"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?

The President seems maybe a little less grumpy, sure. Jan is glad they're getting weapons though it sure looks like they need to make a lot of the other things first and while industrial policy is arguably his job more than anyone else's it's also an entirely novel field and he's not looking forward to all the mistakes he's going to make. (He's also maybe a little uncomfortable about how much he's going to need to rely on advice from a pair of teenage girls.)

Iomedae gets through the whole day without getting too discouraged by President Grim, but by mid afternoon she has resolved to, in fact, say something. Her rationalization is that it does in fact seem like a failure of imagination, or something, on their part, to be approaching this the way they are approaching it. But at least half her actual reason is that it - feels like talking to a brick wall, and she would like to see if perhaps instead they can trust each other and like each other.

"I keep feeling as if there must be something I'm misunderstanding," she says when she's done explaining what they'll need for the first gun that's decidedly better than a longbow instead of just not that much worse and much much easier to train people to use. "Maybe because the world changed, maybe because I'm explaining myself badly. If I went to - any place I've ever known before I found myself on Earth, and admittedly there weren't very many of them, and I told them these things, they would weep, because they are tired of burying their children when they're too little to be good, and they are tired of losing their goats to wolves, and they are tired of going hungry every time it rains too much - and they would want to soar through the air and go and visit all the wonders of the world - I don't know whether we can build Axis here in the world or whether Axis would no longer impress me but it's one of those and you all seem like you haven't made up your minds whether it's worth being happy about it."

"I think - I would say that I hope for the day when we can build Axis and Heaven on Golarion, but I'm not weeping for joy yet because there's still a lot of work for us to do. You've shown us a path that might lead to victory but it's not a short one and we still have to walk it."

"...and your plan is to not be happy until we've won?"

"I'm not really making plans about when I can be happy - but I expect that I probably won't be cheerful until it's at least more clear that we will win. We still need to build all of this, and train engineers to operate all the devices, and teach all the farmers how to use the new fertilizers and plows, and - try to do it all without ruining tens of thousands of lives and livelihoods - and train soldiers and develop doctrines and somehow stop Cheliax from just copying everything we've done until after Hell is removed from power there - There's a lot to be done. Time enough for happiness later.

…I am glad, though, that you and your friend learned all of this, that you came to us to build Axis in the world. I just don't show it very well."

"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 -"