"It is possible to resurrect the mortal Iomedae," she says without disabusing him of the fairly ridiculous notion that he could in some way have spared Her the cost of telling him that. It would in fact be a waste of their shared resources to say that. 

…That one might in fact not be his (or Lastwall’s) fault though if they’ve been able to resurrect the mortal Iomedae this whole time - well someone made a mistake somewhere in there. He teleports to Vigil as soon as the vision ends, to ask Her in the next planned commune whether this vision was in fact from Her, then does a sending to ask, ugh, Clepati, whether she happens to have prepared true resurrection this morning.

It’s the funniest thing! She did! Actually three times but the third one is unrelated.

Yeah he thought that might happen. (He'll ask about the second when he gets there, rather than waste another spell.) Make that an emergency commune, then? And he’ll borrow a wizard for the hop to Sothis.

"Do I need to tell you who?"

“Well, you need to tell me which of them to do first! I get first and second confused, you know. It's like how small children confuse their left and their right."

"...Okay. Well. Iomedae said we could resurrect the mortal Iomedae. There isn't a second as far as I know."

"You never know anything," complains Nefreti, and casts a True Resurrection. 

- the result is a teenage girl, undressed and with long loose hair, whose face breaks out into a delighted smile at the sight of them for all of two seconds before she’s mortified about the undress.

What. Well, uh, he can avert his gaze. While thinking about - what. Why is she a teenager? (Obviously the Goddess would not have warned him, he’s just confused how this is possible and gets this particular result - )

"Nefreti seems to think there's a second person to resurrect, do you know anything about that?"

"Alfirin. She - worked with me on the whole project, she's the one with the better memory for all the chemical manufacturing processes - I can pay for her resurrection, or I predict I'll be able to once we work out terms -"

She's a bit hard to understand, because she is speaking Taldane not just as it was spoken nine hundred years ago but as it was spoken nine hundred years ago in rural Menador.

"...may I have some clothes."

“Clothes are expensive here,” says Nefreti, apparently tremendously amused. 

“We were pretty sure we could pay the resurrection back inside an hour.”

Cansellarion is confused. He doesn’t think clothes are more expensive in Sothis than in any other city? “Nefreti if you have some robes handy I’ll pay for them - mundane robes. Or dresses. Or whatever.”

“I am a paladin of Aroden and usually wear men’s clothes,” says the teenage girl, “though it isn’t very important. ....Who…are you?” She had kind of expected the church’s senior priests to be more…she’s not sure, actually. More ornately dressed, less confused, more people who are the kind of people in the kind of stories you hear about the glorious imperial capital - stories she can now identify as kind of awful, but material abundance will make it better -

“That’s - complicated and I’d rather explain once after you and your friend are both alive and clothed though if you order me to tell you now I will of course obey.”

This gets him an absolutely baffled look from the teenage girl, which unfortunately he misses because he is politely not looking at her. “I have had little access to theological education but I don’t think you have to obey people just because they’re paladins,” she says. 

Nefreti tosses her some robes of many garments. “Try these on and see if they fit! For some reason when trying on clothes people always say ‘and see if they fit’.”

…Iomedae makes the robes of many garments resemble Earth cargo pants and a kevlar vest. They're magical clothes; they fit her automatically. “Can you get Alfirin, please? Uh, not asking as a paladin, just asking because I think it will probably have good results.”

“I’m already working on it! I think. Sometimes I get confused about what you understand ‘already’ to mean. She’ll be here soon.”

Alfirin materializes and wakes up and squeaks. "Clothes please? …that was fast. Subjectively."

“I don’t know how long it took, objectively” Iomedae says. “- what year is it?”

“Oh, I can never keep track."

"Ah - forty-seven twelve, Absalom reckoning."

“ - oh, so not fast at all,” Iomedae says, disappointed. “Does Tar-Baphon rule the world?”

"No - are you both dressed yet? I’d rather explain looking you in the eye rather than facing a wall -"

Nefreti can furnish Alfirin too with robes of many garments. She’s not deliberately being obnoxious, she doesn’t actually have any nonmagical outfits here.

"Okay, let me try to explain everything - well, the most important things. You - Iomedae - called Arazni, joined and took over leadership of the crusade against Tar-Baphon, defeated him, and sealed him away in Gallowspire. Then you went for the starstone and became a god. Eight hundred years later, Aroden tried to come back for the Age of Glory and died instead. Asmodeus' church took over Cheliax. It's about a hundred years since then and we're still trying to fix it. There are some other problems too but that's the big one. And then today You - that is to say, the goddess Iomedae - told me that I could resurrect Her mortal self, and Nefreti here is the high priestess of Nethys and always has the right spells prepared when something really weird happens so I asked her. I assume that's not enough of an explanation, just tell me where you want more detail."

Iomedae mostly got stuck on the part where Aroden died, actually, and is now staring at the man sort of frozen in horror. All of the other bad things he mentioned you can probably fix with guns, but that one she’s not sure you can. 

“Well,” she says in a very small voice when she manages to talk at all, “that is - not what we were expecting. But I think we can still fix it. Possibly not Aroden being dead, I don’t know how to fix that. But Asmodeus’s church taking over Cheliax sounds like you could fix it with a lot of really cheap weapons which don’t take much skill to fire and which are very deadly? And with a lot of money?”

"Devils are immune to fire," he says, half-automatically. "...but yes, that would help a lot. I'm sorry about Aroden. I don't know if there's any way to fix it but maybe we can resurrect his teenage self now and he can go for the starstone again when he's ready? Since that's apparently a thing that works."

"It really isn't," says Nefreti. 

"We didn't die in this world," says Iomedae. "Five years ago Alfirin and I were transported somehow to another world, called Earth, that has - lots of wonders of Azlant, without any magic at all. And we were enslaved - it's kind of a long story - but eventually we realized that if we memorized everything about how Earth made all its weapons and all its wonders, and then killed ourselves, then Aroden could tell His church to call us home and we'd know enough to make the whole world rich, and kill Tar-Baphon besides. So we did that. I don't know why we're - here - instead of being home. But I don't think you could get Aroden the way you got us, because he wasn't…with us? …we did try to check if there were any others but we never found any."

"And probably Iomedae - other Iomedae - would have said if we should resurrect Aroden too -" He remembers what Nefreti said, earlier. "- That wasn't your third resurrection of the day, was it?"

"Believe it or not, sometimes things happen that are unrelated to you! Less often than you'd think, actually. But in this case it just happened a powerful wizard in Absalom was going to explode himself."

...That phrasing doesn't rule out that she's talking about Aroden, so he's not sure whether that's meant to be an answer or an evasive nonanswer. Either way he should probably drop it.

"I don't even know where is Cheliax," Alfirin says, "But I'm not sure that fixing me not knowing things is the most important?"

Iomedae squeezes her hand. "Cheliax is Taldor, the part - west of the rock mountains if Taldor was America -"

"Ah. That's - I don't actually know if Taldor is the size of America or the size of, like, Texas. Is this world a ball?"

Iomedae doesn't know the answer to that! She will listen expectantly to the fancy knight.

"A ball? Yes, the world is a sphere - a wizard went to the moon a long time ago and made round maps, there's one in Vigil - that's in Lastwall, which is the country Iomedae founded after the crusade. We can go back there whenever you want."

"Is there the place to be to make the world rich and end smallpox and the plague and fight Asmodeus with guns?" 

"Yes. Especially the last one, you might want the church of Abadar for making the world rich and they're - a lot of them are here in Osirion but they have representatives everywhere."

Iomedae looks to Alfirin. Her own instincts are to go where the fancy knight says but she has picked up enough common sense off Alfirin to note that there is an argument against doing that, which is that they don't actually know anything at all about the fancy knight except that he says his god, who is Iomedae, told him to resurrect them.

That's Alfirin's concern too. She can ask. "Who are you and why should we believe what you say?"

"Oh! I'm sorry. Alexeara Cansellarion, paladin of Iomedae."

Well if he's a paladin he isn't lying. But he could be lying about being a paladin. "Are you a priest of Iomedae?" Iomedae asks Nefreti.

"Me? No, not at all, though we have some surprising things in common!"

"Such as?" Alfirin asks. She's not sure she likes surprising things.

Nefreti makes a face. "I can't explain that…nor that …not that either…that one's not even true around here…there's a sense in which we both …exist." She looks very smug to have arrived at this.

Well, Alfirin can't deny that that's a surprising thing.

Iomedae is frowning at Nefreti and at Cansellarion. "...does being resurrected always come with knowing who resurrected you and which god they serve?"

"Yes, you always know the caster and the god that granted the spell."

"What if no god granted the spell?"

"...Well, then it wouldn't be happening? Wizards can't do that - except Nefreti who does it because she's a cleric too."

"Wizards can use a Limited Wish," says Nefreti, "and druids can do it, though you mustn't tell them I said so. And in that case you don't learn the god, as there is none."

"....right," says Iomedae. "...I propose that I kill myself again and you have a Lawful Good priest of Iomedae raise me, if there's really such a thing, and then I'll know that it's at least true there's a Lawful Good goddess Iomedae. I will tell you enough to pay for the resurrection in advance, though."

"Wait, don't yet - what if you get raised on another planet first?" Alfirin does not want to be alone in this bewildering future Golarion either and also doesn't exactly want to chase Iomedae across time with repeated suicides.

Iomedae pauses to consider the conundrum. "I don't think that's how that works but if it is then it's...probably good, on the whole...Maybe we could give each world a short briefing before being off again."

Alfirin switches to English "But I thought you wanted to check that these people are who they say they are before telling them things that could help them take over the planet."

"I do want to do that," Iomedae says. "But if it's impossible, then I think that just means we shouldn't explain guns, and we should probably explain nitrogen fixation and smallpox inoculation and penicillin to everyone, and hope that things get kind of backwardsedly better like they are in America? I haven't thought about this very carefully yet, I was expecting to be raised by Aroden's high priest and trust Him because He's Aroden's high priest. I don't know, what do you think we should do?"

"Um - is there any way to test without dying? We could - I don't know. Maybe you're right and we should explain those things and then you can try dying and if they don't get you right back I'll do it too. But if there's any other way to check while alive we could do that instead."

"I bet there are other ways to check, I just don't know what they are because I don't actually know very much about magic. And since Aroden's  - dead - I can't even count on that He'd strip me of my powers if I was accidentally helping the Asmodeans who are apparently ruling Taldor from Colorado all the way to California."

"Yeah. Can Evil gods make paladins? If Goddess Iomedae makes you a paladin again, would that mean she's real and not Asmodeus being tricky?"

"I don't know," says Iomedae thoughtfully. "...I would bet that Evil gods cannot make paladins, because paladins fall if they ever do Evil things, and serving an Evil god is an Evil thing."

Iomedae only under extraordinary circumstances makes a paladin of someone who does not know Her and does not trust Her. For most people, it is a healthier journey, to satisfy oneself about a god and then enter their service, to know what they think a paladin is before you become one.

On top of that, a soul like the teenage girl Iomedae is one that you would definitely want to make a paladin of but with some caution about the surrounding situation so that the baby paladin does not hare off in a wildly unproductive direction, as baby paladins who are obsessed with personally solving all the problems in the world often do.

But 'I'd like to be a paladin so I can get credible communication about whether I'm giving extremely powerful weapons to the right people' is not, in the end, not an Iomedaen prayer.

All of Aroden's former servants are cheap to take up; it's reaching out with the part of Her that is shaped like a part of Him, and holding it up to one of the trillion cracks Aroden's death left in the world.

Iomedae startles and makes a face. "Well, She did do that so now I guess we have to decide if it's good enough," she says to Alfirin in English.

"...Well I was about to say that maybe Evil gods make Evil paladins who are allowed to do Evil things…but…not Good ones? If they're symmetric? So you should…do something nice. For science."

Iomedae hugs her tightly. For science.

Aww, that's nice. "...Still empowered?"

"I seem to be." - she turns apologetically back to the fancy knight. "Okay, sorry, we decided we believe you."

"I'm glad - I'm sure you'll want to check more, later, or before you teach us about weapons, historical Iomedae spent a long time checking if Aroden was what He said He was. Do you want to go to Vigil now or not yet?"

"How far is it?" It's absolutely not worth inventing airplanes so they can arrive in Vigil by airplane but Iomedae 1) knows how and 2) wants to.

"I don't know exactly. Two teleports, so - more than a thousand miles, less than two thousand?"

Aroden could teleport, but from Iomedae's knowledge of the world it is one of those things Aroden can do, not one of those things normal people can do. "You can teleport?"

"I can't. We have wizards who can, one of them brought me here. And I have boots that can take us back."

Iomedae nods seriously. ...they really know almost nothing, don't they. She assumed they'd be waking up in Oppara and she at least had vague ideas about Oppara and instead they are - important out of all proportion to their ability to figure out what's going on, and Teleports can be ordered for them in the blink of an eye.

She is terrified and she is not going to let that get in the way of making the world rich and fixing all its problems. "Well, if Vigil is the place to fix everything then I guess we should go there right away." And she takes Alfirin's hand.

Cansellarion pays Nefreti for her spellcasting and the magic robes and takes the girls' hands and teleports them all to Vigil.

Iomedae is not very impressed by Vigil, at a first glance. America is good at big impressive cities, and she is on the whole not even all that impressed with America. She would've been impressed if she'd come here before America; the streets are paved and clean and the buildings well-maintained and the walls in the distance are thick and tall. It is the biggest Golarion city she has ever seen, and it was supposedly founded by her.

But that was a version of her that did not know how to build skyscrapers and may only have possessed a shaky grasp on sewers. She clings to Alfirin's hand and thinks about how they were right they did the right thing it worked, but it feels kind of hollow since - she did it out of trust in Aroden, and Aroden is dead.

Alfirin is still kind of processing the thing where instead of going back to the Golarion that they left they went to a Golarion that's had another thousand years pass and also where Iomedae at least never left and instead became a god. Maybe that means they never left and they're just copies that got made and put on Earth? That doesn't really explain the thing where Iomedae's a god, though. Iomedae is very impressive as a person and has an intensity to her that very few people do but - very few isn't none, and most of them don't become gods. (It's not at all weird that the original Alfirin isn't a god, she probably got eaten by a bear or something. Most people don't become gods.)

As for how it's been a thousand years here - Well, maybe it's been a thousand years on Earth too, and they just weren't conscious for it - maybe it took them a thousand years to get here, if their souls were traveling at light-speed or slower. Or, speaking of light-speed, maybe Golarion is moving very fast? Or next to a black hole? She doesn't know if that's the direction that works because relativity isn't very useful for industrializing a planet and is complicated besides.

This city is definitely smaller than American cities, and worse, and also, she notices, much colder than the city in which they were revived. She makes her shirt into a sweater because it is admittedly very cool that it can do that, and clings to Iomedae.

Iomedae is clinging right back. The onlookers (there are quite a few, in uniforms) look a bit confused, she thinks. Probably the important paladin of Iomedae does not usually tow around teenage girls by Teleport. "You know," she says in English, "I might have expected if I'd known a thousand years would pass that there wouldn't be anything for us to do. The Industrial Revolution didn't take a thousand years on Earth."

"Depends when you're counting from, doesn't it? It took a thousand years starting from 800. I don't really know why it happened on Earth when it did, but it wasn't anything as simple as 'one thousand years after the fall of Rome'."

"I guess. And even if Aroden was trying to make it happen faster, He's - dead. So." Does the paladin of Iomedae seem to want them to do anything? Iomedae is honestly fairly intimidated by the paladin of Iomedae. He is the second real paladin she's met not counting herself and he's armored and taller than her and watching her like - like she became a god in this world, only she's not actually sure she is qualified. 

He mostly seems to want them to follow him through the city's citadel to a room with tables and chairs and maps - He kicks out the people who were using it already, apologetically. They don't question it. "Is there anything you need? Should I send for the other people you should meet now, or do you have more questions for me or other things you want to address first?"

Iomedae has seen satellite imagery and cannot be intimidated by a room full of maps. She feels a little better. She can't think of more questions but looks inquiringly at Alfirin.

"We're going to need a lot of paper and - probably someone to take dictation." Alfirin's handwriting is not great and it's going to be worse without ballpoints. "But I can't think of anything else right now. Except a round map but that's less important."

They did a practice of this two weeks ago. It isn't easy to know if it'll work the same for real - they could hardly bring in someone who'd pretend to be from Golarion and relevantly ignorant - but they know the first two days of what they want to say, at least. "I can't think of anything else either."

"So send for the people now. And paper."

Cansellarion does so. He introduces the others as they arrive. Jan Zima, Lord-Watcher - that's the title for the leader of their country, he's not a king and got his position by merit not blood - Veena Heliu, precentor-martial for magic, and… a bunch of researchers who Veena will introduce because Cansellarion doesn't know their names. And some secretaries. Veena and Jan are shooting Cansellarion questioning looks. The researchers seem mildly curious.

Iomedae was not expecting to meet the rulers of any countries. At least, certainly not out of the blue like that, with them walking into the conference room; she had expected that once they'd accomplished some things they might get presented to the Emperor, like people sometimes are in legends.

But no, here he is. It's terrifying. She's suddenly deeply curious how they define merit but it - doesn't matter. She's not going to be any good at politics. The thing she and Alfirin have spent four years studying and planning for is bringing technology here, and she'll just have to hope that Evil gods can't pick paladins and that if she's doing Evil in helping these people her god will renounce her. …possibly there are other things she could do but she doesn't know what they are.

Are these people waiting for her to speak. Oh no. Her stomach is doing somersaults.

 "Almost five years ago Alfirin and I were transported in some kind of accident to another world," she says. "It has almost eight billion humans living on it, and no magic that they know of, and rumors of things the gods did a long time ago but no empowered priests anymore. They are very very rich. Only one person in a hundred works on a farm, but they can feed all the rest, and clothes and books are so cheap that they are thrown away, and it is very rare for anyone to die of disease or of monsters, though also none of them are heroes out of legend. Any person can talk to any other person, anywhere on the world, with a nonmagical device they can buy for two weeks' wages in America. They have horseless carriages that go on great paved roads around the land, and they have flying ones that take millions of people every day to any big city in the world. The big cities are very big, they know how to build buildings a hundred stories tall. 

They have weapons that can kill a man from a mile away, without magic, at not much expense, and weapons that do not take much training to use but that can kill a bear, or shoot through armor. They have weapons that are scarier than those, that can burn whole cities and poison the ground where they stood, but I am probably not going to teach you how to build them because I think it might be better not to have them here.

So Alfirin and I figured, we would learn all of the things they know how to do on Earth, and we would commit them to memory, and practice teaching them, and then we would take our own lives and if my god saw fit He'd direct His church to bring us back so we could tell you everything and make this world rich and also beat Tar-Baphon. Only apparently it's too late for that, and my god is dead, and Asmodeus rules the Empire where I was born. I still think the things we taught ourselves will probably help, though. 

…I'm Iomedae. Sir Cansellarion said that this world has an Iomedae who became a god but I - if there'd been a book in the libraries of Earth about how to become a god I'd only have read it in my free time, probably, because this was our best guess about what needed doing. And there wasn't such a book, and I really don't know anything about being a god, and I wouldn't want anyone to imagine I did. Alfirin's actually the one with the better memory for all the tricky engineering processes."

Alfirin swallows, and gets down from the table where she was sitting. "Are there any questions about that or should we start explaining technology?" she asks, nervously. Somehow this is scarier than pulling the trigger was, which is objectively ridiculous and insane of her.

The Lastwall researchers have a ton of questions but recognize that it's not actually their job to ask or know about this part. They keep them to themselves.

(Lastwall's leadership also has questions about this part, but not ones they think the girls know the answers to.) "Just start with the technology," says Jan. He's trying to be reassuring with his tone but when speaking to disoriented teenage girls he's really not any good at it.

"Okay. Iomedae and I don't know what you already know, because we're from eight hundred years ago, so if I'm explaining something that's not new you should tell me and I'll skip to the next thing. The first thing is that you need lots and lots of steel, for making the machines for making everything else. That means lots of iron and coal mines and - I don't know the Taldane word. Are there wizards here who can cast the spell to make us know modern Taldane?"

Heliu can call someone in who prepared share language.

"Limestone," Alfirin says, once she has the vocabulary. "Iron and coal and limestone. The limestone is - it removes the bad parts of rock coal, so that you can use rock coal and not charcoal, because it's easier to get lots of rock coal. I'm going to explain how to make a Watt engine, which is a type of machine that can operate a pump by burning coal, because a pump to get water out and air in is important for making deeper mines and you can start building them before you have a whole steel manufacturing chain set up…"

They can keep going in this vein for a very long time. Iomedae expected the nervousness to get better by a few hours in, but it actually doesn't; it's just unbearably stressful the whole way through. It doesn't help that she now has a language in her head that is the Taldane of 900 years in the future, crisper and cleaner and with wildly more vocabulary than she ever had with the Taldane she spoke growing up. It feels like it's crowding it out, like she can't remember how to speak her own Taldane anymore. Which is fine since no one speaks it anymore except her, except that itself hurts, though it seems like it really ought to be a very small hurt alongside everyone she knew being dead and Aroden being gone and her homeland being ruled by Hell. 

For the most part it's not worth trying to cheat with magic at precision manufacture, which you're going to need to master the slow way, but there are various things that would be really nice to have a little earlier than you'd otherwise get them, such as radio, so they have those presented a little early in the logical progression because they're probably not that hard for a determined tinkering wizard to iron out. 

After …some number of hours…Iomedae doesn't think it's a small number of hours…Alfirin looks like she's flagging a little bit, and Iomedae herself feels like she is made of paper. "Maybe we could take a break?" she says hopefully. Is it rude to suggest this in front of the President/Emperor of an entire country? Probably.

The researchers, who are trying to learn and take notes and not just lecture, would also kind of like a break.

"Of course," says Zima, "How long do you need - oh, of course, you were just raised, you don't have rings. Let's adjourn for dinner and resume tomorrow morning." He directs an aide to find two rings of sustenance if they're going spare or even if they aren't, and another to reserve a couple of guest suites and then make sure some food is brought to them - real food, for people who eat.

"We'll share a suite," says Iomedae. "- also we do not eat meat if you torture the animals a lot. Cows are fine because they are harder to torture and one person cannot eat all that much of a cow."

One suite, then. "We do not torture animals. Why would anybody do - Why would anybody outside Nidal do that? Does Earth have a Nidal?"

"They learned you can make meat very inexpensive if you breed the animals to not die if raised as cripples in very small cages," says Iomedae. "You should probably consult with your gods before you do that. It does make meat very cheap but I am worried it is Evil."

"It seems possibly Evil," Jan agrees. "We'll have someone ask Erastil if it ever seems like a possibility, He'd answer and asking Him questions is usually not a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere."

Iomedae would in principle be kind of curious about that claim which seems to implicitly contain some other ones but she is too tired to be curious. She wants food, and a bed, and a hug. In her imagination of how this would happen, Aroden sent a vision to her father as he was important enough he could pay for an important priest to confirm the vision was real, and he was there when they woke up. Also she was dressed. Also everyone was very proud of them and praised their cleverness. Also Aroden wasn't dead. 

"Thank you," she says to the President/Emperor, and after that hopefully she can just go where she is told.

They are told a place to go, and brought food which contains meat, though in smaller proportions than in the meat-containing foods they are used to, and then left alone.

Alfirin hugs Iomedae as soon as the door closes. "It makes sense that they brought the President and their Secretary of Magic to listen but it was really scary trying to - teach a bunch of adults, including a president and a cabinet member."

Iomedae hugs her back, very fiercely. She usually remembers that she is very strong but she seems to be forgetting right this second. "It was so so scary. I hadn't - thought about that part - I guess it felt like everything scary was leading up to that, and at the point where the gods have said we knew enough we'd already won - you did a very good job -"

Being hugged like this is in fact very comforting so Alfirin puts up with it for a bit before she interrupts Iomedae with "Oxygen!"

"Thanks. I wish - I don't know what I wish. That we weren't too late to find my brothers and sisters I guess. That Aroden weren't dead. I'm so sorry He's dead." She hugs Iomedae tighter.

"- I'm really upset that He's dead," Iomedae admits after a bit. "I know that it will still be good and help a lot of people, but - He would've been so proud of us, and He's the person who explained - that you ought to do it, if you could - 

- and this is very silly but I think His church would've been more pleased with us. These people don't really seem very pleased, just - is that what I'm like as a person -"

"They really don't - it's not what you're like at all, you told me I did a very good job when I really wasn't sure - I think you did a good job too - I think you're great and your, um, original copy? made a country that - everyone important wears army uniforms, it's like some kind of military dictatorship - so I'm not sure I like Her very much at all." Alfirin's probably being faintly ridiculous in how sure she is that she's got the better of the two Iomedaes, when the other one went on to become a god, but the other one never brought all of America's science knowledge to Golarion, so there.

"That's exactly it, I couldn't put my finger on it but you're right. It's a military dictatorship. And not one that - I mean, not one that opened with ‘we know this looks really bad but actually it's the only way to stop Asmodeus who is ruling half the Empire'. What do you suppose they mean that they choose their President on merit."

"They said 'on merit, not by blood' and sounded a little smug about it so - I don't know. The president names a successor? Their top generals vote for one of their number to be president? Their priests do? Some so-called 'impartial panel of experts'? Maybe the god Iomedae picks. I bet military dictatorships don't look as bad if everyone else is still doing monarchy - real monarchy, not queen-of-england monarchy."

"I guess maybe if no one has ever tried democracy you do some kind of ‘we choose a successor through deliberation' thing and if it doesn't break down into civil wars as often as Taldor you feel very pleased with yourself. That doesn't explain the all being very grim and cold but I do feel kind of silly being mad that people weren't being more flattering - if we'd been Raised in Oppara I expect there'd have been plenty of praise but who knows how much of it real-"

"...A military dictatorship doesn't really seem like the kind of place that'd let you leave, if you decided you wanted to, or let you not teach them how to make nuclear bombs, if you didn't think they should have nuclear bombs and they thought they should."

"It really doesn't - we could ask to leave, and see if they let us. I think we shouldn't mention nuclear bombs any more, even here." They could probably kill themselves again, right now, but not with any expectation that there'd be anyone better than Lastwall interested in raising them again.

Iomedae nods. "I think the god Iomedae would have made sure we made it to people who were real enemies of Asmodeus. But I don't know enough about the god Iomedae to guess if She would have made sure we made it to people who would treat us fairly, or who it would be a good idea for us to trust… I guess now that I think about it I didn't know those things about Aroden either - I don't think paladins can betray people even in a complicated way, it feels like the kind of thing you'd fall for if you took advice from some time travellers meant for beating the Nazis and then used it to fight communism in Vietnam or something, but Sir Cansellarion was the only paladin in that room -"

"He's the only one who said he was a paladin - He might not have been the only one, I bet most of them were wizards, but the President looked like he might be a very grumpy paladin. I assume grumpiness is allowed."

"None of them were Evil at least…unless there's a way to hide it. I have the intuition that paladins ought to fall for complicatedly betraying people who help them and no intuition that they ought to fall for being incredibly grumpy."

"You'd think he'd be more cheerful but maybe as President he doesn't know very much about iron furnaces and lathes and doesn't understand why it's all so important - that might be part of it, I tried to explain and you tried to explain but maybe it doesn't work, saying it with words, and we'd have to show them America before they understand why it's such a big deal and are impressed with us."

"Or even if some of the wizards understood, maybe they felt like they had to match the mood of the President, and if he wasn't jumping for joy then nor would they, so as long as he doesn't see anything to be cheerful about it'll feel like none of them understand. You could do an illusion, in the morning, and show them Costco and satellite imagery and the space shuttle and Times Square -"

"I can't. I don't have the spellbook anymore, and I never figured out how to hang a spell without it - Maybe one of their wizards will share. Also illusions aren't very good - maybe it's just that I'm comparing them in my head to photographs and video. Maybe an illusion of those will do it."

"You'd really think that even if one ran a military dictatorship and wasn't Arodenite at all and didn't care about curing the plague and tuberculosis and smallpox or making food cheap or letting all people talk to each other, one would get cheerful about guns. I guess we'll see if that's what happens with the President."

"It's good stuff. I'm just not sure how much of it we'll be able to do secretly, and it's of a lot less use if our enemies can do it too."

"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. 

In the morning they go back to the conference room to continue their lecture on building rich countries through industry and medicine.

After the break for lunch, Jan asks when they'll be able to explain the weapons they mentioned, and if there's anything they can do to help Iomedae determine whether Lastwall is trustworthy with them.

(Alfirin is a little annoyed about how all the questions go to Iomedae, even though it makes perfect sense given these people's religion.)

"We'll decide together," says Iomedae, who is also picking up on that. "I think - it would be helpful if you described what you would do if you had the weapons to conquer your world." This seems like a slightly wiser approach than saying 'reassure me you won't just impose your military dictatorship everywhere', because if they will do that they probably think it's right and glorious of them to do it and there's a chance they will just say as much.

"To conquer the world? We'd - skipping over Cheliax, for the moment, because the diplomatic situation makes that a little complicated - once we'd dealt with that - maybe with sufficiently obvious overwhelming force we could get a real peace treaty with Belkzen - our neighbor to the northwest, barbarians, conduct a lot of raids into our territory. And more permanently deal with Tar-Baphon if the weapons could be used for that. And then - make defensive alliances with all of Cyprian's neighbors so he stops conquering them? Ask the Goddess if we can and should do something about Nidal, or Geb? I suspect the weapons in question wouldn't be enough for either of those."

Iomedae isn't in fact qualified to do politics, and she knows it. She is a teenager and the President is probably very good at diplomacy and knows everything about a hundred different topics she is stunningly ignorant of. It sounds like a good answer. Is that because it's really easy to guess what she wants to hear? It's probably easiest to guess what she wants to hear if the goddess Iomedae is a lot like her. Or was a lot like her as an idealistic teenager, and then turned into the kind of person who founds a military dictatorship. 

It doesn't really feel like a solvable problem and of course that's not any excuse at all not to solve it. 

"Does your Goddess not want to rule the whole world?" she asks neutrally. It is a reasonable thing for gods to want, she thinks. 

…Did Iomedae at sixteen want to rule the whole world? Or - not at sixteen - at whenever this Iomedae left Golarion - and maybe hasn't yet encountered whatever convinced her otherwise? "No, She doesn't. She wants to - make a world that's free from great Evils like Tar-Baphon and Asmodeus, but not to rule it." He says as neutrally as he can. It probably won't help the situation if she thinks he's judging her for her ambitions.

"Does she rule this place? Is she doing a good job of it?"

"Not directly? We consult with Her on anything of sufficient importance, because She sees many things that we do not and is much smarter than us - but ultimately we rule ourselves."

Iomedae looks questioningly over at Alfirin.

"Can the paladin say all of that?"

"Of course. Alex, could you explain to these young women what we'd do with enough weapons to conquer the world?"

Alex explains much the same as Jan did, except that instead of skipping over Cheliax he says Jan would give him the weapons to free it, and he doesn't suggest doing anything about Geb.

"Can we leave and go to another country if we want, right now?"

Cansellarion blinks. "Um. You're not prisoners or anything - I think you should not go to Cheliax and we'd probably ask the Goddess whether we should stop you if you were determined to go there, but if you wanted to go to Andoran or Absalom or something -"

"What about Belkzen?"

"That's…also probably not very safe for you."

"Cyprian, wherever he is?"

Cansellarion looks unhappy. "We would not stop you from going to Galt."

Iomedae looks consideringly at her map, trying to track which countries are 'not safe' or 'not advised' and which are allowed. "Nirm -" wow her Taldane reading is four years out of date "-athas?"

"There's a bit of a war going on there and I'd advise you to be cautious before handing out weapons there but we'd let you go. It might not be the best place to go if you're - trying to get away from us, though. I live there."

"...can you take us now to Absalom, to the Starstone rock and the temple there which used to be to Aroden?" Iomedae is only like ninety percent sure this actually exists instead of being a legend and will be very embarrassed if she's wrong.

"Right now?"

"...yes?" Obviously this is being very rude to very important people but anything that can be faked at all can be faked more easily on more notice. (And if the very important people get annoyed and throw them in the dungeons, that'd be - good to know. If inconvenient. Considering.)

"Veena, can I borrow Mirdeliendë again? That's two steps for the boots, they only have three a day -"

"Go ahead."

"We'll leave in twenty minutes, if that's acceptable."

Iomedae nods. " - I'm sorry. About the inconvenience. It's just that Asmodeus could also think of having a priest of Nethys resurrect us." Probably if He did that He'd have just pretended to be Aroden's priesthood in Oppara which had to partner with Nethys's for the resurrection due to some magical reason Iomedae and Alfirin didn't know enough to object to, instead of pretending Iomedae is a god and that Asmodeus rules the Empire, but. 

"I'm glad you're checking."

If he's really a paladin then she's already sure of her answer but. Absalom. 

About twenty minutes later, the wizard has been found and they are all teleported to Absalom. It's…not as big as New York. More kinds of person, though.

It smells horrible. There is a slave market. Iomedae hates it instantly.

She will forge bravely onwards and strike up conversations with random shop owners about the state of the world these days. She doesn't actually initially ask them very many questions. She's kind of hoping that someone will go ahead and tell her what to think without her asking ...

...now that she thinks that through, it's stupid. She asks questions. Where they're from, why they're here, what sells best, what one should look for in a husband, which gods favor Absalom, which gods have ascended here, what one should do if one's father is a mean drunk, what one should do if one is with child and unmarried, which afterlife they want, why.

This man was born in Absalom, and has always lived here; This one emigrated from Taldor and is considering moving back; These three are refugees from Galt. This catfolk came from Amurristan with her parents after the war, but she was only this big at the time and doesn't remember anywhere else.

These people all live here, these ones are sailors whose ship is in, this one's hoping to study at the Arcanamirium.

Silks, wine, cod, mount spells, knee-high boots with too many buckles.

All the ascended gods favor Absalom, of course. Also Abadar. Also Sarenrae, and Pharasma, and Shelyn, and... some people will just go on to list every god that they don't find personally distasteful and then some. The gods that ascended here are Aroden and Norgorber and Cayden Cailean and Iomedae.

If one's father is a mean drunk, one should get away from the house when he's in his cups/burn all the liquor/no definitely do not do that/hit him back harder.

If one is with child and unmarried one should ask her grandmother for help instead of random strangers/give the child to a temple/get married quickly, obviously/oh you poor thing, here, I can set you up with a remedy/raise the child, of course/go to a priestess of Callistria/go become a priestess of Callistria.

People want to go to Nirvana (To finally get a chance to rest and not work for a living) and Heaven (My father is in Heaven, and his father, and his father; because I don't want to turn into a fox or something; It's just the best one, isn't it?) or Axis (What can I say, I like the city life) and Elysium (I have endured the city life for forty years, when I'm dead I want something different) and "wherever my wife went".

She also reads. Slowly, haltingly, not very well; her Taldane literacy hasn't been exercised in five years of her time and the language has gone off and changed. 

The history books seem to mostly agree with Lastwall on major points such as Iomedae: a Lawful Good god and Aroden: dead and Cheliax: ruled by Hell. Iomedae cannot find any good complaints about her god-self except that her god-self abandoned the revolution in Galt. She asks Cansellarion about that. 

"The Goddess had many priorities in this world, and only limited ability to intervene. The revolution in Galt also had - after the initial stages - a lot of particularly vicious infighting I think it made it a place where She was very constrained in doing right by everyone who asked for Her help, more so than usual."

Alfirin, for her part, asks different people different questions. And then she and Iomedae can compare at the end. Alfirin tries in Hallit, and in Taldane, and then a bit in Spanish to see if it's a trick where they're using magic for the languages - If it is they're clever enough because the shopkeeper can't understand Spanish at all. Some of them do speak Hallit though. She doesn't know if they speak Hallit anywhere in Cheliax so it doesn't mean very much.

Iomedae would like to buy a scroll of Sending, which lets people speak even to those in Heaven, and use it to ask her father if one ought to help the church of Iomedae conquer the world. Hypothetically.

…Lastwall should probably be paying them. Cansellarion can buy her the scroll and Lastwall will pay him back and take it out of whatever the Abadarans conclude they should be paying Iomedae and Alfirin.  Which… now that he thinks about it might be a lot.

If Lastwall is paying them a lot, Alfirin would kind of like to buy a spellbook, if that's a thing you can buy?

Can Abadarans be paid to swear that claims like "Lastwall is a Lawful Good state that has not started a lot of wars" and "the high priest of Nethys doesn't generally do resurrections for infernal Cheliax" and "it sure appears even to advanced magical inspection that Cansellarion is a paladin" and "paladins are not allowed to lie" are true?

Yes, they can be paid to do that and Alfirin can buy a spellbook if she can find one, he doesn't know where to find one.

…and that they are actual bona fide priests of Abadar. She wants them to swear to that too.

Cansellarion pays the Abadarans. The priest casts his special Abadaran truth spell on himself and swears to all that.

Iomedae can't actually think of anything else. She's pretty sure if she had realized this was a problem she was going to have she'd have been able to. But. She and Alfirin will compare notes, in English. "- I think at the point where they could fake all of this they would have easier ways to get us to tell them things."

"That's probably true. I've heard stories about magic that just makes people do whatever the wizard wants, and I bet it's not harder than teleporting."

"- so, are you ready to teach them how to make guns? It's all right if you're not. We didn't promise we would even if all this was convincing."

"I think I'm not ready but mostly because - if we teach them today and then realize tomorrow why that was a mistake it's hard to fix. And that's just going to keep being true every day - maybe we should still wait a day or two, though, because one day really isn't that much time and we could have missed something obvious to check -"

"And if we tell them we're not ready and they take it badly that's - also good to know. All right. Not yet." Probably tomorrow but they won't say it.  

"While we're in Absalom I want to try to find a spellbook for sale though. I know it's not - the most useful thing I could be doing, it's not - special - anymore, but I want it anyways. And they say they're paying us."

"I think it's a good thing if you can do your own magic. It makes you harder to trick. And - you like it and you're good at it. Of course you should get a spellbook. If they sell them."

They find one, eventually, from a scrollmaker. Alfirin requests it and an empty spellbook and some inks. (She tested the ink in her old spellbook, back on earth; it had enough unexpected metals and compounds in it that she's pretty sure spellbooks need a special ink and don't just use whatever's available.)

Cansellarion pays. "So you want to be a wizard?" he asks.

Alfirin resists the impulse - it's quite a strong one, really - to tell him that she already is one and see if paladins get the same look on their face that high school chemistry teachers do. He's prooobably not secretly an evil paladin but if he is it would be better if he didn't know. "Yes," she not-technically-lies instead, "When I'm older, but I should probably start learning soon, right? Maybe when I'm done with the other things we're doing and I have time for it I'll try to learn to cast some of the spells in this book."

"I think it's very hard to teach yourself. Maybe we can find a proper wizard for you to apprentice to, when you have the time."

"We're not ready to teach you the weapons yet," Iomedae tells the President. She is trying to conceal that she's terrified a little bit, because it's embarrassing, but she's not trying as hard as possible because firstly at some point that feels like Lying and secondly because this is in fact a sort of test and it is relevant if the President wants them to be afraid. "We do have more things to teach for the rest of today and the next several days."

A few days is unlikely to matter, for the strategic picture, as long as they can keep this secret - and they probably won't start the big obvious things like trying to build blast furnaces in the next few days anyways. "Okay," says Jan, "Let's get started on whatever's next for today then."

Well, that's not more irritation than the President seems to feel at everything. She nods. They get back to work. 

Regroup, that night, to see if either of them thought of anything else. "...I was planning to give this to Taldor, to beat Tar-Baphon with, and we knew what they'd do after that would probably be horrible and horribly stupid."

"I don't think Lastwall will do worse than Taldor, probably. I don't know if military dictatorships fight more stupid wars than monarchies."

"I don't know either. I think we probably shouldn't do it if we are expecting zero stupid wars but - rich modern worlds do have fewer wars, on the whole. And Lastwall's small, I don't think they could conquer the continent and hold it just as a matter of the industrial base they'd be starting from - I'm rationalizing that it won't be so bad because I want to do it, aren't I."

"Yes, you are. It's okay, though, I think it's the right call, I haven't thought of anything else to check."

"Right. Well, in the morning, then, unless some god warns us otherwise or we think of something before then. What's in your spellbook?"

"All the cantrips the old one had, and a couple more. Mage armor, disguise, comprehend languages, charm person, some combat spells, and… detect doors."

"...under what circumstances would anyone possibly need a door-detecting spell."

"I cannot imagine any - maybe it also does secret passages, like in movies, where the hero touches the right book on a bookshelf and it swings open - maybe people on Golarion build a lot of those for real."

Iomedae feels uneasy whenever she notices how successfully America acculturated her. This is her world and she would like not to feel like a foreign explorer doing anthropology in it. Well, not exactly. Maybe it wouldn't feel like this if they'd succeeded at really going home.

"...I would have a lot of fun exploring this place for secret passages and also they absolutely have guards at our door."

"Yeah. At least - I don't know how much to change what I expect based on today, but I think they'd probably let us leave if we wanted. If there was anywhere better we wanted to go." She hugs Iomedae, a little clingily. "Did you get a good look at any of the maps?"

"I'm out of practice at reading Taldane," Iomedae confesses. "Oppara's still there, approximately where I'd have expected it to be, and it's an option but - probably a worse option than this place. …I couldn't find Sarkoris on the map at all, not that we'd want to go there anyway."

She looked, though. That's sweet. "It's not there. I think. I didn't exactly know a ton of geography before I left, but - the countries that I think should have been close by are there, but then, if you look north of Ustalav and west of Mendev there's just - I think something horrible happened -"

"I'm so sorry. I - wish we could've come back at the right time."

"Would've been better, probably. Aroden, my family, your family."

Iomedae clings. "I'm so glad we're together." She doesn't say 'I couldn't do it without you'. She'd do it, just worse. But it'd be so much worse.

"Me too. I couldn't do any of this on my own - I'd explain things worse and it would be so hard to check, who is evil, and - they might not have known to raise me in the first place. And they wouldn't respect me because I'm not a god."

Iomedae sniffs disdainfully. "Their loss. It's kind of stupid anyway - I'm not a god -"

"Yeah but your original copy became a god and my original copy got eaten by a bear or something so -"

"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 -"

"Well, yes, it's what I'd have done too if I had the chance, but - having seen the way women are treated in America it seems sad to imagine that women can either - not raise a family or not do anything else. Better than not having the choice, but still sad."

"- I have no idea how to make birth control. I did look into it when we were doing medications but it looked complicated and I gave up. You could probably do, like, surgical interventions made easier by priest healing - maybe once we've gotten through the first week we can ask questions about what Lastwall is like and get a sense of things like this -"

"Copper IUDs are mostly just copper - of course you need to have competent doctors to install them but maybe healing magic can help and even if it can't that's going to be easier than setting up a whole pharmaceutical industry. It's a shame biology is so complicated."

Iomedae could not keep up with all of the biology. She could really only keep up at things that she happened to find utterly delightful or that didn't require very much cleverness. All the biology she knows she already told Lastwall, on day 1: inoculation, and how to identify the bread mold that treats infections and consumption and the plague. (Hopefully even here there is a bread mold for that.) "It's a shame everything is so complicated. …I didn't want to say it in front of the President because I didn't want to sound like a naive child, but I think we're going to win. I think they're underestimating America, and underestimating how the thing - has its own momentum, once it's going."

"Of course they're underestimating America. They've never seen it, so they hear me explain blast furnaces and they think 'Wow, we can make swords and armor much more cheaply' and not 'We can build cars and trucks, we can make buildings out of steel, we can make all our tools out of good steel and use those to make more better tools faster, we can make steel ships and steel boxes and fill them with corn and feed a million people on the other side of the world.' I don't think they'll really understand until it gets going and they can see it for themselves. It's kind of unbelievable."

"Their god ought to be able to see. I don't know what the point is of gods at all, if they can't see things like that."

"Yeah. She told them to resurrect us, I bet She saw it. Don't know why She didn't show them, but she must not have, you could just see it on some of the researchers' faces when I got to lathes, like they were expecting me to tell them how to make table legs."

"The gods work in mysterious ways," says Iomedae, with immense dissatisfaction. "- I was all right with it, with Aroden, because I trusted Him. I suppose it's silly to trust the god I happened to be raised faithful to more than a god who is me."

"That's an Americanism they made up to explain away the fact that Jesus hadn't done anything for a couple hundred years. I think it makes sense to trust Aroden more than the god version of you, you don't know anything about who you grew up to be besides that she started a military dictatorship and became a god, presumably by touching a magic rock that also ascended a mafia don and a drunk."

Iomedae bursts into giggles. It's not that it's funny, exactly, but it's walking some kind of tightrope between hilarity and tragedy and the giggly side is the better one to tip over into. 

Alfirin hugs her. "No starting military dictatorships, and no becoming a god without talking to me first, okay?"

"Wouldn't dream of it, except insofar as I don't control my dreams."

"Not that I don't love your careful pedantry, but I think you're probably allowed to just say 'wouldn't dream of it'."

Iomedae says in Commune to do it, and approves the devoting-the-most-resources of the plans they propose to her, but commands that they adopt the more cautious of their proposed schedules, delaying substantially to buy more secrecy. Partner with Kraggodan as much as possible for the coal mining; do as much work as possible in Vigil, which is hard to infiltrate, and much of the work underground in the fortress itself. 

Should they sell much of this information to the Church of Abadar? Yes. Confidentially and with a negotiated delay on the Church of Abadar's open use of it? Yes. 

Do they need to fear external threats to the girls' safety and to continued custody of them? Unclear.

There is not much for anyone to notice - even an archmage who is paying Cansellarion and Lastwall particularly careful attention - for three months. They do partner with Kraggodan on the coal mining, and they use Teleports to move the fuel for their first blast furnaces, and they don't send anyone out of the fortress with the first guns.

(There are ripples, if you're looking closely. Lastwall's usual suppliers in Absalom have been procuring more boots of teleportation for them, but no new regular teleport routes materialize. The air above Vigil is always smokier in the winter, with the additional need for heating, but this year it's worse than usual, darker and sootier. Some call it an ill omen.)

The Church of Abadar pays them eyepopping sums of money, in secret. They offer most of these eyepopping sums of money to their teenage girls, in secret.

Iomedae is not richer than Bill Gates and intends to be impressed by nothing less. She does smile broadly at them, though, so as to encourage honorable behavior like paying your employees. "Thank you. Is it legal here to pay your government to make policy changes or is that bribery?"

"It's not illegal - it's illegal to pay the people in the government to make policy changes. But paying into the treasury - that's just a treaty, I guess." Not the sort of treaty that comes up very often, and when it does usually not with teenage girls, but these are some unusual teenage girls.

"All right. If you're importantly constrained on money I can try to think about things I want right now but I'll probably want more intelligent things next year so I'd prefer that." Iomedae has now read several history books but still feels like she barely has half a grasp on this new world, and also she has no idea how much diplomatic credit she has with these people. She does have the sense that proposing they become a democracy would be spending rather A LOT of it.

Alfirin wishes they'd paid more attention to history. She's pretty sure there were democracies before industrialization, America was already independent when the steam engine was invented - but she doesn't really know at all how you actually make one. She floats to Iomedae at one point that they could, actually, try to relocate to Andoran which is kind of a democracy and not doing the revolutionary France thing Galt is. She doesn't know much about revolutionary France except that a lot of people got their heads cut off and she's rather attached to hers.

Iomedae considers Andoran the likeliest place they should leave to, if they decide to leave Lastwall, but Cheliax could invade it immediately if they felt threatened by something it was doing and it's in fact probably unwise to be anywhere Cheliax could invade immediately if they felt threatened. She negotiates to own a bunch of the tools they're making; if they have to go to Andoran they won't be starting over entirely. (If Lastwall is duplicitous enough that the agreements of ownership are fake, then likely so are the assurances that they can leave if they choose.)

If Lastwall does not want to reclaim her money from her by agreeing to negotiations on how to run their country, then she'll …what do you even do with money in Golarion. Ask the Abadarans to hold onto it, probably. 

"You could buy spells."

"We could both buy magic items - probably the ones Lastwall has loaned us are the ones most useful for what we're doing, but maybe there's more we'd want. I guess it won't hurt to buy spells, maybe even second-circle ones even though I can't cast them yet. I really do think the thing I'm relatively best at here is being an engineer, though, not a wizard. I haven't been using any of my spells most days except prestidigitation."

"Yes. There's a part of me that wants to be an adventurer and go fight monsters and get stronger and eventually - do half the things that the Goddess did in her holy books - but I'd probably die, and it's not actually where I'm needed, and all the moreso for you. …but if we're being tricked in some way, it's harder to trick a powerful wizard. And harder to kidnap one."

"Ooooh yes, it'll definitely deter kidnappers if they hear I can detect doors. After all, whatever cell they put me in, I'll always be able to find the way out as long as it's not locked... You're right, and I should work on it, it's just - I don't see it mattering, very much, in the next couple of years. Maybe I'll get second circle, maybe even third, but not fifth. And I'll probably need a teacher." Alfirin doesn't get along well with teachers when she's smarter and more knowledgeable than them, (or thinks she is) and always seems to feel ashamed or inadequate when she has to turn to someone who she acknowledges knows more than her.

"Not in the next couple of years, maybe. But - Golarion's not America. I worry it's not a place where you can get things done, if you can't resist spells cast on you and can't defend yourself in an ambush. …maybe instead of fretting about this, I should build you a really excellent gun." And she'll pull Alfirin in for a tight hug and then get back to doing that.

In the spring more ripples are detectable. They've hired more than a thousand people. They inoculate new conscripts against smallpox. The hospital for consumptives on the coast of Lake Encarthan - run by retired paladins - is rumored to have been blessed by the Goddess and to be curing them rather than just delaying the inevitable. On the other hand the smog over Vigil does not clear.

"Powerful priests of the gods can control the weather, right? Possibly you should do that. Air pollution's bad for people. …and it might give us away."

Can control weather fix smoke? They consult some priests and druids; The druids say that rain will fix smoke, by putting out fires and by washing it out of the air and into the ground where it will revitalize the earth. They try it; Vigil is still smokey, though less so, and the frequent rains aren't reassuring to the residents who were worried about ill omens. Alfirin warns that the flue gasses from industrial processes probably aren't great for the groundwater either, and the last few wells in Vigil are bricked up and replaced by a handful more priests with create water duties.

They have working radios. It'd be really nice to have working radios at the Worldwound. Iomedae proposes that they set up some very good transmitters and then have things Cheliax will be too scared to let their population hear playing on all the radios, thereby enabling radio adoption in all free countries and letting all the unfree ones shoot themselves in the foot. ….Earth metaphor.

Sure. Once they've figured out radios at all, it's not that hard to scale up production - let the Abadarans sell the technique - and then build some broadcast towers for Iomedae's plan.

…Iomedae was kind of expecting some pushback on this suggestion because Lastwall is not America and doesn't seem to want to be. Cool. They should do some audience message testing but she's pretty sure that what the people want is adventure stories, told in installments by an announcer who does really good voices and sound effects, and group prayer, and news, and sports broadcasts, and an advice column, and after dark an advice column that touches on marital matters. …the obvious thing to start with for Radio Free Avistan is the stories of the Shining Crusade, isn't it, it exists pre-dramatized in workable installments. 

Possibly they should sell radios everywhere while initially only transmitting the sports broadcasts, and then introduce all the rest and force Cheliax to spend its time and state capacity cracking down on a technology that's easy to hide and easy to smuggle and even possible to build at home, which they're desperate to censor because it's possible to use to hear the story of Chelish heroes fighting in the Shining Crusade, or else to let it slide and let them talk directly into every Chelish home. They should maybe get some Chelish expats for market research, if they're going to try this, because Iomedae might be misguessing what people in Cheliax will want to hear, but those are the broad strokes. 

…also they'll have to pick a dialect that's mostly mutually comprehensible and they'll probably lastingly effect some linguistic unification of Avistan thereby and if this inveighs in a different political direction than 'appeal to people in Cheliax' then they can do localization for Cheliax with good placement of towers, effectively make the Chelish-accessible edition of Radio Free Avistan a bit different than the other ones.  

…Iomedae turns out to have a lot of opinions about how to run programming for a radio station. She is open to learning they're stupid opinions, it's just, a radio station is such a multiplier on your ability to talk to people and people are almost always Good deep down once you talk to them.

Nobody else knows anything about radio stations and they're not going to tell her her opinions on it are stupid. They're a bit confused about… sports…on the radio?

The announcer describes what's happening at the sports event. You wouldn't think this would be appealing to people but it turns out it absolutely is. Iomedae's not sure how well this will translate to popular sports on Golarion because she's not sure what those are but you could certainly do live commentary on chariot racing, if that's still a thing, or blow-by-blows on show fights though she has mixed feelings about encouraging a popular interest in those. Iomedae does not herself particularly understand the appeal of sports but she's pretty sure they're important.

…sports…events?

So, in America, sixty to a hundred thousand people will gather in a stadium to watch two sports teams battle it out at American sports, which aren't very good because America doesn't have magic and no one is a legendary hero or can fly. They paint their faces and barely-dressed women do coordinated dances around the field. There will be fireworks. Fighter jets fly overhead. It's a big thing.

...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. 

"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."

(What.)

"Awwwwww," says Iomedae. "I suppose I can suffer my steampunk power armor as long as it has detailing of gears for no apparent reason."

"Some of these gears are functional." Alfirin says, with feigned indignance.

"And the rest are to throw our enemies off the scent?" 

"Like a monarch butterfly."

They are both still giggling when they walk back on over to review the rifle-making processes. 

"Good evening, Avistan. This is Freedom, reporting live from an undisclosed location probably somewhere inside Creation. If you tune over to 95.5, the Church of Abadar will certify that I have sworn to them this morning that to my knowledge no lie has ever been spoken on Freedom Radio. That was an easy thing to swear, as this is our first broadcast, but they're going to tell you every day when they last heard it from us. Freedom Radio is here to tell you the truth, whoever gets mad about it. That's why we're reporting live from an undisclosed location. 

Now, some of our listeners are wizards in fancy towers, pulling out their crystal balls right now to try to learn who I am - good luck with that, wizards! But most of our listeners are ordinary folks, who saved up to buy or borrow a radio, or who went over to a neighbor who had one even though it's getting dark, because you wanted to hear how much grain's selling for near you, or whether there's storms coming. Maybe you know that on 97.7 there's dancing music, and maybe you know that on 97.9 there's sports, but you're not here for puzzles for wizards. What can the truth do for you?

Well, Freedom Radio's running because we think the truth can do very nearly everything. I can tell you what I'd do if my child was sick, and maybe it'll save yours. I can tell you if there's a war brewing, so you can hide what's precious to you when there are soldiers marching towards it. There are some things terribly wrong, in our world, and a world united can beat them into the dust, and a world that doesn't know what's true and what's a lie doesn't stand a chance. And I can tell you about the world to come, and line up some people who've been there who can tell you what you'll answer for when you face the Judge. There's a lot of things in this world that work because people are ignorant. And Freedom Radio is going to make sure that no one will ever be able to take advantage of your ignorance again. 

So, welcome. It's an honor to have you listening. In time, we'll introduce a way for you to call in and talk back. Now, the news."

It's a one hour news segment, which is starting with extremely basic facts about Golarion like which continents it has and which countries are on them, hopefully not presented in an excessively condescending fashion. It has updates on the most recent battle between Cyprian's forces and whichever River Kingdom he's at war with today. It has news of a shipwreck in a storm on Lake Encarthan and another of a shipwreck in a storm near Goka. It has an informational segment about what to give your children to drink if they're diarrheal and an explanation of what causes excess bleeding in childbirth and what to do about it if there's no priest nearby. And it includes interviews with ten farmers in ten different places about what most often eats their animals and what they've tried to drive it off. 

Iomedae waits smugly to see if Cheliax is now going to try to ban the entire concept of radio or not. 

Yes, they are.

Abrogail is alarmed. Some of her idiot advisors are parsing this as a dumb idealistic Andoran scheme, which like the attacks on slave ships is going to alienate them from their neighbors as much as it inconveniences their enemies. Three more such schemes and they'll be able to conquer Andoran back; they're nothing to be afraid of.

But the kind of person who invents a nonmagical way of receiving unblockable messages sent from some secret location halfway across the continent is clever, and ambitious, and probably has a plan beyond 'aggravate everyone'. It would be stupid to wait to see what the plan is, before responding to it.

She orders a lot of scries. Not during the broadcast, when she's sure the girl is ensconced in a Mage's Private Sanctum, but over the upcoming days and weeks. She can't be in a Mage's Private Sanctum all the time - or if she is, that narrows down her location to a few possibilities. Sothis, which would fit with the Church of Abadar's evident involvement, but she can't really see the kind of woman who runs Freedom Radio being willing to live and work in Sothis. Morgethai's private demiplane, in which case the problem reduces to the known problem that Cheliax needs to soul-trap Felandriel Morgethai, and might be sufficient justification to bend Hell's resources towards at last getting it done. Razmiran but that's ruled out because Razmir is too stupid to do this and too evil to want to. Vigil, whose Castle Overwatch Arazni defended against all kinds of magical interference, but it's hard to imagine the paladins espousing the liberating power of truth and freedom either. Or Cyprian, who has the subtlety - but this isn't where he'd turn the engineering prowess -

The scries fail. 

Well.

Well, Lastwall and Mendev's Worldwound forts can use radios for communications, and Andoran and Taldor and Qadira and Osirion and Rahadoum's ships may use them on the high seas, but Cheliax is Evil, and Evil is weak. Sucks to suck. 

"I have to say, Lastwall is being better-behaved than I expected from a military dictatorship," Iomedae says to Alfirin. 

"In more than just how they're treating us? How so?"

"I don't know. They liked the show. They don't yell at their subordinates. They could be concealing it well, but people - don't seem scared. They don't hide mistakes. We haven't had any of the stupid things that you'd hear about from USSR space projects or whatever, people reporting things work that don't work, or stealing everything that's not nailed down, or sending us the supply numbers we wanted instead of the real ones - maybe magic just makes it easier to be an effective authoritarian state."

"Maybe. Truth spells, lots of people who are paladins and can't lie - I guess I can see how they might have fewer abuses of power or messy politics. Could also explain how Cheliax has lasted a hundred years - the truth spells, at least, since they don't have Paladins. I still want to go to Andoran once the war's over or - whatever else happens to make it so Cheliax can't just invade."

"Yep. Andoran - wants to be America, and Lastwall doesn't. …you know what Lastwall really is is a theocracy in a world where the gods do things, and it doesn't have good Earth analogues for that reason. None of our comparison points are going to be any good because there just haven't been Earth countries pointed at the service of an involved god since they were low-tech themselves."

"Yeah. I bet we would have more examples if high school world history classes were more thorough, but they'd still all be pre-democracy examples, like maybe France was a theocracy under Joan of Arc - I don't know if it was, I didn't bother learning French history -"

"I think she died young," says Iomedae dubiously, who looked up Joan of Arc once after being told she was reminiscent. "The Catholic Church used to be a state and call crusades and so on. …maybe still is one, but just pretending their communes work?...there's so much more we'd know if we'd waited a few more years. Probably wouldn't have been worth it, even if the years are one to one and definitely if they're a hundred to one."

"Would've been worth it if we'd been learning the right things, I think, but we had no way to know what those were. I've been thinking about which things we didn't learn but we could've guessed that we should have - the only one I've come up with is that we learned how to make guns but not how armies use guns - World War I had trenches, but that's about all I know."

"Magic might make it more complicated anyway. I - don't know how good to expect Lastwall's execution to be. It seems like if you are paying all the costs of being a military dictatorship you should at least be a useful one and win all your wars but I'm not sure that's how that works. …do you suppose that the fact the other Iomedae was a tactical genius suggests I could learn. I have been assuming it requires, you know, genius."

"I don't think military dictatorships are good at winning wars?" She's not sure who is good at winning wars, besides America. "I think you could probably learn tactical genius, if she did. Unless she spent those four years of her life in a secluded monastery receiving training from the archangel Michael, in which case you might need to find that monastery."

"Joining us here today on Freedom Radio is Temos Sevandivasen , seventh circle cleric of Abadar. He's on the other side of a screen from me, in the service of my efforts to be hard for curious wizards to track down, but he's agreed to sit down with us for an hour and answer all your questions about Abadar. Archbanker, thank you for joining us."

"I have been very much looking forward to the opportunity," he says gravely.