Sudden agony shoots up your leg and you drop the sword, its point embedding itself in the soil. You whirl around to see a cat sprinting out of the room, it's mischief apparently done. You rub at your calf and wince as you feel dampness of the fabric. The little bastard drew blood through your robes, and how did it even get down here, what sort of horrible demon cat-
Your thoughts are scattered as the sensation of the raw energy of death unleashed fills the room, and you whirl once more and then take several steps back as you see sinister purple light arcing across the length of the sword. The Shyish dances up and down the blade, seeking an escape, and then turns inwards and the sword turns red with rust as it ages decades in seconds. Before your eyes it flakes away to nothing, and the now-released death energy sinks into the earth.
You stare in horror. If you had still been holding the sword...
Hah, knew there was a trap in some of them.
Bloody hell.
If necromancers and vampires are luring us to a tomb which had nothing that could actually kill an elector count with runefang, the loot in it would, at least be trying to kill us.
You huff. "There is a couple of other reasons. The first is that I've got a bit of an ardent pursuer, if you get my meaning. Vain, too. Really likes mirrors."
The smile falls off Regimand's face at that. He looks over to the bartender and jerks his head towards the door, and the man hurries out from behind the bar and starts shooing the morning crowd out the door, steins still in their hands. In moments the room is empty, and the bartender scurries through a back door and closes it behind him, leaving the two of you alone. "What foolishness have you been getting up to in that blasted province-"
"Oh, it's not new," you reassure him. "This has been an ongoing thing since... '65, I think. When I filled that practice room with sticky fog that melted candles."
"Why didn't you say something," he asks, aghast.
You shrug. "At the time, I didn't want to admit that the incident was an even bigger screw-up than everyone thought. After that... well, I guess I just got used to it. There's actually less mirrors around than you'd think, and it's easy to get in the habit of dulling the shine on blades and silverware."
He shakes his head in disbelief. "I wonder if it's too late to transfer you to the Bright Order..."
Heres the second facepalm that we just ignored it.
My sides.
"Hmf. Found in Stirland, I take it? So Asoborn construction... oh, I know what this is. Bloody primitives. There was a belief back then that the Winds of Magic were the souls of the dead, so some twit wizards put enchantments on the weapons to absorb ambient winds thinking that would mean it would eat the souls of those killed with it. Nasty stuff, except wrong in literally every way." He closes the case with a click. "So instead you end up with the swords sucking in all sorts of magic and it ends up mixing and curdling and next thing you know it's Dhar. At that point the best thing to do is find a nice volcano to drop it into. You've got the exception to the rule, though - looks like it's been soaking up nothing but Shyish, so it hasn't been tainted." He shrugs. "Not that it's any good. The enchantment itself is lost and could be interesting to work with, but you can't reverse-engineer the enchantment without grounding the Shyish, and unless you do it right the first time, that takes the blade and thus the enchantment with it and you're left with nothing."
...I'm very surprised that they lived long enough to build tombs.
Though that means we got...50 odd Shyish batteries, which LOOK like kickass magic weapons, but would just discharge pure death into anyone trying to do anything more than move them around?
...I hope they won't randomly discharge.
Four days it took, to head back to Wurtbad and ask the bemused Van Hal for a replacement letter of introduction and come all the way back to Altdorf.
Four more days to Wurtbad and back. Van Hal couldn't decide whether to laugh at your predicament or worry about the hideous bruise that had spread across your face by then.
Well, Ranald and Van Hal there are both enjoying this...I can see why Ranald blesses us. He gets so much entertainment for so little work!
He peers at you through the haze of smoke and his own drunkenness as he recounts his tale. "There's a group of 'em that are always together, and though I ain't ever seen your boy getting up to mischief, the others in that group are right proper arses. Always makin' us recite hymns to Sigmar, and if we don't know the words we get a beatin'. And if we say we follow one of the other Gods we get a bigger beatin'. I asked my Priest, and he says that's not right."
You murmur agreement that it's not right, your eyes narrowing.
Zealot, Diligent.
Given our army is going to be a huge mix of Morrites, Ulricans and Sigmarites he's going to be trouble.
You're introduced to a dizzying array of young nobles with more pistols than sense, and none of them have anything bad to say about Gustav von Jungfreud. They seem to hero-worship him, each competing to tell stories of the man charging impossible odds with a repeater pistol in each hand, dealing out improbable amounts of death. You listen carefully nonetheless, and a picture forms in your mind. Gustav is always the first into the fight, the boys are all eager to tell you. Now, you're no strategist, but it occurs to you that leading from the front is all well and good, but there's a time and a place for it, and the time isn't always and the place isn't everywhere.
So he's got good Martial, Brave and possibly Reckless on top.
Pick this guy if you think you want more hotheads.
Luckily for the famous Gunnery School of Nuln, they're entirely welcoming to you, and more than happy to talk of the man who put his chances of tenure in jeopardy to volunteer for service in Stirland. Everyone speaks of how brilliant he is; how he miniaturized the bird-bomb, how he demolished the stables with what he insisted on calling the greatgreatcannon, how he tried to replicate the dwarvern gyrocopter and ended up creating a sort of ballista that fires enormous spinning blades.
You're shown into his workshop, which is a picture of absolute chaos. Parts and pipes and tools and scraps of parchment lie everywhere, half-covering prototype devices of unidentifiable purpose. You eye writing scrawled across the stone wall in charcoal, which appears to be calculating how big you can scale up a mortar until steel is no longer sufficient to contain the blast. Then it starts speculating about the properties of gromril.
Ambitious. Inspired. And quite possibly insane.
And a mad scientist. Oh dear.
Well not actually MAD I think.
I'm reading Genius, and Ambitious. Not sure why he'd want to leave the Gunnery school, but I'm willing to bet that this is due to experiments they wouldn't allow him to perform.
The man's voice trails off, apparently picking up on your suspicion. For a long moment the two of you stare at each other over the table, filling the room with silence.
When he moves, it is with inhuman speed - if his legs hadn't been tucked under the table, he would have had you. As it is, him having to push his chair back and rise to his feet before he could throw himself at you gave you time to draw your greatsword and meet his pounce with your swing.
Once again, silence descends upon the room, broken only by the the blood dripping from the enormous gash in the man's torso, almost splitting him in half.
You stare in horror at the cleaved body of the man that seconds ago you were talking to. You look down at the spray of blood marring your grey robes. You look at your trusty flamberge embedded in the flesh of the thing that just tried to kill you. Then you turn away, and vomit your half-digested lunch against the wall.
I did not expect gribblies in the castle staff.
Thank Ranald for GREATSWORD.
[X] Hide the body and the stains as best as you can. Head to the Courtyard, appraise Markus of the issues of monsters infiltrating, and try to find where Van Hal is. Failing that, group up and head for Kasmir. You want to have everyone together as much as you can without raising the alarm and setting off a general slaughter.
I'm assuming this is a problem we want to link up with our council with.
And have a better fighter.
...and a priest.
But first, da boss.
