So on an entriely different not, what is everyone's favourite thing about Mathilde?
My favourite single detail about Mathilde is something that didn't even happen in the quest proper, which is Mathilde, at the age of 10, having nearly been murdered by her own neighbours and having been abandoned by her family and everyone she ever knew, deciding to circumvent her own Doom by befrending a Cat and naming it Morr.
It also explains a lot about her relationship with Ranald, as a big facet of that seems to be both of them both pointing at fate and laughing uproariously.
Otherwise, I love the contrast between how loyal she is and the fact that despite her distase for politics she's hugely ambitious** and loves games of exact words peadantry (see: Morr the cat, the Liber Mortis & Dwarf Friend Weber's money) to allow her to get away with what she wants that the grey order is institutionally paranoid over.
**No one who wants to revolutionse magic like Mathilde is not ambitious. Also I don't understand why some wizards seemed to think Mathilde wasn't ambitous before the "unleash the battlewizards" proclomation because she took a less visible post outside the empire. Look at her list of known accomplishments: as a very young journeywoman became spymaster to an elector count***, gathering a fearsome reputation amongst the populace. Leveraged that into an actual title of nobility (if a small one) in defiance of practically all convention, essentially took over and successfully completed the campaign that killed Abelheim, a battlewizard and the Amethyst Patriarch, became the first Wizard to have actual and formal power in a dwarf hold since the war of the beard and published/contributed to a series of significant academic papers.
***Yes she had the position forced on her and it was the crappiest province but it's still massively impressive for her age.
