Winning Vote:
[X] Plan Metal and Machine
-[X] [Difficult] Write in, A Greater Warmachine Pt. 2: The plan is built, the weapon ready. A Bolt Thrower of truly prodigious size whose scale belies just how light it was in comparison. With your final touches, it will be something truly deadly to behold. You've tentatively named this beast of a weapon The Reckoner [Cost: 1 action] Productivity Like No Other will proc.
-[X] The Rune Metal Pt. 3: The Gromril isn't pure, well metaphysically. You need to first devise a Rune or Runic array necessary to draw out the magical impurity from the Gromril itself before you can even begin to tackle the actual physical makeup of such a procedure. You're lucky there's a large body of Runework dedicated to removing or stopping magic cold in its unstable tracks, otherwise this would have taken far longer. Your gut tells you nevertheless, that nothing short of a Master Rune will cut it.[Cost: (12 -2) =10 Actions] Student of the Odd and Mind of Metal will proc.
--[X] 3 actions
…
You sniff from your position behind Snerra, looming over her shoulder while your other two apprentices practice for when they finally make their journeyman pieces. Your niece is wearing the same version of the heavy padded suit that you had Dolgi and Fjolla wear for decades, several kilos of weight attached at her elbows and hands covered in so much padding that it made dexterous movement all but impossible without tremendous amounts of carefully applied force and pressure.
And you see, to your quiet joy, that she
still inscribes the form of the Rune of Stone using the intentionally chipped and dull chisel you gave her with precision and grace for the 100th time.
"Hundred and fifty more Snerra, get it done before the week is out," you say simply, walking around and staring ominously at your apprentices from behind them.
Soon, you think, the girl will be ready for her First Rune and likely soon after her First Carving.
A bit of odd nomenclature, but like all things, there is a reason for it.
The First Rune is exactly what it says it is, the very first
working Rune an apprentice shall ever engrave, always the Rune of Stone upon a piece of armour. The First Carving, however, was the first Rune the apprentice made that was put
to work. It was always a weapon Rune, engraved onto a hammer or axe then given to a member of the Apprentice's family to bear into battle. If victory is secured, the bearer living or dead, then it was a good sign. If the weapon or battle is lost then it bodes ill. The reasoning of course is that a good Rune would ensure victory for the dawi and a bad Rune would fail to prevent their death. If you ignored the myriad of other factors involved in each and every battle and believed that your one Rune alone could turn the tide.
You don't necessarily believe in the practice itself or what the outcome signified, but then again the logic made a sort of sense.
A living relative and a won battle were better than a dead dwarf or a terrible loss after all.
Dolgi and Fjolla had made their First Carving only a scant few years after their First Rune, the weapons sent south to their relatives to be wielded in battle, and the outcome reported back. To their quiet relief, neither of their relatives had died and their battles won.
You snort, the memory coming to your mind with ease. Your own First Carving was given to your older brother Hroki, who wielded it for two centuries before you made him a replacement. The offending sight of your apprentice work forcing you to make a new one the next time you met him.
The memory is a quiet comfort.
...
You are informed early into the decade that the Bolt Thrower was completed and awaiting your finishing touches. You get to work immediately, having
purposefully delayed your plans to continue your work with the Gromril just to get this done and prevent a repeat of
last time.
You send the messenger back with a response, and soon enough you have all three of your charges hauling it back into the workshop and into your personal workroom. The elder longbeards that serve as its crew walking behind them, eyeing and grumbling at them menacingly.
It's a beautiful piece of work.
The machine is perhaps a third again larger than the standard Bolt Thrower, the wooden structure is composed of Silver Wutroth, the metal bracings and mechanisms out of Pure Gromril. The mass of silver is broken up aesthetically with inlays or Darkened Silver, sapphires and regular wutroth, the dark lines creating the image of a menacing Frostwyrm.
You grunt at them all, shooing them out of your room, even the Longbeards, and get to work.
Hide this weapon, let the eyes of my foe be blind to it.
Let air shimmer and distort, let mind be befuddled…
You hum the chant, a hammer striking precisely and deepening the groove.
Power Flows
The diamonds are crushed, ground down to a fine powder that is barely noticeable even to you.
Will guides it
You pour in the dust carefully, the only way to tell where it is through the slowly growing light of the Rune.
Let song remind you
Your hammer burns a dull orange, the rhythmic striking in time with every third heartbeat. You must do this again seven times over for each of the chisel marks that make up this Rune.
Let mind shape it
It is tiresome work, but your mind is calm, your spirit fulfilled and the deepest parts of you made content. Finally, after two weeks of chanting, grinding and hitting the completed Master Rune glows with power. The white light it emits, for all its intensity, leaving not even a shadow or mark of its existence.
You nod and walk off towards a barrel of ale, a small smile on your lips.
Quench the thirst before you get on with the other two Runes.
…
You send off
The Reckoner and its very happy crew at the turn of the sixth month, leaving you with little else to do but teach your bumbling apprentices and do
research.
So it is, that in-between long marathons of holing yourself up in your study, you take a break, walk out of your room and check in on them from time to time. Leaving the next batch of lesson plans for them to find in a cache somewhere in the Workshop or outlying area around it.
After all, a keen eye is necessary to becoming a Runesmith.
Sometimes you leave it in places that also train their climbing ability, but that's just good common sense. Every dwarf should know how to scale a cliff or walk across a beam from only a paltry eight meters in the air.
…
The first leg of your research is dedicated to finding the Rune's necessary for the procedure you're thinking of before figuring out exactly what materials you'll need to actually build the Rune itself.
Runic research, as opposed to other more mundane things, is an incredibly theoretical process until it isn't. The cost of materials could make even the wealthiest Runelords balk in fear, especially when it came to master runes. So many times a Runesmith would rely on the years of experience under their belt, a good bit of intuition and heady mix of luck and fate damned chance to figure out a Rune or Runic combination that worked.
With that in mind, much of your earlier iterations relied heavily on modifying the spell siphoning array on your amulet and in your workshop as a basis. Hundreds of different alterations are designed, revised, tested and ultimately thrown away. You make so many of the damn things that you end up with a stack piled high in the corner. Only after the 300th alteration that a startling realization strikes you.
Was the impurity magic?
A simple question considering everything, after all what else could it be? Warpstone was physical chaos if there ever was such a thing, but magic fades eventually. So what then? If the impurity isn't magic, trapped inside the Gromril, clearly it is still tied to it like a scar to an edge. It does lead you down a path of questioning, however. For all that magic is temporary, prolonged exposure leaves its mark on all things. Perhaps then, your efforts with Gromril must be seen through this lens. The taint of the Warpstone leaving behind an echo like the stain from the bottom of a mug on the bartop.
Or you could be wrong!
Bah!
You agonize over the issue for who knows how long until you decide to test it. Your mind denying you sleep for what feels like months on end as you make hundreds of alterations to the talisman combo bent towards the notion of removing that echo of corruption all coming up short. You don't even know what to look for really! Just a hunch, a guess wrought by a floundering mind.
You don't know how, but your body, finally breaking after who knows how long you've spent awake, moves you into bed and you leave the waking world the second your head hits the soft down stuffing of the pillow.
…
Your dream self floats before the meteor again, the chunks of Warpstone strewn about from your failed attempt last time still there. You're a bit impressed with your mind's ability to retain continuity, then again you were a Runelord so at the very least you trained it to be that good.
You wander around, floating all over the now cooled impact crater and look for something that you don't even know you're looking for.
Then oddly you feel a pull, a tingling sensation egging you back to the great ball of Gromril semi-covered in Warpstone. You float there, staring at the meteor until you note the changing lighting. Time begins to pass faster and faster, but still, you are transfixed at the sight in front of you, tilting your head as you watch the reaction occur over what feels like millennia. Instinctively, you know that were you able to look away you'd be seeing the forest reconstitute itself around you, the crater fill in with groundwater and becomes a lake. The haze of the water doing nothing to disrupt what you're seeing.
The cloying mass of the Warpstone starts fraying, breaking at the edges and disappearing into the air. The trickle of a century appearing to you like a torrent as ages pass in the blink of an eye. Slowly, surely the mass corrodes away in its entirety leaving just the Ore in its place, but yet...but yet when you squint you see it.
A shadow. A foulness that clings to the Gromril, burying itself deeply and suffusing the metal until it disappears.
You pick up a ghostly pick, the heft noticeably different this time, and strike at the mound. Your pick strikes true and the clang of metal hitting ore sounds. Again you strike, over and over, working to break away a chunk off the larger mass of rocks until you hear the crumbling of stone breaking away.
Yet the Gromril is whole, the section you struck at though…
… it burns
silver.
Some unseen force makes you tilt your head and look down at your pickaxe your eyes trailing up the dark Wutroth handle, indecipherable patterns swirling up the entire thing until you reach where the metal head sits. Slowly, achingly slowly you get a look at the pickaxe head...
...and see nothing but a shaped
void.
You wake up with a start, chest heaving and mind abuzz. Already the dream is fading from your memory, falling through the solid trap of your mind like it isn't even there.
Flinging yourself out of bed, you desperately grasp around for a chisel and hammer.
…
You don't know how long it's taken you, but you've created two prototypes that you've put inside the warded room you made to handle Master Rune experimentation. Both are based on the original Runic Array in the protected room you're standing in rather than the weakened form of your talisman. They are still weak compared to that potent array, and the area they can affect is pathetically small, but they are both stronger than your amulet; strong enough that they need to be stationary to work. Ignoring all of that, the one to your left is an otherwise lightly-modified version of the array. Instead of waiting for the magic to occur it is meant to draw it out of the metal instead. The one to your right is a slightly different story.
Replacing the Rune of Spelleating is an entirely new and different Rune. One you were inspired to create by the persistent memory of your ghostly pick striking the meteor. The shape, from what you can tell, is derived from the Rune of Spelleating but clearly different in a myriad of ways. You don't really know what it will do, you have an idea, a hunch, but no concrete proof.
At least, not until a few moments from now.
Gently, you put down to ingots of Pure Gromril, one near each array, then immediately run off to put on a protective suit and shield before you come back to activate them.
Paid to be smart about this, you were half asleep but you weren't insane enough to test a New Rune in nothing but your clothes.
With that done, you activate both arrays with one of your hands then pull up the Rune Inscribed shield up to just under your be-goggled eyes. For a few seconds nothing seems to be happening, then slowly, oh so slowly you watch with ever widening eyes as the Gromril on both shifts.
On either side, the bars grow hot, so hot in fact that had you not been wearing the layers of protection and Runic insulation you'd be dead instead of sweating fiercely. The surrounding stone ignites, but the ingot on the left does not so much melt as it does shatter violently. You duck quickly, hearing the dull thunk and see the burning tip of metal actually poke through your Gromril shield by a decent amount. Pulling the shield back down you see the right bar has not exploded. Instead the metal sits there, glowing hot enough to make you squint and for sweat to pour down your face. Achingly slowly you turn off the array and watch with bated breath as the Gromril cools down.
It takes a long while, but you are left with a bar of Pure Gromril. Its silver sheen is not so much brighter as it is different. The side closest to the array almost looks brighter than the side farther away but is still not the same sheen as what you saw that day.
But it is
progress. Blessed progress!
…
The rest of your time is spent further tinkering with the successful array. Altering the rune, the configuration, but despite your best attempts you can only get the Gromril only a few shades brighter, and only on the side closest to the array. It got to the point that you even moulded the Gromril into the shape of a dome over the Runes to see if it did anything.
It made the one side brighter, but not the other.
You try again with different metals, the array does nothing. You remake the array with whatever materials you have on hand, but nothing changes. Hundreds of tests to determine other uses for the Rune that turn up nothing at all. It gets to the point that you are certain of one thing.
Your new Rune is incomplete. Somehow or some way you're missing something
important in this equation and you need to restock on supplies to continue your experimentation.
You barge out of your workshop and see your apprentices are all looking a bit older than last time.
Grungni Damn it you've done it again.
"WELL!" you shout, drawing their attention, "I better see some significant improvement since I've been gone
Beardlings!"
Can't let them know this was anything less than planned.
…
Gain:
-
The Reckoner:
A larger than standard Bolt Thrower that weighs slightly less than most would reckon. Constructed from Pure Gromril and the signature Silver Wutroth of Kraka Drakk, the weapon is decorated in the hold's slightly less famous silver and sapphire filigree. The weapon itself is modelled to look like the great Ice Wyrm the hold was named for; the arms carved into the shape of silvery wings, the beast's snarling mouth engraved at the end of the groove where the bolt is placed. Despite its shining appearance, the potent rune array inscribed on it ensures the weapon remains concealed and makes its first shot hit with the strength of a thunderbolt.
[Combo, Rangerstrike: Master Rune of Disguise, Rune of Penetrating, Rune of Accuracy]
-
Incomplete ??? Rune of ???: the Rune does
something but you don't know WHAT. A vital component is missing.
AN: This is a shorter one than usual, but uh..not much to talk about. Thank you for reading and C&C :^)
