You thank him, and he smiles, claps you on the shoulder, and turns ninety degrees vertically and vanishes from sight.
Urgh ow my brain hurts just visualizing that. Freckin Light Order bullshit.
Your original plan for the weaponized portion of the Grey Tower consisted of a 360-degree view, a revolving chair for you to sit in, and nothing else. Now that it can operate without a Grey Wizard providing the fine control, you've had to expand that somewhat, and a control console has been built on a moving track around the perimeter of the room, featuring three levers, three switches, and one large, intimidating button. The honour of first activation goes to King Kazador, for his contributions to the Karak in general and for the steel that made it possible to work in the Rune of Gazul in particular, and you walk him through the process step by step, doing your best to ignore the curious stares of King Belegar and the Council behind you.
"Blue Lever, Red Lever, Grey Lever. Blue Lever clears the weather. It's already clear, so we set it to 'off'." Chunk. "Red Lever provides light. Suns out, so we don't need it. Off." Chunk. "Grey Lever lets us aim. The shadow's not currently pointing at the Eastern Approach, so we set it to 'on'." Chunk, and a clack-clack as the bolts holding the console in place release, and with a gentle touch it starts moving along the metal track that rings the room. You surrender control of it to King Kazador, and he rolls it right with enthusiasm until it lines up with the half-dozen Broken Toof Orcs that Dreng's Rangers had captured for this purpose, who wriggled fruitlessly against the ropes holding them immobile. "Line up the mark on the top of the console with the line on the window. That aims it - there's a dial for inputting a compass position manually, but this is easier. Flip the 'Direction' switch when that's ready."
EEEEEEEEEE oh my god its so good. Yes.
"I borrowed a goat from the Halflings - she's about halfway between the base of Karag Nar and the greenskins," you peer down, "and trying to chew through her tether, by the look of it. So we'll know for sure in just a moment." You nod to King Kazador. "Fire when ready, your majesty."
EEE HYPE HYPE.
Apart from the click as the button sinks down as far as it will go, there's nothing but silence. But this is more than an absence of sound, this is silence that devours sound, somehow growing louder by the moment. Ulgu is siphoned from the Room of Dawn and Dusk and in the space between heartbeats, the sky is made to forget where the sun should be, and the shadow that was pointing straight north is now centered almost exactly on the greenskins below. The silence echoes, there's a hint of a scrape of metal on metal, and the shadow of Karag Nar deepens into a solid black...
Fucking
hell wow fuck.
You're already folding Ulgu, and the air bends as you create lenses between yourself and the test subjects. The eight of you peer down at an unperturbed goat, still obstinately munching on a rope that was specifically made to be unpalatable, and then you shift the lenses slightly to the now-unmoving greenskins. Their ragged clothing and the ropes that tie them are untouched, but every inch of visible flesh is burned a solid black. "It certainly did something."
Jesus.
Never before has the walk down the stairs of Karag Nar felt so long, and it's further still to reach the Eastern Approach. Pausing only to cast Sleep on the goat before it munches itself free and you have to explain what happened to the Halflings, you make your way down the path with two Kings and five fellow Councillors. You had braced yourself for the stench of scorched flesh, but even as you crouch down next to one, there's nothing, and your Magesight similarly can't detect any energies in them, neither that of a living creature nor any lingering presence from the activation of the Tower.
Prince Gotri, naturally, is the first to be overcome by curiousity and prod one of the corpses, and the dead Orc collapses gently in on itself. All that remains is an empty shell of ash, and the slightest touch is all it takes to rob the remains of even that cohesiveness.
"From the inside out," Gunnars says with grim satisfaction. "Zharrvengryn ignites the energies that bind body to soul."
It burnt the souls from their bodies...
It
burnt the souls from their bodies and turned them into nuclear blast shadows.
Great hopping Ranald on a pogo stick.
"The Imperial Gunnery School is opening up a branch in Karag Nar," he reports happily.
King Belegar almost misses a step, and the rest of you have to come to a sudden halt to keep from piling into him. "How?"
Uh.
Okay then!
So plan wise I have these two.
[] Plan Queekish and Temple Sneks
-[] MAX: Study an artefact: The unknown black gem.
-[] JOHANN: Join him on raids with the aim of finding written correspondence and a gas mask in Clan Skryre.
-[] DUCK: Johann's investigation into the ratling gun has hit a wall. See if you can help.
-[] Found an internal investigation division, to investigate possible misconduct.
-[] Supply a steady stream of Queekish documents for Qrech to translate, and carefully check the results for consistency.
-[] It's said that the only humans that speak Queekish are slaves of the Skaven. See if you can find and rescue some (optional: Clan Skryre).
-[*] Hire a Priest of Esmerelda to teach the We.
-[] You have set up a Shrine to Ranald. Expand it into a Temple to the Gambler - a gambling hall with clean cards, guaranteed unloaded dice, fresh sawdust in the fighting ring, and a lottery every Festag. Costs 100gc.
-[] Investigate how living things react to exposure to the Vitae. COIN.
-[] Have additional rooms excavated underneath your Penthouse: -100gc for 4 rooms.
-[] The Gambler: Investigate how living things react to exposure to the Vitae.
-[] Serenity: The ability of Alkharad to assume a projected form of mist. (ALMOST FADED)
The summary of this one is:
-We got the gem with the explicit intent of throwing it at the golds to study, if we don't do that then what are we going to do with it besides have it sit?
-For Johann we have to get a gas mask to aid with our arcane mark, and so we can see his full suite of awesome stuff, and we need more written correspondence but from a different source.
-People have mentioned the ratling gun, so lets do that. This has another alternate with Adela in my other plan.
-Many folks have mentioned making an internal investigation department because as it gains in power it means the EIC can reach farther and infiltrators can cause more damage before they are stopped. Another reason I think we should do this is that we have also discussed having Handlers, and I think making sure our organization is clean before we get Handlers means we can be much more sure their information is good.
-Queekish docs for Qrech, and I don't think we need to lie to him further tbh.
-This new options with the slaves is really quite interesting and I expect people to leap for it. In anticipation of that here you go and it might be a decent way to learn Queekish spoken if they can be convinced to give it up.
-The temple comes in because I think its a good basis for Handlers in the future, it has a good chunk of the thread hyped up, and I want to answer that hype. We also don't know how it interacts with the effects of the Coin so I figure we should figure that out as soon as possible.
-Then we have Vitae on the living things, so that we next turn might be more comfortable suggesting it to Belegar and if not, at least we are making progress towards the SDS sheet people are talking about so we're comfortable spending favor on Kragg in a turn or two.
-More rooms so we can have training rooms and firing ranges, and a bunker to run explosion experiments in.
Now onto my other plan after I spotted an interesting synergy.
[] Plan Queekish and Temple Sneks Adela
-[] MAX: Study an artefact: The book on Chaos Dwarf anatomy.
-[] JOHANN: Study an artefact: The unknown black gem.
-[] DUCK: Adela's started her education in Dwarven engineering. Escort her to do field-testing with some of Gotri's prototypes, and grab what Queekish you can while doing so. Clan Skryre.
-[] Found an internal investigation division, to investigate possible misconduct.
-[] Supply a steady stream of Queekish documents for Qrech to translate, and carefully check the results for consistency.
-[] It's said that the only humans that speak Queekish are slaves of the Skaven. See if you can find and rescue some (optional: Clan Skryre).
-[*] Hire a Priest of Esmerelda to teach the We.
-[] You have set up a Shrine to Ranald. Expand it into a Temple to the Gambler - a gambling hall with clean cards, guaranteed unloaded dice, fresh sawdust in the fighting ring, and a lottery every Festag. Costs 100gc.
-[] Investigate how living things react to exposure to the Vitae. COIN.
-[] Have additional rooms excavated underneath your Penthouse: -100gc for 4 rooms.
-[] The Gambler: Investigate how living things react to exposure to the Vitae.
-[] Serenity: The ability of Alkharad to assume a projected form of mist. (ALMOST FADED)
The major differences in this plan are:
-Max continues to chug away at the Chaos Dwarf book.
-The gem gets to experience Johann's magic touch of Breach the Unknown.
-And since Adela is a budding engineer I say let her get her enthusiasm out against the mad scientists. Maybe she'll have some usable and not entirely insane ideas from watching their contraptions.
The rest is the same.
E: The mist paper is added because we might be able to adapt that spell to Ulgu, since Boney said in the Approved Spells threadmark that adapting spells doesn't require a trait.
