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What he needed, what he could get, those were the limiting factors.

The obvious gut instinct of 'better guns than the Spaniards' was something that he considered and then set aside after a moment. As thing stood? Those were consumable items and not reliable weapons. The world that he was laying the foundation to build an empire on just did not have the industry and manufacturing capability to produce bullets or replacement parts for modern firearms. He would need to build that up from nothing until a point where it was viable, but until then?

It was impossible to locally produce them. Meaning he would need to personally 'import' every bullet used and every replacement part required. If they had to be paid for legally, then most modern settings where they were available would need a waiting period and people would sit up and look very closely at sudden orders for a hundred assault rifles and tens of thousands of bullets, entirely aside from the matter of actually paying for them. Illegally, of course, had the issue of needing to deal with criminal elements and all of the complications that came of that. There was always the option of going to a post-apocalyptic setting of some kind where nobody cared about who someone looking for guns was, but... buying them still had all the previous issues on top of most forms of money probably being useless in favor of barter for food and goods, and while it was possible to just pick some guns up? Collecting enough ammunition for it to matter was a tricky prospect, and something like a zombie would not care or hesitate to try to take a bite out of him just because he looked young.

The advantage he was looking to supply El Dorado with couldn't rely on needing to be reloaded with ammunition that El Dorado could not produce.

On a little further thought, it also couldn't be something that could be taken away by El Dorado's enemies and potentially used against them... or worse, reverse-engineered. He pictured the Conquistadors armed with AK-47's and shuddered slightly.

So. For now, that ruled out Fallout and similar worlds. In perfect honesty, he wouldn't want to go there to focus on just guns anyway... not when it was possible for El Dorado to locally develop gunpowder munitions of their own over time, anyway. It would be for something more exotic. Energy weapons, at least, but far more importantly... Nuclear energy. The setting had relied on oil and coal until a resource scarcity had shifted directly into a complete depletion of the stuff and then moved on into running their cars and buildings on small nuclear power cores. Far more interesting than just the guns. Of course, the place was drowning in cannibal ghouls, raiders, and mutant monstrosities so it wasn't somewhere that he was going to go on his own or before he could defend himself to begin with.

It also ruled out something like Final Fantasy Materia. The orbs of crystallized planetary life-blood would let anyone who held them access magical superpowers, when they didn't do something like directly summon a powerful entity to fight on the holder's behalf for a time. The critical part of that statement was anyone. They didn't make the holder invincible or invulnerable to harm, and they weren't something that he could turn off remotely if the person using it was shot to death with muskets and the hardware seized.

No, what he was looking for wasn't advanced weaponry or fascinating artifacts that anyone could use whether they knew what they were looking at or not. That set the framework for future troubles as an arms race began between his Golden Empire and the rest of the world. When it came to arming his people, it should for now be with things that were suitably contemporary to the period. Weapons that, frankly, it didn't matter if they came into the enemy's hands... that could even be discarded without concern if the situation demanded it.

Individual empowerment was the way to go. Something that couldn't be taken off of a corpse, or stolen, or even sold away if one of his people got greedy and hadn't yet internalized why it was a bad idea to trade critical war advantages away to invading forces.

If a Jaguar Warrior had the might of three men, or five, or ten? They could make a big difference with nothing but metal clubs and balls to hurl with all their strength. If they were also faster, tougher, more durable...

That was right. What he needed was not a better quality of weapon, not at the contemporary level of conflicts. He needed better quality soldiers.

It couldn't be by way of something like Captain America's super-soldier formula either. In pretty much every iteration of the setting, they went out of the way to show how things could go terribly wrong if the wrong person got dosed up with the stuff. Not everyone was a Steve Rogers, who came out the other end of it a morally upright and photogenic hero type.... and the serum was also an expensive and finicky beast to create, to begin with. Lots of things that could go wrong.

It needed to be something that he could roll out quickly, cheaply, and easily, with uniform and predictable results for everyone who got it.

He knew just the thing. Better yet, it came from a world where it didn't matter that he wasn't very strong, because he wouldn't be expected to act in his own defense to begin with. Where it was, in fact, forbidden for divinity such as him to put their actual godly might into doing things.

In a burst of starry light, hundreds of years before canon, the god Jaguar descended upon Orario.

He didn't even have to fake the right lightshow, himself. His generous patrons took care of assuring that looked correct on his first appearance. It might have happened on its own, anyway, even if they hadn't made sure of it, and that it would be a one-time event. It would be irritating to have to talk around why he could keep coming and going from 'Heaven' at his discretion, after all.

Jaguar smiled toothily.