Say we go to KaK or Kislev city, where it the EIC going to hear about that?
From Karak Eightpeaks gossip mostly- it's not like our pilot doesn't have a bunch of family and friends in a place where almost all human commerce is EIC sold or shipped. The thing about a spy network run through merchants is that we too are visible to them.
Plus my bet is that the hochlander has taken some steps of his own. He's the grey wizard we pay the least attention to, while at the same time he's close enough to be taken as our representative by half the empire. So he's in that perfect 'won't see' blindspot that grey wizards love so much, he's got a firm grip on exactly how powerful she is, and he knows that the rest of the college basically just trusts her. If he's got any sense of personal responsibility, he's going to continue to vet his employer.
Oh, and I bet he knows more about our experiments than we probably realize, since he'd get our requisitions lists.
Basically I'm assuming a LOT of contact and conversation with and between NPCs off screen, especially the ones that aren't plot relevant but still present.
I think the Greys who get the most attention are the apprentices and journeymen/women. As the Bursar said, you don't get the rank of Magister unless they trust you; at that point, I imagine attention amounts to the occasional glance your way, accompanied by significantly more pointed glances if you're either not doing much or obviously suspicious stuff starts happening around you.
Apprentices definitely. Journeymen less so, I'd bet: too much random distance between them for a few magisters to run a circuit, too much work for their old masters to shadow them.
Mathilde said something about remembering the sorts of questions she saw on her magister test from her senior apprentice days, didn't she? I bet the compare/contrast between the two sets of answers is most of what they've got.
Well, we are pretending to be an incompetent Lahmian assassin, so miscasting whilst experimenting with a spell whilst lying under the Tzar's bed would be in character.
I mean, makes as much sense as some of the other plans. (No shade to nighttime heart attack, this time. It's significantly better than some of the earlier iterations.)
