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What do you do, in America, if you want to change the world?
There’s plenty of options. There’s probably more leverage here than there was in Taldor, if one’s not an Emperor or an archmage or something, and Iomedae knows perfectly well she wasn’t on track to be an Emperor or an archmage. America doesn’t have Tar-Baphon, but it has weapons by which civilization might destroy itself as surely as Azlant in a war, and one could go to work on reducing the risk of that. America has a truly horrifying number of abortions probably because no one realizes that babies have souls before they are born. America has mass torture factories for animals. Some people are worried about climate change and some about artificial intelligence and she doesn’t understand all of the arguments well enough to tell yet if there’s anything to worry about there.
When she thinks of her idea she instantly likes it much much better than any of those ideas. She is worried that this is some kind of failure of character. For any of those problems, she would be one in a hundred voices, trying to figure out confusing questions about what needs doing and then convince people to do it. Her clever idea lets her be a hero. Maybe she likes her clever idea better because it involves more getting to personally feel clever.
But she holds the idea close to her heart for a while - she is learning, not to say every thing she thinks, and this one would certainly be a dangerous thing to say - and she thinks that there's no use, ultimately, in trying to make this decision from that angle. What she ought to do depends on the world, and not on what kind of role in a story it is, and whether it works depends on whether she's right, not whether she's virtuous.
And what appeals about the plan isn't that she'll be a hero. It is that she will be powerful, and were Aroden inclined to renounce her for wanting that He wouldn't have picked her in the first place.The thing she wants, the thing she is constantly desperately grasping for whether it’s found in bednets or geoengineering or artificial wombs or starting a religious revival or doing her secret plan, is leverage, to find a place to stand where her efforts go much farther than they have any right to, the weak point in the forces of Evil, the sharp point in the forces of Good, the accident or chance or miracle that lets her deliver not just her own strength but the strength of many others towards an aim around which they had not previously been coordinated.
And the highest-leverage thing she could possibly do is to bring the efforts of generations of inventors home. To Taldor. And build America there. And eventually fix everything from there.
It might not work. But it would be so important, if it worked, that the odds it’d work don’t have to be that high, and they’re also not that low. She’s still a paladin of Aroden here. Magic still works here. The likeliest guess is that they are still inside Creation, and that means -
“I have a crazy and concerning idea,” she says to Alfirin, when she has been in America for one year and they’ve been living with Evelyn for six months.
