Almas is - farther along in reconstruction than Corentyn. Bigger and richer, too. Carissa stubbornly refuses to look impressed. She is not entirely sure how loyal to Cheliax she is if powerful people are fighting over her but she's certainly loyal enough not to look awestruck at foreign cities.

Cheliax' new engineers get a tour of the gunworks and the ammunition plant on the first day. When they break for lunch one of the guides pulls Carissa aside and asks if she'd be willing to meet with Alfirin after the day's tours are done.

Carissa is starting to get used to the roundabout way paladins prefer to give orders. She'd of course be delighted.

Alfirin, it turns out, looks even younger than Carissa. Her office is at the top of a tall tower like a wizard's, an impossible thing of steel and glass with a view overlooking the Almas skyline.

 "Please, have a seat. How did you find the factory, Miss Sevar?"

It matches Carissa's understanding of Hell. She is very sure she cannot say that. "It was extraordinary, ma'am. I am very happy to be here."

"Thank you. I'm rather proud of it. Ser Cansellarion, as best I can tell, wants you to spend your days making and overseeing copies of it, with a little bit of weapon enchantment worked in at the end. I think that's a waste. You figured out how to lay enchantments on guns on your own, without a research team?"

It is a reasonable opening move; say something it would be dangerous for Carissa to contemplate, and hope she can't help herself and gets nervous about whether she'll pass a loyalty check when she gets home. It won't work because Cansellarion's government disdains loyalty checks - the secretary for internal security says that one of the major ways that letting people leave saves time is that you can presume that if they haven't left, they don't wish they could - but there is no way Alfirin could guess this. "I was shown some other peoples' work on the problem but I did not end up using most of it," she says. Other people are really pretty incompetent at weapons enchanting. 

"Do you expect you could do the same for headbands, or rings - I know, there's not the same previously-unsolved problems there, I'm just asking if you have a special talent for weapons or for long metal tubes or if you're equally skilled at other magic items."

"I have no training in other magic items." She is aware that it requires specialized training but not entirely clear on why. She's seen headbands and it really looks like she could make one. Unwise to boast about things that it seems like you ought to be able to do and have never done, though. 

"Do you think if you had that training you'd be able to enchant a headband as easily as a rifle?"

"I think so, ma'am."

"And likewise for rings?"

Rings are supposed to be harder but once again Carissa isn't sure why. You need symmetry and you need to tie the final spell-scaffold back to the beginning and this just doesn't seem like it would be difficult. "I think so, ma'am."

"Well, then. I'd like to sponsor you getting that training at Morgethai's university here, and then I'd like to work with you to build a factory that can spit out twenty enchanted headbands a day. To start, as a proof of concept. How much is Cansellarion paying you?"

"Four hundred Absalom pounds a week, in spellsilver," says Carissa like someone who thinks this is a reasonable salary and not at all someone who was happy with a tenth of it.

"Oh I can double that, though I suspect you'll mostly decide based on who has the more interesting project and not on who has the larger pile of spellsilver on offer… those are both me, though."

"...your project sounds very very interesting, ma'am. I -" don't want to help yet another party conquer my country - is there a framing of that which doesn't sound pathetic - "would want to think through the implications of doing that work here in Almas instead of at home."

"You want Cheliax to be richer? Or Andoran to be poorer?"

Carissa does not totally successfully hide feeling insulted, at that. She has never in her life wished Andoran any particular ill until they invaded her homeland along with everyone else who smelled blood in the water. She still doesn't, mostly. "I don't want Andoran to be poorer! But - Andoran's not bothering to hold the Worldwound - and Andoran wasn't just burned to the ground -"

"Almas was, actually. Razmir. And about half the guns and most of the ammunition made in the factories you saw today are going to the Worldwound… I'd like to see Cheliax rebuilt as much as the next person, though maybe not quite as much as the next person who lives in one of the more damaged areas. Perhaps I should have included the brickworks in the tour after all, I'd like to set up one of those in Corentyn and in Pezzack and I imagine Westcrown will want one too even though there's less reconstruction happening there."

Carissa has been spending so much time feeling out of her depths, lately, but she's pretty sure that that's meant to be generous and for all she knows maybe it is. "That would be - very useful, ma'am. I'm glad you're sending weapons to the Worldwound."

"Did Cansellarion tell you anything about me, before you came here?"

"The Lord Marshal said that you might try to hire me and that I was allowed to leave if I wanted to. And I know that you led the engineering project that let the Glorious Reclamation liberate Cheliax."

"I suppose that's enough to get by on… I also led the radio project. And the first airplanes on Golarion. I'm not just interested in making weapons of war."

Carissa has no particular aversion to weapons of war when they're not destroying everything around her and she knows enough to know that, when that happened, it was good and she is grateful. "That is a - very impressive range of inventions," she says. "Almas is fortunate to have your patronage."