But -

"RESURRECTION IS EXPENSIVE and I will FIND THE SIGHT PERSONALLY DISTRESSING.  Just... get the spells.  Use the spells."

"Use Augury too."

"Have ANY COMMON SENSE WHATSOEVER.  This is your Nethysian safety advisory."

Ione is sounding exactly like every boring fun-killing deuteragonist in the stories when the protagonist just wants to make an enormous quantity of acid.

"GOOD."

...or Ione could just do THAT without consulting Asmodia FIRST but Asmodia supposes it looked like it worked.

"If you want to die in a fascinating way in a magical experiment it should be a really cool magical experiment that makes everyone who hears about it go 'what that should be impossible five different ways'."

They haven't even gotten to the magical part yet!  After lunch they'll start playing around with vinegar to find out what they can do to control chemistry with Prestidigitation now that anybody involved has any idea what chemistry is!

All the more reason to avoid dying dramatically just yet!

If they can manage to die dramatically after lunch while experimenting with Prestidigitation and vinegar, it will be impossible in only one way (Conservation of Energy) but it's a really big and important way!

Carissa has never before encountered the claim that energy is conserved. She decides this is not the time to dispute it. 

If Keltham manages to kill himself using Prestidigitation and vinegar, Asmodia will just quietly go into the Gardens of Erecura and ignore any resurrection attempts until a nice sane Golarion Civilization calls her back a hundred years later.

PL-timestamp:  Day 16 (12) / Afternoon

And now they will try out some magical chemistry!  Where the goal is to see whether you can make Prestidigitation do anything interesting to chemistry, once you know what the chemistry is doing.

In particular, they're going to try making vinegar more and less acidic, wood-ash-in-water more and less alkaline, and they're going to see whether things can be turned into salts that shouldn't be salts and then stop being salts when the Prestidigation wears off an hour later!  Or put some actual salt in water, and see if they can change the amount of chlorine that evaporates away, such that the amount of salt recovered via evaporation changes!  Or see if you can stop salt crystals from dissolving in water by Prestidigitating them to taste like more stable things than salt!

...and if it turns out that, for some of those things, Keltham can do that with Prestidigitation and others can't, he's going to teach them about chemistry layer-by-layer in hopes of figuring out which layer of knowledge is necessary.

By the way, to be clear, this general kind of operation is not guaranteed to revolutionize chemistry within three days.  Up to a month can be required!  Sometimes it even takes longer than one month!  Science Maniac Verrez always says that to everyone, and usually does do it within three days, in dath ilani fiction.  Though in one famous reader-trolling incident the next scene in the book took place thirty years later and involved Verrez's grandchildren.  Actually Verrez's consort who is constantly trying to prevent Verrez from getting himself killed talks a lot like Ione now that Keltham is thinking about it.

PL-timestamp:  Day 10,816 / Evening

Just kidding!

PL-timestamp:  Day 16 (12) / Evening

Those experiments did not all go as Keltham expected.  But he has at least established that (1) anybody can prestidigitate acids more acidic if they know what vinegar or lemon juice taste like, and this works as an actual acid for purposes of eg neutralizing the lye in wood ash, and (2), Keltham is able to do some useless-seeming tricks with ordinary table salt that the others cannot do, even after he tried explaining the chemistry of salt qualitatively in some detail.  Down to the point of talking about electrons, charges, orbitals, fields, albeit with words and not numbers.

Using Communal Share Language (Baseline) and trying to re-explain in Baseline didn't particularly work either.

...well, at least they now have a clearly defined target for further research into How Much You Need To Know Before You Can Use Prestidigitation To Control Chemistry.

Keltham is actually too tired to screw anyone tonight.  He forgot all about scheduled rest hours again, now that he thinks about it.  Possibly for the last several days?  He's not sure.  Things are sort of a blur right now.  Good night everyone!

Carissa decides to conduct a test of whether tropes are real. 

"We're on a streak!" she says brightly. "No high-urgency messages to the Grand High Priestess for four days straight!"

"Burn in Hell, Sevar."

"I'm going to burn the most and become an entirely new kind of devil. How's our wall look."

"I've added a new purple category for Things Keltham Must Never Be Prompted To Think About which includes 'How about if I just died temporarily so I could talk to my god, Raise Dead isn't that expensive, right'."

"The existing color categories are doing okay.  Where are my normal Taldane people, are they here yet?"

"Expected arrival tomorrow at the secondary site."

"If nobody needs me for anything, I am heading off to write up my best guess at Nethysian theology and hope that Takaral left me with some kind of divine inspiration that I can use to get anything remotely right.  Or that I was chosen on the basis of being naturally the sort of person who will make up the right Nethysian theology if she tries.  Wish me luck."

"I hope you come up with something that is very convenient for me," says Carissa, as it's more honest than saying 'good luck'. "Have fun."