"I don't think it's good for anything else that'd be worth using it for in my world. I ....don't know if there's only one metal that's spellsilver, it is distinct in character sometimes in a way that's not about the purity but I don't know if that's being a different metal or not, it handles pretty much the same."

"I'm just trying to figure out - if it gives too much away, if somebody is retracing all of this a few months later, looking for the Summoned Hero's weaknesses or trying to duplicate her crafting accomplishments, and they trace it all back to her, and they find out that somebody walked into the Transmuter station and asked about a metal that grimes in air... you could put me under an Uncreative illusion and I doubt they'd see through it, just, I wish I had any idea what cover story I could use, here.  I have Metal affinity, I've now read a little about crafting, but I'm still not coming up with bright ideas."

"We're trying to discover a new way to create Acid affinity mats? It involves testing the reactions of tons of different metals in acid when they are dissolved and then slowly reconstituted?"

"Basically nobody tries to create mats the hard way, too expensive, they come from dungeons or Creation mages or rare natural deposits.  If somebody was trying to do original research on that they'd be a bigshot intelligent Tier-3 research magician."

"Could they have - had some kind of lucky lab accident they're now following up on?"

"Not in terms of creating affinity mats, no.  Possibly - some other kind of lucky accident - that implies I somehow got my hands on 'spellsilver' in the first place, but it could've been a weird dungeon drop I was playing with..."

"Huh.  That isn't really implausible.  I got some weird metal from a dungeon drop, found I could do interesting stuff with it, it rusted away and now I want more, no of course I'm not telling you what interesting things I discovered."

"Do you know things like - what color it would've been when the dungeon first dropped it, the color of the grime that formed on it, how long it took to rust or dissolve or whatever happened to it such that I now need more..."

Yes she absolutely does. It would originally have been lustrous, silvery, ductile, soft and easy to manipulate. It'd have tarnished like silver, but faster, visibly so by the time he'd even left the dungeon. A centimeter cube of it would be gone completely in a year, turned to a grimy dirt, faster if you were exposing more of it to the air. If you get a little powder of it it'll outright ignite in air. 

She speaks about it rather like a passionately missed lover.

He can work with that.

So the plan is that he asks for samples of pure metals like that, runs his own Metal mana through them to pretend to test something, and his liege... follows him in as a male five-year-old and maybe points to which sample is spellsilver and asks what it is?  Gives him some other signal?

Would it not be weird to bring your child metal-shopping? Carissa doesn't know what's weird here but at home that'd be very weird. You might bring a slave, or a harried younger apprentice, or a bodyguard for a certain kind of person. Your five year old you'd tie to a post out front.

...people don't do much tying of five-year-olds to posts in this country; he doesn't know of any particular other countries where that's different.  If somebody gave you their five-year-old to watch and you tied them to a post outside and went metal-shopping, they'd probably consider it disrespectful and a medium-small deal even if nothing bad happened to the kid.  People get hugely invested in their kids in a really emotional way.

Somebody would do that if the five-year-old was a slave, but people are still hoping for a Summoned Hero to show up to deal with the Fire.  Summoned Heroes have a tendency to execute the entire upper governments of countries that practice child slavery, and to not accept those governments having hastily changed things when the Hero showed up.

" - really? I mean, I'm not surprised someone objected enough to do that, someone probably objected to everyone's hair color enough to do mass executions, but I'm a bit surprised it's a consistent enough trend people will ban child slavery in anticipation. Do they just kill orphans instead?"

Sometimes relatives adopt them, but otherwise, sure.  Why wouldn't you?

" - the next lives we have in Golarion are worse, if you're just a child and haven't had time to get good at anything. So it's - more of a service to the children, and to the gods, to raise them at the state's expense and let them make something of themselves. And if you told people they couldn't have child slaves, they'd kill the kids, and that would be worse, for the children, who'd go on to their next life weak and useless. So really if any of the Heroes had any principles they'd execute governments that didn't have child slavery. 

- which I'm not going to do, because I don't care about the kids."

A few other countries have institutions for raising children?  But the basic bar on those is the kid having a nice enough life, and not being exploited too much for profit or forced to become police or whatever, that the Summoned Hero probably won't execute your government about it.

Nobody knows where they go in the next life, but people don't usually believe it's miserable, or they wouldn't have kids themselves.  So if you're going to store kids in horrible dirty barracks and let them go hungry, they're probably mostly better off finding themselves somewhere else?  So nobody builds an orphanage unless it's a nice orphanage and that can actually get pretty expensive.

To be clear, obviously nobody's going to let a kid with triple affinities or an in-demand dual affinity die, lots of families would want to adopt one of those.

It seems like a perfectly practical solution! She just doesn't see why Summoned Heroes would overwhelmingly feel so strongly about bringing it about in the place of child slavery that they'd kill a bunch of people about it! She would personally, if orphaned, much rather be enslaved than killed! You could offer the children the choice, if you really wanted to be 'respectful'!

...he's not seeing it unless the 'afterlives' are even shittier.

....the afterlives are perfectly lovely but you still get the afterlife if you first try an entire run of being alive, and you can do the afterlives forever but you can only be alive once, and in the case of Carissa's preferred afterlife you get to end up a more cool and powerful kind of outsider if you were cooler to start with.

If somebody told Almys that here, he'd be wondering if the local government was maybe trying to keep people around in shittier conditions by telling them that their afterlife depended on them putting up with that.  But he supposes he could believe it if the afterlives are directly observable and the governments are more... 'Lawful' and honest and truthful and reliable.

Here, an orphaned kid with a single affinity is probably not going to grow up to have an amazing life that makes them a much more valuable person if you stuff them into a relatively inexpensive orphanage.  They're going to grow up to be a boring farmer full of resentments about that awful orphanage they grew up in.  It's widely considered a more reasonable gamble to try to send the kid on and hope they make it to wherever their parent or parents went.

Carissa takes no issue with this but thinks it's baffling that Summoned Heroes have repeatedly regarded it as a cause worth making a huge fuss about. Also seems like the more sentimental half of slaves would be really distressed about their kids being murdered but it's more reasonable for no one to care about that.

...they'd just apply contraception to the slaves?  Making slaves have slave kids will obviously get the Summoned Hero to execute the government, if they're the sort to execute governments about child slavery in the first place.

Honestly, Almys thinks the Summoned Heroes have a point here.  Otherwise anybody could kidnap Adventurers with lots of affinities, turn most of them female, try to breed kids with lots of affinities, kill the ones with fewer affinities, raise them to believe the government controlled your next life too, and get their own personal army of five-affinity superslaves.

No, otherwise everyone would do that and then the slaves would learn the truth and rebel and you'd have a whole population with a much higher base rate of affinities. Also, the described situation just doesn't actually sound worse than the current one? Both of them involve some people being, uh, disrespected, but really to a fairly similar degree.

Multiple affinities don't keep through generations, there's a downward trend, a couple both with four affinities will have more three-affinity kids than four-affinity kids let alone five-affinity kids...

He has the impression that this conversation is faltering on interworld differences neither of them have tracked down, and possibly they should prioritize figuring out the spellsilver thing.

Pragmatic upshot:  If Almys goes in to the Transmuter office towing around a five-year-old, the main conclusion they'll draw is that this customer is not rich enough to afford somebody to watch his five-year-old all day, probably also that he's a single mother.  It might conflict slightly with Almys being an Adventurer who got something in a dungeon drop, but some Adventurers have kids before they retire or get rich, and some of those have complicated childcare-sharing arrangements which would make it totally plausible that if it was Almys's turn to watch a kid he'd be doing that while visiting the Transmuter office.

Then Carissa will happily be a tiny child who can look at all the pretty metals and get his attention as needed.

It's getting on towards the end of Almys's own sleep cycle.  Is his liege planning to pull another all-nighter, and if so, is she confident about not repeating whatever collapsed her Spatial magic last time, or putting up a flying spell beforehand if she does?

She is confident in her ability to not forget the duration on her own Rope Trick until she falls out again, yes.