Iomedae does not renew her paladin vows. She is still deeply invested in the Glorious Reclamation's work in Cheliax, and when she went and did an audit of every order Cansellarion gave her during the war she ended up concluding that they were all completely reasonable and the result if he'd been unable to order her would have been ten times as much time spent persuading her. She thinks she does want to be in a paladin order, in the long run. But for the last year Alfirin has been supporting her in doing the thing she thinks is best, even when that has committed them to a scary and confusing situation, and she is pretty sure she owes it back to Alfirin, to be unentangled in pursuing Alfirin's best guess of how they can improve the world.

It'll be in Almas. 

Almas really has a lot going for it. It's a big city, so plenty of labor to draw on, it's got Felandriel's university so plenty of wizards for anything they want magic for, both powerful wizards to ward their new home and do theoretical and prototyping work, and junior wizards employable for a little more than a laundryman's wage. It's a port, so it's easy to ship in any materials the area is short on. And the construction sector recently expanded, to rebuild after Razmir's attacks.

Alfirin consults with some locals and builds an industrial-scale brickworks first. She knows barely anything about brickmaking, but she knows more than a few things about factories by now and the local brickmakers she's bought out know how they make them by hand and together that's enough to get started.

It's a few months into this, when the Almas brickworks and steel mills are up and running, if not at full capacity, and Alfirin is spinning up the first local chemical plants and glassworks and looking into land purchases for an eventual hydroelectric dam upriver, that she hears about the Opparan gunworks and the gun-backed autocoup, and Marusek asks her if she'd be willing to start a local arms industry next. She says she'll think about it and see where it might fit into the schedule.

"I am worried about the next war," Alfirin says to Iomedae that evening.

"Mmm. I guess it is too much to hope that everyone will smoothly transition into industrial democracies without any massacres along the way if I ask them nicely."

"That didn't happen on Earth, and I'm sure there were people asking nicely… Gods, I wish I'd paid more attention in history. Or taken more classes. World War One was bad because of…trenches and machine guns and mustard gas, right? And Lastwall has machine guns and everyone else probably will too, eventually, and it's not like trenches are a secret technology we can hold back…I'll hold off on trying to rederive mustard gas."

"Machine guns affect how fast you can slaughter people and make a lot of things that used to be a good idea suddenly just lead to the slaughter of your army, and trenches mean the lines can go a long time not moving - I don't know if magic affects that, maybe Cloudkills just beat trenches and make them non-viable tactically - I think the other thing that contributed to World War One being so deadly was just that the world was richer, and had better logistics, and could afford to build larger armies and keep them in the field longer, where that would've collapsed a country before - there's no way around that richer countries can do and endure more killing, if this is stupidly what they've set their mind to - Lastwall won't start a war."

"Lastwall won't, but Taldor might - maybe that's not fair, maybe Taldor got better about not starting wars all the time in the last nine hundred years - but even if they did it looks like Cyprian's got a real Napoleon complex. And those are just the ones I've heard of."

"...yeah. Even if we use our vast sums of money to somehow broker a peace in Avistan - and I'm not totally sure that's the kind of thing that can be done - there's still the entire rest of the world and they're also going to be getting guns and probably doing conquest with them. If it's like Earth there are actually more people in Vudra and Tian Xia than there are here - was that true a long time ago or was that a new thing on Earth -"

"I don't know. It might've been a post-fertilizer thing… Also I don't know if Vudra and Tian Xia have the same - good rivers or high birth rates or whatever it was - just because there's some superficial cultural similarity."

Iomedae frowns out their fancy new glass windows. "Why aren't there more wars on Earth now - is it just because America could beat everybody else up -"

"I think it's that and that all the big countries have nukes…giving all the countries nukes seems like a really bad idea though."

"We could ask the gods if it would make things better?" says Iomedae dubiously. "I kind of see how it makes things better but it seems like it does that by taking some chance of making them a lot worse."

"Yeah. And…maybe it's more likely to go badly if we jump straight to giving them to everyone before - well, I don't know what the other important things are. But it seems like there might be some."

"Before they - stop all being feudal monarchies? I think it might actually be really really bad specifically when a country tries going in one generation from a feudal monarchy to an industrial power - I think you could kind of gloss Russia that way and that was really bad, and Japan that way and that was really bad, and - I should really have read more history books -"

"Mm. Do you remember, did Japan and Russia keep being - I guess not feudal - keep being the same sort of monarchy while they industrialized? Or is it also dangerous if they switch from monarchy to democracy and industrialize all at the same time."

"I think Russia tried being communist," says Iomedae. "And Japan - kept being a feudal monarchy, maybe? I only read one World War II history because the tactics seemed less applicable than the earlier 20th century wars and it was really depressing. I'm pretty sure Japan had an Emperor the whole time."

"Well that doesn't bode well for Taldor… we should try warning people not to be communist. Not that we'll be very credible about that. 'Collective ownership of property is bad, says Mrs. Moneybags who along with her wife has a controlling share of Industry, Like All Of It.'"

"I'm not sure how - historically contingent - communism was - it might have literally just happened because Marx wrote about it and was convincing -"

"Maybe! But… what do we do if someone who's not Marx starts writing about it and convincing people?"

"I explain on the radio that it got tried on Earth and it didn't actually work very well though I don't really remember why not….it would be nice if I remembered more about why not…"

"Maybe that's credible enough…my model of a marxist does not find you credible, but my model of a marxist doesn't know about paladins."

"I can't even enhance my credibility by giving all my money to the poor since I think people will notice I remain, after that, one of the richest people in the world by marriage."

"And I've learned that what I spend my money on, when I have unfathomable amounts of it, is mostly more factories… which is better than yachts but probably does not endear me to the anticapitalists."

"You can try having less appalling working conditions than the early Earth factories and see if that takes some of the teeth out of anticapitalism - I feel like we're focusing on the wrong thing here, or something, somehow. We meant to build a thing bigger than us that will have most of its effects in places we aren't looking on people we'll never meet. And we did that. And it's a - very very big thing - and we were pretty sure it'll have more good effects than bad ones but it's going to have a lot of both - this isn't to say we shouldn't be trying to figure out how to make it go more well but -"