PL-timestamp:  Day 66-70

After a lecture or two on the ways of creativity inside a box - the easiest and most straightforward sort of creativity that there is, which is at least worth trying in a lot of cases -

The Project - not Keltham, the Project - invents the bimetallic thermometer!

By methodology of getting together a dozen kinds of substance that change in various ways with respect to a temperature, over the requisite range, and trying to combine every way they can change relative to each other to form any kind of indicator that can be read.

Sibilla, tier-2, is the one who simply welds a few thin strips of different metals together, applies heat, and watches them bend slightly, as the outer metal expands more than the inner metal.

Within an hour they've got a wound-up spiral coil of platinum-gold-silver.  You can apply heat in the range of most chemical-reaction steps, and watch that spiral wind or unwind a little bit per turn through many turns, to rotate and move a dial on a temperature setting they're going to calibrate.

The alchemist's vampire-bat familiar is no longer a bottleneck on several key processes! This takes the Project significantly closer not just to perfecting but to scaling its cheaper-spellsilver-manufacture methods.  And beyond spellsilver refining, a whole new world of precise temperature-dependent chemical processes has opened before them!  Not just for the Project, but for every alchemist who doesn't have a vampire-bat familiar!

It doesn't promote Sibilla to tier-1 immediately, but it puts her on Keltham's unspoken watch list for it; and if Sibilla doesn't get that promotion outright, she'll sure get a heck of a bonus.

And not just that, bimetal thermometers are one more thing the Project can sell!  For revenue!  Besides sulfuric acid!  And they should maybe properly look into metal refining, too, now that they have a way to measure forge temperatures -

Yes, yes, Keltham realizes that spellsilver is more profitable and the critical step on scaling intelligence headbands and they should master that part first.

Party time?

Sure!

CAKE FOR EVERYONE!

PL-timestamp:  Day 71-77

Down to three-quarters the cost of traditional spellsilver production if any two of Keltham, Avaricia, Carissa, and Shilira are overseeing the entire process!  You also need either an alchemist or Avaricia but it doesn't have to be an alchemist with a temperature-reading vampire-bat familiar!  Total Project spellsilver production at 1.7 pounds!  Avaricia and Asmodia have started to train a crew of older third-circle wizards from Cheliax, now that it's clearer exactly what kind of Prestidigitation needs to be done, and how much math it helps to know, and they've got spectroscopes and illusionary optical microscopes and a standard incremental series of chemical reaction pathways to practice on!

They're clearly going to be able to do the thing!  The only reason it's not time to massively scale yet is that the process is literally improving by the day!

It's the best news in all of human history.

Carissa is not in denial about having squishy slime bits that are sad, rather than happy. If you're in denial about your squishy slime bits then you can't hammer them out of existence.

She focuses on her headband assembly line. This isn't going to be something that couldn't have been done centuries ago; it's just going to be something that wasn't worth doing centuries ago. No society before Asmodean Cheliax has had large numbers of decently-trained third-circle wizards whose time is not actually intensely competed-for, and very few people with abundant spellsilver riches would bother spending it on hyper-specific expensive magic items that can only be used for mass production of a single item, because they wouldn't have had a buyer. 

But with spellsilver cheap, it works. She has it down for +2 headbands, and should be able to figure out +4 headbands very soon.

She's been having a lot of mixed feelings about things, but even if this puts Cheliax on greater alert against Keltham escaping, Asmodia doesn't think she can delay reporting any longer and still look remotely competent.

Asmodia has been thinking about how to package up the Project for stasis, since they're getting closer to the spellsilver production target.  Asmodia admits fault for not thinking of this earlier - especially since it's her responsibility to think of this sort of thing, as the consistency-checker who actually reads everything Keltham sees, all of the documents he's exposed to.

Like Cheliax's contract with the Project.

Keltham wrote in some pretty tight provisions about all of Cheliax's Project-knowledge-derived industry having gratuities payable to the Project.

If the Project shuts down for a year while Cheliax produces a massive amount of spellsilver, even for its own internal use rather than being resold, the contract says an internal price with the Project needs to be negotiated, and the resulting revenue has to accrue to the Project, and revenue has to be reported to Keltham, he clearly did think about the possibility that Cheliax would do a bunch of stuff and theoretically transfer money to the Project but then not tell him about it, and Keltham has the right to examine related accounting and production books.

If they run the stasis plan, that's basically planning for the Conspiracy to blow up when the next revenue report is due.  Maybe that's deemed worth it, for the one-year headstart on Cheliax's enemies, but -

" - doing the stasis plan is going to be an enormous logistical headache along every possible dimension, but I think that one might be manageable. Lrilatha wrote the contract and we had in mind that Keltham might get stasised for extended periods, I think they have some workarounds in mind. You should talk to Maillol about it."

...She'll do that then.

Yeah, Maillol was wondering when or if Asmodia would point that out.  She's been a favorite of his, but he was starting to doubt her competence there.

If it gets to that point, Cheliax is going to present a putative plan where Cheliax withdraws wizards and resources from a lot of other things, like school academies, and makes a truly massive push to scale up spellsilver production and do a lot of mining and catch up on part of the demand backlog and maybe not die during the war with Nidal.  It will be clearly said to Keltham that this is not sustainable.

The books can't be false, but the Queen can pass an act legally creating a separate calendar for Project-related companies which runs thirteen times slower for the duration of that year, making all the dates showing massive production over the next month be legally correct.

Asmodia needs to keep in mind that her superiors are not, in fact, complete incompetents.  Lrilatha and Abrogail Thrune put some cleverness into this.

"Acknowledged."

"Sir, I'd be lying if I claimed to be confident that Keltham is going to buy this, this did not happen in alterCheliax at all, sir."

"Kid, that is sometimes worth doing occasionally.  Like when it buys a massive nation-scale military and political advantage and makes it less threatening for us to fail for the entire rest of the Project."

"You're offended that you weren't consulted about this."  It's not a question.

"I admit fault -"

"Don't.  I wasn't trying to correct that impulse.  You see there's an Inner Ring.  You see you're not part of it.  You want in."

"That's good, Asmodia.  You can get in.  It's just going to take you a while longer before you're ready to sit down at the table with myself and Sevar and Abrogail Thrune.  You can be in the room where it happens.  You may be a little older than this when you're seated, but there's a place there for you if you prove yourself worthy."

"The only reason I'd be concerned is if, say, you noticed this problem earlier, and kept it to yourself because you had dreams of thinking up a solution and presenting it to your less competent superiors on a platinum platter, so that we'd know to consult you next time."

"That would be a problem, Asmodia."

"I - sir, I obviously tried to think of a solution myself, before I came complaining here - but that was today -"

"Asmodia.  Don't lie to me.  I was going to threaten you and let it pass."

"Turn yourself in for twenty lashes at the temple and be very glad that you are on Sevar's light punishment plan."

"This is why you don't have a seat at the table.  You're simply too inexperienced."

"Let's be very clear on this:  You are not being corrected for your ambitions.  Your ambitions are good.  The way in which you expressed them is bad.  Twenty lashes, don't do this again."

"Acknowledged."

"Dismissed."

When it's over, Pilar offers her a cookie.

It's a cookie with sugar chips inside, which, in the mental scheme and code Asmodia devised to ask this secret question, means that Snack Service isn't saying that Asmodia's sponsor wants her to try to sabotage the Project, or warn Keltham.  With her shielded thoughts and Hell immunity that make her the only person who could maybe plan that and get away with it.

...okay.

PL-timestamp:  Day 78

Maillol sits Asmodia down and gives her the Talk.

When it's okay to undermine your colleagues.  When it's okay to amuse yourself by tormenting your subordinates.  The relatively rare circumstances when you should try to kill your superior and take their place, you are a lot more likely to get away with that if your superior wasn't valuable and isn't anyone's pet and was being visibly incompetent and you are clearly more competent than they are.  Be conservative about evaluating that sort of thing; a lot of people get themselves worse-than-killed by having a self-favoring bias, and being shocked, shocked, that their new superior doesn't agree about them being more competent than their dead ex-boss.  The tyranny is not there to be your friend, it's not your superior's friend either, obviously, but all else being equal the tyranny wants both of you working for it and producing for it.  They're going to check whether any apparent incompetence of your superior was actually you sabotaging them and they were a decent performer before that.  Encouraging that sort of gameplay is not in the tyranny's interest.

Your fundamental job responsibility that isn't directly to Asmodeus or yourself is about making your boss look good.  If you try to kill and replace your boss, it had better make your boss's boss look good, and that's harder to pull off than you might think.

Seizing your boss's job without killing them is unreasonably advanced for somebody Asmodia's age.  Anybody you've replaced like that is likely to hang around severely resenting you.  Your boss's boss knows that, they mostly won't promote you into somebody else's place unless they're ready for them to die, or they have some other position to send them to where the two of you won't get into trouble with each other.

Also, Asmodia's boss is, depending on how you look at it, either Maillol, or Sevar.

The main moral of the Talk is that Asmodia should not try to kill her superiors and seize their positions until she is older.

It's kind of embarrassing, but Asmodia knows that she is being shown favor by being told this, and she will respond with the appropriate attitude of somebody who understands that she's being done a favor and that a return will be owed on it.

PL-timestamp:  Day 79-80