Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Dwarves don't skimp when it comes to building... well, anything, but doubly so for something that Dwarven lives will be depending upon. The passenger monitor may have sunk, but it hasn't broken apart and it remained upright. There could be Dwarves still alive in air pockets, and any rescue attempts must not only contend with the frigid waters, but also the ravenous fish surrounding the waters, undoubtedly in even larger numbers than usual, drawn to the spilled blood and the bodies of the fallen. Their only chance of rescue before Barak Varr's forces arrive at dawn is you.

"Do the monitors have sailcloth? Or any other very large pieces of fabric?" you say, interrupting the Okral leaders.

"What?" says one of them, bristling, the eldest by the look of his beard, but the others are already looking around for the captains of the beached vessels, and one of them hurries over.

"Yes," he says after you repeat your question. "As back-ups in case the engines fail, and for fothering. Why?"

"I need the entire submerged vessel cast into moon-shadow. And at least one river bank, ideally both."

"What? Why?" says the captain.

"Do it," says Belegar firmly.

There's grumbling, but it's accompanying the scattered Dwarves moving to do so, likely glad to have something productive to do. It doesn't take long for sailcloth and ropes to be fetched from the beached vessels, and very quickly a spiderweb of ropes tied to trees and rocks and spikes hammered into the ground begins to form as you explore the layout of one of the vessels, trying to get a feel of where you'd be most likely to find access, while its captain tells you as rapidly as he can of what would have likely occurred in the ship after the explosion - what would have been sealed, what would have been opened, where survivors might be. You could simply step through the hull of the ship with Substance of Shadow, but if any survivors inside have a lit lamp or any other source of light - unlikely, but possible - that would cause your messy and probably painful death.

Once that's done, under your direction Dwarves throw long chains towards the ship, one end secured to the shore, so that hopefully no part of the ship is far from a gleam of Chamon that will lead to dry land and safety. And with that done there's nothing left but to have the Dwarves row you out to the funnel, centre yourself, wrap yourself in the magic of Substance of Shadow, hold your breath, and cautiously lower yourself into the water.

It's a disconcerting experience. The water surrounds you but does not touch you, so you drop through it as if it was air, landing on the top of the sunken deck with a reverberating clang. Then you let yourself drop through that surface as well, knowing that you're positioned just right to fall into the central corridor of the topmost enclosed deck, which would certainly have flooded and thus would be filled with water and, more importantly, darkness. And though the darkness prevents your magical protection from vanishing and leaving you halfway embedded in metal plating, it also means you've only your Windsight to navigate by, which is as disorienting as you feared.

Above ground, every day the land is illuminated by the Hysh-rich sunlight, swept by the weather of Azyr, and pulses with Ulgu at dawn and dusk. The water knows nothing of any of that. There's traces of natural Ghyran in the river itself as flowing water resonates with the Wind of Life, but water cut off from the flow stagnates quickly and fades into magical inertness. The only magic around you is the faint Chamon residing within Dwarven steel and, everywhere you look, tiny daggers of Ghur flitting about, full of ravenous hunger and gathering in clouds around pockets of Shyish. Magesight has many advantages over conventional vision, but one that it lacks is depth - regular sight has two eyes, but Magesight only has one soul, so with Chamon on every side it takes utter concentration to make out any details. With rising discomfort in your chest you move down the corridor, running your hand down the wall. The corridor is filled to the ceiling because there's a hatch in the roof, but each room connected to the corridor has an ovular doorway, and even if they were open - which they easily could have been in the rush to escape the sinking ship - there'd be an air bubble in the ceiling. You're proven correct, and take a few deep breaths with relief before pressing on.

You don't have much hope for finding survivors on this uppermost deck as anyone up here could have easily reached the deck and swam for it, but you check it anyway, both to be thorough and to acclimate yourself to this strange new environment. You find many reasons to be glad for the peculiarities of Substance of Shadow, as its selective intangibility lets you refill your lungs without having to bring yourself into contact with the water that surrounds you, leaving your robes dry and your passage through the corridors unencumbered, and not least of which because you're sure that if you could see the water, it would be red with blood. You have to push past several bodies who by their silhouette of Shyish are all but skeletonized.

It's on the next deck down that you encounter the first sealed door, and find yourself hesitating before it. You can't open it without water and hungry fish flooding in, almost certainly dooming anyone who might be inside. But you won't help them by stepping through the door and being fused with it as some lantern or candle on the other side shatters your spell. You concentrate your Windsight as much as possible, straining to see any hint of Aqshy on the far side, but you're not entirely sure you'd be able to see the Aqshy of a candleflame on the far side of a wall of steel.

There could be nobody inside. There could be someone inside who's dry and safe and perfectly fine to wait for Barak Varr's forces to arrive and perform a more conventional rescue. Or they could be neck-deep in freezing water and on the verge of hypothermia. What are the chances that whoever's inside has a light source? One in ten? One in five? Fifty-fifty? How do you weigh an unsure chance of death against the equally unsure chance that whoever's inside needs immediate assistance?

You move on.

The individual rooms, you remind yourself, are not your primary objective. Your exploration of one of the beached ships revealed that these monitors are dual-purpose, and when they're not holding passengers they hold cargo. So just above the bilge are the cargo holds, equally capable of holding row after row of crates and barrels as they are of holding row after row of passengers sitting on wooden benches. They're where most of the Dwarves would have been, and unless the deck hatches were open or breached, that's where the largest air pockets would be. You make your way down several ladders and pause at the final one, which would lead into the aftmost cargo hold. It's sealed. Why would it be sealed? During normal operation, it's left open to allow air to circulate, especially with hundreds of Dwarves inside. After the explosion, Dwarves escaping would have left it open. It would be sealed if water was entering through it, but the explosion was near the front of the ship, and the doors between cargo holds are kept sealed while moving so that one being breached won't fill all of them. The only scenario it would be sealed is if water started pouring in from above. That would prevent anyone from being able to climb out, but the hatches are designed to still be easily closable in any scenario.

You knock on the steel of the hatch and after a few long moments a rapid, almost frantic hammering responds from many hands at once.

You picture the cargo hold of the beached ship you explored, the row after row of wooden seating. At least a hundred, probably more.

That shifts the odds.

You mutter a prayer with the last of your breath and drop through the hatch...

[Rolling...]

And fall with another clang into a pitch-black room, filled with a babble of Dwarven voices as they try to scramble away from whatever just dropped into the room.

"I am Loremaster Weber of Karak Eight Peaks. I am here to rescue you."

You climb partway up the hatch's ladder - rematerializing inside water is ill-advised - to release the spell, and then fold Ulgu into a simple light. In a ring around you, shivering and miserable and wet and waist-deep in water, are scores of Dwarves staring at you in confusion and hope. And on the far side of the hold you can see an open door, and more Dwarven faces peering through at you from the next hold.

You allow yourself a moment of relief and happiness before you get to work.

---

'Rescue' is easier said than done, but there are few problems that arbitrary amounts of Dwarven artifice can't make easier and this proves to be no exception. A series of pulleys is set up with a chain threaded through them, and one of them is affixed to a boulder that is sunk right outside the cargo hold. Through sheer muscle-power the chain is pulled by a team of Dwarves so that it constantly rotates at a steady speed. In theory, anyone affected by Substance of Shadow in such a way that they are not subject to gravity that then grips onto the chain will be pulled through the water and onto the shore and moonlight will first fall upon them as they dangle slightly above the ground. At that point gravity would reassert itself, the Dwarf lets go, and they can be led away to warm up and recover. Then comes the next one, and so on. The Dwarves inside are lined up roughly in order of how badly they need to go ashore, with the wounded and frail first under the stern direction of their Guildmaster. It's all ready to begin. The only bottleneck in this basic machine is you.

Chain-casting is very strenuously warned against by the Colleges. Much as someone who says the same word over and over will soon find themselves garbling it, someone casting the same spell over and over is in extreme danger of garbling that, with much worse consequences than some mangled syllables. But here and now, there's no real choice in the matter. With the cargo hold as flooded as it is and the river filled with snowmelt from the mountains, the only reason there's still survivors is the legendary toughness of Dwarves. But even that can't last until dawn, and until more mundane methods of rescue are able to reach them. So there's nothing for it but to do your best to not garble.

With a small lantern brought from the shore on the far side of the compartment and a stack of benches casting your half of the compartment into shadow, you take the first Dwarf's hand, envelop the pair of you in Ulgu, and pull him through the hull of the ship. It only takes a moment to recognize the moving Chamon of the chain and you place the Dwarf's hand upon it, and it only takes a few grasps for the spell to recognize his intentions and for his hand to make contact with the metal. They disappear into the Windsight-obscuring murk of the water and you step back through the hull, step atop another stack of benches to be out of the water, and release the spell.

And repeat.

And repeat.

[Rolling...]

And repeat.

You can't claim to have done it all perfectly. Several times the spell escaped your control and you were unable to discharge it in time, and your ears are plugged with wax, a milky film is covering your vision, and your muscles ache in a way they shouldn't. But these are the most minor and temporary of manifestations of magic run amok, and after what can't have been much more than two hours but felt like a lifetime, the compartment is finally empty of living Dwarves - an unfortunately necessary qualifier, as three Dwarves heavily injured in the initial blast did not survive the wait. Knowing what you know of Dwarven beliefs surrounding death you try to think of a way to recover them too, but unfortunately one of the many quirks of Substance of Shadow is that it is much easier to apply to living beings than inanimate objects, including formerly living beings. An entire body is beyond your capabilities.

You hesitate before leaving the compartment for the final time, thinking of the sealed rooms above. It was pure luck that the lanterns in the compartment you dropped into had fallen off their hooks in the initial blast, and the compartment was too flooded for them to be relit. Do you roll those dice again and in larger numbers for fewer Dwarves? If every sealed room was filled to standing room only, that could represent as many as fifty or more, but if there's at most one or two in each, less than a dozen. And there's still the matters on shore you could concern yourself with. Any approaching greenskins could present a much greater threat to many more lives, and discovering the instigator of this attack and ensuring the Grudge is levelled against the correct party could have geopolitical ramifications that could affect, or even end, thousands of lives.

[ ] Return to shore and guard the Okral
[ ] Try to track the bandits
[ ] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind
[ ] Scout for any approaching greenskin forces
[ ] Despite the risk to yourself, attempt to save any Dwarves left in the ship
[ ] Use your spare Power Stone to save any Dwarves left in the ship
This will be achieved by supercharging an Illusion to make it loud enough to be heard throughout the ship, despite the water and metal muffling you. This will tell them all to douse any lights they have on them, making it safe to enter their compartments and retrieve them. Mathilde will only enter compartments that return her knocking, which would signify that there's someone inside who would have heard and followed her instructions.


- There will be a one hour moratorium.
- Roll for number of survivors was made here and here.
- To be clear about the danger SoS rescues represent, if you had rolled a 1 when dropping into the compartment, the quest would have ended instantly. Other results of varying unpleasantness were lined up, up to a threshold I won't share.
- Current headcount: 300-400 rescued, including KaK Metalsmiths Guildmaster.

Novel rescue plan FAQ:
- Using a SoS'd stick to see if there is light on the other side of a door or wall would not result in the stick neatly and quietly merging with the wall. The result would be completely unpredictable, probably dangerous, and have a high chance of breaching the compartment.
- Likewise, Branulhune is not an implement for neat incisions. Trying to use it to cut open compartments will be functionally identical to hitting that wall with a cannonball, with negative results for anyone on the other side and on the structure as a whole.
- A Dwarven equivalent to morse code does exist, but those aboard would not know it. It's a Guild secret of the Miners and Engineers.
- Ulgu-based illusion spells cannot penetrate through the Chamon-rich metal without a lot more Ulgu than is available inside the ship.
- Ulgu-based illusion spells can't communicate through water and steel. Sound can't create speech, and Illusion requires too much power to crank up the volume enough.