First AP of Apparation binds one which is instant pay off and further long term research can be put off for being long term research. Altought it probably won't be one or other option in this case since we have a few AP we can probably do both it and AV.
I don't think Runesmiths let trusted dwarves buy runic gear for untrusted people, either.
We did?
The prior safety actions meant that we could go to Thorek and have it work with only a single action, because all the ground work had been laid. If that wasn't the case, we either wouldn't have gotten Thorek, or we would've had to put in some AP before we got the trade.
More specifically Gunnars went to Kragg and Kragg got... inspiration. It's the reason why the Tower has Gazul's rune. But Mathilde did talk with Gunnars to prepare to use it during WAAAGH!!! Birdmuncha.
We undoubtedly wouldn't have gotten that if we hadn't rolled a six; however, the counterfactual universe in which we had not spent a personal AP on T20 helping Gunnars with his task is not available to us, and so we do not know if we would have gotten something less kickass if we'd rolled a six but didn't have that history with him. My knee-jerk instinct is "no" because Gunnars was an established character already as a result of the K8P expedition, so the Rune of Gazul would still probably be in the mix, but that's purely speculative.
If we defer AV for things that will help with our new job, I'll be a bit disappointed. We decided to defer it until after Vlag because it wasn't relevant to a trip to the Chaos Wastes, and this would turn that from a single delay to a potentially indefinite holding pattern, because blue-skies research is almost never going to be obviously relevant to what we're already doing, because we can't know the result ahead of time.
We are not an employee. We are a project leader and business/research partner. Laurelorn is not our boss, they are our host. If they don't like us that doesn't mean someone else gets to do the Waystone thing. It means that the Waystone thing gets done somewhere else by us.
"What have you got there..."
This human just hand-drilled into hell to pull out a dwarf hold. So at the very least pretending to respect the drill handed toddler would seem to be the low cost maneuver, however much it might grate.
And you think that the Elves aren't smart enough to know that they would have absolutely no chance of working with the Dwarfs if not for Mathilde? Without Mathilde there are no Dwarfs working with Elves.
You're vastly underestimating their egos.
Well, the leading optimistic hypothesis - I remember a lot of resistance to the idea because people thought it would just explode into Winds as soon as we poked it that way.
Exclusivity wasn't an explicit part of the deal, but is pretty implicit in the fact that it's based off of using Suspicious Demon Goo provided by the local zhufokri. I remember a Boney statement along the lines of the other runelords knowing they really wouldn't like the details of how it's done, but also don't like waiting a hundred years so they have Thorek swear to replace anything damaged or destroyed and then carefully avoid learning more.
Sure, but you don't exactly expect much from a toddler regardless of drill hands - a lack of immediate results is just as likely to be chalked up to the task actually being that hard (the elves already tried it and only managed a knockoff) or humans just not being all that good than blamed on Mathilde not putting in enough time and effort.
How about if we delay to do something we know will have immediate results, like windherding enchantments?
Windherding allows things like the Dammerlichtreiter thurible that uses Ulgu mist to carry a Shyish spell further and spread it more widely - or throwing shadow knives imbued with Aqshy so that after they go through armour they then explode. It goes significantly beyond just having two spells next to each other, they can become outright interwoven.
That was the original description, but we've run a lot of possibilities past Boney since, and it's been confirmed that interweaving spells is within its realms of possibility.
