...None of that makes any sense to them and they're not sure how they'd put it on the radio if it did. Which seems for the best, at least in the case of the prostitutes. But. They can try to find some competitive sports and talk about them on the radio if Iomedae is really sure it's a good idea? Maybe start with the games in Oppara, those sound a bit more like what Iomedae's talking about than anything else they know of.

Oh, she's absolutely not sure it's a good idea. If no one's going to tell her that her opinions are stupid then she's going to have to learn this from trial and error and will presumably find that many of them were. But sports are really very popular on Earth and worth attempting to incorporate if they can figure out how. 

Okay. They will let the Abadarans know that sharing radio technology is fine, and suggest to someone that they could broadcast what's happening in the games in Oppara and see if it takes off.

Iomedae has listened to approximately half of one radio broadcast of sports but she can try to coach someone on how she thinks it's done. …also she should pick a new name. If she's going to be in the radio broadcast business and maybe even if she isn't. She gets the sense that people here do not name their children after their Goddess much.

It stands out a little, yes.

What wouldn't stand out. She has only been exposed to Arodenite naming traditions nine hundred years ago - where 'Iomedae' was definitely a family being showy with their knowledge of Azlanti, but not a statement beyond that - and to Earth naming traditions.

They can get her a list - not a very good list, it's not like there's an international survey - of names across the Inner Sea. In Galt and Andoran naming your children 'Freedom' and 'Virtue' and 'Courage' and so on are popular.

…you know what, sure. She will broadcast under the name Freedom. It speaks well of the human spirit, people naming their children Freedom. 

"- magic items worn by a powerful adventurer are approximately indestructible, right?" says Iomedae to Alfirin. 

"I think so. Why?"

"What constitutes wearing something? …I want to figure out if the pilot of a single-engine small bomber can be wearing his airplane."

"...are you trying to hint I should be spending more time on wizardry? I think it's - an approximation, not exactly 'things they are wearing' so much as 'things very close to their skin that move with them' - Maybe someone's found a way to make a rowboat that's as resistant to magic as the rower's clothes, but I doubt it."

"I just didn't want to ask Lastwall in case it was a very obviously stupid question. They make such faces when I ask them obviously stupid questions. …jet packs, though, jet packs will probably count?"

"Jet packs probably count…I guess powerful adventurers could probably survive using them."

"I think the main reasons it doesn't work on Earth are heat shielding, the acceleration forces, the noise, and the fact you'd need superhuman reflexes, and a magic item fixes half of those and powerful adventurers don't have the other half. 

…oh, and fuel. I guess that's still a problem."

Radio Free Avistan has a slow, gradual launch, because people have to hear about it and purchase radios. The Church of Abadar has a frequency on which they have someone read aloud market values of various goods in various places, starting over when they get through all of the relevant goods, which is brilliant and Iomedae wouldn't have thought of it, good for the Church of Abadar. They soon thereafter launch another frequency which warns ships of storms and pays for itself in reduced cost of insuring them. 

There are sports. There are prayers. There are animated tellings of adventuring stories (starting with ones less politically fraught than the Shining Crusade, to entice Cheliax to allow the sale of radios). There is an advice column and an after-dark advice column that still meticulously avoids using any actual descriptive vocabulary about the act being advised about. 

None of it is discernably related to Lastwall; some wizard came up with this design, and sold it to the Church of Abadar, and is anonymous and now presumably fabulously rich. Lastwall does announce once radios are widely available for purchase that there is a frequency they will monitor for requests for help within their territory, which is just good sense; every other state that was organized enough for village temples to have scrolls of Sending will do it too. Including Cheliax.

Catherine suspects that Lastwall is involved, somehow. She had noticed the boots of teleportation being scarcer and tracked that to Lastwall's suppliers. Watching them more closely led her to notice when those same suppliers went and purchased a copy of every known first- and second-circle spell. It's a strange set of purchases for a powerful wizard, who would presumably pick some higher-circle spells too, and outside the typical budget of a second-circle wizard. When the radios first start appearing, made with a wizard's cleverness but nonmagical - it starts to make a bit more sense.

She takes a radio apart and puts it back together again. She doesn't really see how, either in the pieces or the assembly process, making one would involve a lot of black smoke. Which means there's more to it than radios.

They hired a thousand people. It's not hard to find one and ride along silently for his day's labors.

They intend to go public with the guns once there's enough to hand them out everywhere at the Worldwound at that point everyone else will presumably start desperately re-engineering, but at that point the lead will really be quite large, because these guns are made of metal alloys no one else has the slightest idea how to produce, and manufactured to a precision no one else can dream of attaining without quite a lot of magic help. (They asked their Goddess if they should wait even longer than that, until they have flying powered armor and so on, but she said no; The best guess of why is that this is much, much much slower than the open operations will be. Most smart people in the world aren't trying their hand with these tools yet and things will change a lot faster once they are.)

The person Catherine's riding along with spends his day crafting rifle barrels to ridiculous precision, while a person next to him checks if the precision from him and the other craftsmen is in fact adequate, which it only is about half the time. He is one of a hundred or so people spending their day that way. The smoke-producing processes must be elsewhere, but it's evident at a glance (if you're an archmage with a lot of engineering knowledge) that they're working with steel alloys no one else has, both for the rifles and for the tools that make them.

Morale is high. They know they're making secret weapons, really excellent ones, and they know that with these in hand their soldiers will be unstoppable.

Well that's…interesting. Does it look like there's someone in charge?

There's a man in uniform managing supply requests and tool problems and complaints. There's no sign of anyone higher-ranking until mid-afternoon, when -

Iomedae comes in to collect the latest round of rifles completed to the newest set of specifications. It's sometimes useful to talk to the people who made them, especially if the reject rate is kind of high and it has been for these batches. She waits until the mid-afternoon lunch break so as not to interrupt everyone in their work, though she still interrupts a couple of people working through lunch. She pets the most recently finished rifle like a beloved child and then asks if the specifications are no good or something.