"It might seem like a bit of a ridiculous request, but - may I hug you?"

It does seem like a bit of a ridiculous request. "Of course."

Myrabelle hugs her. "It really could not have succeeded without you. There is nobody else in the world who could have done what you did for me, and nobody else in the world I would have trusted to do it. I may not be the best at showing it but I am proud of you."

Oh. Lilia is very very very good at controlling not just her expressions but the feelings that might produce them, or she'd probably be having some difficulty, right now. She leans into the hug. "You know I've never wanted anything else," she says, and she is not particularly a person who keeps track of whether things she is saying are true, when no one else could possibly tell, but she thinks that one is. 

They return to their original workshop after the war. Alfirin's looking into land purchases and legal agreements in Andoran, and they're probably going to relocate there in the medium term, but it wouldn't be the kind of thing that happened overnight even if Andoran's government wasn't extremely busy with the emancipation of all of the slaves in Cheliax right now.

Anyway, Iomedae wants to be in Lastwall right now because she's worried Andoran wouldn't invent the concept of gay marriage in order to pressure her into comporting herself appropriately, and she trusts that Lastwall will. 

Iomedae wants to be the test pilot for the first flight of Golarion's first airplane, and when she makes this known no one objects, even though she kind of expected them to. Maybe she has successfully conveyed over the radio the glory and majesty of airplanes and they see why this is so important and agree she ought to have it, or maybe she's failed and so they don't see and are unwilling to wrestle her for it. 

Either way it is a great occasion to indirectly get engaged to one's girlfriend. They have cleared a large flat area and have priests on hand in case it crashes horrendously, which she warned everyone that it might. They have gasoline engines, but not good ones. Obviously the chief engineer on the airplanes project would be on site personally to crank up the engines for the flight, and obviously that's easier to do if one is temporarily a handsome young man, and obviously Iomedae would lean out of the cockpit of her airplane and kiss her lover before she rolled out.

And obviously there's a sizable crowd.

The plane spends only three seconds in the air because the engine fails almost immediately, which is disappointing - she wanted to beat the Wright Brothers – but a useful result and still exciting to the crowd. The engineers rush over at once to figure out what went wrong with the engine and the second test flight, half an hour later, makes twenty four seconds. Iomedae leaps gleefully out of the plane when this latter flight lands and bounds over to Alfirin, presently a girl, and kisses her again. 

"I would say that I just had a religious experience except that I've done that and it was really much worse."

Alfirin has already been approached by Xiomarra asking to speak with her after the demonstration. "Twenty-four seconds, by my watch. I think that might be a world record or something. An entirely successful test flight, I think?"

"Oh, I think so." Iomedae's eyes are sparkling.

Alfirin kisses her. And then kisses her again. It's probably not necessary to drive the point home.

Cansellarion's standing there when they're done, looking a bit awkward. "Congratulations. It's very impressive, for a machine with no magic… How many more iterations before it can fly a teleport like you talked about?"

Alfirin laughs. "Oh, hundreds. It won't be soon and I'm not getting there on my own. But it's not going to be a secret project. No reason to keep it small, we can hire everyone who's smart enough and wants to be an aerospace engineer."

"On Earth it was…I'm not sure, sixty, maybe eighty years," says Iomedae, "from the first flight to a world where millions of tons of cargo moved by air and the median American could afford to fly across the continent for vacation. It might be faster because we know some of what they got wrong, it might be slower because we have fewer of the prerequisites. I bet you could supply the Worldwound by plane inside a decade, if all the cleverest people in the world decide this is the coolest thing they could possibly do with their lives. And hopefully lots of them will."

"Not much faster, probably. This is about the limit of how much of an airplane I can build from memorized facts. Maybe we'll get fancy aerofoil wing shapes sooner just for knowing they exist."

"A decade isn't bad. I look forward to seeing one. Iomedae, I have to go deal with some other matters, but can you find me in my office in the city when you're done here?"

Oh no. Iomedae in her delight at her own cleverness failed to contemplate that succeeding would take the form of getting scolded. "Yes, sir," she says.

Alfirin giggles when he leaves. "Valentina wants to lecture me. Wanna bet on whether they coordinated to have one person on each of us, or whether we're gonna get any more?"

"...I think they coordinated," says Iomedae consideringly. "I think they had a very panicked emergency meeting about this terrible situation and how best it should be approached and selected people, and if we hear from anyone else it'll be someone who wasn't in the emergency meeting. …I am going to tell Cansellarion we were troublemaking on purpose."

"Of course you are," she says fondly.

"This means you should talk to Valentina first so we can get their reaction when they don't know we are troublemaking on purpose."

"Mm. I suppose I ought to get going, then. Enjoy your adoring crowds."

"What exactly are your intentions toward Iomedae?"

"Pardon me?"