It would be a better story if she'd brilliantly captured some weapons and enchanted them in order to demonstrate her value to the new regime, but that isn't what happened. What happened is that she notices the prickle of a crystal-ball scry while she's hiding in a village three days' travel from Corentyn. The villagers refuse to sell her food but haven't gathered the nerve to try to drive her out yet. (She's undecided on whether to Fireball them if they do try it.)

It's an officer she once served under. Jehanes is looking for arms and armor enchanters who can do tricky things, and he remembered her, and wondered if she was dead.

She isn't, yet. 

She gets the job offer, if you could call it that, five months later when she's returning home from services at the Iomedaen church that replaced the Asmodean one that was looted in the first days of the fighting. Jehanes never misses it, so she hasn't either. Jehanes does not seem to actually believe it, so she doesn't either. 

          A tall man - presumably a wizard of some power, he has a headband - stops her on the way out. "The Lord-Marshal's secretary for internal security would like to meet with you," he tells her. " - to offer you a job, you're not in any trouble. Are you free this afternoon?"

'The Lord-Marshal's secretary for internal security would like to meet with you' is the kind of phrase which makes the mind go blank with terror and more or less miss the rest of the sentence, not that it actually makes her feel any better when she belatedly processes it. She cannot possibly refuse. She should not want to refuse. She briefly contemplates saying she'll be there and then fleeing the country, but only because terror has made her temporarily too stupid to notice that 1) that wouldn't work 2) she doesn't know anywhere else to be safe and 3) she should not be tempted. She isn't tempted. She's just - nervous. 

 "Of course," she says. "Where's the meeting?"

             "Westcrown. We can provide transport. We can go now, if you'd like - I understand there are security concerns -"

Is Jehanes going to be angry that she came to the attention of the Lord Marshal's government - probably, but if he did anything about it that might bring him to the attention of the Lord Marshal's government - he'll want to know what she did that got her attention but she doesn't know - 

"I'll arrange my own transport," she says, half surprising herself and definitely surprising her interlocutor. "I'll go to the meeting, but I don't know who you are and would be an idiot to run off with the first person who thinks of claiming to work for the Lord-Marshal."

           "That's very reasonable. I can get you a scroll of Teleport."

What. With that she actually could flee the country. To Absalom, maybe, off blind reckoning which sometimes works. They could scry her and come and get her. Maybe that is what they are testing for. "...why?"

          "Well, I think the secretary for internal security would really like it if you'd take the meeting but if you'll defect at the first opportunity anyway then you may as well not waste her time first."

"Two scrolls," her lips, which do not seem to be at all on the same page about the plan here as the rest of her, say. "I've never been to Westcrown before."

          He raises his eyebrows with the expression of someone not particularly presuming she was going to Westcrown. "Can you pay for the second?"

Not with money that's on her, and she - has no idea what'll happen, if she returns to the estate and explains. This interaction has gone sufficiently unexpectedly that she can no longer keep track of exactly what her plan was, here, but facing Jehanes is not appealing. She shakes her head slightly. 

          "One scroll, and I can try to give you the Teleport location by thought?" 

"All right."

She goes to Westcrown with the scroll of Teleport. She's loyal, and a loyal person would go to Westcrown. It's not even a decision, not really. 

"Sevar," says the woman across the desk, who looks Carissa's age and almost definitely isn't. "I wanted to congratulate you. A good many brilliant people have been working without success on figuring out how to lay the standard enchantments on firearms. As I understand it some of them had nearly a year's head start."

Carissa reminds herself that this ought to be the opposite of a frightening thing to hear, being as it is an argument against having her executed on the spot. It is still a frightening thing to hear, because Jehanes was keeping it very secret. "You are well-informed, ma'am," she says neutrally. 

"And you are underpaid. Have you considered working for the Reclamation government?"

Well, here I am not having fled the country. She can't say that. "It would be an honor to serve," she says instead.

The woman sighs impatiently. "We're working to establish a gun industry in Westcrown. One plan that has been floated is to send you and some other brilliant Chelish people to Vigil or Almas for the next year, to trade what you've discovered for tutelage in gunmaking so that we can build the industry at home. Explain the implications, please."

Carissa had instructors who liked to do this, call you up and ask a complicated question and burn you alive in front of everyone if you were bad at answering. Carissa liked those instructors, usually, but they were asking her questions about magic, not about politics. The worst an answer about magic can be is mistaken. 

" - Cheliax would have its own weapons and not be relying on Lastwall and Andoran?" she says, aware this can't possibly be the answer but not thinking what could be. "...you'll get wildly ahead of Jehanes? …you may as well give me a Teleport scroll because if I want to defect I'll have the opportunity?"

"None of those are false. The implication which I would personally be attending to in your position is that what you figured out, yourself, in a few months of work, is something that Cheliax thinks it could trade for the secret of firearms itself. - with plenty of other wrangling behind the scenes, to be clear, but - how much are you currently being paid?"

"Forty Absalom pounds a week, in spellsilver," says Carissa, who has never been this rich in her life and who is navigating the currency crisis through mostly refusing to use currency.

"Let's make it four hundred. And you'll get to learn all of the secrets about how guns are really made, and you're vastly less likely to die in intra-Henderthane infighting."

Carissa is struggling to think of a reason to list off the ways you're bribing someone when you don't have to bribe them at all. "Yes, ma'am."

"As someone trying to improve recruiting for the Reclamation government, I am curious if there's anything that kept you from applying to us in the first place aside from your low self-esteem."

That stings, though Carissa tries not to show it. The truth is that she…didn't really consider applying to work for the Reclamation. She assumes it will be very terrible, and she assumed they didn't want to hire Evil people, and she assumes that going to work for the crown is still the kind of thing that brought you into close contact with the kind of people who wanted the crown and shortly after that got you killed.

None of that is a politically wise answer. Is the woman trying to give Carissa an out, with the suggestion it's a matter of thinking herself unworthy? She is dimly aware that 'I figured out how to enchant guns, but I thought myself unworthy of serving you with that' sounds ridiculous.

"Jehanes is a loyal servant of the Reclamation government and I assumed would tell me if I would better be of service here," she says. 

 "I don't think he'll dare retaliate," she says breezily, "but is there anyone we should protect on your behalf?"

Carissa's mother and sister died when Corentyn was sacked. Her father was probably smuggled out of the country safely, though she has no way to check. "No."

"It would take you about five months to save up for your mother's resurrection."

Is she being accused of caring about her mother? Do people accuse people of that? But Carissa wasn't, in fact, saving for her mother's resurrection. She hadn't even considered it. Her mother's better off in Hell - no, the new regime holds that no one is better off in Hell. Is Carissa being accused of not trying to resurrect her mother, when a person who agreed that Hell is bad would do so? That seems more likely. 

"I don't care if you do," the woman continues, casually. "But their trials will be delayed, if they have a shockingly wealthy relative who might, so it's not too late. Personally I do not love my sister but I would save her from Hell if it were convenient."

Because loyal people don't want their relatives among their enemies. She feels cold and sick and angry. She wants to yell at the woman that if she'd been in Corentyn during the sack she wouldn't have been trying to save other people. 

"I don't have the bodies," she says. 

"We do. It's too late for a Raise Dead, which is why it'll take you five months."

They can't possibly have done that for everyone. So the woman learned that Carissa was alive and valuable, and went to Corentyn, and - but that makes it not make sense as a loyalty test. The test worked fine without them being in possession of the bodies. 

That's the behavior of someone - and this is the affect of someone - who thought it might be a bribe.

Which makes sense, if Hell is bad, and Hell is bad, she's been told so. Only -

- only it feels very difficult, and very dangerous, to believe that Hell is so bad you don't want people to go there.

She does wish her mother and her sister were alive. When they died it was upsetting. Maybe she is overcomplicating this. If she'd thought of a way to save them at the time she would have, and now she has one. A bribe that is as a bonus a way to demonstrate her rejection of Hell. Or maybe the scheme is in fact even more complicated than this and she is undercomplicating it. Egorian was supposed to be full of games. You'd sometimes, at the Worldwound, meet the people who'd lost them, if they were lucky. 

"I try to be thorough about hiring people."

An answer compatible with all of those theories or none of them.

Carissa attempts a smile. "When - and, uh, where - do I start?"

"The Lord Marshal wants to see you."

Carissa feels cold inside, even though she's not important enough that that's what would happen if she'd done something wrong. She drops her project and reminds herself that this was inevitable from the moment she decided to Teleport to Westcrown and that the price of involving oneself in politics is that you come to the attention of powerful people and the benefit is unfathomable riches and interesting and important work and if she lives to forty she'll consider it the best decision she ever made.

She enters. She kneels.

"You may sit." he gestures at the chair on the other side of his desk.

She does that. Reasonably swiftly. She does not want to waste his time and she does not want to look like she thinks she's going to die of this (though she is going to die of this - not today, but inside a decade) - lest he start wondering why she thinks that and whether it's because she is a traitor of some kind.

"Please don't make any promises about what I'm about to say - We're going to send you to Almas, to teach some of our allies how to enchant guns and to learn from them how to run a factory to make guns in large numbers. Our ally is probably going to make you an offer to stay there in Almas and work directly with her instead of here in Westcrown. You're allowed to accept that offer. You won't be punished for accepting that offer. But I'd be glad if, before you do, you tell your supervisor on the trip to Almas what the offer was and give us the chance to match it. If you decide not to tell your supervisor you won't be punished for that either. Do you understand?"

They say that the royal court makes men go mad and it's suddenly very easy to understand why. What game is this? What move is possibly the winning one? Jehanes was a very straightforward person, by comparison. No promises. No disputing his claims that she won't be punished for defecting. No lying, presumably, about the very direct ‘do you understand'. Carissa wishes she'd had time to do something clever with all her new spellsilver though of course they probably deliberately timed the test for before she did. "I hear you, your majesty, but it pains me to imagine that my loyalty is in such question," she says after what is probably an unacceptably long pause. 

He puts a hand to his forehead. "Montero, do you -" He cuts off.

"...Sevar, would you prefer to be less afraid?"

"It's not a trick question," says Lilia, irritably. 

Carissa prefers not having stupid human frailties to having them. "Yes, your majesty."

An instant later Carissa is enveloped in a calming presence. She is, indeed, less afraid. "Your loyalty isn't in question. I understand this - probably seems to you like some bizarre test. I swear it's not a test at all. I am a paladin, do you know what that means?"

Does he think she's stupid. That's probably a reasonable conclusion given how well she is handling this. Carissa fought at the Worldwound and knows what paladins are. They will pity you, won't fuck you, sense Evil, and can smite demons. They get their powers by obeying Iomedae. 

"Yes, your majesty."

"So you understand that I am bound by my oaths not to lie, and that I am telling you the truth when I say you won't be punished for leaving my service to work for our ally instead, nor for contemplating doing that. I am asking - not ordering, just asking - that you check whether we can offer you something better than our ally will, even if she offers you something better than what we're paying you now. There's no action you could take about this situation that would lead to you being punished for disloyalty."

She's still pretty confused! Not, at this point, about what he is trying to convey, he said it quite a few ways and she is not going to entertain the theory that he's outright lying when he just told her not to, but about - why??? Why not punish her why offer to match some other offer when he can just order her to not desert why speak to her at all is she valuable or not and if she's not why play nice and if she is why not hold onto her -

"Most of the people I've hired fled the country during the war," Lilia says. "I spent the end of it in Vudra, personally. The thing I explain to them, when I am trying to persuade them to come back, is that if they are working for us, and then they decide they'd rather do something else, they will be allowed to go do that. The crown is no longer a yawning rift which keeps a permanent grip on anyone foolish enough to wander near it in the first place. Because when it was, all our best people ran away. But part of not keeping a permanent grip on people is that they are allowed to entertain other job offers. If the Lord Marshal tells you to stay - or just counts on the fact you'll assume you're supposed to - then what do I tell the next ten people I'm trying to convince to come work for him?"

The Lord-Marshal shoots a grateful glance at his secretary

"I would expect that not punishing defectors causes more of them," says Carissa, because it sounds like the woman is trying to make a suspiciously complicated argument this isn't the case and if that's what the suspiciously complicated argument is saying then she doesn't buy it. 

"Oh, if you were still enlisted our life would be much easier," says Lilia. "Even paladins are allowed to punish defection among their soldiers. But what you are is a free Chelish citizen freely serving the crown, and there are lots of those, and many of them are only here because they trust the Lord Marshal that he'll let them quit if they think of something they'd rather be doing. This is how most places work. It is not how Asmodean Cheliax worked because it could not recruit enough talented people that way, and because Asmodeus would rather have slaves than free people even where they didn't trade off in numbers. But it is how the Reclamation government works. If it worked some other way I would have stayed in Vudra."

It seems to Carissa like it could work that way for this woman and not for Carissa, and indeed like that's the obvious move, to let the people who know this is on offer get it in their contracts while the people who don't know it's on offer don't get it in theirs. She isn't sure how to articulate this complaint and doesn't really want to waste important peoples' time complaining they gave her the contract meant for people who know the dance better than she does. "You have my family's bodies," she says instead. She means it as assurance she won't leave even if she's absolutely allowed to do that. 

"We do?" asks the Lord-Marshal. "We can have them shipped to you in Almas if you request it."

Carissa is back to being bewildered. 

"Sevar, is there anything that you - wouldn't do to someone, even to get them to do what you wanted?"

Okay that is a more normal test sort of question. And her usual answer is probably still acceptable under the new regime. "Well, I wouldn't - destroy their soul or something." That denies it to Asmo-Iomedae. Denies it to Iomedae. Carissa is a good citizen of the new regime.

"Good. People around here would consider ‘your family will go to Hell if you don't work for us' to be at least as bad as ‘we'll destroy their souls if you don't work for us'. It will absolutely not be raised in a civilized dispute. It is not leverage we have over you. It is something I looked into because in your place I'd have wanted someone to look into it. I won't object if you appreciate me accordingly but if you decide to move to Almas and spend every waking minute denouncing the Reclamation we'd still send you the bodies, if you want them."

Carissa is still half convinced this is nonsense but the woman's impatient voice makes it make perfect sense, at least in the moment, drenched in the warmth and safety of the Lord Marshal's power-whatever-it-is. And she's supposed to believe it, so it's not a good idea anyway to chase down the nagging feeling that it wouldn't make sense if she looked too closely. "Oh," she says. "Thank you. I think I understand."

"I'm glad. You're dismissed."

Then she will exit as gracefully as she can and stare at her work until her heart is pounding at fighting-demons pace and not being-tortured pace, and not try at all to think about whether any of that makes sense because it had better.

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."

"I am here because I don't expect Andoran to start any more wars."

That one is clearly intended to be reassuring but isn't because it's too obviously nonsense. "I'd heard the claim, ma'am, that Andoran intends to end the international slave trade," on the radio from Reclamation-affiliated people, even.

"Believe it or not, I expect that to be achieved without any wars. More piracy than I'd like, probably, but I think most of what will be actually instrumental there will be economic leverage." 

That sounds a lot like "we're planning to not have wars because we don't think anyone will be stupid enough to fight back" which is possibly even true. "I understand, ma'am."

"Did you have any questions for me?"

She doesn't want to talk politics. There is no upside and nearly arbitrary downside. She is a wizard and she is not interested in politics and she has no questions -

no, better -

"...how do airplanes stay up?"

"The air around us is always pushing in every direction, you just don't notice because it's pushing the same amount in every direction. An airplane's forward motion and the angle and the shape of its wings make it so that there's more air underneath the wing than above it, so the air pushing it up from below is stronger than the air pushing it down from above. Would you like to ride in one?"

It half makes sense and she can review the rest later in her own head. She does not understand it well enough she can ask a clever followup question.

"...yes."

"I think you're next free during daylight hours on Oathday. I'll ask my wife if she wants to take you up then."

Carissa is puzzled by the word briefly before she realizes that Alfirin is conveying that she prefers women, and that she wants this known about her. Which is a good thing to know before she accepts the job offer though hardly a problem. Her affect changes slightly. Gentler, more cheerful. "Thank you, ma'am."

"You are free to go. Please let Jandi know if you have any more questions for me or have made your decision about working for me."

She'll decide before Oathday, because she's not going to accept a favor from Alfirin's woman if she's not in fact prepared to join her. She has…no idea what she'll decide. It feels like too big a question to even start to tackle. Of course she wants to learn from Morgethai and build factories of headbands, she wants that more than she thinks she's ever wanted anything, but- she is Chelish, and this place isn't, and apparently that does matter -

The Lord Marshal wanted her to tell her supervisor the offer, in case they could match it. She intends to start by doing that. "Thank you, ma'am. I will."

"Alfirin proposes that I get training in wondrous items and rings manufacture and then figure out factory production of magic items. I would…like to do that very much."

In the short term they really do want their own arms factories. In the long term… Magic item factories would be very good to have, and very good to have in Cheliax as long as there's not another successful attempt by Hell to take the country. "Do you think you could do that here?"

Carissa haaaaates the way paladins do loyalty tests, even though she knows it is the virtuous and correct way to do loyalty tests and also you're not even supposed to think they're loyalty tests and also they're not. 

"I don't know," she says carefully. He doesn't look angry so she got that part right, at least. "I wouldn't have thought of - any of the things I saw today - but now I've seen them. ...Andoran has Morgethai, and Alfirin herself. It would probably go faster there. I'd rather do it in Cheliax if it could be done in Cheliax."

"It would be better for Cheliax for it to happen here, but we don't have an archmage and we don't have Alfirin," Except for the sense in which they have both but he doesn't expect her to help and isn't allowed to plan as if he knows she's here.

Carissa has no idea how to make decisions like this and wishes someone would just give her orders so she wouldn't have to. She is aware this is pathetic. "Alfirin claimed Andoran is helping with the Worldwound now," she says, despite having totally failed to explain even to herself why she cares about this.

"I think they are."

"I'm to decide by Oathday." 

"...I wouldn't have expected her to set a deadline like that… Did she offer you more pay or just the different project?"

"She also offered to double the pay. I -" Carissa would have expected to care more about that, really. "She said I would probably decide based on how interesting the work was, not who had more spellsilver, and I think she was right about that."

"Well, we're willing to give you the same work but probably can't give you as good collaborators."

And no airplane to fly in. "I understand." It is bizarre how little they are trying to persuade her. Alfirin was at least trying to persuade her, though Alfirin was enough of a bizarre alien that only some of the trying landed. It would be insane to feel rejected that her superiors haven't told her she had better come home but she kind of feels that way a little. "I'll…think about it, then?"

"It's your decision…If it matters to you, it's better for you to succeed in this project here than to do it in Almas, but probably better for you to succeed in Almas than to fail here. So from my perspective it matters a lot how much you think the resources Alfirin's offering you there will matter."

Carissa nods vigorously, which is a mistake because it makes her existential dizziness get coupled with normal dizziness. "I would rather come home, if I can succeed at this in Westcrown. I will…try to figure that out."

"Goddess go with you, then."

In the end what decides Carissa is the university in Almas. She slips away to check it out at the end of a full day of factory touring and demonstrations - she's not going to get her spells back in the morning, but that's the price of having only a few days to make an important life-altering decision - and she walks the lecture hall and the dormitories and it's - much better. The student discussions are lively and fervent and interesting and the students are either smarter or less afraid, or both, and don't mind it if someone else benefits from what they're saying, and the spells preventing unwanted people from getting in are very good but there are none at all preventing anyone from getting out, and there's magic everywhere, the magic of people who are learning magic and have a lot of free time, silly pointless absurd spell-hangings and chalkboards full of theoretical magic diagrams…

If you'd asked her whether Good universities are better than Cheliax's Evil ones any time since the Iomedaens conquered Cheliax she would of course have told you that Good universities are better, but she is very very surprised to realize that the university in Almas is better. It hurts a little bit like watching Corentyn burn hurt. It is obviously a reason to study here and she feels vaguely sick at the thought of studying here. 

She goes to the university library and reads books about spellcraft until all of her stupid mortal feelings are gone and replaced by a burning desire to stay in this library until she's beaten everything it knows out of it. 

And she goes to meet Alfirin's "wife" to go flying on Oathday.

"You must be Carissa Sevar," says Iomedae cheerfully. "I'm Freedom. Ready to go flying?"

"Yes," says Carissa, smiling back. She did her hair nicer today, and picked a prettier outfit.

She's going to be cold. Well, she's a wizard, probably she'd just rather solve the cold with magic than with clothing. Iomedae helps her up onto the airplane and instructs her in not touching anything and not distracting the pilot and, in the event of a crash, how to Feather Fall cleanly out of the top of the plane instead of ending up tangled in it. Then she explains several hundred miscellaneous other things about airplanes. How many different airframes Earth tested, including a bunch of stupid ones, and how if you're flying at really high altitudes you actually want a different wing shape than you want at low altitudes where the air is thicker and how a cleverly designed plane can be suited to both, and what they'll need to master to fly that high - jet engines, much improved metallurgy -

She catches herself in the middle of a digression about the Comet midair disintegrations. "But of course we should actually get in the air."

Carissa likes these people. …though Freedom claims to be Chelish and is the least Chelish person Carissa has ever met, even if she looks the part. "I'm ready," she confirms. She'll ask about the 'you are not a Chelish person' thing when they're back on the ground. 

Iomedae waves goodbye to her wife, and they're off. 

"What's Alfirin like?" Carissa asks once they've landed. It seemed ill-advised to have fraught conversations in the air and also it turned out to be far far too loud. 

Iomedae beams at her. "She's the smartest person I have ever met, and she's very stubborn, and has endless energy, and she's worried sick right now about making sure all of this invention makes the world better and not worse. I think you'll get on very well."

So she's not jealous! That's good. "I am going to stay here. I'd - rather make Cheliax rich than Andoran, but - I think this is the best place to figure out how to make magic items by machine."

"I want to make Cheliax rich too. It's just - we're doing all these things that it is very complicated to make sure have good effects rather than bad ones, and a lot of it's out of our hands but in a free country more of the things that are out of our hands will be good. And Cheliax will be a free country, too, but - right now it's under occupation, which is different."

Carissa isn't sure what to say to that. "The Reclamation liberated Cheliax."

"Yes," says Iomedae fervently. "But - there's still a lot to do, and you can do a lot of it with radio, and you can do a lot of it with occupying soldiers, and that leaves an awful awful lot that you can't do with either and that still has to get done…we'll figure it out. I do not mean to abandon Cheliax. I'm from there, too."

What a perfect opening. "You don't act like it."

"No, I suppose I don't. I've been away for a while….for centuries."

"Oh." From - old Cheliax, from Cheliax before it was Asmodean. It hurts the way the university hurt. "Have you been back?"

"I visited Westcrown. I - haven't gone to the place where I grew up. It'd be - very different. I don't think I want to see it. Probably I'll go someday. Where're you from?"

"Corentyn."

"Were you in the city during the war?"

"Yes. I made it out, during the fighting…the people I knew mostly didn't."

"...I'm so sorry."

This is infuriating for some reason. Probably because of a personal deficit within Carissa. 

"The liberation of Cheliax was noble and good and I am glad of it."

"...I don't know, seems pretty reasonable to be upset about it when most of the people you know are dead! We - did our best, but that doesn't mean it was good enough, or that it's all right, or that it's not awful -"

"Well," says Carissa reasonably, "either there is nothing wrong with Hell, in which case it's not a problem that they're all in Hell, or there is something wrong with Hell, in which case you were right."

Was she not supposed to say that. It seems safe and orthodox. 

Alfirin walks across the airfield and into the silence. "How was the flight?"

"It was wonderful," says Carissa. "Thank you.

…very loud. For long trips I expect it'd be worth building silence in." See, she's a reasonable person who has been thinking about item enchantment as is her job. 

"Oh, if you can figure that out that'd be great," says Iomedae. "For airplanes and also for jetpacks, which I really really want to make possible."

Alfirin grins at her. "The engines will get a little bit quieter as we get better at building them but never so quiet that they wouldn't really benefit from a silence. Freedom has been asking me for jetpacks for years but I think the thing that would help most with that is a decanter of endless rocket fuel -"

"You can't do that," says Carissa immediately, "decanters of endless water function because there's an elemental plane of water and there isn't an elemental plane of rocket fuel."

"Well that's a pity… Everyone agrees there's just the six, that's not disputed?"

"...I've never heard it disputed but I grew up in Cheliax…this century…and our education had some deficiencies." Carissa is trying to sound cooperative and not upset about this.

"...isn't there a kind of rocket that can use water as fuel?" says Iomedae, thoughtfully.

Alfirin thinks. "It sounds plausible but I bet it's one of the kinds that's only useful in space… Have you seen the university yet, Ms. Sevar?"

"I went two nights ago," says Carissa. "It's - very impressive." There is an edge in her voice.

Probably about her city that burned and hasn't been repaired. Iomedae winces.

Alfirin is missing some context. She raises an eyebrow at Iomedae, then turns back to Sevar. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be pressuring you to make a decision right away. Take your time."

"Hmm? - no. I am going to stay, and accept your offer. I'm sorry, I should have said immediately."

"No need to apologize. I'm very glad to hear it. I'll let Jandi know, and you can ask her for any help you need with the logistics of moving to Almas. I'll also get her a copy of the deal for you to look over before you sign, if you're happy with it."

Carissa nods. Realizes she should be more upbeat and grateful. Nods again but more happily. "Thank you. I'm excited. It seems like - well, the most interesting problem in the world. And some of the most interesting people in the world."

That seems like it's both true and laying it on a little thick. Alfirin casts a mildly concerned glance to her wife. 

Mildly concerned glance indeed!!

Carissa catches that but is not sure how to interpret it. She will pretend she didn't notice that they're silently discussing her. Probably it's fine. If it's not fine she technically hasn't signed yet!

Alfirin feels like having walked into the middle of this conversation put her kind of out of her depth, moreso for being a little bit unsure how to relate to people who work for her but are also both older than her and very impressive magical prodigies who make her feel vaguely embarrassed about only being a second-circle wizard. If she were a more competent adult she would have a good way to handle this but instead she's going to try to get out of it, like a coward. "Well, I was just stopping by to check that the flight went well. I'm looking forward to working with you Ms. Sevar, enjoy the rest of your afternoon." And she retreats back toward her steamship workshop.

Carissa is not sure what that was about. She smiles at Freedom. "Thank you for the airplane ride."

"Of course. Let me know if you want to do it again sometime, when the weather's good I spend a lot of time in the air…you can learn to fly too, if you want."

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."

... now she does understand the orthodoxy but has backed herself into enough of a corner that unless Alfirin is generous with her it will be difficult to extricate herself. The orthodoxy is that it's not a loyalty test. Everyone should vote whatever is in their hearts, and this will not be used against them at all, and so there is no reason for them to even want to know how their superiors would like them to vote. "Right, of course."

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

Is there a good way to say 'well it's not really at all believable' without making it sound like she doesn't believe it? Not really. 

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

"Do you, uh, believe in paladins?"

That one Carissa absolutely knows, and practiced extensively as soon as the Reclamation decided to employ her. "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," says Carissa reasonably, "so they're unusually trustworthy." It is one of those nice middle grounds that makes you sound neither gullible nor liable to distrust paladins when you're obviously not supposed to.

"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."

Carissa is an idiot. The Supreme Elect has announced publicly that the loyalty test is not a loyalty test, and so thinking that it is is, itself, disloyal. Of course.

"I - apologize if I seemed to be questioning the honor of the Supreme Elect. Of course I trust his word."

"I, um. Didn't think you were. I just meant that - if he says he'd step down, and he can't lie about something public like that where he'd get caught, and people paying attention in Lastwall and Galt and Taldor all think he'd step down... one wouldn't be particularly stupid to believe that he'd step down. If he lost the election."

"I, uh, would have expected people to believe that he'd - quite reasonably and correctly change his mind under some circumstances? Like...say that the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn won, he would not step down in her favor, nor would he be expected to, nor would it call his honor into question that he didn't, since of course a paladin can't enable an Evil person coming to power. And ...that's an extreme example but probably there are lots of unworthy people like her." Everyone but himself, for example. Or everyone but his chosen successor.

"I think he might, actually. It would be terrible for the country but he swore in his oath of office to step down when his term is over and - I think paladins usually stick by their oaths. Even when that has terrible consequences. If, uh, it was some other terrible person who was actually eligible to run, I don't think his oath obliges him to step down if someone ineligible happens to get more votes than him."

Ah hah, maybe 'eligible' is where all the actual deciding who runs the government is hidden. 

"What makes someone, uh, eligible?"

"Landowning Andoren citizen, over the age of - I don't actually remember all of them, but thirty for humans - not an Asmodean or a diabolist or demoniac or soul-sold, willing to take the oath of office."

And Andoran was formerly part of Cheliax, so anyone can be credibly accused of being an Asmodean. Or just stripped of their holdings. That does seem like sufficient rules that you can, as the ruler, make sure you like the result while also truthfully insisting you'll respect it. "Oh. All right, I understand."

Alfirin seems to have gotten whatever she wanted out of this line of conversation. She steers it back toward magic.

Carissa will gratefully accept the opportunity to escape that line of conversation. Alfirin's apparently still annoyed, though, as she doesn't ask her to stay the night.

The next day, with dread in her heart, she goes to the city building to register to become an Andoren citizen. She hates Andoran. But if she wasn't going to be willing to play the game, she should've run back home.

They ask her questions about her understanding of voting in Andoran. She knows the answers, now. She does spectacularly.