

QM notes:
-There is no canonical answer to the question yet. There is a departmental dispute of jurisdiction, and the loser will almost certainly appeal it to arbitration anyway, and the Celestial Bureaucracy will have long arguments about it.
-And when I say departmental dispute, yes, they are rather managerial. It's called the Celestial Bureaucracy for a reason. Imagine that your boss's boss's boss has shown up to ask you for your opinion.
-The rest of your voted plan will resume afterwards.