"Right.  Okay."

"Let's do that then.  What's step one?"

"We are currently doing that.  Right now.  We're having deep conversations while lit by dancing sparkles of your magic, in the warm indoors, while beyond us is visible a dark night and darker ocean.  This would qualify as an instance matching what is conventionally held to be the category for step one."

"Okay."

"What's step two?"

PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Late Night

"How'd I do."

"We now have to figure out why in alter Cheliax no one ever develops sexual attraction gradually, if it's not that that's just a wildly pathetic thing to do.

On the bright side, he didn't call it for Conspiracy on the spot."

"Are we under the impression that girls in alterCheliax are somehow told about all of the standard gendertropes?  Because that didn't happen in realCheliax.  It failed to happen so hard that it literally did not occur to me that alterCheliax would do better.  I was not, in fact, aware that this was a thing that Asmodeanism was denying me."

"We really need to kidnap that bunch of reference Taldane girls but my guess is that this is an Asmodeanism thing and they'll all have the concept."

"I admit fault then.  AlterIone could have been unusually clueless, too scared to talk to anybody and just reading books instead?"

"I also admit fault, Keltham said something similar to me and I thought he was just talking about near-asexuals, people who aren't sure if they're asexuals."

"...I propose we statue Keltham tonight and spend a full day trying to catch up on how things work everywhere that isn't Cheliax, now that we have some of our promised intelligence officers and retired out-country agents to answer questions."

"And yes, kidnap some fucking Taldane girls already, anybody, this is ridiculous."

"And treat them nicely, I'm sure you were about to say."

"Obviously don't tell them it's Cheliax, we don't want to learn what scared non-Asmodeans look like."

"If they hate us they're going to be less useful for Asmodia's attempted Law lessons. We'll treat them better than Taldor ever did, and we'll claim to be some random bunch of Taldans who the Crown has no power over. Statue Keltham, and let's line up some decent intelligence briefings for tomorrow."

PL-timestamp:  Day 16 (12) / Morning

Another cloudy morning!  Is there any particular reason for the Conspiracy to be doing that, if weather control is a thing?

Maybe if they're, like, getting their usual airplane flights and space launches done?

If so, that's mildly incompatible with the god-war being faked, because if the god-war was faked, they've got better apparently-sky-wide illusion technology than this, and don't need to cloud up the sky to hide things.  Unless the illusion tech can add new lights but not hide others, which mostly doesn't seem to be the way his own illusion spells are trending?

Stretches of cloudy weather in an unknown climate don't seem that improbable on priors, but it's a good thing to notice consciously.

Keltham should probably be giving a lecture on Markets, for the benefit of everybody who isn't Asmodia, but what he actually wants to work on right away is ACID.  Keltham is so pumped about figuring out how to make massive quantities of acid.  In all the stories where the protagonist wants to do anything scalable with chemistry and therefore has to start by making huge quantities of acid, they're operating in some world that doesn't have magical healing and the whole story is just blah blah safety precautions but this is Golarion and people come back from the DEAD.  In this place Keltham gets to just run right out and make ACID.

(...the term 'acid' probably has some slightly different connotations when said in Golarion, land of truly horrific combat spells with 'acid' in the title, than in dath ilan, where it sounds like a glamorously dangerous key industrial input.)

Acid in Golarion has connotations approximately to the effect of 'liquid lingering torment'. But that's okay! They're Asmodeans! They would love to learn about liquid lingering torment!!

So how would Cheliax be doing about sulfur, in the quantities required for acid on the scale required for refining spellsilver?  Like, more spellsilver, not just current quantities of spellsilver?  Does Keltham need to mine cheap sulfur first, or find somewhere to mine pyrite?

A thing to note for later review maybe with an Owl's Wisdom, Carissa thinks as people scramble to get Keltham information about the availability of sulfur and the output of sulfur mines,  and the identification of pyrite, and then mining costs and mining techniques and goods transportation and a hundred other things that come up down that path -

- is that probably they should've gone for this first. Just this, the tools to get rich. It's safer than the Law. It's more obviously useful than the Law. It's not going to break anyone inside. And it means Keltham is mostly thinking about things they don't have to lie to him about. It is quite plainly what they should've been doing all along. They didn't because they wanted to stall on a contract to figure out how to get things past him, but they failed at that anyway. And they didn't because the Law is - more hypnotizing, more fascinating, because it feels like the Law matters more than this, the Law that is the reason dath ilan knows all this - 

- it feels like it wouldn't do, for Hell to be always relying on the inventions of other places that are better at invention. But that doesn't mean it was the right first priority. 

...something to think about later.

This sounds like fun, but... also the sort of thing where, once Keltham figures out acid manufacturing here, he'll be able to reproduce it much faster if he leaves Cheliax and flees for Osirion.  The real point here is learning Keltham's Law by seeing it in action, and then being harder on themselves about it than Osirians will be and creating true Keepers of Asmodeus.  That's the way to pull ahead in this race for real.

And Pilar isn't really picking up how Keltham is thinking about any of these things.  They should've maybe asked to have learned more Law first.

If Keltham manages to DISSOLVE HIMSELF IN ACID he'll need a RESURRECTION and they'll have to get it to him REALLY QUICKLY like maybe within SECONDS because Abadar might be on standby ready to yank Keltham's soul and go "Yo" and "Haha no Cheliax can't have you back" and none of this can be SAID TO KELTHAM but maybe they can come up with some reason why it'd be quite bad for him to die except for the part where the OBVIOUS REASON is to PREVENT HIM FROM TALKING TO HIS GOD and in fact now that Asmodia thinks about it Keltham could DEMAND TO GO DIE EXPERIMENTALLY AT ANY TIME TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION so they really don't want Keltham THINKING IN THAT DIRECTION AT ALL.

Somehow nowadays all of the people around Asmodia seem MUCH MORE RELAXED THAN SHE IS and Asmodia doesn't know why they're not all already DEAD if that's how RELAXED they are about things.

"So, Keltham.  You're not actually doing anything with acid today.  Any day where you're actually going to, you're going to pray for a bunch of Resist Energy spells, that's second-circle, up to twenty minutes per caster circle, so you can Resist Energy (Acid)."

It's fine!  Who knows if that spell even works on the sort of acid fumes that otherwise lead you to end up with horribly scarred lungs!  Keltham bets Restoration works on that, if healing surges don't, and if not, he can always die and come back!

"KELTHAM.  NO.  BAD KELTHAM."