They'll finish agreeing on job offers while the Doom-Tested candidates are still well inside their promised 2-hour break time.  The decisions didn't end up very ambiguous, in the end.

Keltham will, trying not to sound diffident about it because new gendertropes, note that he's been feeling slightly more distant from Carissa over the last week or so.  If he already knew an order he could give her to solve this Problem, or could drag her off to his cuddleroom and hurt her to fix the Problem, he would've already done that; this Problem is not being produced by Keltham's hesitation to do something he already knows he wants to do.

Huh. Carissa has also noticed this but on her end it's straightforwardly that many evenings Keltham is sleeping with other people, which she assumes he wants to do and intends to continue doing. Possibly it'd be good for there to be something going on between the two of them which does not have the property shared by both 'kinky sex' and 'serious conversations about bad things in the world' where Keltham wants to do them incrementally and not rush to the end state, and which are therefore things to be rationed rather than indulged on impulse whenever one feels like it.

She's not sure what a good candidate thing would be. There's the problem where many topics of conversation turn into the 'serious conversations about bad things in the world' failure state. She has been working on training into Wondrous Items to decompress in the evenings, but that's not a good shared activity. She could.... watch his magic practice and give extremely Spellcraft-loaded advice but isn't sure he'd find that fun. 

It's also possible that how much he's in the mood to give orders varies for him week-to-week? She thinks that's true of some people and can mess up a relationship founded on giving orders. Some people vary all the way to 'in the mood to take orders now' but Carissa suspects she'd have noticed, if Keltham were like that. But if he has even the weaker version, then querying 'what do I want to do with Carissa' might come up empty. 

During his first couple of weeks here, they were fighting large problems together and making progress on them together.  Now it's more - split up, Keltham working on chemistry, things in the Project feeling more routine.  They're both still working but they're not fighting together the same way.  Carissa being tied to a bed - doesn't always give her the same chance to, impress him, maybe.  'Impress' is not exactly the right word, but -

Of the things Carissa's described, her watching his magic practice and giving him extremely Spellcraft-loaded advice sounds closest to being right, to him.  It's something they can work on together, succeed on together, and someplace where she can remind his brain that she's Carissa Sevar.  It's - maybe something for him, like his being dangerous is, for her, that she's got ludicrous Spellcraft.  Not just that she's a valuable possession, but that she's - somebody who could have had the Queen of Cheliax, if Keltham hadn't gotten to her first.

"Well, I'd be happy to watch your magic practice and give you advice. Once you get good enough at magic you'll be able to be impressed by the things I can do, which is something I'll look forward to."

Then let's try it.

How is Keltham at Spellcraft, by Carissa Sevar's standards?  He's been a wizard for, like, two whole weeks now!  And is smart and already knew some math!

He's appalling, but she's used to that, for some reason the wizard academies barely teach this and so everyone's appalling. Usually less appalling, but still. She will avoid being rude about it and will instead just give pointers ordered by importance to address.

Just to be, like, super clear here, because Golarion, if Keltham went and got Lady Avaricia for a second opinion, would Lady Avaricia be pointing out more things that Keltham was doing wrong and being less encouraging about his overall state of competence?

"I would be very surprised if she noticed any errors I didn't notice. Her Spellcraft's nothing impressive herself - well, she's third-circle at eighteen, which is actually very impressive, but for a third circle wizard her Spellcraft is actually notably mediocre."

"It's more that I wanted to explicitly verify you were telling me about what-all you noticed.  I mean, not all you noticed, but not soft-touching my overall performance level."

Keltham will hang four cantrips under her supervision, one Silent Image, and then, if her supervision helps for that sort of thing, do some scroll practice.

She isn't failing to mention things that might be useful to spare his feelings, that seems like it'd make it kind of pointless to have it be her doing it. She will have lots of opinions.

Fundamentally, Spellcraft is about anticipating the ways that magic hung in any particular state is obviously going to behave, so that you can move it to desired states without it thinning out, swinging wildly, sticking to other parts of itself, curling up, etcetera. Once you understand exactly how the magic is going to behave the way you understand how your own fingers are going to behave, the way you can reach out for something without calculating exactly how far your hands have to travel to get there, then you're going to be able to cast more or less any spell you've seen the structure for. Obviously there are lots of explicit heuristics that can be taught, and a good understanding of tension and flows and the way attraction-that-falls-away-with-the-square-of-distance makes things behave, but you also have to get an intuition for it. 

It'd be really nice if he could cast Arcane Sight and see what she sees, but she can't think of any way to do it. ...maybe he could sell a devil a millionth of his soul for Arcane Sight. 

"Joke rather than serious suggestion, right?  Because how would that work, sell them my soul with 1/1,000,000 probability?"

" - you know, I had in mind a joke, but now that you say that I don't know that that isn't allowed."

"I'd want to be pretty sure of the random number generator, write into the contract that it doesn't work if the random generator proves to be fixed, and have an option to buy back the contract at some reasonable markup like fifty times the price of Arcane Sight," Keltham is not insensible of how much this would basically be a weird loan allowing him to capture an unreasonable amount of value himself, "but if Hell will basically sell me Arcane Sight now in exchange for probably a large payment later when I buy back the contract, it seems like plausibly a nice cheat that cheating people should cheat about."

"I do not know if Hell will do that but I do love cheating at things in order to get more magic. We could at least write Lrilatha and ask if it's worth trying."

"I'll route to Subirachs first, we don't need to bother Lrilatha unless Subirachs doesn't know already."

(So is Carissa Sevar any good at, like, teaching Spellcraft.  To Keltham.)

Moderately? She's clearly noticing a bunch of things that aren't even worth particularly trying to pick up at his level, but she has a much deeper model of what goes wrong every time anything goes wrong, and can show him with an illusion - see, when you did this, that bit was dragging in a way that'd be a real problem if you'd been subsequently trying to close that loop -

She clearly hasn't done a lot of teaching before but she has done a lot of paying attention to Keltham and thinking about how to explain things to Keltham before and it's sort of the same skill.

Well, but are there concrete results in terms of skill acquisition.  Can he now, like, hang two first-circle spells in the same day, or cast one of the more difficult practice-scrolls without failure...

Yep, with her assisting he can get harder practice scrolls down.

At the current rate of progress, how long until he can cast third-circle wizard scrolls like Major Image?

She hadn't been aware that was a specific aim of his. If they're willing to burn through a bunch of failed scrolls trying he could probably land it tomorrow. They might burn ten along the way, but he's rich, right?

He'd be able to show them proper high-resolution video of dath ilan with actual sounds!

What's the cost of a Major Image scroll like?

375gp.

What the superheated toilet paper, why, since when do ten casts of Major Image cost roughly the same amount as an intelligence headband.

Paying a wizard to cast it for you ten times would of course be much much cheaper; the expense is that scrolls use spellsilver or magical inks with similar properties to hold the magic for you so you don't have to be competent to hang it, and they require quite a lot of the reagent they use.

This is frankly insane and, yes, Keltham should've checked that before spending a lot of time on scroll practice.  Though it's probably good Spellcraft practice in general, since it lets him keep going past his daily wizard magical capacity.

Is there a loanable magic-item Keltham can rent which would let him cast a few Major Images?  For that matter, what was the rent-price of Goggles of Detect Magic, or of Arcane Sight, now that Keltham has any money?