"This one didn't. This one was in a library memorizing facts about how fertilizer works."

Iomedae prays before she sleeps, because she has done that every night since she was too young to remember. She prays to Aroden. Doing anything else hurts too much and besides, what if he's not dead and they're lying…she's not sure the logic holds up. She prays to him anyway, to withhold her from error and help her build America in Golarion, except better. 

She tries praying to the goddess who is supposedly Iomedae but it's just too awkward. She ends up just saying 'it's been nine hundred years, and Hell rules the Empire now? Really?' and then realizing that is actually an excellent question. 

Someone brings them magic rings that'll make them need less sleep, supposedly. Iomedae looks to Alfirin; she's not going to be able to tell the difference between a helpful ring and a cursed one that imprisons them both or something. 

"This is the first magic ring - magic item of any kind - that I've ever seen. I can't tell what it does."

"Fair enough," says Iomedae. "- well, how about we try them one at a time and make sure we can take them off once we've put them on and that the other doesn't think they've made us odd."

"Okay… You first." Because if these are a trick to learn the things they're not saying, Alfirin knows more of them. Iomedae probably does not know enough to build an atom bomb on her own.

If one of them needs to force the other to remove the ring, Iomedae can take it off Alfirin and there's no way Alfirin can take it off Iomedae. But if things have come to that, the President's Secret Service can probably step in anyway, so - "sure." 

She puts on the ring. "It doesn't feel like anything."

"Who was the king of America when we left?" It's not really anywhere near enough of a check for tricky mind control rings but she can't think of anything else.

"I don't feel obliged to answer," Iomedae says, that being easiest to check for. "And I think I could lie, subject to my usual constraints on that - suppose I wished to and wouldn't deceive you thereby, I could say that America being a British colony its monarch is the Queen of England."

"Okay. Can you actually answer, though?" It would be a pretty weird mind control ring if she couldn't, but you never know.

"America doesn't have a king and isn't a military dictatorship. It's pretty cool."

"Oh good. And you can take it off?"

Iomedae tries it and can indeed take it off.

Alfirin tries next. "It doesn't feel like anything for me either."

"What do you miss most, about America."

"Plumbing - well. Right now it's plumbing. Once it's sunk in it's probably - Evelyn and Lily and Emily. I think maybe it's been four hundred years and they're all dead now and might not have afterlives."

Iomedae will bravely plow through the rest of the mind control ring testing but her heart's not really in it, after that. 

In the morning they go back to the conference room to continue their lecture on building rich countries through industry and medicine.

After the break for lunch, Jan asks when they'll be able to explain the weapons they mentioned, and if there's anything they can do to help Iomedae determine whether Lastwall is trustworthy with them.

(Alfirin is a little annoyed about how all the questions go to Iomedae, even though it makes perfect sense given these people's religion.)

"We'll decide together," says Iomedae, who is also picking up on that. "I think - it would be helpful if you described what you would do if you had the weapons to conquer your world." This seems like a slightly wiser approach than saying 'reassure me you won't just impose your military dictatorship everywhere', because if they will do that they probably think it's right and glorious of them to do it and there's a chance they will just say as much.

"To conquer the world? We'd - skipping over Cheliax, for the moment, because the diplomatic situation makes that a little complicated - once we'd dealt with that - maybe with sufficiently obvious overwhelming force we could get a real peace treaty with Belkzen - our neighbor to the northwest, barbarians, conduct a lot of raids into our territory. And more permanently deal with Tar-Baphon if the weapons could be used for that. And then - make defensive alliances with all of Cyprian's neighbors so he stops conquering them? Ask the Goddess if we can and should do something about Nidal, or Geb? I suspect the weapons in question wouldn't be enough for either of those."

Iomedae isn't in fact qualified to do politics, and she knows it. She is a teenager and the President is probably very good at diplomacy and knows everything about a hundred different topics she is stunningly ignorant of. It sounds like a good answer. Is that because it's really easy to guess what she wants to hear? It's probably easiest to guess what she wants to hear if the goddess Iomedae is a lot like her. Or was a lot like her as an idealistic teenager, and then turned into the kind of person who founds a military dictatorship. 

It doesn't really feel like a solvable problem and of course that's not any excuse at all not to solve it. 

"Does your Goddess not want to rule the whole world?" she asks neutrally. It is a reasonable thing for gods to want, she thinks. 

…Did Iomedae at sixteen want to rule the whole world? Or - not at sixteen - at whenever this Iomedae left Golarion - and maybe hasn't yet encountered whatever convinced her otherwise? "No, She doesn't. She wants to - make a world that's free from great Evils like Tar-Baphon and Asmodeus, but not to rule it." He says as neutrally as he can. It probably won't help the situation if she thinks he's judging her for her ambitions.

"Does she rule this place? Is she doing a good job of it?"

"Not directly? We consult with Her on anything of sufficient importance, because She sees many things that we do not and is much smarter than us - but ultimately we rule ourselves."