"Hmm, so you could put one enchantment on the barrel and one on the chamber and have them still both apply to the bullets fired without interfering with each other? But wouldn't they fail to combine, like if you cast magic weapon on a weapon which is already enchanted? Or - oh it should still work if you have, say, a flaming barrel and a holy chamber and a shock magazine, if you can get all three working, is that what you mean?"

"Yes, just as you can make a flaming holy shock gun anyway if you want to, it's just that the costs get prohibitive. But if there's such a thing as a magical insulator with the right properties you could do it cheaply and interchangeably."

"There's, oh, seventy or eighty elements that I don't know if anyone on Golarion has isolated. There's probably a good magical insulator in one of them and if there's not, well - hundreds or thousands of complicated organic compounds to either find or synthesize. I have no idea where to look, yet, but I bet we'll find something."

It sounds like they'll have a perfectly lovely evening talking about magic item manufacturing! Carissa seems to enjoy it to the point of being positively giggly. 

Alfirin is delighted to spend hours talking about magic item manufacturing. She's dispositionally a wizard even if circumstantially she's not much of one. Yet. Growth mindset.

...Eventually the conversation turns back to Andoran. "I know you've only been here a few weeks, and busy ones at that, but I was wondering if you're planning to apply for citizenship."

 "Do you think I should?"

"Well, it's really up to you. But if you're planning to live here for a long time it seems like a good idea. You'd get to vote."

"Of course. Can you tell me more about how voting works?"

"Oh, well here in Andoran there's an election every five years. Next one's 4715. There will be polling places, where you go and mark on a ballot everyone you're voting for. You get one vote for each race, so that's one for the Supreme Elect, and one for your representative to the People's Council - Almas is big enough to get three reps, so which race you're eligible to vote for depends on where exactly you live, probably you're in the second district. And then you also vote for the city council, again depending on where exactly you live." Alfirin is excited to vote; she's only done it once before and mostly only for state offices.

"And we can learn who is worthy of our support in the election by listening to Freedom Radio?"

Alfirin frowns slightly. That sounds... like there's a hint of something Chelish in it. "I don't think she does any endorsements? I think - well, it's not illegal and obviously it happened sometimes in America but I think right now it would be - kind of improper. Andoren democracy is still very young, you know. She did have Marusek on the show, of course, but she had Codwin too, we were much too busy at the time to be taking a stance on Andoren politics." Wait, no, that probably just reminded her of the war and her dead family which is maybe still upsetting even now that they're back. Nice going, Alfirin.

"I think, coming as I do from a Chelish background, it is obvious why this would be - more efficient for a society with less wizards - but it is less obvious why she wouldn't give - endorsements - and where one could find them, in that case -"

"Well, Freedom Radio is very popular right now. An endorsement for one candidate or another could be decisive, and... well, I don't think Freedom is totally unwilling to swing an election like that, but she wouldn't want to do it unless she was very confident that her preferred candidate really was much better than the others, or unless she had some special knowledge that most of the voters don't have that was relevant, like if -" She can't just say 'if a Marxist were running for office' because Carissa will have no idea what she's talking about. She kind of enjoys completely ignoring those considerations when talking to Cansellarion, but doing it now would be mean and make the conversation less productive. "- If there were something that had been tried in America or one of America's neighbors, that sounded like a good idea but worked out really badly in practice, and one of the candidates really wanted to try that. Then she'd probably explain on the radio why the idea isn't as good as it looks."

She looks relieved. "So where there is an orthodoxy it'll be on the radio, and where there are no - endorsements - it is because it doesn't matter?"

Alfirin is looking at her with a slightly horrified expression. "That's not - I mean there's not supposed to be one orthodoxy. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. People are should get to make up their own minds about who should rule them. If Freedom were to say who to vote for on the radio and everyone listened to her - Well, you might as well declare her dictator-for-life, there's not a real difference anymore."

"...well the important difference is obviously that if you make everyone 'vote' then you can tell who's loyal and who isn't? Cheliax does that with Detect Thoughts but Andoran doesn't have enough wizards, so it's clever, really. It's not as good as Detect Thoughts because you can lie but I think making people lie is still useful, usually."

"...I think I understand now why in America it's illegal to take a selfie with your ballot. Uh. The point isn't to find…disloyal…people, it's to pick the new government."

"Right, of course."

"I suppose it must seem…unbelievable… if you lived your whole life in Cheliax."

"I think you will have a harder time getting anything useful out of employing it there."

Right. Unbelievable. So, uh, how to communicate that democracy is...real... "Do you, uh, believe in paladins?"

"The Lord Marshal and the Supreme Elect are both paladins," says Carissa. "So is Freedom, and many of the officers of the Glorious Reclamation, and the people who defend us at the Worldwound. Iomedae, as a mortal, was a paladin, and chooses paladins who embody Her virtue and bravery and honor."

"Right, but is it true that they can't lie or is that just a trick to make gullible people trust them?"

"Well, they can't lie very often or they wouldn't be able to maintain the pretense they can't lie at all. So they're unusually trustworthy."

"Okay. I can, uh, work with that, I guess. So when Codwin says very publicly that he'll step down if he doesn't win the next election, he's probably not lying. Because we'd all be able to tell, if he didn't step down, and lots of people are going to be looking for proof that they're lying about the vote totals so it'd be pretty risky to lie about those."