Okay, so, given the sheer amount of internal disarray he has going on here, he is going to give himself time to think about this, absorb, and not come to a conclusion right away.

They do say not to rush into sex if you are feeling rushed, and that... probably extends unchanged even to very large quantities of sex?  Why is his brain slightly reluctant to accept that obvious-seeming meta-conclusion.

Invisibly, and also inaudibly, two high level wizards spent a truly heroic length of time trying to have straight faces at each other and it's not totally clear who failed first because it was basically simultaneous.

"I -" says one of them, the one who doesn't need to breathe because he has a necklace of adaptation - "- reject the explanation that this is what people are like without free will or with better training in not using it."

The other one doesn't have a necklace of adaptation and does need oxygen and so takes several minutes to catch his breath. "My theory is that, probably, if I can trust my premises here, Cheliax exists."

"We should add to the list of things that go wrong with a honeypot setup, 'he decides that the presence of girls implies that his ejaculate is very valuable and he should not give it away for free'."

"Should we, though. When it will absolutely never ever happen again."

"Well, if we commission thousands of him, maybe in a few generations it's a common problem."

"Gods forbid."

"From what I know, the gods seem supportive."

"You know if Nethys gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and destroy themselves. Maybe if Abadar gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and end up like this."

"I have heard as many as several things about the pharaoh of Osirion and that seems probably wrong."

"But was it presented with the observations and inferences separated, with numbers for every sentence? No? I submit that you know nothing about Osirion except that a book-writer wanted you to believe that it exists."

"Observation: Osirian women can't own money. Inference: therefore, the pharaoh probably does not oblige them to pay him to fuck them."

"I didn't hear any numbers."

"Thirty seven. Point one five. Eight hundred ninety six."

"Ah. A credible claim, then."

Keltham needs a Plan.

He needs to handle this attempted mass mating rush in a way that neither immediately escalates to cuddling, nor signals that he is opposed to the mass mating per se.

Can he just... be nice and smile at the girls, but pretend not to notice their flirting attempts, for now, possibly?  Or be deliberately ambiguous, leaning negative, but with occasional positive signs thrown in?  Would that work to correctly signal that he was delaying but leaving his options open, if the underlying strategy was successfully decoded by the other side?  It's more of a classically feminine stratagem than a classically masculine one; but 'feminine' is here standing in for the sexuality in relatively greater demand, and the inversion for his own case should be as obvious to them as it is to him.  And even if the stratagem isn't correctly decoded by the amorous horde, obscured by unknown subgaps of the cultural gap between he and they, it seems relatively failsafe?  Given the common-knowledge-avoidance underlying theory of flirting, sending ambiguous signals should avoid either escalating or terminating -

Wait.  That style of flirting exists in dath ilan, deployed by people who know what 'common knowledge' is.  'Common knowledge' is not a very advanced formalism, but it is very plausibly not something that is known here; or plausibly something that exists, but is beyond the lower quartile of a population with -3.2 average intelligence.

A lot of romantic complications seem like they would plausibly be beyond the lower quartile of a -3.2g world, if that world designed or just equilibrated to romantic norms that worked for almost-everyone.

...do amorous girls in Cheliax... even do subtlety... at all...?

No, he might be panicking prematurely here.  Carissa opened by saying that she'd be curious about what happened to him, but afterwards mentioned that Keltham might be tired and need to find a bedroom to sleep in, rather than suggesting that they immediately go to a cuddleroom.  Romantic norms here probably call for some subtlety.  Probably.

...how about if he smiles in a friendly way, looks appreciative of appearances, and pretends not to notice any overtures that aren't fully overt?  He's from a very alien place, and it should be much more plausible than usual that he actually isn't picking up on flirting attempts.

At the point where Keltham noticed that he'd been surrounded by pretty girls his own age, he'd been about to... ask around for library-help, in case he was looking in the wrong place to find subject-encyclopedias.

Keltham observes of himself that he is, in fact, scared, even armed with his new Plan.

The stereotypically wise question to ask when you're scared is, "Suppose you go on avoiding this forever, how well will that work out for you?"

And Keltham knows well that he does not, in fact, wish to avoid talking to amorous female hordes forever.  Every man must, at some point, talk to the amorous female hordes bent on mating with him, and pretend not to notice.  This is wisdom.

In full knowledge that he is both silly and doomed (for he is not without understanding of how his own life might appear, seen from the outside) Keltham turns around to address the library.

"Do any of you happen to know if I'm looking in the right place for..."  Taldane doesn't have the word subject-encyclopedia.  Great.  "The kind of book on magic that would say - how much weight magic can lift, how much water it can turn to steam, how fast a little bit of magic accelerates when it clings to another little bit of magic?"

He has the rapt attention of the horde. 

"Principles of Spell Design has that," someone says instantly.

"I don't know if they'll have that here."

"Archduke Henderthane's not a wizard, I don't think -"

" - he might not say -"

"- but most of the noble houses've got sorcerous bloodlines, rather than studying to be wizards -"

"- it was only recently under the glorious guidance of House Thrune and Asmodeus that wizardry's better than a sorcerer bloodline -"

"And it still, you know, depends on the sorcerer bloodline. And on how smart you are."

"And if you're a noble you're enhancing splendour not cunning which works better with being a sorcerer -"

"- anyway if he's either not a wizard or pretending not to be he won't have Principles of Spell Design in his public library."

"Ostenso's Imperial Academy Of Magic has it. - that's where we go to school."

"Probably someone could fetch it for you."

...Did the local government assign him a research harem?  Because these pretty girls sound a lot like an engineering team that somebody just tossed a problem.

Okay, that's honestly kind of awesome.  Keltham is not going to complain about this at all.

"Expect I'm gonna want a lot of books that aren't here, if there's better libraries than this," Keltham says out loud.  "Unless it's very low-overhead to grab them one at a time, let's build up a list before making a run.  Principles of Spell Design definitely sounds like the kind of title that should be on it.  Does anybody see a standout good book that's already here, for quickly getting some picture of magical basics?  Right now I have very little idea of what magic can do or what's already been tried."

The girls have ostensibly been examining the selection of books in this library for the last three hours but they spring into action to actually examine the selection. 

"You want Bloodlines, it's got a breakdown of all the known wizard spells by which sorcerer bloodlines manifest them and so it's got a breakdown of all the known wizard spells."

"I know I saw Serrano's Abjuration -"

"I have Lorca's A Definitive Guide To Summons in my backpack -"

"That's no good, I have Marias and it's better -"

"All known wizard spells sounds hella useful."  Though the fact that there's a bookable finite list implies incredibly strong design constraints, why isn't that like saying that one of your books contains all known blueprints for technology that uses electricity?  Maybe she just meant all the known popular ones?

Bloodlines is found in the library. It's in eight volumes but it's distinctly finite. The girls are quietly arguing with each other about which is the definitive text on Transmutation and about how far afield the book-fetchers will be persuadable to go. There is at least one whispered "Asmodeus's direct orders -"

Keltham is sufficiently intent on rapidly flipping through All The Wizard Spells that he's unlikely to overhear any whispers like that.

WHAT.  WHAT IS THIS.   HOW IS THIS THE LIST OF WIZARD SPELLS.  WHAT.

Mage's Faithful Hound

5th Circle, Conjuration

You conjure up a phantom watchdog that is invisible to everyone but yourself. It then guards the area where it was conjured (it does not move). The hound immediately starts barking loudly if any Small or larger creature approaches within 30 feet of it. (Those within 30 feet of the hound when it is conjured may move about in the area, but if they leave and return, they activate the barking.) The hound sees invisible and ethereal creatures. It does not react to figments, but it does react to shadow illusions.

If an intruder approaches to within 5 feet of the hound, the dog stops barking and delivers a vicious bite once per round. The dog also gets the bonuses appropriate to an invisible creature (see invisibility). Its bite is the equivalent of a magic weapon for the purpose of damage reduction. The hound cannot be attacked, but it can be dispelled.

The spell lasts for 1 hour per caster level, but once the hound begins barking, it lasts only 1 round per caster level. If you are ever more than 100 feet distant from the hound, the spell ends.

So you could either send something into the Elemental Plane of Fire, or alternatively with the same conserved-resource expenditure, materialize a temporary domesticated wolf.  Not, like, a barky bitey sphere or something, a domesticated wolf specifically.

The spell list is incredibly varied, gratuitously exotic, around three-quarters focused on combat (albeit this does make some sense if wizards only get more powerful by defeating monsters), and exponentially too tiny for a list of possible structures that can be made that complicated and which are key to a whole society.

But, wait, the pipes were enchanted to deliver hot water, weren't they?  Maybe all the utility stuff is - magic items, right.  The wizard spells are just the structures you can build using an item-scaffold, tie off, and then carry around until you fire them at something.  It would make sense for those to be combat-focused, because that's the context in which you'd fire something immediately and without carefully constructing a reusable magical item to do it instead.

It still doesn't make sense how there's a short finite list of structures this exotic.  Unless...

"Two wild-ass-guess hypotheses," Keltham says out loud.  "Confirm or refute.  Hypothesis one, only gods, or some extremely rare class of people with access to restricted stuff, can create," or rather compile but Taldane doesn't have the word, "spell designs.  Hypothesis two, there's a much wider variety of magicalized devices than standard wizard spells, too many for there to exist a comprehensive book set listing all such device templates.  Also, sorry all my words come out so long and stuffy-sounding, they'd be shorter in my native language."

"Spell design is really hard and only gods or extremely powerful ancient wizards can do it from scratch," one of the girls confirms. "- and yes, you can do a wider variety of things with magic items."

"What you can do with magic items is combine elements more freely," someone else says. "If there are two items that do different things, you can build one item that does both. You can't do that with spells at all. And you can make a magic item that casts a spell once an hour, or twice an hour, or on a trigger, that's really tricky to put in a spell."

"I'm approaching certification in item crafting, if you have more questions specifically about that."

Keltham has been trying to figure out what obvious-to-him things would not have already been tried.  "How are magic items at precision, focusing forces down to smaller levels?  Let's say I want to take all the power that would go into something like a mage's faithful hound, and apply all that power to compressing and heating something the size of a dust speck."

The girl looks crestfallen. "I ....don't know. I think it'd take more skill, to make something that can work on very small things."

"Sort of thing a topnotch research team could do in a week, a month, a year, a decade, or never?"

"I think if it could be done in a week someone would've done it. Though they might have, and not published it, depending what it's useful for."

"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make them excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for - is Keltham's current thought.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, that would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around a bigger mass of liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.

Is that squirrel thinking about how to do SCIENCE to MAGIC in order to create HUGE EXPLOSIONS?

The existing treaties about enormous destructive magical explosions admittedly don't encompass this but new ones that do should be agreed upon promptly, because if there are a lot of explosions of that kind there won't be anything anyone values left on Golarion! ...also, that particular squirrel should NOT be encouraged to blow itself up, that particular squirrel is very valuable.

This is so exciting!  Prophecy is broken and now the squirrels are going to develop magical nuclear weapons centuries ahead of Nethys's schedule!

The squirrel appears to be in Cheliax!  Nethys goes off to bother Asmodeus about this.

The top decile of attractive girls at Ostenso's Imperial Academy of Magic are diligently taking notes and also exchanging glances at the announcement that there are equity distributions involved in this? It kind of sounds too good to be true but he is a bizarre alien. An oblivious bizarre alien.

Keltham shall continue asking extremely basic and/or extremely difficult questions!  And seizing one book after another from the library (this time with their guidance) and reading random pages from it!

Facts that are likely to become clear to his audience:

- Keltham does tend to look at you when you drop a pen on the floor and strategically pick it up.

- Keltham believes that they were assigned to him as a research team.

- Keltham is a proud man, but has an alien concept of pride which does not preclude him continually calling his own ideas stupid.

- Keltham thinks himself to be in charge of something he calls the Golarion Industrialization Project, but does not seem to act or talk in any way that reflects this self-assigned high status.  Trying to show him overt signs of deference causes him to produce odd looks and uncomfortable side glances.

- Keltham thinks his researchers all need to learn basic calculus in order to be able to work on his project.  Obviously they are going to be dealing with all sorts of things that equilibrate, and you need to learn derivatives to understand equilibria.  Keltham hopes the smarter ones among them can have learned the basics there before they reconvene tomorrow.

- Keltham is following an unknown ruleset for sexual mindgames which permits him to appreciate prettiness and physical stretches through (completely direct and unhidden) looking, but not to respond verbally to verbal hints of interest.

- Keltham's mind runs completely skew to all other mindgames played in Cheliax.

- Keltham has absolutely no idea how Golarion, Cheliax, or this entire universe, operates.

- Keltham believes and takes for granted that they are all being paid lots of money to work for him.