Keltham's got his cover letter ready for her and is otherwise continuing in his scroll practice.  He checks over her own work when he's got a moment, writes some corrections to her version of what he said, and hands it back.

To be clear:  Keltham is not saying that Meritxell needs to get an Owl's Wisdom right away.  She is clear to wait on this message getting routed, so that she can, very likely, talk with Subirachs about this.

Yeah, Meritxell thinks that unless she shouldn't talk to Subirachs for some reason it's better to do it before she gets an Owl's Wisdom.

Her letter is all ready and can be sent off.

Make it so.

PL-timestamp:  Day 23 (19) / Afternoon

Spectroscope improvisation day!

Let's see if they can get this to the point where they can both see the lines of emitted spectra from heated materials, and also, see the corresponding absorption lines when you shine light through!  That's because photons are emitted by electrons falling from orbitals energized above minimum, back down; and electrons can correspondingly absorb photons of that frequency to jump up.

Once they've got enough spectrographic detail, they can probably start to figure out where Golarion materials are on the Periodic Table; Keltham doesn't actually remember how the regularities work, but he knows they're there and don't require advanced math to notice.

Incidentally, do Golarion miners already have ways to tell exactly which minerals and metals are in which bits of ore?  Because if not, they can just burn ores under a spectroscope and find out exactly which elements could be mined from that kind of ore, in principle, if they could find a way to extract it.

None of these people know anything about mining but the question and idea can be passed on to project consultants who are. 

Does it matter what kind of light you shine? Are all magical lights going to be just as good as each other?

The light has to cover the full spectrum from red to blue for absorption lines to be noticeable, but they can determine whether light has that property by shining it through the spectroscope.

...of course that's assuming magical light behaves the same way as regular light at all, but if it doesn't, they can use mundane fire.

Also dath ilan has specialized burners that generate less light-noise when you put materials in them to burn under a spectroscope - less light from the fire and more light from the burning material; probably something about the fuel.  If they know of magical fire sources that burn with less luminous flame, that's potentially useful for spectroscopy.

In related thoughts, they seem to be making progress here and spending multiple days on this stuff.  Project Lawful is getting to the point where they could use an expert alchemist on call to answer pure alchemy questions, even if they're not Lawful and not able to mentally organize the research.  Or an early-professional alchemist if a real expert would be too expensive...

Uh, Keltham may possibly have been something of an idiot here, is it perhaps the case that an expert alchemist in Golarion does not cost the same amount per week as ten Security wizards?

(There's some brief panic about whether to change these numbers? No? Okay -)

- the alchemist would be more expensive than a Security wizard but way cheaper than ten, yeah. 

Okay, then Keltham wasn't quite as stupid as he was worried about, but yeah, they're getting to the point where having an alchemist on-staff and Security-cleared seems worth it.

Back to spectroscopy.  The 'diamonds' in Lady Avaricia's earrings are kinda tiny for this purpose, they need either a much larger version of this crystal or to find a different crystal... there should definitely be some cheap crystals that would work for this?

Really big diamonds are ludicrously expensive. Quartz might work? Quartz is cheaper.

Let's try it.

And if quartz doesn't work out of the box, let's try Prestidigitating it.

Keltham's got to remember to just cheat the shit out of everything, there's no point in not cheating when you've got magic.

Can somebody tell him about 'bound fire elementals'?  If Keltham is right that they have max temperatures rather than max added heat, keeping the sulfuric acid process at the reference temperature (above water-melt by 450% of the difference between water-melt and water-boil &c) could be as simple as getting exactly the right quality of 'bound fire elemental'.

Depending on how tunable they are, they could also be useful for the fire source in flame spectroscopy.

Fire elementals are sort of grub-like creatures from the Elemental Plane of Fire. They do burn at a specific temperature rather than output a specific heat; they generally need to be in a metal containment box when on the Material Plane, which lets the heat through but doesn't allow various contaminants to affect them or allow them to wander off lighting everything on fire as they go; they're not generally used for light for that reason. Larger ones burn hotter. 

Helpful that some of the new candidates knew fire elementals did have a temperature, though obviously if that wasn't true nobody would need fuel for forges.

If they can get a fire elemental close to 450%-of-etcetera, that might solve one of the major steps towards synthesizing concentrated oil of vitriol.

(Asmodia is not especially happy about yet another ORANGE STATEMENT going up on her wall, now they have to make sure that Keltham doesn't see or read about the way that fire elementals are actually used.  But Sevar already told Keltham fire elementals exist, way back in the first hours when Keltham asked about the hot water in the archduke's villa, and fire elementals are obviously-to-him useful... so, Asmodia supposes the best avenue is to lock them in a box and make sure they never try to talk to him.)

(Why does she feel weirdly bad about that.)

(She guesses she knows why she feels weirdly bad about that.)

PL-timestamp:  Day 23 (19) / Evening

Keltham gets in some martial arts practice after work, and then spends the evening with Carissa, having some uncomplicated sex with her.  He doesn't want to have complicated sex all the time.  His Carissamodel is telling him to not even ask her if that's okay with her - although also it is fine and in fact she prefers it that way - but he needs to not ask and just look to his own desires.

He'll then mention - without giving any of Meritxell's specific details, obviously - his sense and his worry that one of his Keeper candidates basically, like, manufactured a bunch of uncomfortable realizations inside herself, and made herself be distressed about them, because she thought that was how a Keeper would work.

He could be wrong.  It just didn't ring true to him.  Feelings like that have ever been wrong.  He's not particularly thinking Conspiracy, his brain obviously did suggest that but the Conspiracy has zero visible motive here.

Pulling this anonymous candidate from the Keeper program on that basis seems - like taking a decision away from her.  Maybe she'd be fine.  Maybe this is something that lots of Golarion Keeper-candidates will do, maybe they all have to get past that.  Maybe all of his other candidates will also exhibit a bunch of warning signs and if Keltham removes everyone like that he'll have no Keeper candidates left.  He wouldn't have been disturbed the same way if that pattern had shown up in his regular ilani-in-training, that's like a normal sort of mistake a kid would make - but -

Keepers are supposed to be better than this, according to Keltham's cultural standard.  Keeper candidates are supposed to be better than this before they start trying to be Keepers.

Keltham has a bad feeling about this.

...It's just, not the kind of clear-cut clearly-correct bad feeling, where it actually seems like you plainly ought to listen to it and stop.

"Is the bad feeling, if it's accurate, that this person is going to hurt herself? That she's going to end up in a position like Keepers have, holding power over others, and use it in a way that hurts them?"

"I guess - mostly like - that she won't succeed at what she's trying to do..."

"I suppose if I put it that way, it's not my business to tell her to stop, at all.  It's just, Keeper training is very high on the list of interesting things to try where you don't try it unless the prediction market says you are extremely likely to succeed, but -"

"I still have the bad feeling after I've said all that."

"Maybe I'm worried that she does succeed and it turns her into something she shouldn't have been.  She has very nearly zero context on all of this.  Maybe no matter how much I keep telling myself it's her risk to take, my brain just doesn't believe it's reasonable to try to delegate management of a risk about which I know something and she knows nothing."

Carissa leans on him quietly while she thinks, on several levels, about this. 

"What does it mean, to turn someone into something they shouldn't have been?"

"I don't know because, like, either that's secret, or just not a thing I happened to look up answers to, and I don't know how to put it into words because - you don't really have very much of a model of how minds work yet - and this isn't a very explicit model even within that, it's an intuitive sense of something that mastered Law skills but got itself twisted up into an unpleasant weird unnatural shape in the process, because those skills - didn't resonate with it, weren't natural to it, and it forced itself to master it anyways."

"I'm not sure that anything I'm thinking of is relevant, or helpful, but - a thing about Abrogail, from the kind of person that she is, is that if she participated in shaping someone - if part of the structure of their mind is something she built, when they were in her power, when it was her responsibility - then she'd be very upset about them getting put back together wrong. It seems likely, to me, that that'll also be true about you, once you get to the point where you want to do that, feel competent to do that. And I wonder if - it's wrong for Keltham, to participate in shaping someone while suspecting that they're not going to end up shaped right, even if - even if that's hard to ground in being wrong for them or being wrong for Good..."

"I'm not sure I'm Evil enough, yet, to just make the decision my way because I don't want to hurt someone.  I'm not sure I want to become Evil enough that I go around just not hurting people and protecting them because I want to."

"She's her own stuff.  She's not my stuff.  I don't necessarily get to decide what to do with her."

" - yes, but maybe back up a little? I'm - not particularly thinking you ought to kick her out, I think Hell can fix it no matter how bad it is so I'm not worried for her sake and for the Project's sake it's probably good to see what happens if people who want it, but are not necessarily ideally shaped for it, try it. And she's her stuff, like you said. But even if 'this is bad for Kelthams' isn't a reason you want to use as an input to decide, it seems important, if it's right."

"Yeah."

"Fair."

"I feel so much like I'm trapped in an awful void of not knowing where anything is, how anything actually works, and if any of my fears are real."

"...which is what ordinary pre-paradigmatic Science! feels like, I guess, when the objects of discovery and manipulation are people that you care about at all."

- hug. "- now I'm thinking of solutions to that but they all seem like very stupid solutions that would actually be a hilariously bad idea. For example you could declare Keeper training is only for people who are incredibly annoying so you won't get attached to them emotionally."