The debate between the spinning lyre and the portativ is more closely fought than you expected, but in the end the durability of the portativ wins out over the portability of the spinning lyre. That makes the next step in this process a great deal simpler, as instead of having to find a luthier cleared for magical topics, you simply enlist the Perpetual in charge of the Gold College's plumbing. A day of work creates an enchanted set of pipework that cannot be called an instrument but can be called a proof of concept, as the noises it makes change reliably and proportionally to the presence of Winds. The next step is to replicate the enchantment without the enchantment.
There exists in thought experiments the concept of a 'mundane enchantment' - all the inner mechanisms of an enchantment, normally formed of a complex gantry of criss-crossing magical energies, being replicated step by incredibly laborious step by manual mechanisms made of Wind-sensitive materials. It's almost always a very impractical thought experiment, as it would require a mind-boggling amount of time and effort to make and there are some enchantment mechanisms that just cannot exist somewhere that is subject to the laws of physics. But if one scales down their desires from the enchantment to a point where the question arises as to whether it is an enchantment at all, then you manage to yank the project back into the realm of the feasible.
That was your original plan, but you start having to rethink it once you actually get your hands on a portativ and dismantle it. You'd originally thought the keys would be the place to incorporate the mechanisms, but they are only ever either open or closed, and while having slightly more or less resistance in the presence of Winds might be something a skilled player would notice, that's far less useful than what you had in mind. The part of the portativ that actually makes noise is one solid piece of metal with no moving parts. Obvious in hindsight, perhaps, but you've never had reason to give the matter much thought before. That might have been quite the roadblock if it weren't for what is apparently called the languid, a small flat plate of metal or wood that blocks most of the pipe and forces the air to move in the way that creates the characteristic resonating sound of organ pipes. Even very small changes in the dimensions of these plates will have very noticeable changes in the sounds that those pipes produce. That makes your job simpler. Maybe not simple, but simpler. Also not all that interesting, but it is for such purposes Teclis gave us Apprentices. You give Eike a moderate bag of silver, a list of materials from the Gold Order, and the names of a few organ-builders in Altdorf that the Light Order considers reputable.
---
A week later you have several large sacks of organ pipes marked with the Rune of the Wind they are supposedly sensitive to and a hand bellows to pump air through them, and the four of you travel from College to College and go through the laborious and noisy task of testing each one for how they sound in the presence of their respective Winds. Here Kas comes in very useful as they are able to record the difference in tone from baseline with some sort of runic alphabet used for musical measurements. You build a set of different instruments based on how dramatic the difference is between their baseline and in a Wind-rich environment, and bring in a compliant organist willing to perform a song on an array of different instruments in different places, and most notably during the next full Morrsleib. One is picked out that is very noticeably off when there's high levels of Winds around, not terribly thrown off by merely mild amounts, and is suitably alarming when all eight tones are altered by the presence of
Dhar, making even the jolliest and most familiar songs take on a deeply disquieting aura.
The only remaining step - well, okay, there are arguably still steps like demonstrating this to various authorities and distributing schematics to all corners of the Empire, but the only remaining step before you can call this prototyping complete - is selecting a name for what you have created today.
[ ] [PORTATIV] Write in
Eike has learned:
Entertainers (1/3)
Engineering (1/3)
---
You were expecting, and half dreading, half hoping for having to spend a great deal of time walking a bunch of supercilious Elven Mages through every little step of the enchantment. But after a few clarifying questions you answered through mail, the Mages seemed to get enough of a grasp on the base concepts to start prototyping. You'd begun to very hesitantly allow yourself to consider what you might do with the time you'd set aside for this, and then House Fanpatar gets in touch with you to request your advice on acquiring large amounts of very specific reagents. Reading through their requests and doing some mental calculations, this speaks to a shaky grasp of the core principles leading them to lean on brute force instead of a more elegant and efficient harmony. Normally, this would be cause to intervene and try to get the project back on track, but for an infrastructure project like this you want brute force. You don't want the structural capacity of a bridge to be exactly right, you want it to be far in excess of any foreseeable load in even the worst of circumstances. So you begin to work through the EIC to smooth the acquisitions that the Mages require.
There are, of course, many kinds of wood that grow and thrive in swamplands, but the Eonir have exterminated them in the Schadensumpf to prevent the forest from encroaching on the swamp. You're far from an expert on the matter, but luckily there's someone much closer to being one very close at hand, and Panoramia is able to point out a few hardy species to send samples of to the Mages that would have been overlooked by Plan A: picking every type of tree with 'swamp' in the name.
Commissioning various regional mining guilds to quarry blocks from a handful of inselbergs in appropriately swamp-like conditions is the easy part. The part that requires your personal touch is explaining to them in a very clear and Wizardly manner that it really had to be from those specific rocks, and substituting seemingly identical granite from somewhere more accessible would actually be extremely detectible and extremely in breach of contract.
Trolls are horrid creatures, but everything that makes them a terror in life makes them very useful in death. River trolls are far from the worst of their varieties, but their preferred habitat brings them into regular contact and inevitable conflict with taxpaying citizens of the Empire, ensuring that there's always a bounty on them. That means you don't have to commission adventurers from scratch and for full pay and expenses to get your hands on parts of them - all you need to do is to put enough of a price on those parts to nudge the risk/reward calculations of the job ahead of the other work available in the area. Soon enough, very carefully sealed barrels of viscera are making their way towards Laurelorn.
'Bog iron' originates as nodules of iron-bearing minerals that can be found in certain kinds of wetlands. Some say they come from natural processes involving specific grasses and algaes, others say they are gifts from the Swamp Gods for which veneration and reciprocal gifts are owed. For political reasons you will not be weighing in on the debate, but what you might be willing to reveal your feelings on is how surprisingly difficult it is to get your hands on it. It turns out that the problem here is one you're surprisingly familiar with - Karak Azul didn't pick its name out of a hat, it's called that because it sits on some of the richest iron deposits in the known world, and someone went and reconnected it with the wider world, and centuries of accumulated ingots hit the Empire's metal markets. Thankfully you've got contacts within an organization that also values the metaphysical aspects of bog iron and has continued to gather it even after doing so became more expensive than the much purer Dwarven ingots, and though they don't have much of an opinion on the Eonir, they are in favour of being paid by the Eonir at a time when they have so many more opportunities for expansion than they have gold to fund them.
[Rolling...]
It's in this final task that Eike comes to the fore, basically taking over that entire facet and interfacing directly with the Council of Manhorak to ensure a steady stream of material that matches what the Eonir require of it. You only keep half an eye on what she's up to because her maturity in general and her expertise with this in particular warrants a decent amount of trust, and if her curiosity leads her to taking the opportunity to pry into some of the secrets of the Council of Manhorak, then you're okay with letting it happen. If this is the point where she overextends and gets herself into trouble, then at least it's with an organization you have enough pull with and power over to keep it from spiralling out of control. In the end nothing concerning seems to come of it, and Eike ascends another notch in your assessment of her.
In the end, there is no grand opening or other celebration of the completion of the magical road through the Schadensumpf. While the Queen is pushing for greater ties with the outside world, that this can so easily be seen as a means for outsiders to bypass some of the most formidable defences of Laurelorn - ones that had so recently been instrumental in the defeat of a particularly dangerous Beastherd, no less - makes it a poor centrepiece for that particular cause. So it simply appears in the space between one day and the next, a network of solid paths over boggy hillock and bottomless murk, strung like bunting between invisible waypoints that can be shuffled around to present as straight or as windy a path as desired, or no path at all. You can see a dozen places where it could have been done better, and a dozen places where your intuition insists that it should not be able to work at all. Such are the wonders and woes of other peoples' enchantments.
Eike has learned:
Economics (Old World): She has an understanding of the bigger picture of the flows of money and goods throughout the Old World, and what causes those flows to shift. +1 Learning
Theogenesis (1/3)
---
Before you add them to the long list of topics you've added to the literature upon, the question needs to be asked of yourself: what do you actually know about the Lizardmen? The answer is shockingly little, and what you do know can be interpreted through various different lenses to get a very different picture of them as a whole. Even their name is a riddle, as they are thought of as lizards shaped like men by some, and thus as beasts to be guarded against or culled, and as men shaped like lizards by others, and thus as a society to be negotiated with or warred against. Even your two papers play into this duality, as the one on their theorized polyphenism would frame them more as a eusocial hive and therefore, to
most readers, as mere insects incapable of thought, but the one on their alphabet begins with the presumption that they have an alphabet, which is the domain of thinking beings.
You do find obscure mention of them in the scrolls about the works of the Old Ones you received from the Eonir, who with frustrating brevity mention them as tools of those Old Ones that are turned to various purposes as they shaped the world according to their mysterious whims. However, nowhere does it specify whether the mechanisms of their being wielded were along the lines of one giving orders to an underling, a command to a dog, a call to a herd, or bait to a beast. One impression you're getting of these Old Ones is that they favoured elegance in their doings, and creating a species that unknowingly fulfilled the purpose of their creators while pursuing their own needs and wants seems like the sort of thing they might find apropos.
This leaves you with something of a problem in that you're going to have to get creative for this paper to be more than a mere distillation and translation of Lathruai's efforts - you want there to be some sort of contribution by yourself, even if that is just bringing in other perspectives as well. As is so often said in matters of the pen, to steal from one is plagiarism, but to steal from many is research. So you get to researching.
You make what use you can of the Old One texts - largely restricted to making the sort of lofty comments and references that suggest you know a lot more than you're letting on and really only serve to make it clear to everyone that you have access to sources that they don't - and then begin to draw from a better populated portion of your library. Books on Arthropods, acquired to help you better understand the We, are used to supply a solid grounding on the form of polyphenism that the Lizardmen are theorized to possess: one mirroring the worker-soldier-queen model of ants and bees and the We. As the paper takes form the comparisons to the We are made perhaps slightly more than is strictly necessary, in the hopes of prodding more attention towards your book that can teach them more of the matter. You draw from your books on Dragons and Draconids - did you get those in the wake of your encounter with the Dragon Ogres during the original Karak Eight Peaks Expedition, or after the discovery of Cython atop Karag Zilfin? - to head off one potential counterargument, saying that the known mutability of Dragons is heavily based on the presence of Winds and so you would not get a balanced ratio of varying forms of Dragons out of a single 'hive'.
With the lizards shaped like men side of the equation taken care of, you turn to the men shaped like lizards side and find a lot more examples to disprove. The society of the Beastmen seems like a good fit at first glance, but what few know is that the 'Beastmen' that emerge from the forests to torment the Empire are the result of their own internal caste system, rather than an accurate cross-section of their 'natural' forms, and plenty of creatures that fail to fit into the 'standard' forms of Gors, Ungors, Centigors, and Minotaurs are either preyed on by those higher in the hierarchy or wiped out in the earliest skirmishes due to their lack of equipment and their being treated as disposable by the Wargors. Similarly the Bull Centaurs of the Chaos Dwarves, the Stormvermin of the Skaven, and the Skin Wolves of the Norscans might give one the impression of a polyphenic species until one digs deeper and finds that all three are more likely explained to be mutations induced by the terrible Gods of those respective peoples.
Then you turn to the example of the greenskins, and find that it cannot be so easily refuted. The perspective of an adventurer with a background in apiary had reached the conclusion that the Lizardmen were hives with some sort of undiscovered spawning chamber where the reproductive caste gave forth the others, but one with more familiarity with Orcs and Goblins could just as easily imagine a chamber where some sort of seedbed gives forth multiple forms of related and cooperating creature. Lathruai's notes even compared the size of the smallest caste to Goblins.
As is often the case with such things, an unexpected blockage in the flow reroutes the entire course of the paper. You (well, largely Max) go back and rework the paper to frame it as an evaluation of what is known and a few sets of theories that might fit the facts, and one of the theories being the one you've built up from scratch more solidly justifies your name forefront on the paper.
With that one more or less in the bag - more more than less, though there's still a fair bit of work on Max's part before a final revision will be waiting for your stamp of approval - you turn to the matter of linguistics and the original focus of Lathruai's investigation. A lexicon of both the Lustrian and Southlands dialects of Lizardman runes is useful in itself, but that Lathruai has mapped the drift between the two by roughly estimated age presents a deep and fascinating question. The main question to ask is whether the natural state of the language of the Lizardmen is static, like the dead, scholarly, and artificial languages of the Old World like Old Reikspiel and Classical and
Lingua Praestantia, and there's something about the Southlands that is causing it to drift, or if the natural state of the language is the same as other living languages and there's something about Lustria that's keeping that process from occurring. You don't know anywhere near enough about Lizardmen society to begin to guess, but it's still an interesting question to raise.
As you study the runes, you notice that there are echoes and rhymes that can be found between the glyphs here and those of Anoqeyan if you look for them, but they're also there between Anoqeyan and Khazalid and, if we're being honest, between both and Dark Tongue. Some people use this as the basis for some sort of overarching theory that all languages are ultimately related, but it can equally be taken to mean that there are fundamental truths about the universe that can be reflected in spoken or written language and the only way a language wouldn't have commonalities with every other is if it deliberately rejects those truths.
Ghur in
Lingua Praestantia and Anoqeyån is the same as in Dark Tongue, and conceptually very similar to Gor in both Beast Tongue and Khazalid. Any search for linguistic links needs to be eternally cautious about following the false echoes of these reflected truths.
Which is what you tell yourself over and over and completely fail to be convinced by when you find that of all the rune lexicons you peruse, the one with far and away the most apparent commonalties with the Lizardman glyphs is
Norscan. The vector for this apparent information transfer must surely be the Norscan colony of Skeggi in the New World, the only reasonable place for any prolonged contact between the Norscans and the Lizardmen, and you find more evidence to support this suspicion when you notice that none of what they seem to have adopted has carried with it the deviations contained within the Southlands dialect. But though you've never really had much reason to give its existence much thought, you'd have assumed the only thing they'd be taking from the Lizardmen would be gold and death, not flourishes from their Runic alphabet. Either the Norscans have a hitherto unsuspected affinity for archaeology, or there's something else going on there. As frustratingly confusing as the question is, the thing about academia is that an interesting and novel question is almost as much of a contribution as an answer is, so you work it into the paper.
After far too long of staring at different Runic alphabets, you think you can start to see the trajectory of lingual evolution converging back on its origin with Lizardman-influenced Norscan veering back towards Khazalid and, perhaps, to some theoretical universal precursor. But you're starting to get the same flashes of recognition when looking at the patterns in cobblestone streets, so maybe there's just a finite amount of ways to draw straight lines in two dimensions and you need to take a break.
You leave what you've produced to Max to do his usual magic to. Far from your best paper, but academia always needs bricks even if it's the capstones that get remembered.
Some time later, the final drafts of the two papers are presented to you. The former one is as you expected, but the latter seems to have worked in the day-to-day details from Lathruai's diary to take the reader upon the same journey of discovery that she had, giving the attentive reader a grounding in the Lizardman runic alphabet along the way. It ends as abruptly as the notes do, but in this version as a culmination as a sense of dread formed by the highlighting of the danger of the waters that Lathruai had been sailing and an emphasis on the absence of friendly sails. It then switches to Max's usual and much more scholarly voice to inform the reader that the documentation was intercepted between the Dark Elves who likely acquired it and the Chaos Dwarves who would have ultimately received it, and it does so in a way that implies without actually saying a great deal of swashbuckling adventure that didn't actually happen, and sinister plots to rob the civilized realms of this insight that never actually existed. You sign off on the publication of these papers with a smile.
[Polyphenic Theories of Lizardmen Society, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Competent, +0. Very Exotic, +2. Alien, +1. Precious, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +5.]
[Linguistic Deviation in Southlands Lizardmen Runes, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Confirming, +1. Delivery: Thrilling, +2. Very Exotic, +2. Varied, +1. Accessible, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +6.]
[Greater attention drawn to Araneae Sapiens: +1.]
---
Eike is finishing her fifth year as a Wizard and her third under your tutelage, and under a normal trajectory would be halfway to beginning her Journey. She has a good grasp of the most-used Petty Magics of the Colleges, but though she has enough raw power and control to reliably cast Lesser Magics, so far she's only learned your own understanding of
Aethyric Armour. This isn't necessarily a problem yet since her skills in other areas are developing nicely, but it's still something to be aware of, so you've decided to give her some time at the Grey College to learn some more spells from the expert teachers there, as well as to develop her understanding of enchantment. The question is what spells she should be learning, and whether she should stick to the unlearned spells in the tiers she has already demonstrated ample skill with, or whether she should begin her forays into the spells of Grey Magic proper. As her Master, you have the sole authority to make that decision for her.
There is also the question of her studies into enchantment. There are two paths open to Eike: to develop a skill in Enchanting based upon your own, or to develop one of her own. Your enchantment paradigm is based on your very acute Visual Windsight and a natural knack, but Eike's Windsight is Intuitive and her own natural talent lies more in understanding the Aethyric compatibility of various materials. The only parts of your understanding that you can reliably communicate are your understanding of Runes (non-Dwarven, it stands repeating even in the privacy of your own internal monologue) and the suite of petty spells that are able to substitute for a reasonably well-stocked laboratory. Though you've found a number of niche uses for those spells over the years, you've rarely had need to perform enchantment outside of extremely well-stocked laboratories, and considering Eike's background, you don't see her hurting for resources in the future. It might be better to sign off on her learning whatever she can from whoever is available, rather than just signing her up for classes that will further develop her understanding in the basics.
Vote for as many spells as you want. Eike will learn the spell that has the most votes first, then the second if she rolls well enough to still have time remaining, and so on. At average rolls Eike will learn about three spells.
Simpler Magics
Eike can reliably cast magic at this level.
[ ] [SPELL] Sounds
This is the sole remaining unlearned Petty Magic, and will be easier to learn than the others. Finishing the list of Petty Magic will increase Eike's Magic characteristic, allowing her to reliably use Relatively Simple spells.
[ ] [SPELL]Blessed Weapon
This will teach the basic version of the spell, not Mathilde's mastery of it.
[ ] [SPELL]Dispel
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Alarm
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Lock
[ ] [SPELL]Magic Mapping
Formally known as Mathilde's Multidimensional Aethyric Polysevirric Projection.
[ ] [SPELL]Move
[ ] [SPELL]Silence
[ ] [SPELL]Skywalk
Tougher Magics
Eike will have to make conscious effort and risk miscast every time she casts spells at this level.
[ ] [SPELL]Bewilder
[ ] [SPELL]Doppelganger
[ ] [SPELL]Eye of the Beholder
[ ] [SPELL]Mathilde's Multidimensional Aethyric Projection
[ ] [SPELL]Mindhole
[ ] [SPELL]Mutable Visage
[ ] [SPELL]Shadowcloak
[ ] [SPELL]Shadowsteed
This will teach the basic version of the spell, not Mathilde's mastery of it.
[ ] [SPELL]Take No Heed
Enchantment
[ ] [ENCHANT] Basics Only
This will only progress Eike's basic Enchantment skill, and so will not prevent you from trying to teach her Runecraft and Tool-Free Enchantment.
[ ] [ENCHANT] Freeform
This may allow her to develop her own style as an enchanter or learn one from others, which may end up incompatible with your own.
- There will be a twelve hour moratorium. Voting will not be in plan format.
- I think what the Portativ is doing is shifting music from major key into minor in the presence of Dhar, but I don't know enough about music to be sure if that makes any sense.
- I'm not giving you any examples of organ names to start with because I can't think of any, but any ideas that I like may be edited in.
- See the Spellbook threadmark for a full description of the available spells.
- Learning the basic version of a spell will not prevent you from teaching her your Mastered version later, but won't make it any easier either. It would also make it possible to develop her own Mastery. If she does develop a Mastery, it would prevent her from learning yours.
