"So long as it's not that we're - failing to make it understood - it's not really any of my business how anyone feels about it." It's a free country, they'd say in America, except she's pretty sure it isn't so she doesn't say that. "I don't know if we're going to win. I just wasn't planning on waiting that long to be pleased about guns, because they're great, or medicine, which is objectively even better. And I'd expect that if Cheliax tries putting guns in the hands of their people they won't like who gets shot."

"They have armies. Human armies, that are loyal enough to the regime."

"Even if any soldier who'd rather not go to Hell could instead shoot their commander? Or do they not know that they work for Hell - this isn't important right now." But she knows the people she grew up with, and even if they were temporarily pretending to obey Hell they'd stop the instant they could, instead, fight.

He's a little too old and jaded for the hope that the people of Cheliax will see sense and turn against their evil overlords. They've had plenty of time for it, if they were going to do it without help. "You're right. Let's get back to the lectures. You two are doing a great job." He manages a smile.

Iomedae can tell when she's being Managed because she's being Difficult but it's on her for pushing the point about how horrendously grim they all are. She'll go back to describing what went wrong the first few times she tried building her own Civil War-era guns.

"I don't know exactly what my father would have done if we'd learned there was a war and the new Emperor worked for the forces of Hell," Iomedae says in English that evening when they're alone. "Not start worshipping Asmodeus, obviously, but -"

"You think he might not rebel?" Alfirin's birth parents would rebel - if they were in Taldor - but she doesn't feel like talking about them now.

"If there was a war already going on he'd of course join the other side of it. If there wasn't - he might wait for someone who looked like they had a shot, to join in then, or he might rebel right away, I'm not sure. It'd probably depend what our priest had to say but of course we hypothesize here that the priest is suddenly powerless… I am sure he'd never give them his oath. It's just - such a stupid thing to do, right, aside from an Evil one -"

"Yeah, it's a stupid thing - it's been a hundred years, though. Maybe they killed everyone important who wouldn't swear to them."

"Probably they did. And their families. But I think that still leaves - more people who think they have no choice to play along than…people who think it's fine… I don't know. A lot of people were Nazis and it didn't even take a hundred years to get them to be like that. Though it also wasn't that hard, once you won the war, to get them to stop…. Part of me says that our job is to bring modern technology to Golarion and there are a thousand people more qualified to figure out Cheliax but part of me doesn't believe that at all and doesn't really think these people will get it right unless we help them."

"Turns out we'd have been better served waiting six more months and reading up on denazification. Not that we had any way to know that at the time… maybe more about social organization and history in general. We probably could've guessed that'd be useful."

"Yes. I think in hindsight it was stupid to not have thought of this more as a - political and diplomatic project, as much as a technical one. We thought we had a different political environment we were operating in, but - I spent a lot more time building guns than thinking about meeting Presidents and how to not offend them and how to be taken seriously while a teenage girl - you know, to Lastwall's credit, I don't think the 'girl' part's mattered -"

"Their wizard secretary and engineering, sorry, siege secretary - are both women. They do seem more American about gender than I was expecting."

"Well. Mixed feelings about the other Iomedae but if she created women's rights then good on her. I wouldn't necessarily have expected you could do it without - guns, and tractors, and maybe birth control -"

"Maybe they have birth control? Maybe you just need that. We could ask one of the women."

"We could. Maybe should. Maybe I'd feel a little less disoriented if we understood - anything about this place other than what the people on its important secret projects behave like. If it had - families and farms and things - I mean, I'm sure it does, but -"

"I assume Lastwall has families somewhere - maybe none of the people in charge do, if they're like - monks and nuns or something. And then if they don't have families women can do important work - that sounds a little more plausible, with the surrounding tech level, and also really sad."

"I mean, it's what I wanted to do and I wasn't expecting to be sad about it. I didn't have America to compare to, and it seemed like a pretty good deal, having Aroden to obey instead of a husband -"

"Well, yes, it's what I'd have done too if I had the chance, but - having seen the way women are treated in America it seems sad to imagine that women can either - not raise a family or not do anything else. Better than not having the choice, but still sad."

"- I have no idea how to make birth control. I did look into it when we were doing medications but it looked complicated and I gave up. You could probably do, like, surgical interventions made easier by priest healing - maybe once we've gotten through the first week we can ask questions about what Lastwall is like and get a sense of things like this -"

"Copper IUDs are mostly just copper - of course you need to have competent doctors to install them but maybe healing magic can help and even if it can't that's going to be easier than setting up a whole pharmaceutical industry. It's a shame biology is so complicated."

Iomedae could not keep up with all of the biology. She could really only keep up at things that she happened to find utterly delightful or that didn't require very much cleverness. All the biology she knows she already told Lastwall, on day 1: inoculation, and how to identify the bread mold that treats infections and consumption and the plague. (Hopefully even here there is a bread mold for that.) "It's a shame everything is so complicated. …I didn't want to say it in front of the President because I didn't want to sound like a naive child, but I think we're going to win. I think they're underestimating America, and underestimating how the thing - has its own momentum, once it's going."

"Of course they're underestimating America. They've never seen it, so they hear me explain blast furnaces and they think 'Wow, we can make swords and armor much more cheaply' and not 'We can build cars and trucks, we can make buildings out of steel, we can make all our tools out of good steel and use those to make more better tools faster, we can make steel ships and steel boxes and fill them with corn and feed a million people on the other side of the world.' I don't think they'll really understand until it gets going and they can see it for themselves. It's kind of unbelievable."

"Their god ought to be able to see. I don't know what the point is of gods at all, if they can't see things like that."

"Yeah. She told them to resurrect us, I bet She saw it. Don't know why She didn't show them, but she must not have, you could just see it on some of the researchers' faces when I got to lathes, like they were expecting me to tell them how to make table legs."