Alfirin resists the impulse - it's quite a strong one, really - to tell him that she already is one and see if paladins get the same look on their face that high school chemistry teachers do. He's prooobably not secretly an evil paladin but if he is it would be better if he didn't know. "Yes," she not-technically-lies instead, "When I'm older, but I should probably start learning soon, right? Maybe when I'm done with the other things we're doing and I have time for it I'll try to learn to cast some of the spells in this book."

"I think it's very hard to teach yourself. Maybe we can find a proper wizard for you to apprentice to, when you have the time."

"We're not ready to teach you the weapons yet," Iomedae tells the President. She is trying to conceal that she's terrified a little bit, because it's embarrassing, but she's not trying as hard as possible because firstly at some point that feels like Lying and secondly because this is in fact a sort of test and it is relevant if the President wants them to be afraid. "We do have more things to teach for the rest of today and the next several days."

A few days is unlikely to matter, for the strategic picture, as long as they can keep this secret - and they probably won't start the big obvious things like trying to build blast furnaces in the next few days anyways. "Okay," says Jan, "Let's get started on whatever's next for today then."

Well, that's not more irritation than the President seems to feel at everything. She nods. They get back to work. 

Regroup, that night, to see if either of them thought of anything else. "...I was planning to give this to Taldor, to beat Tar-Baphon with, and we knew what they'd do after that would probably be horrible and horribly stupid."

"I don't think Lastwall will do worse than Taldor, probably. I don't know if military dictatorships fight more stupid wars than monarchies."

"I don't know either. I think we probably shouldn't do it if we are expecting zero stupid wars but - rich modern worlds do have fewer wars, on the whole. And Lastwall's small, I don't think they could conquer the continent and hold it just as a matter of the industrial base they'd be starting from - I'm rationalizing that it won't be so bad because I want to do it, aren't I."

"Yes, you are. It's okay, though, I think it's the right call, I haven't thought of anything else to check."

"Right. Well, in the morning, then, unless some god warns us otherwise or we think of something before then. What's in your spellbook?"

"All the cantrips the old one had, and a couple more. Mage armor, disguise, comprehend languages, charm person, some combat spells, and… detect doors."

"...under what circumstances would anyone possibly need a door-detecting spell."

"I cannot imagine any - maybe it also does secret passages, like in movies, where the hero touches the right book on a bookshelf and it swings open - maybe people on Golarion build a lot of those for real."

Iomedae feels uneasy whenever she notices how successfully America acculturated her. This is her world and she would like not to feel like a foreign explorer doing anthropology in it. Well, not exactly. Maybe it wouldn't feel like this if they'd succeeded at really going home.

"...I would have a lot of fun exploring this place for secret passages and also they absolutely have guards at our door."

"Yeah. At least - I don't know how much to change what I expect based on today, but I think they'd probably let us leave if we wanted. If there was anywhere better we wanted to go." She hugs Iomedae, a little clingily. "Did you get a good look at any of the maps?"

"I'm out of practice at reading Taldane," Iomedae confesses. "Oppara's still there, approximately where I'd have expected it to be, and it's an option but - probably a worse option than this place. …I couldn't find Sarkoris on the map at all, not that we'd want to go there anyway."

She looked, though. That's sweet. "It's not there. I think. I didn't exactly know a ton of geography before I left, but - the countries that I think should have been close by are there, but then, if you look north of Ustalav and west of Mendev there's just - I think something horrible happened -"

"I'm so sorry. I - wish we could've come back at the right time."

"Would've been better, probably. Aroden, my family, your family."

Iomedae clings. "I'm so glad we're together." She doesn't say 'I couldn't do it without you'. She'd do it, just worse. But it'd be so much worse.

"Me too. I couldn't do any of this on my own - I'd explain things worse and it would be so hard to check, who is evil, and - they might not have known to raise me in the first place. And they wouldn't respect me because I'm not a god."

Iomedae sniffs disdainfully. "Their loss. It's kind of stupid anyway - I'm not a god -"

"Yeah but your original copy became a god and my original copy got eaten by a bear or something so -"

"Well my original copy didn't become such a good god that I'm going to be smug about it. And we'll decide everything together, like we planned."

In the morning Iomedae tells them that they're ready to talk about weapons. Alfirin's better at all of the chemistry and metallurgy and physics, but Iomedae's the one who instinctively adored guns, and spent a while in fact making them herself with varying quality tools and testing them out on trees in the American wilderness to see if they were of any practical use. Making anything good - and especially mass production of anything good - is going to require them to master all of the metalworking and machining and chemistry things that Alfirin's been lecturing on for the last several days, but the thing about guns is that they're useful across a really wide range of competence at making them. 

Is this, in fact, what it takes to cheer up the President and all the researchers diligently taking their cues from him?