"I'd expect the demons won't be able to pick it up, at least."

"Sure. I think we can consider holding a Worldwound fort likely to get vastly easier inside five or ten years, maybe sooner. Holding Belkzen, too. The timeline depends on weapons details, which were pointedly not on the day 1 agenda."

"She doesn't trust us?"

"She shouldn't trust us. Her god's dead but conveniently there's a new god, who is her, and we promise we want the weapons to fight Hell, which rules her homeland? I wouldn't trust us. So she gives us - the things that you'd begrudge very few people. But, Heaven someday heal us, I don't want to teach Cheliax how to fix smallpox."

"So tell her more about the strategic situation, get her on board with talking about weapons. She knows what a paladin is; Alexeara can confirm you're telling her the truth."

"I'm not exactly disputing that, but I'll note that she is very very young - younger than you're imagining - knows less than would be ideal about what a paladin is, and spent the whole day terrified. If it wasn't Her I don't think we'd be doing as we ought, if we were to pressure her into giving us weapons. It is Her, and I think we can be pretty sure she'll be glad she did, but even so it doesn't sit right."

"Terrified? - did the Goddess not pick up where Aroden had left her -"

"Where Aroden had left her was 'not strong enough to lay on hands'. Like I said. Younger than you're imagining."

"At sixteen she -"

"This one didn't. This one was in a library memorizing facts about how fertilizer works."

Iomedae prays before she sleeps, because she has done that every night since she was too young to remember. She prays to Aroden. Doing anything else hurts too much and besides, what if he's not dead and they're lying…she's not sure the logic holds up. She prays to him anyway, to withhold her from error and help her build America in Golarion, except better. 

She tries praying to the goddess who is supposedly Iomedae but it's just too awkward. She ends up just saying 'it's been nine hundred years, and Hell rules the Empire now? Really?' and then realizing that is actually an excellent question. 

Someone brings them magic rings that'll make them need less sleep, supposedly. Iomedae looks to Alfirin; she's not going to be able to tell the difference between a helpful ring and a cursed one that imprisons them both or something. 

"This is the first magic ring - magic item of any kind - that I've ever seen. I can't tell what it does."

"Fair enough," says Iomedae. "- well, how about we try them one at a time and make sure we can take them off once we've put them on and that the other doesn't think they've made us odd."

"Okay… You first." Because if these are a trick to learn the things they're not saying, Alfirin knows more of them. Iomedae probably does not know enough to build an atom bomb on her own.

If one of them needs to force the other to remove the ring, Iomedae can take it off Alfirin and there's no way Alfirin can take it off Iomedae. But if things have come to that, the President's Secret Service can probably step in anyway, so - "sure." 

She puts on the ring. "It doesn't feel like anything."

"Who was the king of America when we left?" It's not really anywhere near enough of a check for tricky mind control rings but she can't think of anything else.

"I don't feel obliged to answer," Iomedae says, that being easiest to check for. "And I think I could lie, subject to my usual constraints on that - suppose I wished to and wouldn't deceive you thereby, I could say that America being a British colony its monarch is the Queen of England."

"Okay. Can you actually answer, though?" It would be a pretty weird mind control ring if she couldn't, but you never know.

"America doesn't have a king and isn't a military dictatorship. It's pretty cool."

"Oh good. And you can take it off?"

Iomedae tries it and can indeed take it off.

Alfirin tries next. "It doesn't feel like anything for me either."

"What do you miss most, about America."

"Plumbing - well. Right now it's plumbing. Once it's sunk in it's probably - Evelyn and Lily and Emily. I think maybe it's been four hundred years and they're all dead now and might not have afterlives."

Iomedae will bravely plow through the rest of the mind control ring testing but her heart's not really in it, after that.