"Not everything I want, no." One thing she wants is for her daughters to be happy. She's not going to get that one. "I could still use someone watching Cheliax. And Lastwall. I don't think I will get the Chelish crown, but it may be worth trying for the First Citizenship or whatever they end up calling it."

See, that makes more sense. Lilia nods. "I will endeavor to get reoriented. If you're working openly with Cansellarion, is he going to trust me more? I'd like to take the opportunity to remove a bunch of people I particularly dislike who are going to try entrenching themselves, but I don't expect it to work if he'll only meet if I'm in chains and only trust a truth spell that he may at some point realize he shouldn't trust."

"He'll trust you more. I don't know if it'll be enough…No murders. I'm sure you realize that we must appear to be model citizens of the new regime." Alex will suspect they aren't but he's neatly tied up pretending he thinks she's just a Galtan swashbuckler. It hardly matters. At least in the short term, they'll be model citizens and Alex' suspicions wouldn't get him anywhere even if he could act on them.

Has her mother been spying on her in Vudra - probably primarily to check that she wasn't a Wish-kidnapping target. It would not be hard to learn about the murder because they put it on her tab.

"Of course. I intend only to check if other people are doing murders and report them if so to our wise and benevolent leadership. Does he know that Isarn was my warning? I'd been considering that my - currency, if the forces of Good ever did get their hands on me somehow."

"I have not told him that. Nor about the first Freedom kidnapping, though he may have guessed that one. You may tell him, if you think it advantages you."

"I'll see just how distrusted I am." She smiles, slightly. "I do not even have to pretend to think the paladins have gone and made a compelling case that paladining is not a stupid thing to do."

"They did wildly outperform what I expected of them five years ago." They had some unexpected help from a wholly unpredictable source but Myrabelle habitually does not mention things like that to Lilia.

Lilia would never expect her to. "Anything else?"

"It might seem like a bit of a ridiculous request, but - may I hug you?"

It does seem like a bit of a ridiculous request. "Of course."

Myrabelle hugs her. "It really could not have succeeded without you. There is nobody else in the world who could have done what you did for me, and nobody else in the world I would have trusted to do it. I may not be the best at showing it but I am proud of you."

Oh. Lilia is very very very good at controlling not just her expressions but the feelings that might produce them, or she'd probably be having some difficulty, right now. She leans into the hug. "You know I've never wanted anything else," she says, and she is not particularly a person who keeps track of whether things she is saying are true, when no one else could possibly tell, but she thinks that one is. 

They return to their original workshop after the war. Alfirin's looking into land purchases and legal agreements in Andoran, and they're probably going to relocate there in the medium term, but it wouldn't be the kind of thing that happened overnight even if Andoran's government wasn't extremely busy with the emancipation of all of the slaves in Cheliax right now.

Anyway, Iomedae wants to be in Lastwall right now because she's worried Andoran wouldn't invent the concept of gay marriage in order to pressure her into comporting herself appropriately, and she trusts that Lastwall will. 

Iomedae wants to be the test pilot for the first flight of Golarion's first airplane, and when she makes this known no one objects, even though she kind of expected them to. Maybe she has successfully conveyed over the radio the glory and majesty of airplanes and they see why this is so important and agree she ought to have it, or maybe she's failed and so they don't see and are unwilling to wrestle her for it. 

Either way it is a great occasion to indirectly get engaged to one's girlfriend. They have cleared a large flat area and have priests on hand in case it crashes horrendously, which she warned everyone that it might. They have gasoline engines, but not good ones. Obviously the chief engineer on the airplanes project would be on site personally to crank up the engines for the flight, and obviously that's easier to do if one is temporarily a handsome young man, and obviously Iomedae would lean out of the cockpit of her airplane and kiss her lover before she rolled out.

And obviously there's a sizable crowd.

The plane spends only three seconds in the air because the engine fails almost immediately, which is disappointing - she wanted to beat the Wright Brothers – but a useful result and still exciting to the crowd. The engineers rush over at once to figure out what went wrong with the engine and the second test flight, half an hour later, makes twenty four seconds. Iomedae leaps gleefully out of the plane when this latter flight lands and bounds over to Alfirin, presently a girl, and kisses her again. 

"I would say that I just had a religious experience except that I've done that and it was really much worse."

Alfirin has already been approached by Xiomarra asking to speak with her after the demonstration. "Twenty-four seconds, by my watch. I think that might be a world record or something. An entirely successful test flight, I think?"

"Oh, I think so." Iomedae's eyes are sparkling.

Alfirin kisses her. And then kisses her again. It's probably not necessary to drive the point home.

Cansellarion's standing there when they're done, looking a bit awkward. "Congratulations. It's very impressive, for a machine with no magic… How many more iterations before it can fly a teleport like you talked about?"

Alfirin laughs. "Oh, hundreds. It won't be soon and I'm not getting there on my own. But it's not going to be a secret project. No reason to keep it small, we can hire everyone who's smart enough and wants to be an aerospace engineer."

"On Earth it was…I'm not sure, sixty, maybe eighty years," says Iomedae, "from the first flight to a world where millions of tons of cargo moved by air and the median American could afford to fly across the continent for vacation. It might be faster because we know some of what they got wrong, it might be slower because we have fewer of the prerequisites. I bet you could supply the Worldwound by plane inside a decade, if all the cleverest people in the world decide this is the coolest thing they could possibly do with their lives. And hopefully lots of them will."

"Not much faster, probably. This is about the limit of how much of an airplane I can build from memorized facts. Maybe we'll get fancy aerofoil wing shapes sooner just for knowing they exist."

"A decade isn't bad. I look forward to seeing one. Iomedae, I have to go deal with some other matters, but can you find me in my office in the city when you're done here?"