She counts them off on her fingertips. "It took me most of the last two days to decorate my room until living in such privation would not impair me, and I still finished the transcripts and associated exercises faster than most of the students who don't have some kind of disability where they repurposed all their brains for math and can't use any of it for anything else.

I attended every one of Asmodia's lectures and despite the fact she is an idiot child in shoes far too big for her she had no complaints for you about me.

Salts are pairings of 'elements' on opposite sides of Keltham's 'periodic table', the possibility of which I looked for as soon as he introduced it because of the alchemical teaching that every salt is in two parts and that's why they dissolve in water so readily. 

Your outfit isn't bespoke and it's nice enough it ought to be, I'm surprised that tailor let you walk out of the shop with it fitting so poorly. I suspect they spent the rest of the week agonizing over whether they were going to get in trouble with their superiors for letting you walk out like that or if they'd have gotten into more for trying to have you stay when you were evidently in a hurry. I didn't see you, at the palace, but I have a friend who did, and that's how she knew that you'd been important for less than a week, with the timing matching Nidal rather neatly."

It's always hard to know if peasants get subtext but she thinks everything crucial must have gotten through, there. 

(some time later)

...and that's about all the experimentation he's got in him for today!  Keltham finds today's results very encouraging!  There were a lot of bizarre phenomena that nobody understood!  But not a steady stream of YES or NO either!  With that amount of variation, there's going to be all kinds of handles they can use to find hypotheses that compress these mysterious details!

Also they actually did manage to Prestidigitate materials that would burn a different color!  This is very encouraging and strongly suggests that Prestidigitation chemistry can in fact be a thing!

The first target remains large-scale high-purity sulfuric acid synthesis, which would all by itself noticeably contribute to bringing down spellsilver costs and can be considered as a prerequisite step to trying to refine spellsilver out of less costly ores.

Keltham has left behind some descriptions of common chemical reactions made with identifiable materials.  He suspects he may end up taking a slower day tomorrow, and has other things to do today.  People could, only if they genuinely actually have the spare time and energy and don't need time off more, try to experiment with measuring the reaction rates of known reactions.  And, if they can measure those rates precisely enough to make it worth it, check to see if they can make particular reaction pathways happen faster, slower, more reliably, that sort of thing.  It'll probably be easier to make flames that burn cooler rather than hotter but that's only an informed conjecture...

Oh yeah, temperature.  Keltham is still trying to figure out how to build a thermometer.  The last attempt exploded and was sort of a stupid idea anyways.  That part's actually sorta important.  They'll be doing a lot of temperature-measuring.  More precise measurements mean consuming less material inputs to generate effects large enough to notice.  There doesn't happen to be a Measure Temperature spell, does there?

There does not. Alchemists use mercury.

...somebody wanna explain what 'mercury' is?

[...]

Okay, wow, that sounds like Element-80 and... maybe that stuff is safe to be around if Restoration works against it, but Keltham wants to poison some mice with it and make sure Restoration actually works, there.  Element-80 has a horrific safety rep in dath ilan because, at least in dath ilan, it's incredibly hard to get out of a person once it gets into them.

If Restoration works to let mercury-poisoned mice lead otherwise productive and happy mouse lives, maybe they'll risk it.  But it might take a little time to be sure of that?  Unless it's already a known fact that a Restoration gets rid of all the sickness - possibly insanity, Keltham doesn't remember if Element-80 was one of those - that would otherwise be caused by Element-80 poisoning?

Restoration heals damage; Neutralize Poison prevents further damage; possibly there are subtle long term effects, it's not like anyone would've checked. Alchemists are kind of crazy.

Okay but what do the survey studies show about the causal structure of -

Rephrase.

Were they crazy before they became alchemists, and if they die and come back are they suddenly less crazy?  More importantly, does anybody in Golarion actually have any reliable knowledge about anything in this subject area?

.....no? You just kind of hear, you know, stories about crazy alchemists. It's not like anyone went and talked to all the alchemists about their craziness histories. The first one would melt you with an acid bomb when you knocked on their door.

Why is his life like this.

All right, you know what, what Keltham is actually going to do here, is file an actual request for this query to get routed to actually knowledgeable people ASAP, because it is possible that definite knowledge exists, here, even if nobody on this Project is specialized for it.

Thermometers that won't irrevocably poison you and drive you mad are in fact an important requisite of chemistry.

Not to mention, with all of magic and all of physics to work with, you'd really think there'd be something with a measurable linear dependence on temperature that was not 'the density of mercury'.  Like seriously.  Maybe he can build a resistance thermometer and calibrate it off a mercury one?  Though resistance thermometers probably don't work at, like, another ten times the temperature distance between frozen water and boiling water, such as you need for metallurgy... actually, Keltham would be sort of surprised if the Element-80 thermometers worked for that either.

Anyways!  This was in fact an encouraging day and an encouraging set of results, full of detailed surprises to make hypotheses about!

Good afternoon, everyone!  Enjoy whatever it is you do when Keltham isn't watching!

Maybe an hour or so later, Keltham shall summon his Carissa to his cuddleroom.

....aww man she wanted to work on her Glibness swords. This is slightly visible on her face when she's fetched and Elias Abarco smirks at her, which it'd probably be unprofessional to light him on fire for. ...not unprofessional to arrange for someone else to do it, though.

Anyway. Carissa comes to the cuddleroom.

She'll be promptly stripped and chained to the bed, and only then, of course, will Keltham explain.

Keltham is planning to start his Golarion martial arts practice, you see, and Keltham keeps forgetting to ask how wizards end up more resilient to damage, or for the six major theories thereof, which seems like an important sort of fact to know.

It was established rather some time earlier that Keltham is only permitted to obtain this information by tickling it out of Carissa.

He's just finally gotten around to remembering the question on some occasion when it is actually a good time to do that.

She pouts. It's not meant to be convincing distress even to Keltham. "Begging for mercy - allowed, or the same sort of thing as saying 'no' and not allowed?"

"Not allowed.  I don't want you trying to figure out exactly what doesn't sound like a request, while being tickled, and I don't want to fight my own brain around any edge cases that slip through..."

"Whoops, scuse me.  My internal Abrogail is telling me that was not the correct answer, and she kinda has a point."

"Ahem."

"Don't be ridiculous.  You can obtain mercy by telling me about the six theories.  Why would I want to hear anything else out of you?"

"Oh no. You have an inner Abrogail. I should just surrender now. ...I won't, though."

"Well, allow me to help align your actual behavior more closely with your sense of what it should be."

Keltham will then actually output that behavior!  His own sense of what he should do is not usually far off from what he does.

Carissa will hold out for a respectable bit of time just out of principle. 

Right, but what are the actual theories here?

(Keltham has a sort of wordless sense that only tickle-torturing people for information you're genuinely curious about would be a sexual-epistemic virtue, if dath ilan had already invented virtues about that sort of thing.)

Yeah, yeah, okay. 

Theory one: Magic healing makes people tougher, over time. This explains why combat veterans tend to get much tougher. The idea is that the healing does more than just fix you. This would imply that rich nobles are much tougher than normal people because they can get frivolous magic healing, and indeed they do tend to be. 

Theory two: People are directly tougher in proportion to how powerful/important they are because the universe thinks that powerful people should be harder to hurt and kill. This one is out of favor because of how it - treats the universe as something that decides that? Why would that be the case?

Theory three: In a normal person, the relationship between the soul and the body is of a particular character, like the soul is a cloak worn by the body. Some kinds of uses of magic or spells cast on the person or exercises of power draw the soul closer to the body, and make the person tougher. 

Theory four: God-treaties have most people weak and easy to kill, but people who are particularly important harder to kill because this makes the future less noisy and more predictable, which is no longer relevant because of Foresight.

Theory five: There's an underlying factor of Selfhood that affects the strength of your alignment aura, how hard you are to kill, and how hard it is to affect you with certain magics; this is technically compatible with the 'soul' theory but the proponents hate each other. 

Theory six: This is actually just one powerful wizard she put up with once in order to get some spells off him, but he thought that just as combat and adrenaline make you able to channel more magic, they make you internally channel more vital essence which is what makes people healthy.

...okay, if this is the actual state of speculation, either Keltham is really missing something, or people in Golarion really don't Science, or the correct answer is an infohazard getting buried.

Theory one seems like it would be incredibly easy to test in opposition to the others, by just taking a normal unimportant kid and healing them once a day... well, maybe you need to get hurt for the healing to count, but that test could at least rule out the version where regular healing does it without injury being needed first?

And if the pilot experiment returned NO on the added toughness, get one of the higher-grade masochists, or just use anesthesia, and test it with actual injuries on someone, starting after they were adults at age 13, and could sign up for an experiment?

Do clerics who use five bursts of positive energy per day, somewhere that needs the healing, end up some of the toughest people around?  If not, are any of those clerics masochists who could injure themselves first or have their sadists do that before each healing?

Does being incredibly rich make you tougher, as it would if it was just importance?  Are there any famous cases of people losing all their money and then immediately losing the extra toughness?  Did the girls on Project Lawful suddenly get much tougher once they were much more important?  Should they get a dagger right now and test whether Keltham is important enough to have the extra toughness?

Have they quantified strength of aura, quantified how hard it is to do a standard amount of damage to a paid volunteer, and checked whether aura strength looks directly proportional to extra toughness?

How can people possibly not already know whether some of these theories are true or false?

Keltham won't explicitly mention his suspicion about the correct answer being a buried infohazard, but will ask Carissa about the obvious tests or checks on the other theories, flexing his tickling-fingers in a threatening way as he does.

"If anyone has done most of those experiments they haven't advertised the results. Clerics are tougher than average but not five times tougher than other people with similar careers, but they mostly do not self-injure before doing a healing surge and I don't know anyone who has tried it. If it goes by importance it's not in a 'you immediately become tougher when you get a promotion' way."

Notably it's at least a little tricky to tell how tough people are and it does vary a lot even among wizards of the same circle, unlike strength of aura which goes directly by caster circle. Keltham probably is hard to injure, she'd expect.

She agrees that none of this is how Civilization would explore the question. It's - pretty normal, for questions here.

Right.  He lets Carissa out of the chains.

They're going to go test right now how difficult Keltham is to injure.  He's had practically no healing that involved injuries, has probably had a relatively very small amount of healing compared to other clerics just from channeling like seven or eight total energy bursts, and is incredibly important to multiple gods crowded around his Project like enormous light-drawn moths.

Some of these theories die today.  As in the next five minutes.  Golarion is presumably just bad at disseminating information [or is deliberately keeping a secret] because native INT 20s with +6 Intelligence headbands cannot possibly be this silly.