"Whether Tonia or Peranza or some other girl cracks this week. Which is a nice bump to the odds they can't sustain the deception for a full month; they're already worried about people who try to comprehend any other ideology breaking down."

"Tonia, Peranza, are those among the families we grabbed?"

"Tonia yes, Peranza no. Tonia's parents don't know anything, they're farmers who keep their heads down. We wouldn't previously have identified either girl as particularly likely to defect but we have very little on the internals of Project Lawful. I don't think the trading in Dis tracks it all that closely."

"Are we deferring to them on the odds of the girls having a breakdown?"

"...my instinct is that they're underestimating it, because they don't have a full picture of the threat surface - of how many things about human values are incompatible with Asmodeanism, about how many lies Cheliax is telling. I expect no one in Cheliax could even list all the lies. But - I'd still give good odds they make it through this week.

Worse odds they make it through a month."

"Then we'd better start preparing for once Keltham arrives here. Which - means preparing for war, I think - Your Majesty, are you up for this -"

"I have no reason to expect tomorrow to be any better," says the pharaoh through gritted teeth.

PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Endless Night
PL-spacestamp:  Cheliax / Ostenso coastline / Fortress of Law

(Asmodia has now delivered rather a long lecture on alterCheliax.  She's tried to explain the basic concepts of how Keltham is not looking for things inexplicable in alterCheliax but less likely there than in his concept of the Conspiracy, using the example of Ione telling him a library book was missing.  She's explained that Keltham didn't see Manohar giving Asmodia her headband as especially being a sign of the Conspiracy, but that he'll be narrowing down which Conspiracies are then more likely on the assumption that this is a Conspiracy.

She's conducted a number of individual interviews that have stretched on for a while.

She probably won't be able to finish this all in one night without a Security, or one of the interviewees, or Asmodia herself noticing that their own universe is not being incredibly consistent here.)

Yeah, Asmodia doesn't think she's going to manage to get this one done on time, unfortunately.  These supposedly smart people are not instantaneously understanding the Law of Probability and all of its consequences for some weird reason.

So apparently the new researchers aren't going to be introduced to Keltham tomorrow!  Day after, maybe?  They can spend tomorrow's daytime reviewing previous Keltham lecture transcripts.  Or maybe a bit of time at the secondary site, hanging around the abducted Taldorian girls pretending to have been likewise abducted themselves; that'll get them some experience pretending to be non-Asmodeans to other non-Asmodeans.

They should not spend too much time around the existing girls before then; Keltham will certainly be on the lookout for signs that Conspirators know each other too well.

PL-timestamp:  Day 18 (14)

Keltham now has an enormous quantity of Resist Energy (Acid) spells!  And a couple of Protection from Energy (acid) spells!  And some of the cheaper raw materials and reagents he's requested have arrived!  Today is an Acid Day!

Keltham is going to experiment with regularizing the reactions using Prestidigitation, including more arcane endeavors to modify stuff like the binding forces of outermost electron orbitals, or more mundane attempts to Prestidigate more precisely adjusted exact temperatures inside a reaction vessel.  Though he's improvised some attempted means of measuring temperatures inside pressurized boiling acid containers - haha oops that sure exploded!

Ione maybe did have a point about having some appropriate spells up.  That would have been a lot more painful and possibly a lot harder to heal if it hadn't just been the boiling-liquid damage he took there.  Resist Energy (Fire) should work to prevent a repeat, right?

Back to figuring out how to precisely regulate the steps of acid manufacturing and purification using Prestidigitation!

Break time!  Lunch!  Asmodia wants to run a daily practice prediction market about who Keltham sleeps with each night which Keltham doesn't get to see until the next day!  Keltham will quietly smile to himself and set up a market like that and see how long it takes the women to work out that they should only trade at extreme bid-ask spreads when people might be betting using private information!

Asmodia wants to experiment with policy prediction markets too!  Asmodia wants to bet on which avenues work out for mining spellsilver!  Keltham will explain that this sort of thing works better when anybody actually knows anything but sure!  Maybe they can get the spellsilver mining experts to bet too?  It's actually kind of complicated when the policy prediction market is trying to do a continuous quantity like 'when spellsilver manufacture drops in cost by how much' but they can arbitrarily declare the threshold to be a 25% cost drop in one month, and have policy markets on whether that's more likely to get done if Keltham invests his effort in manufacturing cheaper acid for the current process, or in perfecting spellsilver extraction that works on the alternate spellsilver ore.

Afternoon!  MORE ACID!  MAKE ALL THE ACID!  PERFECT ALL ACID MANUFACTURING PROCESSES!  FASTER REACTIONS!  HIGHER YIELDS!  HIGHER PURITY!  ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE WITH PRESTIDIGITATION or maybe it would be if Keltham could actually solve or remember any quantum-mechanical equations for anything besides the hydrogen-atom equation.  But Keltham is nonetheless making SLOW PROGRESS and has only doused himself with boiling acid again TWICE.

Keltham is trying to explain what he's doing to some of the watching researchers while he does it, but it's not going great, what with nobody except him actually understanding any chemistry let alone physics, and Keltham not really having time to slow down and explain.  Which, yes, makes Keltham the only experimenter, and no that's not particularly a fast way of getting work done.  But Keltham thinks he'll have an easier time explaining, once Keltham himself has some idea of what can be done with Prestidigitation really.

...Actually in retrospect they could have run a policy prediction market on how fast research would go, depending on whether Keltham tried to explain chemistry first so others could help, or tried to do things himself to understand where he needed help and what to explain?  That was something the other researchers might've had an opinion about.  Oh well.

Break for spellcasting practice, Keltham still wants to be a proper wizard.  He continues to feel weird about bugging his god for spells every morning and would feel better about that if the spells had a price list.

More ACID!  Keltham needs OXYGEN!  Even if he can manage to make element-20 'taste' like it has 5-of-18 electrons in the outermost shell instead of 2-of-18 using Prestidigitation, you still can't get sulfur trioxide from sulfur dioxide without OXYGEN!  But Cheliax has already discovered WATER and can produce WATER at SCALE and WATER contains OXYGEN!  All they need is a sufficiently controlled form of what the locals charmingly refer to as Lightning-aspected energy, which, surely, somebody will have on hand -

...that's not something anyone has on hand, apparently?  It was literally built into a sex toy!  No Keltham's not using the actual sex toy until he knows it's replaceable, it has limited charges and they're going to need a lot of that stuff.  Also for cuddleroom purposes you'd probably use alternating current rather than direct current Keltham thinks?

Haha right then, set aside Lightning-aspected energy for now, they're just going to build a magnet-based generator and power it with a primitive-ass hand-crank, unless somebody can get a controlled-directional-Lightning source to him before then.  Keltham can leave directions on how people could possibly experiment with that, if he's not doing this full-time tomorrow.

And then they run that energy through pure water to create hydrogen and oxygen at the two terminals, that should give Keltham the ability to turn sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide if the element-20-to-23 Prestidigitation trick works, and he can dissolve sulfur trioxide back into boiling concentrated sulfuric acid to create... an EXPLOSION probably!  But an EXPLOSION of PROGRESS!

...where's Asmodia.  Keltham hasn't seen Asmodia for a while.  Did she get dissolved in acid at some point?

She went off to teach some of the incoming students arriving shortly some of the Law that Keltham has already taught, in hopes of saving him time?  That makes sense.  Good thinking there.  They didn't really do very much that needed Asmodia today.

Good night everyone!  He will probably be sort of tired tomorrow.  Sorry about all the exploding boiling acid if that bothered anyone.

"I have no words."

"In a sense I think that was unambiguously the best day the Project has ever had. He didn't have any questions for us and he taught us, uh, quite a lot of things that appear to have the potential to be very important."

"How is everybody in his home dimension not already dead?"

"Maybe that's how they selected so hard on Wisdom."

"I feel that if dath ilani had been selected hard on Wisdom we should not have seen what we have seen this day."

"He's probably not going to keep this pace up but if he does we will just let him, tell him Asmodia's teaching the new arrivals, sit back and make sure he doesn't die."

"Think I might've mistimed one of my own Resist Energy spells and gotten some lung damage off inhaling acid fumes.  Should I go get that healed, or do we want to see anything about what happens to me if I don't?"