Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Afternoon
Keltham: Well, that sure was a fascinating lunch discussion full of interesting topics! And questions! Some actually pretty basic questions! Mostly relayed through Ione! Keltham has definitely learned the important fact that he needs to actually back off and not try to plunge the new candidates directly into the same classes as the current hires! But it's not a 'failed' experiment, the PLAN failed, yes, the HOPE failed, but the experiment itself is just data.
Keltham now has FOUR basic phases to cram into his limited supply of days and hours! And they are:
- Teaching Law to the current hires, including some Keeper-only classes;
- Overseeing the current hires teaching the new candidates;
- Doing Science! to acid synthesis, spellsilver refining, roads, medicine, and all other important subjects;
- Having a personal life including wizard practice, scroll practice, also now learning martial arts from Security, and dating Carissa, Yaisa, Meritxell, Ione, and Asmodia.
...This would be a really good time to be a sufficiently advanced wizard that he'd only need to sleep two hours per night. But that, apparently, is not within the cards for a while.
......The thought occurs to Keltham that, at this rate, he may end up participating in his first threesomes and orgies - rather earlier than those would usually come, in the natural course of increasing sexual complication - just for scheduling reasons.
Carissa Sevar: "I think alternating days is a good idea for the Law lectures anyway, I've seen lots of the girls staying up late going back over the notes and having more time probably lets things sink in more. I have no idea how to help you with your sex life. ...I guess perhaps you would benefit from having it pointed out that you don't have to, like, do a whole evening date every time and can also just pull someone aside for a blowjob at lunchtime? I don't know if that'd actually feel like keeping up with your personal life more."
Keltham: "Yeah, at some point I'm going to have to slow down and ask myself what I really want, whether I'm really getting it, and what the whole point is, but not now. Maybe after I'm dating a few more girls."
Keltham: Anyways! He's gonna go hang his spell for the day, get in some scroll practice -
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Middle Afternoon
Keltham: - talk to Chelish experts about agriculture and plant breeding, to see if they're missing anything there he can plausibly quickly fix -
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Dinner
Keltham: - have dinner with all the researchers, show the newcomers where dath ilan is located inside its universe -
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Evening
Keltham: - and spend his evening making extensive use of Yaisa.
Tonight is the 7-day anniversary of their first week's arrangement, for twenty-five gold per week, including Keltham having... control, of certain things.
How's she feeling about continuing that arrangement indefinitely?
nsfw
To be clear, Yaisa has not been authorized any orgasms at any point in the last week, has been used only occasionally, and has sometimes been given
assignments. This morning, for example, Keltham told her to spend the whole day playing with herself without coming, when not otherwise occupied, and maybe if he felt like it, he'd let her come this evening, on their one-week anniversary. As of asking her this question about continuing their arrangement, Keltham apparently hasn't felt like it yet!
To be clear, Keltham feels like Yaisa should have a fair look at what she might be getting into, here. At least, that's what his brain firmly claims is the reason why he's being so mean to poor Yaisa.
Also to be clear, there's been an additional two days that Keltham doesn't know about inside Yaisa's existence.
lintamande: Yaisa is in favor! - she thought about whether she could demand more money from Keltham because he clearly thinks he's being very mean to her but she doesn't think she could say under Fairness she ought to get more money, not really.
Keltham: He's pretty happy about that!
nsfw
Happy enough, even, to let Yaisa -
...apparently he's
notthat happy? Yet?
It just feels - weirdly wrong and awful that Yaisa might think she was owed an orgasm, that she'd deserved or earned one, if they start off their relationship this way? That Yaisa might start expecting orgasms on future celebratory occasions or anniversaries, and feeling wronged if she doesn't get one?
Keltham probably wants to see this girl come again at
somepoint, but is weirdly afraid of doing that tonight.
Keltham briefly considers whether to force his brain into doing this anyways, but backs off. He doesn't think you're supposed to refrain from doing things you might have enjoyed, out of fear of where it might take one's relationship; but he is uncertain of himself still, and there is also a heuristic against forcing yourself to do things you feel afraid of doing. He can always make Yaisa come next time, when it'll definitely actually be just because he feels like it, and not because he owes it to her or that's an informal rule of their relationship.
He should tell Carissa about that part, later. Probably Carissa will be happy? At least Keltham is guessing so, anyways. Carissa is always happy when...
..well, it feels, sometimes, like Carissa is always happy when Keltham is cruel to somebody. But it's presumably more that she's happy that Keltham is being Evil and learning to do what he himself wants, that Keltham is discovering his own sexuality, and that Keltham is being more the way that Carissa hopes he'll be towards her.
Keltham will, of course, ask Yaisa explicitly whether he's allowed to tell Carissa about how he's being mean to Yaisa, for that information is also Yaisa's. (He won't mention his private wobbliness about the direction Carissa is taking him.)
lintamande: "Hmmmm." She pouts thoughtfully. "....yes, if you sometimes give me secret gossip on what's up with you and Carissa so I can smirk knowingly when the new kids repeat ridiculous rumors."
Keltham: Keltham will ask Carissa for authorization about that and get back to Yaisa.
...are these rumors theoretical, or...
lintamande: - no there are totally lots of rumors about Carissa. Like that she was created from scratch by the gods to be perfect for Keltham, that's one that Yaisa's heard, or that Asmodeus Himself chose Carissa to drop Keltham on, or that Abrogail gave Carissa to Keltham as a slave, or that Carissa is pregnant with Keltham's child....
(The Project decided that it was better if Keltham knew some things consistent with someone thinking of Carissa as chosen by Asmodeus, just in case some hidden correlate of that ever came to his attention.)
Keltham: Oh, right. He should actually schedule some Alter Selfs to take place where he can see them.
Yaisa okay with doing that tomorrow? He probably won't date her tomorrow, but it doesn't need to be a date, just a quick switch where Keltham can see it.
Carissa wasn't created from scratch by the gods for Keltham. It's nearly certain that whatever force selected Keltham to arrive in this universe did so in a way that very strongly matched him and Carissa to each other, and selected Carissa for him to land on. If anything, from a local perspective, it's more like they should see Keltham as having been created from scratch for Carissa.
Keltham's got no idea if those forces explicitly negotiated with Asmodeus. Keltham would guess no on the explicit negotiations, but yes on Asmodeus and the other gods rapidly figuring out what was going on and making decisions that would've contributed to the tropes selecting this place for his landing, including some things that the gods would only do if the Keltham-steering forces looked to be sufficiently beneficial for them.
Or if for some weird reason Asmodeus would've tried to shut down the whole thing if Keltham had landed on anybody who wasn't attractive to the Queen of Cheliax, then Keltham could've landed on Carissa at least in part for that reason. But the Keltham-steering forces might have needed to predict Asmodeus doing a lot in exchange, to serve whatever goals Asmodeus was able to deduce predictably-to-the-steerers from seeing how Keltham had been steered already.
Negotiations like that don't have to be explicit when you're a god.
What's 'slave'? Keltham heard Yaisa use that term before and he can tell from context that it's a sex thing, but not the details.
lintamande: (Yaisa didn't follow that but probably someone was taking notes and the anxious genius types will puzzle over it later, whatever.)
A slave is... a person who is wholly the possession of another, if you're really hardcore about it regarded by Civilization itself as their property as much as their shoes are. Yaisa is not herself that hardcore; lots of people use it just for aesthetically reminiscent relationships that didn't involve paying Civilization to go along with this. When you call someone 'slave' in bed you're not necessarily bringing in the whole thing, just the thing that's hot about it. Probably Keltham is now going to have a million questions Yaisa can't answer because her exposure to this concept is all from disrecommended romance novels titled 'slave of a barbarian' and so on.
Keltham: Yeah, that's been mentioned to him as something he might want to negotiate with the government of Cheliax about. Though only at the point where Keltham wants that for his own sake, and he's not quite there yet.
Is 'The Queen just gives Carissa to Keltham as a slave' something that especially seems within the realm of plausibility?
lintamande: ....no, it's completely ridiculous, so is 'Carissa was created wholesale by the gods', people don't come up with rumors because they're plausible they come up with them because they're fun to whisper and tend to make other people say, scandalized, "no, that couldn't possibly be" but then doubt themselves because they're on Project Lawful.
And, like, it'd be true most places, so it has that for credibility? Some places have, uh, kind of a lot of slavery, not that Yaisa wants to have that conversation which does not sound hot at all.
Keltham: He's confused but will queue it up on his Carissa questions list.
Actually, he should be heading off to bed about now anyways.
Sleep well, Yaisa...
nsfw
...and spend an hour teasing yourself in the morning. Keltham's probably not going to use her, that day, to be clear, Keltham is just being mean.
Oh, that thought seems to have turned him on again? Well, he can make some quick additional use of Yaisa before he heads off to bed.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Night
Keltham: Keltham repairs to his bedroom, from his cuddleroom, and asks Security to drop Carissa a note to come by if she has a moment.
Only if she's really got a moment, though. Yes, Keltham understands that he's got the ability to give her orders, if he wants to, he just wants there to be actually in practice a way for him to give her less-than-maximum-priority requests. It's too nervewracking the other way.
Carissa Sevar: Then she'll make him wait for fifteen minutes while she reviews the Yaisa transcripts and tries to make sure the stuff about godnegotiations doesn't translate to anything new and important. She thinks it doesn't, for once, though they should put it in the report to the Grand High Priestess in case she's wrong.
Then she'll change into sleeping clothes, since Carissa who doesn't have a ring of sustenance was about to go to bed, and go find her boyfriend.
Keltham: (Keltham possibly looks slightly sleepy. A healthy teenager who's previously had a lot of dath ilani healthcare can pull a lot of fourteen-hour days, it is a thing that is within the capability of a teenage human body, but he may start to look a little worn at some point.)
Keltham wants to share a thing about Yaisa with Carissa. Yaisa says yes but wants secret gossip about him and Carissa so that she can look knowing when the newcomers repeat weird rumors. Yes, no, Keltham should make decisions like this himself but it's fine to ask Carissa if she has input, or Keltham should make all those future decisions unilaterally without asking Carissa for any input at all.
Carissa Sevar: "I won't be hurt if you decide unilaterally but as you decided to ask, yes, that's fine. Though also I copied some spells off Lady Avaricia after dinner in exchange for some interesting tidbits about myself so the gossip may be less valuable than Yaisa hoped."
Keltham: Keltham will share his sexy Yaisa details, then.
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds like someone's having fun."
Keltham: "Hopefully two people are having fun, but her price would've gone up if she wasn't, or so I hope... eh, I'll just remember to ask her that explicitly at some point."
He'll also tell Carissa about the Carissa rumors; repeat what he told Yaisa about divine pseudo-negotiations after the fact; and ask why there would be a lot of slaves in other countries and Yaisa wouldn't want to talk about that. Are they doing this particular form of perversion dreadfully wrong, outside of Cheliax?
(It sure does look like something that could go horribly wrong, as Keltham has thought on multiple occasions.)
Carissa Sevar: "In a lot of places when you conquer a place in war you take the people there as slaves, as payment to the soldiers for their work in fighting the war. In - general this custom replaced the custom of killing them. I wouldn't expect Yaisa to know this but my best guess is that slave, sexy sense, came from people looking at slaves, bad sense, and going 'okay but I'm sorry that's really hot', which is why people who are cautious of their phrasing, like Abrogail, might say 'possession' instead, so as not to mix them up in language.
In more places than that, including parts of Cheliax, slavery can be a status for a person convicted of a serious crime against another person that justly denies them the protection of Civilization and that they don't have the means to make right. Say I burned down your fields, the local temple might award me to you as compensation for the wealth I destroyed."
Keltham: ...okay, what's a slave when it's not a sexy thing? Or does somebody who burns somebody else's fields get awarded as a sex!slave?
Carissa Sevar: "The word just means 'a person who has forfeited the protection of Civilization and is the property of another'. Usually you figure out with them what they're going to be obliged to do and it's not too horrible because if it is then they'll be like 'well fuck this' and go right to Hell, which you obviously aren't allowed to stop them from doing. Probably if your fields just got burned you want a farmhand! But it's often a sex thing, because, unlike in dath ilan where I'm getting the sense practically everyone would go 'well fuck this' and go straight to Hell, at least half of people in Golarion will go 'sure, beats having to wash all your dishes'."
Keltham: Do Chaotic Evil, or Chaotic Neutral, people ever get awarded as slaves. Those afterlives didn't sound so nice.
Do Neutral Evil people ever get awarded as slaves.
Carissa Sevar: Yes. Not in Cheliax, which gets very very close to everyone to Lawful, but yes.
Like Awaiting Consumption it's kind of something Carissa didn't expect Keltham would benefit from learning about. Also, selfishly, it seems likely to make him run screaming from the entire concept.
Keltham: Yeah, it's okay. Dath ilani know how to decouple between Things and Other Things Which Are Not Actually That Thing.
Message: If there's Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral, or Neutral Evil people who were taken as slaves after their country lost a war, Golarion Civilization and possibly Keltham are going to go in and replace Governance inside the countries holding them at some point. Is this a fact that needs to not be spoken where Chelish Governance can overhear it, say because it implies that Civilization or Keltham will come into conflict with factions Cheliax considers itself to be friendly with?
Carissa Sevar: Message back: Messaging because - maybe at some point we'll need to do this for real. But not on this. Cheliax hasn't conducted a war of conquest in three hundred years.
Even when we were dysfunctional before the Church came in we weren't like that.
I don't think any countries that meet that description are our allies at the Worldwound but even if they are, the Worldwound alliance would prohibit us attacking them there, not - for unrelated reasons going to war with them, and certainly not permitting someone else to do that.
Keltham: Okay. He should maybe go to sleep now.
...please don't say things like 'forfeiting the protection of Civilization'. Civilization doesn't exist here, and if it did - it wouldn't think like that. Probably Golarion Civilization won't think like it either. Even if it's mostly Kelthams, Lawful Evil instead of Lawful Good, it still won't think like that.
He still hasn't gotten around to meeting any Intelligence 10 people at this point, but - when he does - he strongly suspects that -
He should actually just not do that. Shouldn't actually meet anybody with Intelligence 10, not for a while. It's probably not good for his mental health if he starts thinking of the rest of Golarion as being inhabited by children, some of whom are being taken as slaves. Kelthams were children too, at some point, and needed protection themselves, even from themselves.
(The concept that actual literal children would be taken or held as slaves has obviously not occurred to him at all.)
Carissa Sevar: I don't think they're much like children. And - I wouldn't say they never need protection from themselves but I think it's mostly a kind of protection you give them by making all the afterlives a soft place to land, not by trying to blunt all the edges of the world.
But - yeah, I do think they might seem like children to a dath ilani, so maybe you shouldn't meet them. And Civilization here's going to have to be different here, to be something that functions with them, if we don't just headband everybody.
Keltham: They'll just headband everybody. Spellsilver doesn't look to be a kind of thing that Civilization couldn't produce by the millions of tons if it felt like it.
Goodnight, Carissa.
Carissa Sevar: Goodnight.
Carissa is very curious what Keltham will do once they headband all the people who are way below 10 intelligence and only get to 12 with the most expensive headband in the world, but now doesn't seem like the time for that conversation, and hopefully by the time that situation actually arises Keltham will be eviller and think that enslaving all the stupid people is perfectly reasonable.
They can shift all the planning around 'we have avoided telling Keltham around slavery and that could explode' to reflect that it'll only explode if he learns about Chelish slavery, or maybe slavery of children.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Long Night
Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar would really really like to spend this night making glibness swords but she should be responsible first.
"I'm here to request correction, if you have any."
Jacint Subirachs: "If I'd found myself foolishly thinking clever-sounding thoughts about Hell's instructions to the Chosen - rather than Hell's instructions to myself, a slave of the Church - what are your thoughts about whether I should, in general, dare to speak to you of such? Hell's instructions to Church and Crown are suggestive that it may be Asmodeus's will, that you come to comprehend His instructions to you for yourself, without such as myself presuming to instruct you on them. But perhaps my thoughts are foolish, and you will know them for such, and think something valuable in the process of refusing them..."
Carissa Sevar: Well that sounds like a serious and important question of the kind Carissa can sense she's mostly been dodging for more immediate ones, lately.
She is doing a good job at her duties. The project is making interesting and valuable progress; Keltham does not seem suspicious; he's been corrupted a thoroughly respectable degree; morale is high and the markets on who will collapse aren't too pessimistic.
She is not doing a particularly good job at the duty that Hell actually set her, to find in herself desires that have no place in Axis. She's definitely gotten Eviller. She's pretty sure that running the project is about as Lawful Evil as an action can be. She is exercising power over other people to see the will of Asmodeus done, and trying to awaken in Keltham that which will let Hell claim him; she's being very Evil. But the instruction wasn't just to be more Evil. And it seems likely that the traits that make you rise in Hell are not just 'having done tons of Evil things unhesitatingly as ordered', that she is not yet the right shape for the greatest of her ambitions.
It does seem that Asmodeus intended her to find that path without steering by the Church, or their instructions would have emphasized less not being proactive. But -
"It seems to me that my current efforts to obey Hell's instructions to me are inadequate," she says carefully. "So I would desire your thoughts, on the principle that - when I seem to be making little progress is a good time to seek out perspectives that might help me find my way."
Jacint Subirachs: "Your efforts are incomplete. It's been less than three weeks since Hell instructed you. You are serving Asmodeus well in this world and being raised high within it. Keltham must be contained now, he must be corrupted on a time limit. If I thought you were wrong to prioritize the first line of your instructions, I would have advised you to take some time off your long nights and find somebody you hated enough to enjoy experimenting on, keeping in mind that you could name nearly anyone short of a Count and the Crown would wrap them up and hand them over. But if you're really a good Asmodean, and I'm starting to think that you are, then you have relatively more time in which to do such things - is my own possibly foolish thought. You should not pass up obvious opportunities to make progress, for you should not dally on any of Hell's instructions, but you are allowed to prioritize."
"Your efforts may possibly be inadequate as well as incomplete, but it's not obvious to me that they are. They're clearly imperfect, but then, you're not Irori, and won't succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid. You are, apparently, the sort of slave that needs to remember that and not think otherwise."
"There's a difference between knowing that you're falling short of perfection, as is worthy of some punishment even in a good slave, and failing to recognize the progress you've made as possibly making you not a bad slave, who might not be judged worthy of severe punishment. That judgment lies in the hand of your superior, to be clear, it is not your place to decide that you are doing not too badly. But you didn't leave that judgment to me, you called yourself inadequate. That was wrong of you, by the way."
Jacint slaps the Chosen hard enough to hurt, but not very much compared to being lit on fire; slaps don't do that. "There. You've been punished."
Carissa Sevar: "I understand." Mostly; there's always a small discombobulation, a sense that there's something there Keltham would have questions about she couldn't answer. She tends to listen to that instinct but she does not need to listen to it about this, because they are not going to tell Keltham anything like this, not for a long time, and when they do he actually might have better instincts for it than she does.
Jacint Subirachs: "The thought that I had - after seeing how much you couldn't be the one to decide your own punishments -"
"Well, it came to me while I was reviewing the transcript of what you said to the new candidates. About how, I forget your exact words, they might need to unlearn old habits of Cheliax, and consider that you might be Lawful enough that your words to them were actually true. It's forbidden to suggest out loud that your superiors are lying to you, it isn't wise to think it too much... and that makes it hard to notice or even imagine that what your superiors are saying is true."
"What if Hell's instructions to you are not meant to work against your own interests? What if you're not Irori and can't succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid? I think if you were to leave Asmodeus and walk the path of Irori, you would need to learn to punish yourself, with only nothingness above you. And to survive that, if you could survive it at all, you would need to find the part of yourself that can never punish yourself enough, if the judgment is left to your own hands, and tear that out of your soul -"
"Or you could leave your punishments to your superiors. Maybe it's not the case that you'd be better off with Irori and you're not allowed to think that. Maybe Irori's Way is actually not the best path for you; a path that you might have been tempted to punish yourself into walking, if left to your own devices, but a path you cannot walk as yourself and remain whole. What if Hell's instructions to you are not meant to work against your own interests? It is heretical to think otherwise; that may make it hard to notice when it is actually true."
"That was all of my foolish clever thought."
Carissa Sevar: Oh.
Carissa feels slightly dizzy; it is strange to realize you were lying to yourself and hadn't noticed.
'remember that you are not Irori' is an instruction you would give to an Asmodean whether or not they were like Irori, whether or not that path was one they could walk. Because of course walking it means not being Asmodean, and possibly breaking, within you, that which makes you usable in Hell. If anything 'remember that you are not Irori' is maybe an instruction you'd more give to an Asmodean who is capable of being like Irori, since otherwise, why not let them try and fail?
But there is a good reason not to let Carissa try and fail, namely that she's needed for this whole operation. And - maybe Asmodeus doesn't actually want his useful servants smashed apart on the rocks of their own idiocy, so He warns them against it, and if they listen, good, and if they don't, then their destruction is wholly the product of their disobedience, which seems - pleasing, somehow, to Carissa, in a way that is perhaps the shadow of how Asmodeus feels about it.
Maybe she doesn't just need to learn to wield submission as a tool to entice Keltham, maybe she actually needs to believe in it.
How would she tell?
Well, she could try it and see if she becomes more able to accomplish Asmodeus's goals. The fundamental-assumption of Keltham's lecture this morning, that she's pretty sure half the students missed because he never stated it, so obvious it was to him - that going out and checking is the way to arrive at truth. Lots of smart people disagree with that; they argue that truth is found in mathematics, in logic, in theories, not in the mud where you never know anything for sure and have to do a lot of math just to guess how unsure you are. But dath ilan didn't even bother teaching it to their young children, because it was so intrinsic to everything else. You go and check.
Subirachs is not a source of advice Carissa can use to figure out everything herself; Subirachs is Carissa's superior, and the answer is what she says it is. Carissa doesn't actually understand why Asmodeus wishes it so but she can feel the outlines of a reason, maybe, sort of, and she doesn't actually have to know. Carissa should not follow the path of Irori, not just because it would be disobedient but because it wouldn't work; it would not make the project succeed and make Carissa someone who can fix even Hell if she needs to.
- that might be right. Not Carissa's job, anyway, to assess if it's right. Subirachs will tell her if she's doing better or doing worse.
Jacint Subirachs: "I think you possibly are meant to assess whether I'm right, unfortunately for you, in the particular exact matter of interpreting the will of Asmodeus spoken by Hell to Carissa Sevar. I don't think I'd have had my clever thought in a thousand years, if I hadn't read your transcript. Perhaps I'm still wrong or failing to see fully. I'm not smart enough, not Lawful enough, that the Chosen of Asmodeus should defer to me in a matter of understanding."
"But to whatever extent we do understand Asmodeus's instructions - even if it's because you told us so - the matter of how well you are doing in obeying them, and how much you need be punished for deficiency, is something that you must leave to your superiors. Trust to your superiors, even knowing they'll sometimes be less than perfect themselves, because their judgments make what is right. Matters of Irori and Asmodeus I am only guessing upon. If you ever try to punish yourself as much as you think is needful, you'll destroy yourself; of that, I'm now sure."
"I have no more advice or correction to offer you this night, Chosen."
"Your third-circle enchanter-assistant has arrived. The Queen confirms that she is pleased."
"Go with Asmodeus."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa departs respectably like a reasonable person whose priorities are Asmodeus's.
Carissa Sevar: GLIBNESS SWORDS TIME!
Carissa Sevar: Glibness is that rare phenomenon: a sorcerer spell wizards can't cast. In general, one might expect there'd be lots of sorcerer spells wizards couldn't cast; after all, sorcery is inborn, sometimes from unions with bizarre magical creatures that themselves have abilities no wizard can replicate. In practice this is very rare. Sorcerer spells tend towards configurations that a wizard, watching carefully, can see how one might emulate, and almost every sorcerer spell has eventually and painstakingly been found in a stable configuration that a wizard can build for themselves.
Not so with glibness. Glibness, to all appearances, doesn't have a stable configuration; it can only be cast spontaneously. You can never hang it on a scaffold.
(For this reason there's a school of thought that argues song-sorcerers, who can cast Glibness, aren't actually sorcerers at all; Carissa doesn't know much about that but suspects it of being stupid, people trying to throw something that reflects their own weakness out of the category 'sorcerers' rather than understand it better.)
But the fact you can't scaffold glibness doesn't mean you can't enchant a magic item with it!! Enchanting a magic item with a spell usually requires casting the spell, but it's also technically possible (if trickier) to build the channels in the magic-item-scaffold through which the spell would flow if you cast it, without casting it. Many people don't do that because they're lazy and it's trickier but it's not even that much trickier, unless you're also using a double scaffold so that you can get the project done faster, which, yes, admittedly they are doing that here, and which does make it a smidge difficult, but not that hard.
The other tricky element of what they're doing is putting Glibness in a sword. The standard way to do this would be a Wondrous Item but Carissa doesn't have time to retrain so she just invented a bunch of adaptations to arms-and-armor enchanting that make it work when you're doing something nonstandard like this. ...probably her assistant, who does have Wondrous Items training, can skip that part, and just do it as a slotless charm.
Does that all make sense?
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: "Yes, Chosen of Asmodeus. I will not fail you."
Carissa Sevar: This is going to be so much fun!!!!
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: ...she may notice at some point that the assistant enchanter seems unable to do some of the fine detail work that Carissa Sevar doesn't think should be that hard! Perhaps he's lazy? Or rather, he definitely seems to be trying quite hard right now, but perhaps he's been lazy his whole previous life up until this point, and that's why he seems to have such miserable Spellcraft? You'd seriously get the impression this person couldn't remotely use spellsilver from a distance of even two feet away! What kind of third-circle wizard is he?
Carissa Sevar: - Carissa isn't sure what the point of sending her an enchanter who is bad at enchanting is? This isn't meant to be an object lesson, it's meant to be a way to get everyone glibness swords as soon as possible, and they're going to take four days each even going at a good pace!
Does giving him her armillary amulet help him see what he was doing wrong.
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: It helps, but it's pretty clear that this person isn't actually going to be able to create slotless/sword-based Glibness items without Carissa coming in here and helping like every day on the most important detail work.
...maybe Abrogail wanted to give her an excuse for needing to take a little time every day to do some enchanting? That would be very thoughtful of the Queen! Just like her, really!
Carissa Sevar: Or maybe Abrogail sent her someone who sucks so she would get frustrated and torture them to death. That seems more like Abrogail, actually.
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: HE'LL TRY EVEN HARDER BUT TRYING HARDER DOESN'T ACTUALLY LET YOU DO MICROSCOPICALLY DETAILED WORK PERFECTLY IF YOU'RE NOT CARISSA SEVAR
Carissa Sevar: - Asmodeus didn't give her spellcraft powers! She just did things and then got better at doing them!! He should try it!
-- actually, she's getting frustrated and not having fun and not making sword progress, so what he should do is watch and try to learn something while she spends the rest of the evening making glibness swords, which is fun, unlike trying to get people to understand things, which is terrible.
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: He - he can do some parts of this work - he can help -
Carissa Sevar: Right but if she has to pay attention to him then she'll be annoyed and not having fun, and she could really use some uncomplicated fun right now, so she's just going to do this and he can watch and then on his own time he can try to copy it and see how far he gets!
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: Acknowledged.
Carissa Sevar: Anyway aside from them not having been able to send her a good enchanter this is a very refreshing break from her stressful dayjob.
Terrified Newly-Assigned Assistant Enchanter Who Wasn't Briefed Very Much And Is Now Certain He's Going To Die Horribly: He watches her nearly inhuman Spellcraft with horrified attentiveness.
He couldn't match the Chosen with two more wizard circles and twenty more years of practice. Couldn't make these tiny swords of glibness even if he trained for a year to make just that one item type. But he can maybe possibly if he works until exhaustion show the Chosen that he can prepare the lesser parts of her work for her, present her with prepared materials that she'll be able to complete with two hours less of her time, if he works for ten hours before then.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 19 (15) / Still Night
Asmodia: The Most High has apparently decided that Asmodia is cleared to know who Broom's god actually is: "Otolmens", the god of preventing the universe's inconsistencies from destroying it while all the other gods run around making Her work harder. Oh, Aspexia Rugatonn doesn't quite describe Otolmens that way, in so many words. But it's kind of... obvious.
Keltham must not be told this, because you don't want to go around suggesting to people that they might have the capability to destroy the universe and steer their thoughts in that direction; Keltham must be allowed to think that Broom's god just works to prevent Wish spells gone awry and lesser such disasters.
This also feels obvious? Asmodia had completed and Predicted the thought before she even got to that section of the letter.
(shielded:)
Otolmens couldn't possibly be her sponsor, could She? It - doesn't feel - somehow - like a sort of thing that Otolmens would do...
Still - if each of the Special Girls corresponds to some god involved in this, if that's how tropes work, then maybe Otolmens is the one that Asmodia corresponds to? Even if that doesn't make Otolmens the one who saved her in Hell and to whom Asmodia owes gratitude or fealty?
Asmodia will think about it.
If there's someone somewhere in all the universe who cares about her - then Asmodia wouldn't want to see that universe destroyed.
"Otolmia" doesn't have a bad ring to it, either.
Asmodia: She'll also, after some amount of internal deliberation and review of thought transcripts, recommend Korva Tallandria for a lot of Fox's Cunnings tonight.
Asmodia isn't sure why she's doing that, making the decision that's actually best for Cheliax. It's not in Asmodia's own personal interests, to do that. It would be better for Asmodia if Korva failed out of the regular classes because she couldn't keep up with the math. That way Asmodia could steal Korva and put her to work exclusively on the Wall...
...why isn't Asmodia doing that? It obviously isn't out of being Good; they're all working to serve Evil, here. Asmodia could get away with the disloyalty, her thoughts can't be read.
Asmodia doesn't know.
Well, whatever. Asmodia doesn't always need to know the reasons why she acts the way she does, right.
Asmodia recommends Korva for a lot of Cunning spells tonight, and files a request for a +2 intelligence headband that Korva can wear at nighttime. The Project could also really use a +4 intelligence headband that people in general can pass around at nighttime or when Keltham isn't looking. The newcomers could be that smart, for all Keltham knows; and there's not much chance of them being able to keep up otherwise. There's limits to how many enhancement spells the Project's harried third-circles can do, with so many more people. Project Lawful uses mental stats the way some projects eat spellsilver or gold.
Carissa Sevar: Sure, authorized. Asmodia can have a favorite among the new kids if she wants a favorite among the new kids.
lintamande: Meritxell gathers around a bunch of the new students to condescendingly reteach Probability since Asmodia shouldn't be the only one doing that.
Iarwain: One of the new kids, who in fact looks older and scarier than Meritxell does, is going to say out loud that Meritxell could maybe use an extra Eagle's Splendour for purposes of making herself understood.
lintamande: Well then that one can leave, and Meritxell will teach the ones who don't object to her teaching style.
Iarwain: That's fucking cold. Even most of the crueler teachers don't do that.
The rest of the new kids will listen attentively.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 20 (16)
Keltham: Actual chemistry lecture this morning! The newcomers should probably at least try to attend; it's not relying on math from Keltham's earlier lectures.
This is the Periodic Table of Elements. It's ordered by protons, and organized by the arrangement of electrons as they fill up the least energetic orbital positions.
Keltham will spend much longer, this time, describing the electron orbitals; and how covalent bonds allow shared electrons to fill more of their shells; and how this lower-potential-energy state, where more electrons are closer to stronger attractive charges of protons, makes molecules tightly bound together in a way that takes heat to pry apart.
When you could-in-principle rearrange all the atoms in a reaction into a lower-energy state at the end, releasing heat along the way, it implies a potential more stable state the system might get into, and stay in afterwards. To get there, you need a high temperature, so that the vibrations of heat will break apart some of the original molecules and let them randomly recombine, sometimes into the lower-energy state. Ideally, you pick a reaction temperature that easily breaks apart the feed molecules, but doesn't so easily break apart the more tightly bound final forms.
The reaction they're trying for with sulfuric acid is:
Stage 1: burn sulfur to sulfur dioxide, this is exothermic but requires a high starting temperature
S + O2 => SO2
Stage 1.5: purify the sulfur dioxide?? Keltham doesn't actually remember how to do this, unfortunately
Stage 2: catalyze sulfur dioxide to sulfur trioxide, in the presence of oxygen, using Element-23 oxide as a catalyst
SO2 + V2O5 => SO3 + V2O4 (probably)maybe SO2 + V2O4 => SO3 + V2O3 and then V2O3 + O2 = V2O5??
Stage 3: cool and dissolve the sulfur trioxide in sulfuric acid to form oleum
H2SO4 + SO3 => H2S2O7
Stage 4: react oleum with water to form concentrated sulfuric acid, twice as much as previously existed
H2S2O7 + H2O => 2 H2SO4
He's not really sure about the details, in the case of the sulfuric-acid synthesis pathway. But a reason the vanadium catalyst might help in the first place - is if it's relatively hard to tear apart an O2 molecule, for example, and the exoergic reaction of a single SO2 to SO3 isn't enough pull to tear apart a single O2 molecule - it could happen with two SO2 molecules at once, cooperating to tear apart an O2 molecule that's already heated and vibrating, but then it's less likely for all those molecules to be in the right positions. But V2O5 could resist the tug more weakly, giving up an O molecule to a demanding SO2 molecule; and then giving up another O molecule and turning into V2O3; and then swallowing down a whole O2 molecule to go back to V2O5 again. Possibly. For example.
The main point of this process, as Keltham understands it, is that it's liable to produce relatively high-purity sulfuric acid at scale.
It will also - he suspects - be much easier to do, much much easier to do reliably, if they can learn to really use Prestidigitation.
Keltham: Prestidigitation can alter color, taste, stickiness. Keltham has now verified that Prestidigitation can modify acidity and basicness in order to modify the reaction of vinegar with wood ash (lye). He's previously verified that Prestidigitation can produce temporary magnetism but only for so long as Keltham is concentrating, and even that he can get a material to reject a magnetic field using Prestidigitation.
All of this is of a kind with the shapes of the electron orbitals, the potential energy surfaces that determine possible reactions and reaction rates.
Prestidigitation should definitely be a sort of thing that can break the rules of chemistry. They can maybe make Element-20 'calcium' behave like Element-23 'vanadium' for purposes of turning it into something that behaves like vanadium oxide, without Keltham needing to somehow figure out which Golarion metal is 'vanadium'. Though vanadium oxide is donating oxygen molecules within the chemical reaction, so the oxygen part ought to be real.
There could maybe be a way to directly Prestidigitate sulfur dioxide to quickly react with oxygen at high temperatures, and turn into sulfur trioxide without need of a vanadium catalyst, if they really knew what they were doing. There may be, conceptually speaking, something sulfur dioxide could taste like, which would make it react more easily with oxygen and slide down the exothermic gradient to sulfur trioxide.
Keltham is guessing that energy is probably conserved, even in the presence of Prestidigitation, which means that they probably can't do very much work of a form 'make this very tight binding loose' because it should properly take energy to shake loose of a binding like that. But even small changes at the potential energy surfaces can do a lot to eliminate reaction barriers.
...though there's already hints that you need to be able to... sort of understand that stuff, or visualize it, on some level, to get Prestidigitation to know what it is you want it to do?
How are people doing on that.
lintamande: Uh, how should they be visualizing 'electrons' and 'orbitals'? Are these...tiny beads on strings?
Keltham: Keltham's not sure how far they're going to have to go into Law to get Prestidigitation working for them.
Layer one: There's tiny little pointlike particles called 'electrons' with 'LEFT' charge being pulled towards nuclei with 'RIGHT' charge. Identical electrons can't be in the same place at the same time, so there's only so much room for electrons to crowd around each other, as they get closer to a nucleus. Actually electrons can only be at certain exact distances from nuclei for, uh, reasons, so there's only so many 'orbitals' for them to live in. The lowest distance can only contain 2 electrons.
Atoms with more protons, like Element-8 'oxygen', are strongly electron-stealing or 'electronegative' and tend to tear away electrons from weaker nuclei like Element-4 'beryllium'; the electrons are still shared, still orbiting around everywhere, but you'll find more of them around the oxygen nucleus and less around the beryllium nucleus. Which in turn will make the oxygen side of beryllium oxide more LEFT-charged, since it's got fewer protons than electrons, since the electrons are crowding around the part with more protons to attract them; and the beryllium side more RIGHT-charged. This means that beryllium oxide is liable to go forming crystals in which the beryllium RIGHT sides of one molecule can get closer to the LEFT oxygen parts of another molecule, and the crystal structure will have its own strength - though not as strong as the underlying molecules, which is why it's easier to break substances with a hammer than transmute them.
If knowing layer one is enough to get Prestidigitation working, everyone's lives will be a lot simpler.
Layer two is about why two electrons can fit into the lowest orbital; it's because they need to have different ????-states and there's only two possible ????-states. Similarly, the next shell out, that can contain up to eight electrons, is actually two possible states of one kind of orbit, and six different possible kinds of another orbit.
The electrons have magnetism going on, and there's a way that electric charges and magnetic fields have a nature that fits together. A wave that propagates through the coupled electric and magnetic fields is a photon; when you have a lot of photons together, that's light.
Layer three is that the electrons aren't actually pointlike particles moving around, they're clouds of complex numbers with an equation that propagates the cloud, and the reason electrons can only orbit in certain distances and patterns is that their waves would interfere and cancel each other out otherwise. This is the point at which you could start to calculate where the orbitals go, though that's rapidly going to get harder for anything beyond one electron orbiting one proton.
Layer four is learning what the clouds are made of, and starts to get into underlying 'realityfluids'. And 'anthropics'.
lintamande: ......hopefully that doesn't turn out to be necessary for Prestidigitation.
Carissa Sevar: (Actually she kind of hopes that it does. Then they'd know what anthropics are.)
Keltham: We can hope! Hope is cheap since it doesn't affect actual outcomes!
Keltham hung a Silent Image earlier today! Here's what sulfuric acid actually looks like. You can see how those dangling hydrogen atoms on the end could potentially be ripped loose from the electrons holding them in, repelled by the positive charges at the center, and go off as positively charged protons to mess around with other chemical bonds and break them and dissolve them, which is what makes an acid acidic.
Here's what electron orbitals actually look like.
Protons are heavy and RIGHT-charged and clumped together by more powerful forces into nuclei despite the repulsion of similar charges; electrons are LEFT lighter and cloudlike, attracted to protons, self-repelling, and no two of them can be in the same place at the same time with the same ????. The heavy protonic nuclei settle into a configuration of least energy, taking into account the attractive electron charges and that the protonic nuclei repel each other insofar as not electron-neutralized; the heavy protonic nuclei act as a sort of backbone for the light electron cloud.
It's actually less complicated than the weird twisted interactions found in hanging spells, in some ways? There's a lot fewer interactions, really? It's just that these are different interactions, and the math is a tad deeper than any individual force described in second-circle wizard textbooks.
Also they can't just manually manipulate the forces, they've got to subtly influence them with Prestidigitation to make bulk chemical interactions go differently.
Also also nobody's ever done anything like this before, so far as Keltham knows. So they're gonna have to try a lot of stuff, and it's not actually clear which level of understanding is gonna be required to do what.
After lunch it'll be time for more experimentation using various things Keltham requested, using cheap materials he could identify, that will chemically react in ways that Keltham knows about!
Can they, for example, alter various substances, so that, when plunged into a hot fire, they burn with a different color of flame? Not alter the flame's color directly, Prestidigitate the material so that it burns with a different color when lit? That's a fairly direct test of their ability to mess with orbitals and potentials; it's electrons moving between orbitals that emit light of a particular energy and hence color.
Are they ready to get a lot of identical NO answers to 'Did that work?' while carefully observing for signs that anything observable went even slightly differently?
Carissa Sevar: That is actually the kind of thing Chelish wizard education prepares you for unusually well.
lintamande: A fair number of people are now trying incredibly hard to be the fastest to figure it out.
Keltham: Well so is Keltham. It doesn't matter how unfair the competition is, he's still competing.
Iarwain: ...and yes, Keltham is first to Prestidigitate materials to burn with different colors of light. Yay? If he was feeling competitive about that?
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Feeling competitive is beneath Lady Avaricia, but winning is not.
She's studied under an alchemist; her education has generally been more varied than that of the other students. And none of what Keltham said was that complicated, if you're not overawed by him, which she isn't.
Can she imagine this flame burns like salt, even though it didn't? More complicated than that? Can she imagine it tastes like salt? Can she imagine what's going on in salt, what its electrons are doing, and -
- she doesn't get it as fast as Keltham, but she gets it.
Keltham: Well, now he's actually interested in this 'county's heiress'-type person.
Everyone pause. Does Eulalia have any guesses for what she knows that the other students might not know?
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I know all kinds of things they don't know, since they're peasants. Relevantly I was thinking about how salt burns in different colors. Prestidigitation can be used to make food salty. That was insufficient."
Keltham: "What sufficed for you, if thinking about saltiness didn't do it?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I kept thinking about saltiness, but in more detail - about what structures salts form, what alchemical properties they have, how different salts make different colors, what specific salt I was pretending to burn."
Keltham: "Do you remember the last thing you thought before it worked?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "That green would go better with my nails today so I should burn copper."
Keltham: He doesn't really get this person, but that's fine on a level where Keltham hardly even notices it. Dath ilan has lots of weirdos.
"Huh. All right, time to slow down in at least that section and do slightly less maniacal experimentation. Let's have you peel off somebody and try to teach them to do what you do, but note down what you're trying to teach them in what order. Any tier-1s want to volunteer for that?"
Carissa Sevar: "Sure." Otherwise she'll be worrying about Lady Avaricia/Asmodia or Lady Avaricia/Ione explosions.
Willa Shilira: Willa had been trying to influence her Prestidigitation with complicated math in her head in the hopes it might be enough like real chemistry. Maybe unsurprisingly, it wasn't getting anywhere. A little while after Eulàlia's comment though, she decides it's time to escape her solution space.
She gets out a copper and licks it. And now she has some green flames too, how about that!
She immediately starts licking her other coins to try to branch out, but it seems to be harder going getting anything but green.
Keltham: All right, somebody else should definitely just try that.
Pilar : Doesn't work for Pilar.
Asmodia: Works for Asmodia.
Keltham: Right, well, that's actually very encouraging in terms of being able to eventually figure out what's going on here. Much more informative than everything just working reliably, when you think about it.
Korva Tallandria: Feeling competitive is NOT beneath Korva. If she isn't competitive with everyone else here about SOMETHING that isn't math, she's pretty sure she's going to fail out of the project, and possibly in some important sense kind of fail out of hell.Prestidigitation she can do, though. She doesn't want to copy the copper thing, now that it's been done, because it's much less impressive to be second at something. What other things burn weird colors that aren't green. Potash, she's pretty sure, but she doesn't know what potash is doing at the tiniest level other than that it's a kind of salt....sulfur burns blue, she's pretty sure, and it's definitely a pure element because Keltham was talking about it. She's just gonna go for broke and try to directly simulate sulfur. Sulfur has a lot of prestidigitation-worthy traits, actually; it has a smell, a little like eggs, and she's seen it before, knows its texture and the shapes it forms and a few of the things it mixes with, knows that it makes some mildly poisonous smoke -
After a few minutes of intense focus and blocking out everyone else, she gets a blue flame, and then starts coughing.
Keltham: Somebody hit her with a Dispel Magic and see if that immediately stops the coughing, he'll do a radius healing after that and after any lingering smoke has had some time blow away.
Korva Tallandria: It takes a little bit for her lungs to calm down again, but after that she seems fine.
"Uh. Sorry."
Keltham: Giant positive healing energy burst!
"For what? You didn't kill yourself at all, let alone in an unusually expensive way, and I think we probably want to plow ahead and not be too cautious until the first really costly injury. Nice blue flame, by the way."
Ione Sala: "Keltham -"
Keltham: "No, I'm sticking to theme on this one. Premature caution is expensive, slow, and not fun. We keep pushing until we find out what's actually dangerous. If we get through all of Project Lawful with zero experimental fatalities it means we were being much too safe."
Korva Tallandria: Korva personally thinks that dying prematurely sounds way way way less fun than being the level of cautious that it takes to avoid that!! Actually it sounds terrifying!! She barely knows anything yet, so there's no actual reason to resurrect her, which means she would be stuck in Hell not having made adequate use of her time as a mortal, which might mean an extremely boring eternity as a paving stone when compared to all of the people who actually got a head start on making something of themselves!
Obviously this just means that she's going to have to look out for her own safety, though, since it isn't remotely reasonable to expect Keltham to look out for it. Finding his assistants' lives expendable is really perfectly par for the course for the sort of person that he seems to be.She's a little baffled by the claim that he isn't evil yet, though.She'll just... nod.
Willa Shilira: Keltham has all the best opinions! Needless fretting about possible grisly death would probably make this so much slower and also less fun.
She is game to race ahead licking stuff and making fire until some of it blows up in her face, and then to race ahead some more.
Ione Sala: "And just to clarify explicitly, any casualties get resurrected. Even people who have not yet signed contracts with Project Lawful, who are second-circle wizards, who Cheliax couldn't afford to resurrect as a matter of routine, especially not during a war. Yes?"
Keltham: "Yes. Would anyone have seriously thought -"
Ione Sala: "Not everyone had a nice comfortable life before coming to this fortress, Keltham."
Keltham: "Fair. I stand corrected."
Ione Sala: She really needs to figure out whether or not this is a sex thing for her, at some point.
Carissa Sevar: Quietly, but not too quietly - it's a conversation they could have in alter!Cheliax, the version of it reserved for real!Cheliax would happen at night:
"It cannot possibly come as a surprise to you that no one likes you and that most people remember you as an obnoxious stereotype."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "No one ever remembers anyone else as more than a vague stereotype, unless you've attracted wildly more of their attention than is smart."
Carissa Sevar: " - so, you want people to assume you're frivolous and obnoxious since they'll round you off to something and it's not particularly dangerous?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Oh, no, I am frivolous. And obnoxious."
Carissa Sevar: In alter Cheliax she wouldn't light this person on fire. She probably wouldn't even be tempted.
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I think there's a dath ilani way of looking at it, actually, if you like that better, if it allows you to feel like your vague sense that I'm more important and better than you've accounted for is grounded in something. People who have better Sense Motive than Bluff don't choose what to claim; they choose how to be."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't - have - a vague sense you're better and more important than you're pretending to be." I have a vague sense that you're not doing something that makes sense to me and that's a threat to my project.
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Huh. I am better and more important than I'm pretending to be. Do you want me to walk you through what should have tipped you off?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'd be delighted."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: She counts them off on her fingertips. "It took me most of the last two days to decorate my room until living in such privation would not impair me, and I still finished the transcripts and associated exercises faster than most of the students who don't have some kind of disability where they repurposed all their brains for math and can't use any of it for anything else.
I attended every one of Asmodia's lectures and despite the fact she is an idiot child in shoes far too big for her she had no complaints for you about me.
Salts are pairings of 'elements' on opposite sides of Keltham's 'periodic table', the possibility of which I looked for as soon as he introduced it because of the alchemical teaching that every salt is in two parts and that's why they dissolve in water so readily.
Your outfit isn't bespoke and it's nice enough it ought to be, I'm surprised that tailor let you walk out of the shop with it fitting so poorly. I suspect they spent the rest of the week agonizing over whether they were going to get in trouble with their superiors for letting you walk out like that or if they'd have gotten into more for trying to have you stay when you were evidently in a hurry. I didn't see you, at the palace, but I have a friend who did, and that's how she knew that you'd been important for less than a week, with the timing matching Nidal rather neatly."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: It's always hard to know if peasants get subtext but she thinks everything crucial must have gotten through, there.
Keltham: (some time later)
...and that's about all the experimentation he's got in him for today! Keltham finds today's results very encouraging! There were a lot of bizarre phenomena that nobody understood! But not a steady stream of YES or NO either! With that amount of variation, there's going to be all kinds of handles they can use to find hypotheses that compress these mysterious details!
Also they actually did manage to Prestidigitate materials that would burn a different color! This is very encouraging and strongly suggests that Prestidigitation chemistry can in fact be a thing!
The first target remains large-scale high-purity sulfuric acid synthesis, which would all by itself noticeably contribute to bringing down spellsilver costs and can be considered as a prerequisite step to trying to refine spellsilver out of less costly ores.
Keltham has left behind some descriptions of common chemical reactions made with identifiable materials. He suspects he may end up taking a slower day tomorrow, and has other things to do today. People could, only if they genuinely actually have the spare time and energy and don't need time off more, try to experiment with measuring the reaction rates of known reactions. And, if they can measure those rates precisely enough to make it worth it, check to see if they can make particular reaction pathways happen faster, slower, more reliably, that sort of thing. It'll probably be easier to make flames that burn cooler rather than hotter but that's only an informed conjecture...
Oh yeah, temperature. Keltham is still trying to figure out how to build a thermometer. The last attempt exploded and was sort of a stupid idea anyways. That part's actually sorta important. They'll be doing a lot of temperature-measuring. More precise measurements mean consuming less material inputs to generate effects large enough to notice. There doesn't happen to be a Measure Temperature spell, does there?
lintamande: There does not. Alchemists use mercury.
Keltham: ...somebody wanna explain what 'mercury' is?
[...]
Okay, wow, that sounds like Element-80 and... maybe that stuff is safe to be around if Restoration works against it, but Keltham wants to poison some mice with it and make sure Restoration actually works, there. Element-80 has a horrific safety rep in dath ilan because, at least in dath ilan, it's incredibly hard to get out of a person once it gets into them.
If Restoration works to let mercury-poisoned mice lead otherwise productive and happy mouse lives, maybe they'll risk it. But it might take a little time to be sure of that? Unless it's already a known fact that a Restoration gets rid of all the sickness - possibly insanity, Keltham doesn't remember if Element-80 was one of those - that would otherwise be caused by Element-80 poisoning?
lintamande: Restoration heals damage; Neutralize Poison prevents further damage; possibly there are subtle long term effects, it's not like anyone would've checked. Alchemists are kind of crazy.