...is he actually reluctant to make weapons for Cheliax mainly because his brain still hasn't gone quiescent about the Conspiracy thing?

This is not a very consistent attitude to hold, brain!  In the sort of Conspiracy world where Cheliax does not already know all of that stuff Keltham knows, where his making weapons would actually matter... Keltham has also been teaching them to refine spellsilver at 10% of the cost.

That is also a bad thing to do if he is secretly captive inside a Conspiracy!

If his dath ilani sensibilities don't instinctively worry about that, the way they worry about crafting weapons, it means his sensibilities are wrong and incoherent about at least one of 'Is it okay to make weapons for Cheliax' and 'Is it okay to mine cheap spellsilver for Cheliax' and he needs to resolve that.

Is he, in fact, thinking about the right things at all, here?  Maybe if he asked Lrilatha about weapons, she'd say it's unlikely that Cheliax could really benefit much from them, that he should spend his next effort on forging, or roads, or agriculture, instead.

Thaaaaat seems unlikely to be the thought that finishes this dilemma.

He has not, for one thing, actually asked about weapons.  Except of that paladin, on a much more grand and impractical scale of explosions that seemed safely nonthreatening to his real life.

And for another thing, explosives shouldn't be very hard at this level of chemical expertise, compared to mining spellsilver.

And for another nother thing, back in dath ilan, if he'd come across an internally inconsistent thought like 'It's okay to mine spellsilver for my apparent hosts but not to build weapons for them', he would have considered that as a big deal, and tried to resolve it.  He somewhat got out of that habit due to Golarion making him be totally incoherent all of the time.  But things are settling down now, he is not having a new terrible epiphany every four hours, and he can afford to maybe start being a little coherent, again.

Right.  So.

Is he, in fact, inside of a terrible Conspiracy of terrible people doing terrible things, who should never have been given any of his chemistry ideas and definitely shouldn't be given explosives.

Take a moment to experience fully how much this feels like an awful stale thought you don't want to have to think again...

And set that aside.

Okay, so.  Now that he's thinking about this clearly, there's obvious things he could do, which he has not done, and that would be a reasonable reason for his brain to fail to go quiescent about this.

One, he could actually try to review all of his evidence and compare the most probable Ordinary and Conspiracy worlds implied by that evidence in hindsight, to that evidence and each other.

Two, he could try to poke and probe at his reality in any number of ways that he has not, in fact, really allocated a special day to do.  Except this should actually be Step One because you'd want to do that before assembling all your evidence.  Only there's a preliminary Step Zero quickie evidence review that he ought to do before he assembles 'poke and prod' procedures.

Three, depending on results of initial poking and prodding and the evidence review, he could do things like try to do scryed consistency checks on the larger world, even accepting for now that it's dangerous for him to step outside Broom's god's interdiction.  He could ask to talk to somebody Lawful Neutral or Lawful Good who's powerful enough to demonstrate, like, their not being fake, somehow he is not sure of how that could work.  He could demand a huge assortment of random books from all over the world, now that he can afford those.  He could try in other ways to put his vision clearly outside of Cheliax even if he can't put himself outside of Cheliax.

It's not going to resolve any doubts about his having landed in a competent supercivilization that could keep him completely deluded.  That’s probably why doing this hasn’t seemed worthwhile to him before now.  It's not going to make his fears go away.  But it could maybe resolve his doubts about whether making explosives for a weaker putative version of Cheliax seems okay.  The Conspiracy that can actually be helped by him, if he makes explosives putatively to help Ordinary with their long grinding war with Nidal, is a narrower concern to investigate.

Even if Lrilatha said Cheliax didn't want any explosives, he obviously ought to do that just about the spellsilver business.  Really, arguably, should have done it before, but on arrival he was still disoriented then on a level where that would have been hard... and then he was too busy making spellsilver.  Yeah, in retrospect, there was sort of a missing step in the middle, there, had he taken time for meta-thought to order things.

Keltham doesn't feel too terrible about that part, it legitimately took a while for his brain to quiet down and shake itself out to the point where its remaining doubts were this easy to go through and organize, without a hundred other Additional Questions running off in all directions.

Still gonna suck if Carissa, and Yaisa and Asmodia and Meritxell and Ione, all get lost to him over it, after he let himself get attached... okay that problem is mostly Carissa, he'd survive losing the others.

Is his brain actually worried about that?  On a short-term timescale?  This requires that his brain assign significant probability, not only that everyone he's come to have feelings for is a Conspiracy agent, but that Keltham has enough evidence to figure this out, or will be able to find enough evidence as soon as he tries.

Well, that sure seems like the sort of thought that could get in the way of a happy relationship.  That makes Keltham's correct course of action here very clear.

He's going to announce now that he's taking tomorrow off announce that part tomorrow, it may inconvenience others but he doesn’t want his brain thinking that the Conspiracy successfully deduced what that request meant in context and stayed up all night to prepare.  He’s taken days off before, but maybe he’d ask for this one with a facial microexpression that gave it away, or somebody would make an inference from the precise timing of the request.  If he’s doing this at all, he’ll do it with a pretense of security mindset, so his brain doesn’t think he could try again better.

He’ll spend some time tonight figuring out what to try, and which spells to request tomorrow at dawn.

And then he's going to try to crack the world he's inside, to see if it's just a fragile eggshell, after all.

Wrong attitude!  And then he's going to try to crack the putatively fragile eggshell of the world he's inside!  If the world is real, it'll be able to take it!

That which shouldn't be destroyed by the truth, can't be!

PL-timestamp:  Day 89 / Long Night

Avaricia's going to stay out of suspension at least for a month to help with the more sensitive Presidigitable chemical processes. Carissa has some hesitations about this, most of them shaped like 'if you start treating Avaricia as a dath-ilani-rude-person and forget who she actually is, and then she outmaneuvers you and arranges for you to never wake up, you'd deserve it', but it means spellsilver's a lot cheaper and at her Splendour acting normal should be easier. And she's not close enough to Keltham he'll notice subtle personality changes. 

Maillol's also going to stay out of suspension at least for a month, possibly for the duration, to manage the logistics of the expanded spellsilver project. She's not worried about that. She is pretty sure that every time Abrogail or the Most High or Gorthoklek steps into their fortress he is deeply grateful deep in his heart that it's Carissa they're here to see. 

They're about a week out. They can do it sooner, if anything makes them nervous; they can wait a bit longer, if Keltham's teaching something immediately applicable. People keep coming up with reasons to stall; probably they're all as nervous as she is. More nervous, maybe, because more disposable. But she remains pretty sure it's the right call.

PL-timestamp:  Day 90 / Morning

You don't get to be a seventh-circle cleric of Asmodeus without the ability to be professional.  Including being professional when terrified that you're going to be fired, executed, and not have a good time in Hell; this is practically synonymous with being professional at all, in Cheliax.  Project Lawful is probably valuable enough, at this point, to continue anyways, and this, probably isn't Subirachs's fault -

Her report relayed via Security to the Chosen of Asmodeus contains no tone at all, just the facts.

Spell Gauge shows that Keltham received the following spells upon praying today:

1st:  Comprehend Languages, Sanctuary, Protection from Evil, Abadar's Truthtelling x3
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, Eagle's Splendour, Augury x2
3rd:  Invisibility Purge x2, Summon Monster III

(4th is unknown as always, Subirachs cannot read that high)

An extreme emergency request for 8th-circle support to mindread Keltham has already been sent by Teleport.  Burning their scroll of Heightened Detect Thoughts on Keltham can also be done immediately pending Sevar's orders.

This is a very tropey time for him to get suspicious, is the first thing Carissa's brain produces, for some reason.

"Do it. And try to secure a Dominate Monster so we can control whatever he summons, and put - Rabassa and Tura and Abarco on his personal security, if they aren't already, and have someone review last night's activities. And check all the girls to see if anyone tipped him off and if so what they said. 

- additionally I - want Her Infernal Majestrix on site. She might think of something I won't, and she can definitely authorize things I can't."

Subirachs doesn't remind the Chosen that standing orders from the Most High are that Sevar is supposed to fight this game against Keltham by her own will, because tropes probably do not permit the Queen to win if she's in charge.  If Sevar wants to request Her Infernal Majestrix standing by while restricting herself in whatever way the Most High has demanded of her, it's her call.

The Security sent as messenger to Egorian has Telepathic Bond up; the new request can be added immediately.

Emergency mindread results:

Keltham is thinking about whether to trust Cheliax with weapons information for the war on Nidal, and plans to spend a day properly trying to pierce Conspiracies specifically in the class of 'the Conspiracy isn't so powerful that they couldn't use my knowledge about spellsilver or weapons'.

He's conducted a preliminary review of some of his evidence, but all his surface thoughts referenced was the point that if the Conspiracy existed, it was improvising very hard during its early days.

He hasn't done a full review of evidence, because he's planning to gather more evidence today.

His next destination is asking Ione for books written in non-Taldane languages.  He plans to collect those early, before the hypothetical Conspiracy has a chance to react to his other requests - something about a scry - and his brief surface thoughts about what he was planning to do to the books later didn't make sense to the Security who cast from scroll, something that felt like an inscrutable dath ilani thing you could do to a language - one of his 4th level spells is Tongues -