"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. 

"Follow them every time and it's in the Goddess's hands if it works," someone says grudgingly after a moment.

"Right, so we wrote them wrong. What's different between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't."

So the person in charge is a child - or chooses to appear that way - in strange clothes that don't match any styles Catherine has heard of in Avistan or Garund or Casmaron or even Tian Xia. From Alkenstar, maybe, it fits with the smoke and the firearms - but it seems like these firearms are expected to work, reliably. So either there have been some breakthroughs in Alkenstar, which got exported to Lastwall and as of yet nowhere else - or something else.

The girl reminds her of Iomedae, a bit. Might be a distant relative, at least one of Iomedae's brothers had children, and Catherine can imagine the family might have fled Menador for Lastwall - or it could be a coincidence. Catherine's curious, though, and her curiosity about this lines up neatly with her curiosity about everything else going on here - she jumps over and follows the girl when she leaves.

She goes back to the firing range to test out the rifles that seem to be within tolerances. There's a Silence up, so she works without conversation, here. She's pretty good with the guns, though obviously the actual adventurers present are wildly better. The rifles do, in fact, reliably work. And at close range punch through steel; that's one of the things they're testing. (Another thing they're testing is alloys their guns don't punch through.) 

And then out of the Silence to consult with - another teenage girl. In a different language. (It's not a Golarian language, but Catherine understands it fine anyways. Non-Golarian languages are the whole reason she did a permanent comprehend languages.) "They're getting about half of them within tolerances. Theorized it might have to do with the metal temperature, or the air temperature, or the hand of God. People seem very set on hypothesizing that their own allies are sabotaging our industrial processes to confuse us, when their allies are gods." 

The other girl rolls her eyes. "It's not the hand of God. Quality control at the steel mills is pretty good - I wonder if it's the parts warping from heat from the machining, maybe we need to tell them to go slower, or use more water for coolant -" She prestidigitates her hands clean of grease from some device she was working on. "Let's go take a closer look at the process, shall we?"

"Works for me." She holds out her own hands, which have powder on them from firing the guns, and once they're fixed puts a strand of hair back behind her friend's ear. "The ones that are within tolerance can punch through enchanted steel at forty feet but not at a hundred. Unreliable in between."

"At normal armor plate thickness? You know, a lot of Lastwall's people are really strong - like physically strong, they might want to try wearing double-thick armor if that helps -"

"Or mithril but using the lightness to make it thicker rather than overall lighter, yeah. Though I note we've contributed notably less to mithril production - I'll suggest thicker armor to the President, they'll probably want to start training them with it soon if we're going to have the guns out within a season -"

"Might not be worth it. In the long run it's still a losing proposition, the guns will keep getting better - we might have a while without good personal ballistic armor until there's enough of a chemicals industry to synthesize you a real kevlar vest. Or a wizard comes up with something."

"In the long run it's still a losing proposition but for the war I think we'll have a forty-to-one advantage at steel production and that makes a lot of losing propositions look pretty good, if they are 'throw more steel at the problem'. Maybe we can at least run tests on thicker plates and see what it'd take. That's also useful for building tanks." They're thinking hybrid magitech tanks, probably, because proper tanks are very hard to build. Flying carpets surrounded by steel with holes to fire through are less hard to build.

"It's much more feasible for tanks, yes - probably want at least a couple of inches of steel and that should hold up fine against everything we're planning to distribute."

"So what I'm hearing," Iomedae says teasingly, "is that the powered armor with jetpacks that I know you're working on in your free time is going to be more Iron Man 1 than Iron Man 3."

"Iomedae, we don't even have serious electricity generation down yet, let alone arc reactors. Any power armor you get is going to be some steampunk monstrosity."