Well, that does square with the rough amount of money that the Queen of Cheliax should be willing to spend on sex games, so okeydokey.

Can you pull spellsilver essence into, say, iron, and then pull it back out again as if that iron were spellsilver?  Where to be clear, Keltham is thinking about questions like "Can depleted spellsilver be recharged, can it maybe be recharged with something else that isn't spellsilver and used repeatedly, can he make synthetic spellsilver instead of mining it?"

No one has successfully made other metals behave magically as spellsilver does, including by magically transmuting it into spellsilver. It's not known to be impossible.

Okay but can you take a lump of depleted spellsilver and recharge it off non-depleted spellsilver that then depletes?

No. Depleted spellsilver might as well be some entirely different metal in terms of the kinds of things you can do with it; you can't 'charge' iron, so you can't recharge depleted spellsilver.

Interesting.  Keltham is guessing that they've never, say, compared a 1-foot cube of spellsilver to a 1-foot cube of depleted spellsilver to see whether one is 0.1% denser than the other, on grounds like 'Nobody has that much spellsilver' and 'We don't have weighing-instruments fine enough to detect that difference off a 1-inch cube instead'.  But if somebody by any chance has performed that experiment, Keltham would like to know...?

...they have not performed that experiment for both of those reasons. Also even if it were true they've never heard of any theory of alchemy where that'd be useful information.

If spellsilver is the kind of thing it sounds like, where you can filter it out using a series of chemical reactions, then spellsilver has not always existed since the beginning of time.  It got turned from non-spellsilver into spellsilver at some point.

Unfortunately 'at some point' is billions of years ago inside the centers of exploding stars, in processes that are beyond what even Keltham knows how to cheaply duplicate at scale.

But the point is, spellsilver exists; most things that exist can be made out of other things that are not themselves.  The question is, what is the cheapest way of getting more of a material?  And this, for spellsilver, is almost surely mining it and purifying it with acids.  That doesn't mean Keltham isn't going to check the other routes, before he spends a ton of time on cheap high-purity acid.

If what distinguishes spellsilver from depleted spellsilver is a tiny weight difference between two metals that otherwise seem chemically to be exactly equivalent, this means Keltham cannot realistically figure out how to recharge depleted spellsilver.  If it's not that, he should go on thinking.  They don't know, so he'll go on thinking.

If there were, say, a ten-thousand-pound mass of pure spellsilver lying around, would there be any good way to detect that from a hundred thousand miles away?

From a hundred thousand miles away? No. There are divinations for finding objects but you have to be quite close, within half a mile or so.

All right, for now he'll stick to the plan of getting spellsilver on-planet instead of trying to figure out whether this solar system has an asteroid belt.

Keltham will ask a few more incredibly strange questions, then have them go through every single step of the process with ingredient costs and labor costs and success reliability and lost masses attached to each step, then ask about every other process that has ever worked for refining spellsilver out of any ore no matter how expensive that was, then spend any remaining time until dinner listening to summaries of bright ideas that definitely don't work.

Sometimes apprentices will get the idea that you can use prestidigitation to separate out the spellsilver instead of coaxing it to precipitate in the acid; this seems like it should work but doesn't. The bones of lots of different animals and people have been tried in case some bones have more potent alchemical properties than others, but they don't seem to. Prayer does not help. Replacing acid with fire seems like it should obviously work but does not. Having the work carried out by holy men doesn't make it more efficient....and so on in this vein, because the set of things you try from a Golarion worldview are mostly not the set you try from a dath ilani worldview. 

Message to Carissa:  These people are NOT trying the things a dath ilani would try and you should continue to be terrified of Hypothetical Corrupted Keltham's supervillainy.

(He doesn't particularly notice the part about trying bones from different people; you could get those in Civilization too, for a price, so long as you weren't trying to get skulls.  Actual human skulls are famous for only being in museums, in sections screened off by competence tests, with very somber stories attached to each.)

- noted. 

(They all seem like perfectly reasonable things to try to her.)

Dinnertime seems to have arrived.  Uh, Security question: do these people get invited to dinner?  Or Keltham says bye for now, and they should call him when they've tried the seashell thing or he'll call them when he's got cheaper or higher-purity acids?

If he has further questions he can ask those over dinner; if he's done, then they can depart to try the things he suggested.

...he obviously has an unbounded quantity of Additional Questions, but he was careful to ask his most urgent ones first.  Dinnertime is also generally, by the customs of his own people, a time for freer-form conversation rather than focused Q&A.  Which in this case is going to be a little odd because of the Security restrictions on what they can ask him; but generally, if they opt to come to dinner, they should expect more questions like 'So what was your most interesting day on this job?' or 'How do you hire people for this kind of work?'

In that case they'll probably just get to work? They're very eager to try the things he suggested and the best Security is not thinking much about things they aren't supposed to know about.

He didn't really suggest very much besides the seashell-ash business, but okeydokey again.  See them later.

PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Evening

"So you kept on asking about the prices of things and it was incredibly obvious you were using some Law.  This Law is one that I desire to know.  Right now, not when you get around to it eventually."

"Any particular reason -"

"From the way you're talking it's REALLY OBVIOUS all those prices are related by Laws to THINGS and EACH OTHER and I DO NOT KNOW what those relations ARE and this BOTHERS ME."

The Conspiracy would totally need to know, to make up their prices, but you can't not be curious about anything the Conspiracy'd want to know.

"You were surrounded by prices your whole life before you got to Project Lawful.  You weren't curious about them then?"

"No because I had 6 fewer Wisdom" and 1 less Intelligence "and didn't realize that Law was a kind of thing that could exist, and was busy studying to be a Worldwound wizard, and most importantly there was not a BOY walking around who clearly DID KNOW and wasn't SAYING.  If everything about this relationship were completely different, I'd assume you were holding out against me offering you sex about it.  I'd offer you sex about it if that was something I thought you wanted from me."

Right then.

This is, in fact, going to take a proper future Law lecture.  But consider the point that if there weren't equal numbers of men and women, or rather, equal parental investment in men and women as a means of producing grandchildren, there'd be other strategies that genes could influence people towards, hence heritable strategies, that would yield a greater return on investment, so it wouldn't be stable in the face of natural heritage-selection.

The spellsilver makers are presumably trying to carry out their own process in the way that's cheapest per pound of yielded spellsilver, which means that everything about it should also be the cheapest way to do that step, relative to their options, and there might be alternative ways of doing the same thing but they should all be more expensive.

Keltham may be able to figure out how to do some things with chemistry more cheaply or reliably.  But this potentially changes which steps or ways of doing things are cheapest, not just how to do the same steps more cheaply or reliably.  So Keltham tried to get information about more expensive alternative ways to do the same thing, in case Keltham knows some way to make those alternative roads, cheaper, more easily than he could optimize the standard steps.

There's also the basic point that before you spend a lot of time optimizing something, you should make sure it's an expensive part of the problem.  Cutting the price of something by a factor of two doesn't help a lot if it was only 1% of the original cost.

The prices are sort of like 'how important is this' or 'how much do I even care' labels over the whole process, as well as implying things about other prices being higher if they were the costs of other known ways to accomplish the same thing.