Pilar, are you sure this is how alter-Pilar -

He had me stabbed in the thigh yesterday and then healed it right away and didn't do anything else so YES.

"I think I'm just going to give up on a certain internal struggle and, since your literal sanity is at stake here, double-check to make very sure that you mean the version of that where I'm telling you everything that I'm scared will break people from Golarion."

She's only even pretending to be pretending to be in denial about anything!  And she's still annoyed by this boy insisting on spelling everything out!  There's a reason it's called subtext!

"Tell me everything that you're scared will break people from Golarion."

"I'll... consider it.  Not the sort of decision I'd want to make instantly."

"Meritxell, I'd try saying this by Message, but apparently then Asmodia just sees where the Message is going anyways, and my further actions would make your answer deducible anyways.  You want to continue the lesson, or go off and mull things and see what else shakes loose?  Details by Message if you want those private."

"I'm fine," Meritxell says curtly. " - actually I'm not fine but I don't want to miss out on the rest of the lesson."

"The alternative isn't you missing out on the lesson, it's that we break and resume another day and you don't miss anything -"

"You know, never mind, I shouldn't even have asked you, these things would be expected to have latent effects, not just immediate effects, and it's stupid not to give those another day to develop and observe before piling anything else on."

"You're insulting Meritxell here."

"Overruled, sticking to my theme.  This isn't just a challenge to your ability to learn Law without getting hurt, it's an experiment where I'm figuring out how to teach Law.  When you're experimenting it is sometimes considered wise to apply one experimental manipulation at a time so you can distinguish their effects."

"In my current state of uncertainty, that seems wiser than the equal and opposite advice, which is to start by testing all of your interventions simultaneously to see if any of them do anything."

Pilar, back off.  You know Meritxell's lying, Keltham doesn't.

"Fair.  Apologies."  It seems like the right Kelthamism for the circumstance.

Lesson suspended for the day - for reasons of experimental distinctions, not because he thinks Meritxell couldn't handle more.

Meritxell has first claim on his evening, if she expects it to be useful to her to be around a dath ilani while any further thoughts are playing out?  It's the same offer he'd make to Carissa, whom Keltham does not particularly think of as weak, under similar circumstances.

That's very sweet of him. She ...kind of wants to get drunk and have sex without talking about anything at all, is he up for that?

Uh, sure.  He hasn't witnessed this 'drunk' thing and is kinda curious.

PL-timestamp:  Day 21 (17) / Evening

Meritxell hopes that her SACRIFICES FOR THE PROJECT are APPRECIATED and appropriately REWARDED. 

She's going to get drunk but much less drunk than she appears to be getting, and then cry on Keltham and tell him that he's smart and pretty and nice and it's tragic how he won't hurt her just because she's not into it. 

He'll awkwardly hug her, awkwardly have sex with her, and wonder why in the flaming violet blazes anybody would voluntarily take this mind-affecting drug.

"I deserve a medal or something."

"Yes, yes, good job. You should actually go sober up."

"'m not drunk. - I mean, yes, sir."

PL-timestamp:  Day 22 (18)

ACID DAY!

The Lady Avaricia, since her superiors hate her and are trying to kill her, will reluctantly be impressive on acid day. Keltham might have been unimpressed with the alchemy books because of their habit of venturing bizarre claims with no evidence to back them and bizarre theories with no sense of what tests would approve or disprove them, but she's used to that and has spent a while thinking through which of their claims make more sense in light of Keltham's 'chemistry', and how they're best translated into chemistry terms. 

She wouldn't want to dominate the class, though, if anyone else has sketched out likely chemical structures of various alchemical compounds based on what the standard introductory textbooks say about their characteristics. No? Well, probably that's because they were instead working out why there are such differences in the reported boiling temperatures of various alchemical mixtures, in light of what Keltham's taught about chemistry? Also no? Maybe some of them want to improve her speculative work on which Golarion-substances are which elements?

Keltham seems appropriately impressed with Lady Avaricia's work!  If he's upset or even, in fact, noticing Avaricia being incredibly dismissive and condescending towards everyone else here including him, it doesn't show!  At all!

Much progress on acid synthesis is made today!  Not to the point where they can complete a full production cycle on using sulfuric acid to make twice as much more sulfuric acid!  But they're not going to be able to do that until Keltham can improvise something with linear reaction to temperature, that doesn't break down at relatively higher temperatures, calibrate it off one of those incredibly scary and dangerous 'mercury thermometers' that was sent to him, and figure out what temperature is... converting units to obvious landmarks... higher than the melting point of water by 450% of the difference between the melting point of water and the boiling point of water.

Maybe there's something he can do with the thermal expansion of a metal, instead of the expansion of liquid mercury... that requires him to have something to use as a measuring stick, though, and the measuring stick needs to not also be expanding... well, he could use the difference in expansion between different metals, maybe, you could hope for that to be linear... but you'd need a pretty fine-grained view of the differences, going from melting-water to boiling-water will only expand a metal by on the order of 0.1%, if he's got figures roughly right, and using another metal as the reference point would diminish that even further...

Does Lady Avaricia have any ideas for that?  Also any ideas for identifying element-23?

If they had a way to measure the target temperature and element-23 - and possibly some way to distill Element-8 'oxygen', though maybe regular air works for that, Keltham isn't sure, or regular air works if you purify it - though all the spells Keltham has read about so far seem unfortunately aimed towards producing a sphere of air, clear of say burning sulfur, and not so much purifying air that you can then use to burn sulfur - but maybe you can pump air out of the purified sphere and it stays pure - or maybe a sufficiently extreme cold spell or Ice-elemental spell would let them liquify air and distill out the oxygen - then they could maybe even complete a full production cycle on sulfuric acid / 'oil of vitriol'!  If all goes well, they'll even be able to produce the more expensive high-purity high-concentration 'distilled oil of vitriol' that people usually buy from Hell or the City of Brass!

'Lady Avaricia' is her most preferred form of address, check?  The name on her nametag is complicated.

One doesn't usually leave other names off a first introduction or a 'nametag', as that'd be denying information to the sort of person who knows how to interpret it, but it's fine to call her something shorter, such as Lady Avaricia.

Mercury thermometers can measure up to three, maybe four, times the difference between the melting point and the boiling point of water. She's not herself worried about their dangerousness but he could do all manipulations remotely with unseen servants if he is. She thinks people've tried almost everything that's cheaper to get than mercury and it's actually just much better; there's not a lot of likelihood they're going to trying at random invent something better in that temperature range, and if she were going outside it she'd probably try mercury admixtures.

The first thing she'd try to find element-23 would be to ask an alchemist supplier for false-spellsilvers that are acid resistant - is she right that element-23 is acid-resistant, it looks like it ought to be.