"Then we may be able to get away with telling Keltham that lie."

"Why don't you work with human subjects?  You don't come across as particularly squeamish in conversation and attitude.  I suppose I've never actually met somebody who is, but Keltham will have."

" - because it's a dead end? People have been trying to crack potion miscibility for as long as there's been alchemy. The first person to get it will be richer than the gods. But if you buy a hundred fucking slaves and feed them all your perfectly optimized concoction adjusted for their body weight and sex and astrological sign and hair texture and whatever else you thought of, you'll get a hundred different results, and five of them will drop dead, and if you try repeatedly then everyone'll be dead by the end of the month. It's worth a try whenever you think you've thought of something new that it's possible no one else has found, but it's a stupid waste of time and money to try to build a career off. The interesting progress in alchemy is all in ores and oils, and rabbits are cheaper than slaves for practically all testing."

"Is that what a Taldorian alchemist who doesn't work with human subjects says?  Because that sounded at least a little Chelish to me.  Especially the part about slaves."

"If you pay a hundred elderly volunteers, they'll all be dead by the end of the month. If you want an alchemist from Taldor why didn't you hire one of those, I've never been to Taldor."

"It seems like they'd make that difficult for us. Try it again, with an Eagle's Splendour, see if that helps your bluff any."

"I think we also bring in the fake paladin.  I have a sense that some of this would have twigged Keltham's sense for - real Evil, not what we've told him is Evil - and that's something nobody else here knows how to fake caring about."

Carissa gestures at Security to do what Asmodia said. "How do people become an alchemist, how did you become one?"

"I was apprenticed to one, and I was the least incompetent of his apprentices - do they have apprenticeships in Taldor?"

"Yes."

Asmodia has a nervous feeling - as expressed within her state of continuous low-grade panic - that at some point Project Lawful is going to fuck up on account of nobody on staff being really actually Good, knowing what that's like inside instead of outside.

Not something that could be fixed easily, or at all, in any obvious way.  But just because you can't fix something doesn't make it be not a problem.

...why is her brain suggesting that they ask Pilar?  Pilar's curse isn't that frequently helpful and couldn't be trusted anyways.

PL-timestamp:  Day 24 (20) / Mid-Afternoon

Keltham returns from having taken a couple of hours' break for wizard practice, scroll practice, and walking around outside but still within the Forbiddance.

On his return, he finds... they've got an alchemist for him already!  Apparently somebody saw this one coming and started the Security screening process earlier.  Good for them!  Well, time to introduce himself and his work, then!

This is Keltham!  He seems like a pretty extreme mad-experimenter alchemist apprentice, the sort who's obviously going to end up dead within weeks if not days.  He's not just slightly 'off', everything about him is way off in more directions than you can easily count.

Today's frontier of research is a spectroscope, which burns matter and uses a prism to refract the light into component colors, or shines light through the burning material in order to check for absorption lines within the colors.

Why is that important?  Well, light is made of particles called photons, the color corresponds to the energy of the photons, and the emission-absorption lines correspond to increases or decreases in energy of the 'electrons' that are constituents of the 'atoms' that are the almost-perfectly-stable constituents of matter.  The electron orbitals are a huge determinant of how matter behaves chemically, how it gets transformed by acid or what other atoms it combines with into semi-stable molecules.

Part of their major project here is to see whether informed use of Prestidigitation can greatly change the reach of what's possible in chemistry.  Prestidigitation can change color, stickiness, taste; these are all things that plausibly depend on electron orbitals.  They've already verified that Prestidigitation can change the reaction rate between acidic vinegar and basic wood-ash lye.  Lady Avaricia was first other than Keltham to Prestidigitate matter such that it would then burn with a different color of flame; Korva Tallandria managed to get matter to not only burn with the color of sulfur but to smell something like sulfur and to produce coughing like sulfur dioxide.

Keltham is hoping that by using a spectroscope on Prestidigitated matter, his researchers will be able to get direct feedback on how their Prestidigitation is changing the behavior of electron orbitals.  That seems like it could be one of the key steps in learning to make elements behave like other elements that Keltham doesn't have time to identify in known Golarion materials, or even behave like elements that can't exist as ordinary matter.  It will enable them to regularize the transformations that Prestidigitation applies to materials, even if two different researchers think copper tastes slightly different to them.

Keltham is mentioning all this, of course, because he's sure that the alchemist is wondering why, if you can use Prestidigitation to control chemistry that easily, nobody's ever done it before.  They've had some indication that you may need to know something about electron orbitals, before people seem to be able to conceive in the right way about which transformation they want to apply, by controlling the taste of something, that would also make it burn a different color - his researchers weren't able to do that right away; as of yesterday, some researchers still couldn't.  But also, Keltham is guessing that it would be a great deal more difficult to map your way through Prestidigitating chemistry if you didn't understand the underlying atomic interactions, started out by trying to Prestidigitate complicated tastes into other complicated molecules instead of atomic tastes into atoms, and couldn't use a spectroscope to see what your early attempts at Prestidigitation chemistry were changing about the electron orbitals.

Besides making distilled oil of vitriol and refining spellsilver, are there any other non-magical chemical transformations that would be hugely profitable to improve or that would be vital to the economy of Cheliax or other countries?

(Elapsed time before he learned knowledge that any government in Golarion would kill and soul-trap him over:  Three and a half minutes.)

- yes, yes, there are some. For nonmagical reagents, the ones used at large scales where it'd be important to invent a cheaper version are bleaching powder, used in cloth production, and soda ash, used for glass, textile, soap, and papermaking. There's a standing large prize for a process to produce alkali from sea salt; likewise there are efforts to make naphtha, pitch oil, and sal ammoniac. 

Keltham doesn't have memorized that many processes for producing chemicals at scale, alas.  He knows one bulk process for producing an alkaline substance, the same way he knows a process for bulk-producing the most industrially important kind of acid.  Lady Avaricia is trying to identify Golarion materials in terms of the underlying constituents of matter that Keltham is familiar with; she'd be the one charged with figuring out what 'soda ash' and 'bleaching powder' might be in his terms.

Oh, also the alchemist shouldn't take it personally if Lady Avaricia thinks he falls far below her standards or seems rude.  Lady Avaricia is one of those people who can't bear to conceal outward appearances, and thinks that everyone and everything is terrible; it's nothing personal if she thinks it about him, and says so out loud.

What sort of incredibly finicky processes are there for producing small amounts of very expensive things, such that substantially higher demand would exist if the cost decreased?  Spellsilver itself is one of those things from Keltham's viewpoint; it's being produced in very small quantities via a finicky process that Keltham hopes Prestidigitation can smoothen and regularize, and there'd be demand for much higher quantities of spellsilver if those were available.

This is so much better than the conversations with fake-Keltham. He can name some candidates.

If there's one of those that has relatively less expensive inputs and is just labor-costly because it's hugely finicky, the Project might want to practice on that.  And if there's none of those with expensive outputs, they could try perfecting via Prestidigitation some processes that sell for less.  If his researchers maybe want to mess around with it whenever.  Rather than, you know, the boiling-acid version that should only be done in groups, and with Resist Energy cast.  Keltham has given them some known chemical reactions to mess with, to see if they can steer around reaction pathways, but those reactions are pretty elementary and not that finicky to start with; there'll be some different game for mastering the trickier processes.

Their current problems along the way to completing a distilled-oil-of-vitriol production step, include:

- Figuring out if they need to purify oxygen for step one, where they burn sulfur to turn it into sulfur dioxide, or if regular air works.  If regular air doesn't work, they'll need to liquefy air to distill it; or use a controlled-lightning process on water to make combined Element-1 and Element-8 gas.

Also, it would be helpful to know if any of the "create a bubble of breathable air" spells work in a way where they can extract purer regular air from that, which will be useful in chemical reactions.

- Either figuring out some known Golarion metal is element-23; or getting something else to act as 23 for purposes of its oxide catalyzing SO2->SO3; or directly Prestigitating SO2 in a way that makes it easily combine with oxygen at high temperatures to form SO3.  They also need to know if pure oxygen or at least pure air is required for this step; Keltham suspects you can't just use atmospheric air here, but he's not actually sure.

- Measuring temperatures for purposes of getting the SO2->SO3 furnace to above the melting point of water by 450% of the difference between the melting and boiling point of water.  Mercury thermometers don't go that high and are kind of dangerous anyways, unless they're very certain that healing or Restoration works to solve a long-lasting poisoning problem with mercury.

Restoration should fix damage from mercury, he can't think why it wouldn't. 

(He avoids suggesting a quick human-subject test to be sure.)

He does happen to know that bubble-of-air spells make air, rather than pure oxygen; pure oxygen has been isolated and he has a secret technique for doing so, as well as one for measuring temperature, which he'd be willing to share with this project for half its proceeds.

Half the proceeds from what, exactly?  Selling the purified oxygen if the Project can figure out how to make his process scalable, and they can't find a better process that's more scalable and not derived from his?

Half of the proceeds from selling, or selling the secrets to making, the alchemical products and ores-refined-alchemically and oils-produced alchemically this project is hoping to produce.

Doesn't particularly match up with Keltham's model of how hard it would be for him to produce oxygen, or find another alchemist who knew how.  There's a lot of stuff with oxygen in it.  Water is 8/9 oxygen by weight and Keltham knows how to split it.  There's no way that saving a couple of weeks on hammering out the issues in a reconstructed method of dath ilan would be worth half the proceeds of the Project on all chemical sales forever; oxygen simply isn't that important an input.

Keltham has in fact heard about Golarion's concept of bargaining, and could potentially try doing things that way by countering with a ludicrously unfair offer of his own?  But first Keltham wants to make sure that he's not missing some key facts that would make this a sincere and fair offer, one that Keltham shouldn't be trying to bargain down from.

Keltham's got truthspells, and also a spell that causes people to only say prices that would be fair given their knowledge, if the alchemist wants a quick way to prove that he's being honest about something or just prove that the entire offer is one that's fair relative to his own model of things.

The alchemist doesn't know what Keltham means by a 'sincere and fair' offer. It's sincere in the sense that if Keltham takes the offer he will share all his secret techniques; it's fair in the sense that it's 50-50, which is ....in some sense the fairest possible division of anything?

(Is that what Good people think????)

He knows secret techniques for other chemicals and is willing to teach them too for half the proceeds. Notably alchemists don't usually teach their techniques at all, certainly not to someone who wants to scale them; why, then you'll never make money off it again! You sell the results and keep the process secret. He is only offering to sell the techniques at any price because this project does seem promising.

Keltham is not particularly expecting the alchemist's personally derived secret knowledge, relative to more public and commonly known alchemical knowledge, to contribute even 0.1% of what Keltham remembers from an entire alternate world with a vastly more advanced comprehension of nonmagical materials science.  As produced by literally millions of alchemist-equivalents with 20+ Intelligence, freely sharing results with each other, and paying 'patentgratuities' on useful discoveries in proportion to how useful they were.

If the 'patentgratuity' methodology was applied to the Project, they'd end up paying him for the two weeks of time that ended up being saved by their using his secret oxygen production technique, or more if it later turns out that it'd have taken longer than two weeks to get lightning-based water splitting going.

The basis on which Keltham had been planning to do this was more prenegotiated though: if the guy proved as valuable as a regular Project employee, Keltham was going to offer him the 0.1% share of the Project that non-elite employees get; if as valuable as an elite Project employee, the 0.2% that elites get.  That'll be harder for him to sustain over time, as the younger Project employees learn more new methods and math, but earlier contributions are also more valuable.  Those shares of the Project do need to last through all the employees that will prove worthy of them; later employees will get offered more like 0.01%.

If the alchemist isn't happy with either of those, the Project will pay his regular consult fees, not give him a share of the Project, and use only what's public knowledge in Golarion.  Keltham assumes the guy has already signed the standard non-disclosure agreement saying that he cannot, without the Project's permission, use or talk about stuff like Prestidigitation chemistry?  Also, can the guy use Prestidigitation because if not he may need to spend a week picking that up.

0.1%???? A thousandth? For an alchemy project without an alchemist on staff?

Has somebody possibly not explained the scope of the Project to him?

The plan is to use the knowledge out of Keltham's world to revolutionize all nonmagical farming, medicine, clothmaking, mining, metallurgy, manufacture, roadmaking, etcetera, all of which actually scale up much further than Golarion has taken them so far.  Probably also use the methodologies out of Keltham's world to revolutionize a bunch of magical stuff too.

Roughly, the plan is to turn Golarion into its own version of his Civilization, as the people of Golarion may want to become that, and the Project is step one of it.

If all dreams fail and the Project ends up being worthless - as does not particularly seem likely at this point to be the case - then the alchemist still gets to keep his usual and customary fees, and the people on the project can sign non-disclosure about whatever secrets of his he revealed to them along the way.  Alternatively, if the Project plays out to the extent of being able to capture one gold piece of value created for everyone in Golarion, it ends up worth something like a billion gold pieces, on that theory, and 0.1% is worth a million gold pieces.

This is what the god-war a couple of weeks ago was about, FYI; it started with Zon-Kuthon trying for a decapitation strike on the Project two days after Keltham arrived in Golarion.