Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

The Empire has no small amount of magical trinkets of questionable provenance and niche purpose to adorn the more open-minded or desperate commanders for pivotal battles, and now the Cathayan Jet will join this arsenal. Perhaps it will make a difference on some battlefield of the near or distant future, or perhaps it will gather dust for your lifetime and beyond.

[+2 College Favour]

---

With Wolf as able to call upon your mental resources as you are to call upon his, teaching him is simply a matter of encouraging him to call upon those resources when he encounters a situation he doesn't understand, and over time his own understanding will expand from observation. You start with hiding treats, which quickly fails because you're unable to even think too long on the subject without Wolf and his motley pack materializing and swarming you. So you pass on the task to Max and Johann, and every day they conceal some within the Penthouse in little wooden containers that muffle most of the smell of them. So Wolf has to resort to looking beseechingly at Max and Johann, who obliging explain to him where it is - though they deliberately avoid giving any gesture that might indicate a direction. The result is rapid and effective, and every morning Max and Johann give more and more obscure and roundabout instructions that Wolf is forced to develop an understanding of before he can discover where the treats are concealed.

[Learning Lingua Praestantia: Learning, 81+27=108.]

The next step is significantly trickier. The throat and mouth of a canine is built for howls, growls and barks, not for spoken language, so teaching Wolf to speak any mundane language would have to find a way around that significant obstacle. Lingua Praestantia, however, is no mundane language. It is descended from the tongue of the beings the Elves say shaped the world, and it not only possesses words for concepts alien to Reikspiel, it also resonates with magic in such a way that chants and incantations in it resonate with magic and assist with the shaping of spells, rather than acting as a mere mnemonic device. A much lesser known property of the language is that it works the other way as well - just as Praestantia can shape magic, magic can form Praestantia. Theoretically, any creature with even a sliver of magical ability could learn the cantrips to turn magic into spoken word, but as it requires that creature to already have a solid grasp of the language, in practice it is only of use to Familiars, who have the intelligence and inclination to attempt it in the first place and can use their bond to accelerate the learning process.

Normally, it would be a slow and painstaking process for a canine to learn even the simplest of cantrips. Without fingers to gesture or hold physical components or foci, and without a tongue to incant, all the usual crutches for those first starting to learn magic are incompatible and Wolf must leap straight to silent and practically still casting, with only the wagging of his tail to provide a very primitive approximation of a somatic component. But Link of Psyche allows you to transfer your understanding of magic directly from your mind to his and walk him through digesting the alien concepts involved, and a few patient weeks eventually leads to him being able to 'cast' words. He's never likely to be a chatterbox - it's just not in his nature to use words to communicate what a wagging tail or a warning growl could more succinctly encompass - but this does give him the very useful ability to nearly-instantly relay information for you.

---

Perhaps Qrech has truly resigned himself to making the most of his situation, or perhaps he simply acts that way as he awaits an opportunity. Perhaps it doesn't make a difference. But as you look upon the room that was once a bare stone chamber and is now lined with shelves filled with the beings and beasts of the near east, and listen to him explaining the name and history of the newest additions, you feel confident that at least part of him is happy here, and you set yourself to the task of making that happiness sustainable without taking up a constant portion of your attention, and also without compromising the security he is to remain within. After a fair bit of thought, some correspondence with the College Secretariat, and a number of conversations with Qrech, you finally settle on something that will keep him occupied and engaged for at least the next few years - an enrolment in a series of University of Altdorf courses on Near Eastern Studies, to take place entirely through textbooks, lecture transcripts, and correspondence with a Professor and a handful of fellow students who have already demonstrated loyalty to the Empire. And just to be sure, Qrech's outgoing mail is to be written in Khazalid and translated by trusted Wizards to prevent the possibility of some hidden message being concealed within them. This would require him to learn Reikspiel to understand the coursework and responses from his pen-pals, but it just so happens you speak it, and this adds a layer of quid pro quo to the gambit you're about to attempt.

With the Coin weaving believability into your words, you tell him of opportunities lost where you could have eavesdropped on Mors or Eshin and learned something that could be used against them, but could not comprehend the language well enough to understand, or even to transcribe it and have it translated later. You also bring back up the fictional power bloc within the Grey College, where those with the knowledge of Queekish keep an iron grip on it to maintain their income of influence from doling out translations, and tell of how you aspire to undermine them by learning the language for yourself, and then go on to undermine their monopoly and make them vulnerable to internal politics. Between the Coin and the Skaven worldview, this story is accepted without question by Qrech, who nods along thoughtfully as you tell him of it, and he scratches a dozing Skufit behind the ear as he considers your request.

[Rolling...]

"To teach you the High Tongue of Skavenblight would be blasphemy," he says at last. "To teach you the Moulder Tongue would be treason. But I would be willing to teach you the Low Tongue, used for Clans to talk to one another, and for the commanding of slaves."

You consider this, and finally nod in acceptance. Qrech's mindset, you reflect, is almost entirely recognizable, as you understand his loyalty to his Clan and his Empire. But the part that you need to remind yourself of is that though he is loyal to the Under-Empire as a whole, he holds no loyalty towards any Clan but Moulder, and does not see his efforts to undermine other Clans as working against the interests of the Under-Empire. All resources on the Skaven describe them as treacherous, but perhaps it would be more accurate to describe them as having a different conception of what loyalty means, and holding a belief that internal strife strengthens the whole, rather than weakening it.

[Learning Low Queekish: Learning, 72+27+11(Library: Linguistics)=110.]
[Language Learned: Low Queekish.]

It's said that Queekish relies a great deal on whisker motion, body language, and scents. What that fails to understand is that there is no one Queekish. Written Queekish is monolithic, a linguistic hegemony enforced from the top down by the Grey Seers of Skavenblight, but the 'High' Queekish dialect does not extend beyond the Blighted Marsh, with every Clan possessing its own variant on the language. And when one Clan has to speak to another, they do so in Low Queekish, a language stripped down to the bone for maximum mutual intelligibility - which means no tenses, no genders, no cases, and no nonverbal components. Once you wrap your lips and tongue around the pronunciation of the various sounds in it, learning it comes incredibly simply since you already know the much more complex written language.

---

Of the forty or so Wizards attending the first lecture on Waystones, only five are above the rank of Apprentice: yourself, a Bright Magister who won't stop drumming their fingers on their desk, and three Journeymen who must be preparing for their final examinations. Of the Apprentices, Jades and Ambers are the most common, followed by the Amethysts, and only a single Celestial is present. Up at the board, the Gold Perpetual delivering the lecture begins by writing in letters taking up the entire chalkboard: DON'T.

"If there is any option available to you that does not involve messing with a Waystone," she intones in a Talabeclander accent, "take that option, for the good of yourself and everyone in the area."

The lectures you attend over the coming weeks hammer that point repeatedly, and involve a great many accounts of times this advice was not taken, and the terrible fates that befell everyone unfortunate enough to be in the general area. They also grudgingly give instructions on how to recognize when leaving the Waystone be is not an option, and how to resolve them using rote phrases of Anoqeyån. How to resolve a blockage between two Waystones, how to reconnect a Waystone that has been severed from the Leyline, how to vent an over-accumulation of energies in a Henge. All well and good, and suitable information for Apprentices who will soon be unleashed upon the world and told not to mess with the big magic rocks, but your need is greater and you're unable to get past the deliberate obfuscation built into the lecture. After being rebuffed at office hours, you have a quiet word to Algard, who apparently has already received a note warning him you might be Up To Something on the subject; he pens a reply that says that you are Up To Something with approval from the highest levels, and all assistance is to be rendered. After that, you receive a slightly less frosty reception from the Perpetual Professor, though she does increase how graphic the tales are of times things all went wrong.

[Learning about Waystones: Learning, Breakpoints 50/80: 10+27+10(Windsage)+4(Library: Waystones)=51.]
[Office Hours: 73+27+4(Library: Waystones)=104.]
[Magical Skill added: Waystones and Henges.]

Between the now more helpful Office Hours and a set of one-woman field trips to the Henge of the Jade College and the Waystones of the Amber Hills, you manage to grasp the very basics of what Waystones are. The world is criss-crossed with natural channels along which magic flows, and the Waystones act as embankments to contain and deepen those channels. Where multiple Leylines meet, Henges are built to direct the magic towards its ultimate destination - supposedly, but perhaps not necessarily, the Great Vortex of Ulthuan. With your higher clearance, you're also told in private the incantations for tapping into a portion of the power flowing through Waystones, which comes with even more dire warnings as to how terribly that can go wrong. Also passed along is the amount of raw explosive power necessary to destroy a Waystone or Henge, which has been unfortunately necessary from time to time when a blockage has curdled into Dhar somewhere the Empire is unable to hold for long enough to restore the proper flow. Better a one-time Dhar explosion than a permanent and self-restoring font of Dark Magic for the many enemies of the Empire.

---

It is all well and good to know that something is flammable, but scientific rigour demands to know the exact flashpoint. Similarly, you are not satisfied with knowing in general terms what can cause the disintegration of Aethyric Vitae. You need to know the exact circumstances under which it will transform. So you settle in for a long and tedious chain of experiments wherein you do the same thing at very slightly different levels over and over until you get a different result. It certainly isn't thrilling, but it is a requirement to be able to engage in future projects with the substance with any degree of safety or confidence. So hour after tedious hour, you find new entries to add to the list.

First, the most dangerous and least desirable transformation. Pure warpstone gives a range in yards, refined warpstone in inches. Morrslieb with a clear sky can still trigger it while waning, while an overcast night is only dangerous when Morrslieb is full. A trip into the formerly Skaven territories confirms that ambient Dhar can trigger the transformation, but only at levels equivalent to recent Battle Magic use. You spend some time on equations trying to reconcile these numbers, and confirm that if one assumes Morrslieb is 'merely' a source of ambient Dhar, it should not be anywhere near sufficient for the transformation. But then, Morrslieb has never been merely anything, as the fact that its phase can sometimes be visibly different in places mere miles apart can attest.

Now for the more desired transformation. Petty and Lesser Magics are insufficient, even when physically touching the Vitae, which surprises you. The simplest spells require the direct touch of the caster, while the strongest spells you know can trigger it at mere proximity - though seemingly anything that would block line of sight would prevent this. You dutifully calculate and note the exact range for a selection of spells. Magical artefacts only cause the transformation when active, at ranges equivalent to the spells they contain, which simplifies the bookkeeping. Ambient magical energy causes transformation only at significantly higher levels to that of Dhar, which means it should be safe in any mundane situation short of something along the lines of being surrounded by particularly inspired astronomers during a lightning storm.

It may not be particularly glamorous work, but the resulting notebook filled with the exact circumstances under which the Vitae will transform is quietly satisfying nonetheless.

---

[Rolling for Cathayan Books: 1, 2, 3.]

You'd considered the possibility of a full hangar built into the side of the peak, but in the end you decided on adding a landing pad directly to the balcony, which would shave off a few seconds in case of someone needing to reach the Eye of Gazul in a hurry. As local masons and architects freed up by the arrival of Karaz-a-Karak's Okral get to work on that, you turn your attention to incoming correspondence from the Empire, most suspenseful of which is the translations of the Cathayan books. What you find, to your great disappointment but some curiosity, is that the books were apparently a geographic encyclopedia of Cathay, and while some things like their Three Great Rivers and the mountains to the west and oceans to the east are much the same as you're used to, some things raise your eyebrows - the Great Maw, the Baleful Deserts, the Castles in the Sky, the Dragon's Spine. Still, the world is full of curiosities and most of them are a great deal closer than that of Cathay, so you add a new shelf to your library and put them from your mind.

[Rolling for Grandmaster Engineer examining the Stirland Repeater: 1, 2]

The correspondence from the EIC raises eyebrows as well, as contained within the first trickle of local gossip you've ordered to be collated and passed on, you find the reports from the Gerber-Kiesinger Repeating Rifle Factory as they phase in the recommendations from a Grandmaster of Zhufbar's Engineers Guild. Though he didn't pass on any truly revolutionary information, he did apparently decide that it breached no vows of secrecy for him to get the manlings to stop blowing themselves up quite so damn often while they did what they were already doing, and he introduced the design and some of the tools for smoother-working mechanisms and more reliably airtight seals within the Repeaters. The resulting weapons are no less prone to fouling or resistant to battering, but you suppose to a Dwarven point of view, it's the fault of the Umgi for using substandard powder and not treating their weapons with sufficient care.

---

Thus concludes the work Mathilde performed these past months, but not every waking moment was filled with work. With whom did she spend her free time, this past year? The four with the most votes will be chosen, not counting those locked in.

[+] The Wizards of Karak Eight Peaks (locked in)
[+] Social interaction initiated by someone else (locked in)

[ ] Gretel, who's apparently spending her newly-earned wealth to make herself at home.
[ ] Adela, to see where she's at in deciding her future.
[ ] Hubert, to go deeper into discussion on Ulrican matters.
[ ] Elder Hluodwica, High Priestess of Esmerelda and civilian leader of the Eight Peaks Halflings.
[ ] Francesco Caravello, proud leader of the Undumgi and possible future Thane.
[ ] Oswald Oswaldson, newly-minted Chief Bombardier of the Undumgi.
[ ] Soizic, military leader of the Undumgi.
[ ] Sir Ruprecht Wulfhart, leader of the frontier town of Ulrikadrin.
[ ] The We, to check on how they're settling in to the new arrangement.

[ ] Barak Varr, to watch the progress of the canal.
[ ] Karak Hirn, to satisfy your curiosity about Prince Ulthar.

[ ] Roswita, as she campaigns through Hunger Wood.
[ ] Kasmir, to see how he's keeping himself busy in Sylvania.
[ ] Wilhelmina, to see how she's going when she's not a terrifying financial juggernaut.
[ ] Julia, to see what she has gotten up to as Stirland's most experienced spy master.

[ ] The Amber College, to see how your donation of Lustrian eggs is going.
[ ] Follow up on your donation of the Skaven organ-vat, and see what has been made of it.

[ ] Other (write in)


- There will be a one hour voting moratorium.
- Feel free to suggest other candidates for social actions, especially any I may have forgotten about.