Carissa is a wizard and can fly. She doesn't argue the point. "Thank you. I think I'm going to be very busy."

"Whatever suits you. We're glad to have you."

Carissa manages a beautiful cheerful relaxed smile. "Not as glad as I am to be here."

Carissa's boss has her for dinner once she's worked there for a few weeks. She spends a while fretting over how to dress - Alfirin always wears impossible exotic clothes, which it'd be gauche to directly imitate but which are probably suggestive about her taste - eventually she decides on something glittery she saw on a Vudrani adventurer at the Worldwound. The food is delicious. Carissa is delighted to merit such bribes and slightly nervous about what meriting them is going to entail. 

"So how are you finding Almas?"

"The university is wonderful," she says, and then worries it'll be taken as a slight on the rest of the city. "...it is no wonder that Almas is so prosperous."

Carissa has no idea how to navigate that. It does seem to her like being more of a wizard is objectively superior to being fabulously wealthy but not much of a wizard. But it seems horrendously rude to say that. On the other hand agreeing when Alfirin says it seems maybe different. But she still can't just agree that she's better than Alfirin, and also all the flattery would land more easily if she could figure out what it's aimed at. No one would go to this much effort just to sleep with her, would they?

…perhaps she will just deflect and tell Alfirin cool things about magic item creation, and come across socially oblivious but also harmless and competent at magic, which is in fact the thing she's competent at. 

 "I hope it'll be of use. Did you know that most of the reason it's spellsilver-intensive to layer enchantments is that they interfere even if they're activated only separately? Otherwise you could thread them. I've been wondering since I saw the factory if there are magical insulators that'd let you separate the parts of a gun and enchant them each separately and more cheaply…"

Ah, she has at last succeeded at pitching concepts at the right difficulty to avoid annoying Alfirin. She worries the lessons often annoy Alfirin. "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."

This is safe territory and Carissa will delightedly stay on the topic of magic for as long as Alfirin will tolerate it. 

Alfirin will tolerate it for quite some time! Eventually the conversation turns back to Andoran, though. "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."

Oh no Carissa does not want to do that at all. "Do you think I should?" Is that an order?

"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."

Translation: if you don't do it I'll think you're disloyal and planning to leave soon. It's how they do loyalty checks around here. "Of course," Carissa says, her heart sinking. "Can you tell me more about how voting works?" Most importantly of course who to vote for.

"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."

Oh it's a complicated loyalty test. ....no, probably not so complicated after all. "And we can learn who is worthy of our support in the election by listening to Freedom Radio?"

Alfirin doesn't seem to like that response. "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."

Okay now she's confused and this seems like a bad topic to be confused about. Alfirin just spent the evening flirting with her and this is probably as safe as it will ever get to ask a clarifying question, which doesn't mean her heart isn't pounding -

 "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 ...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."

So some of the elections are just - a distraction. ...maybe. It still feels like she's missing something, or Alfirin wouldn't have been annoyed by the first question. "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?"

That seems to upset her even more. "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."

Carissa wants to back off and forget this whole line of discussion very badly but she keeps her face relaxed. She is foolish and eager to learn and too valuable to murder and you can't actually pass a loyalty test you don't understand.

It does seem like there is not much difference between Freedom telling everyone who to vote for and everyone not voting at all, but obviously she's not supposed to think so as Alfirin is saying that like it's a bad thing. 

"...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."