This is Keltham!  He seems like an obvious mad-experimenter alchemist apprentice though slightly off in several ways.  He comes from a world that has zero knowledge of magic and far vaster knowledge than Golarion of everything that isn't magic, and he's going to use that knowledge to cheaply produce vast quantities of distilled oil of vitriol and drop spellsilver refining costs by a factor of ten!  They're rapidly advancing in applying his otherworldly knowledge to Golarion!

Today's frontier of research:  Recreating an otherworldly instrument that will burn materials in flame and send the resulting light through a crystal, to show the exact colors of light inside, to determine what fundamental constituents are within nonmagical matter!  Is that a sort of thing that'd be useful to alchemists in general, by the way?

(Elapsed time until he acquired knowledge that Cheliax would kill him over:  47 seconds.)

Well. That's not great but he'll just have to be very useful to this project so he's kept around for it. 

That....is indeed the kind of thing that'd be useful to alchemists. In general.

Keltham is continuing to talk rapidly, obviously excited about this meeting!  He is pleased to be introduced to what is, by his standards, an otherworldly mad scientist much like himself!  Has the alchemist done a lot of experimentation on human subjects, by the way, and if so, what kind?

- yes, mostly for potionmaking rather than metal refining or distilling? He can't actually think of a useful human experiment he'd run on refining or distilling but for potionmaking you need human subjects for testing dose, testing effect duration, testing toxicity, testing side effects, and so on, it doesn't extrapolate reliably from rabbits. 

Interesting!  What's the most toxic thing he's found so far that way?

- he's not actually a poisons expert and doesn't work with anything as lethal as, say, bluering, his potions experiments have mostly been on concoction miscibility - the known problem where taking multiple alchemical concoctions simultaneously has hard-to-predict side effects, some of them deadly and some of them actively desirable, so if you could only figure out how to reliably get the desirable ones you'd be very wealthy selling to adventurers. Unfortunately minutia of dosing that vary person-to-person and day-to-day seem relevant to concoction miscibility, and of course test subjects tend to expire of mistakes, so it's a difficult area to make progress in, but worth it when you have the subjects on hand.

The government doesn't require him to buy resurrection insurance or anything on them, does it?

That is the most baffling question he has ever been asked and he does not like this entire line of questioning, in retrospect. "- depends. Is that how it's done on your originating planet?"

His home planet doesn't have resurrections.  No magic, remember?  They put people into very deep cold instead and will do something with them later.

You can get people who'll let you kill them in alchemy experiments, but they're very expensive, obviously.

What does the need for resurrection insurance depend on?

- uh, sometimes your experimental subjects are old or sick and going to die anyway. And in that case you don't need resurrection insurance. 

Uh huh.  And how much do subjects like that cost?

....fifty gold?

That does sound cheaper than resurrection insurance!  Much cheaper!  Makes you wonder why he'd use any resurrection-insured subjects at all, really.

.....well, it's much harder to get those subjects.

Uh huh.  So they're much cheaper than resurrection insurance, but much harder to get.

And how much does resurrection insurance cost for him?

...it depends a lot on what specific experiments you plan to run.

Whatever he was working on last week will be fine.

- he wasn't working on this last week! He doesn't do that much with admixtures! He thinks a couple years ago when he last had a theory worth testing it was ...1000gp?

Keltham must have really not liked that answer!  His whole face starts to change.

"You failed at the point where you told Keltham that buying killable test subjects is much cheaper than resurrection insurance on them, but also they're much harder to find.  If that had been true, their price would have gone up until the supply increased and the demand went down."

Asmodia has now read an Abadaran book!

"All right, in this game of yours how expensive are test subjects? And do you have to pay to resurrect them?"

The girl who looks like and dresses like a second-circle Ostenso wizard academy student is speaking very levelly.

"This is not a fucking game, alchemist.  You just failed a live-fire test, one you thought was real.  The only reason you're not in a lot of pain right now, is that we do not expect putting that much fear into you to help you keep your composure around Keltham.  Project Lawful has higher priorities than the Asmodean condition of your soul."

"But if you'd actually fucked up, tipped Keltham off, if he'd ended up in Osirion constructing weapons for them to use against Cheliax and that was your fault - you would have personally pissed off, among others, the Queen of Cheliax, a Count of Hell who bought my soul on the speculation that Keltham would make it more valuable, and, probably, Asmodeus Himself."

"Keltham has not, so far, probed any of the outside experts brought in.  He has asked questions like that of Project employees, which is what we are to him.  If you are sticking around then he will probably ask questions like that of you at some point.  You're either ready for it when it happens, or you are a liability who should never be introduced to Keltham in the first place."

"50 gold pieces for a death volunteer didn't sound impossible to me, given that slaves with a lot of lifespan remaining cost 75gp, but that slavery is mostly illegal in alter-Cheliax.  But if that's true then you only use dying subjects and never buy resurrection insurance on healthy subjects.  Everything about alter-Cheliax MUST be consistent."

"How about I just don't deal in human subjects at all."

"Are there alchemists like that in Taldor?"

"I would assume so, what with how human subjects are expensive and irrelevant for most of what we do!"