The coming months are going to involve a lot of time spent in the laboratories, and Max and Johann become the first guests to grace the new bedroom in your Penthouse as they prepare for a deep dive into some of the loot acquired from the Skaven, to the mutual delight of both Wolf and the wolf-rats. Though there's some moderate grumbling from Johann and Max who aren't quite close enough to be entirely pleased with sharing a room, they quickly find that Max's late nights and Johann's early mornings mean they only ever encounter each other in passing, and things quickly settle down into a harmonious peace.
I could swear I recall a scene like this in one of Prachett's books. Its a husband and wife pair there though.
You take the time to sort through the various books captured from what was once Clan Moulder's territory in the hopes they'd be immediately relevant, but apart from a few books for your burgeoning section on Skaven society, the closest to potentially useful are a series on various types of small mammals and the terrible uses that Clan Moulder can put them to. The rest are clearly recreational in nature, and are split between those that give you an intriguing glimpse into what Skaven yearn for, and those that give you a horrifying glimpse into what Master Moulders apparently yearn for. You sort them into your library accordingly and turn your attention to your work.
Horrible things to do to cute fluffy animals 101.
Skaven Romance.
Skaven pornography, targeted at those who spend their lives rummaging around the insides of critters and are hard to impress.
[Mathilde vs Eshin notes Part 1 - Translation: Learning, 70+27+13(Library: Skaven)=110.]
[Mathilde vs Eshin notes Part 2 - Politics: Diplomacy, 33+13+13(Library: Skaven)=59.]
[Mathilde vs Eshin notes Part 3 - War: Martial, 29+23+5(Strategy - Skaven)+13(Library: Skaven)=70.]
Our Strategy skills are good enough that even with a bad roll we got okay stuff on it. Pity the politics flew over our head.
Hopefully when someone better at diplomacy looks at it we'll get to see what they make of it.
The translation of the documents is simple enough, and you're able to construct the various documents into something resembling a single coherent timeline that gives an inside look into the events of the Third Skaven Civil War through a very unique lens, but any further examination is stymied time and time again as most of the letters are to and from individuals already intimately familiar with the names, places, and Clans involved. After using a few drafts to feed the Red Tower, you end up settling for delivering the translations in as accessible a format as you possibly can and leaving the digestion of the information to the diplomats, strategists, and anthropologists of the Empire - or at least to those with sufficient clearance.
[The Clan Eshin Perspective of the Third Skaven Civil War. Subject: Rare, +1. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Dull, -1. Exotic, +1. Precious, +1. Alien, +1. Tactically Significant, +2. Classified, -2. Total: 5.]
Look at all them labels on this bad boy paper. And to think that's with mediocre rolls.
[Max vs Chaos Dwarf anatomy: Learning, 90+18+10(Patient)-10(lacks fluency)+9(Library: Anatomy)=117.]
In contrast, Max flies through the tome on Chaos Dwarf anatomy, helped a great deal by having already searched through it and translated every piece of jargon involved. The work contains a wealth of knowledge derived from constant skirmishes between Clan Moulder and the Chaos Dwarves over Zorn Uzkul, and you shudder to think of the amount of test subjects Clan Moulder would have needed to determine the role of every single organ.
Dwarves are tough. Probably less than Mathilde thinks, a dwarf facing a skilled medic could take a very long time to die.
All the subjects possess the tusks that physically distinguish them from the Dwarves you know, and some possess cloven hooves or horns as well. The most dramatic mutation is that of the Bull Centaur, which are well-documented in the tome, but of most interest to you is the record of the vivisection of a Sorcerer with special attention paid to the petrification that had begun upon his body. His feet and ankles were entirely of stone, and displayed evidence of grouting to repair cracks and chips, but the spread upwards was uneven, with blood vessels completely petrified to the knees and showing increased rigidity as high up as the thighs, even as the flesh above it appeared unchanged. But nothing above the waist showed any signs of the transformation, which provides you with quite a bit of food for thought.
So curiosities:
-Why do they seem to consistently mutate towards a specific type? Tusks, horns, hooves to a centaur lower half. This suggests that as with Skaven, their mutations draw from a singular coherent source.
-If the feet petrify first, how do they move with any dexterity at all?
-If the blood vessels petrify first, how did the flesh parts stay alive?
-Did the petrification slow down towards the torso or was the petrification fatal by then?
Magic as you know it flows primarily through the arms and chest, and under very few circumstances would it concentrate in the lowest extremities of the body. But you know next to nothing of the nature of the magic the Chaos Dwarves use. Is it Divine Magic that flows from below? Is their strange God physical, rather than ephemeral? Would that be related to their affinity for fire and molten rock and metal? If it is Arcane Magic of some sort, and they deliberately push what they cannot expel downwards? Or does something in the nature of it make it obey the call of gravity, rather than flowing through the air like the Winds? Or is seeking a logical answer a fool's errand when dealing with Dark Magic?
Given what we know, petrification happens where it touches magic, so its not being pushed down, but being pulled up. Drawn from the earth using their affinity for stone?
Too many questions, not enough data. You give the completed translation and the attached metal printing plates your approval and have them sent north for printing and distribution. It's not quite sensitive enough to be classified, but as your colleague Lord Magister Grey has learned, the Chaos Dwarves are just as capable of holding a grudge as their uncorrupted cousins. So the true authors are classified, and anyone without the clearance to learn the truth of the matter from a College librarian will have to be satisfied with directing their gratitude towards Magister Grey and Journeyman Gold.
[Anatomy of the Fire Dwarves of Zharr-Naggrund. Subject: Rare, +1. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Compelling, +1. Exotic, +1. Thorough, +1. Varied, +1. Tactically Relevant, +1. Anonymous, -1. Total: 7.]
A wise choice.
Nevermind if Moulder realized we plagarized their work heheh.
...wonder what the College thought of the paper.
The second floor of the White Tower plays host to much less serene studies, as you and Johann turn your attention to your pile of Skaven artefacts. The Ratling Gun has been Johann's focus for years, and it bears the scars of several attempts at exploratory dismantling. You ring the workstation with Johann's stolen blueprints and books on engineering and warpstone, which certainly helped Johann rebuild it after his probings but focus entirely on how to assemble and maintain the devices without going into any of the underlying theory.
Dude is persistent, but just has no luck.
First things first, you bring your well-developed Windsight to bear on the bulky machine, and immediately regret it. Though the ammunition for it has been removed and safely stored away, the device is dense with absorbed Dhar and immediately gives you the sensation of nausea centered in each of your eyes. You fight back the impossible urge to attempt to vomit from your retinas, double check that the Room is indeed whisking away and safely venting any radiating Dhar, and begin to study it more cautiously.
Vomit from eyes, like JoJo vampires?
Kind of curious how the materials withstand being immersed in so much Dhar without breakdown. Does it just not work like that?
Reasoning it would make the most sense to follow the journey the ammunition itself takes, you begin furthest from the gun itself. The backpack mechanism is extremely complex due to the compartmentalization required to keep the huge amount of ammunition it contains from causing runaway reactions, and though it's not a difficult task to puzzle out the mainspring-and-flywheel mechanism, you quickly run into the first of the walls that Johann encounters - the amount of energy the backpack should be capable of storing would rotate no more than a quarter of its cargo out of their compartments, and much less when one takes into account that the flywheels appear to be cannibalizing the device's own motion to feed back into the mainspring. You compare your notes with Johann's, and find them in agreement. You scowl and move on to the next step.
Okay, this part is an engineering challenge. The mechanism does:
-Ammunition separation to avoid chain reactions. This is valuable for gunpowder as well, in that it prevents the powder's elements from separating due to environmental conditions, but thats on a high concept design level and not Mathilde's meddling.
-Recoil fed reloading action. This should be something an engineer could do, though probably not as easily, but its mostly an engineering problem.
-Mechanized reloading action. Something adds energy to the system.
The hose that links backpack and gun is made of a black material unknown to you, which somehow has the properties of being both resilient and flexible. An exploratory cut reveals that the material is uniform all the way through, except for abrasions on the inside caused, you assume, by the passage of the balls the Ratling Gun fires.
Rubber tubing. Nothing much we could do for this one since theres no spells for it and theres no basis for understanding where the material even comes from.
That and the Empire seems to be in the wrong climate band for plants with suitable sap. You want somewhere hot and moist.
The impetus for the motion is part of the gun itself, where part of the mechanical energy of the crank being turned powers a pair of bellows as well as the gates that route the air; on the exhalation, the air blows down the revolving barrels, presumably to cool them and clear them of any blockages, while the inhalation pulls the shot up the hose. Again, all well and good, but a careful test of the mechanism - with the barrel pointed away from anything fragile, just in case - shows you that the suction is about what you'd expect from a hand-cranked bellows, and considering the weight of the warpstone-infused shot, nowhere near enough to account for the rate of fire. This is Johann's second stumbling point, and he has no more idea than you how to bypass it.
...this bit is just looney tunes, the bellows can't remove enough heat OR apply enough suction to move ammunition unless it was completely airtight and close fit. I'd guess Mathilde underrated the blockage clearing issue - warpstone powder blockages are a great deal nastier than black powder blockages, at much lower concentrations too.
The third link in this infuriating chain is the firing mechanism itself, where the hose delivers the warpstone shot to a mechanism twinned to the revolving barrels so that it drops it into a firing chamber as it arrives in the uppermost position. The third of Johann's walls is the most obvious of all: there's no mechanism for delivering gunpowder, just a holding mechanism for a piece of pure warpstone. It's the same sort of thing one often sees in the 'warplock' designs, where a fragment of pure warpstone reacts with warpstone-infused gunpowder, which causes ignition a lot more reliably than flint on frizzen.
Its a firing pin mechanism! But without cartridges?!
You're starting to understand how Johann could spend so much time on this and get nowhere. You spend some time watching Wolf and Skufit and the Wolf-Rats frolic through their park, and then return to the laboratory to grind away at the myster
Commercial break for frolicking puppers.
You use a freshly-laundered white handkerchief to rub down the interior of the firing mechanism, and do the same with one of the more conventional warplock weapons and a mundane flintlock weapon, and examine all three under a microscope. The handkerchief applied to the two more conventional weapons picked up faint black stains visible to the naked eye, and they looked fairly similar under a microscope, except for the sharp, angular fragments of refined warpstone dust mixed in with the warplock stain. But the handkerchief applied to the Ratling Gun came out clean to the naked eye, and the microscope reveals nothing but warpstone dust. You take the handkerchiefs a safe distance away from the eyeball hazard of the Ratling Gun, and to your Windsight it's quite clear that the dust from the Ratling Gun is of a significantly greater potency than that from the warplock, which suggests an answer.
Ooo, smokeless powder! Except using warpstone so no go there.
The next experiment is technically a breach of the Articles of Imperial Magic, but it's one covered by Johann's permission slip, so on a clear day with Morrsleib nowhere to be seen the two of you take the warpstone firing crystal and some of the bullets far out into the mountains. You have faith in Kragg's work, but you're also not an idiot, so you use extremely thick gloves to attach the firing crystal to an extremely long stick, and while sheltering behind a rock you clumsily do your best to bring it into contact with one of the bullets, and sure enough there's something almost like an explosion that shatters the stick in your hands and sends the bullet skittering away across the stone.
Definitely not an idiot.
That is an explosion I'd not want to get involved in even with a seed of rebirth.
It also suggests some things that were only lightly hinted at earlier about just how incredibly
strong the metalwork of the gun barrel and the seals are to withstand multiple hits of that per minute.
With equal caution, you return the firing crystal to its holder and retrieve the bullet, noting the damage it has taken. Johann was watching its trajectory carefully, and points you towards the stone it rebounded from, none of which is anywhere near as marred as the bullet despite being significantly more fragile than warpstone-infused metal.
"All the retrieved shots we've studied have similar markings, and nobody thought anything of it," you part-explain, part-vent to Johann on the way back. "Propelled by an explosion and into metal or bone or what have you, of course it would be damaged. But this one has the same markings even though it only bounced around the place."
"So the shot itself explodes," he says. "Why only part of it?"
"It's not..." You pause, and consider what an explosion technically can and can't be. "It's an explosion, but it's not an ignition explosion. The part of the shot closest to the firing crystal is flash-decaying into Dhar, and my best guess is when it transforms from solid warpstone to intangible Dhar, it goes through a gaseous phase, and the gas would have much more volume than the solid warpstone."
"Like a steam mechanism," Johann says. "Except boiling warpstone instead of water." He frowns as he considers that. "That's insane."
This one...we can do with magic.
Cheating with AV aside, a firing pin loaded with Flashboil and water filled bullets should be able to produce a similar phenomenon.
Might be a good time to rope Adela in, we're looking at several significant engineering problems with proximate solutions nearby
"Effective, though," you admit. "No wonder you couldn't figure it out. It's a warpstone reaction, and nobody's stupid enough to use Tale of Metal or Breach the Unknown on warpstone."
"You'd be surprised," is his somber response. "We have a wing at Frederheim from that sort of thing. I had to serve six months there as an Apprentice."
Its...good to make sure they know the consequences of doing it wrong before they learn how to. Wonder if its mandatory, or if they realized Johann was the type to just use the two spells on everything and thus needed an education in how it could go wrong?
At your return, you work your way back through the machine based on this new understanding of the firing mechanism, and the firing chamber being horrifically dense with vaporizing warpstone provides the key to unlocking the other mysteries. Dhar calls to Dhar, and in sufficient quantities it would be more than enough to draw in warpstone-infused shot. The crank only needs to begin and sustain the reaction, not power it entirely, and after the first few bullets have been fed through the backpack mechanism, the magical draw on the rest can be tapped into to restore the flywheel to full power once more. It is an absolutely Skaven machine: cunning elegance built around a core of pure insanity. And, unfortunately, completely reliant on warpstone.
Its pretty aesthetic except for the part where its built around boiling concentrated warpstone powder.
You pen your notes and sketch a few charts of the full workings of the device, as well as jot down a few ideas on how one might throw a wrench into the works.
[Learning, 54+27+20(Windsage)+9(Library: Warpstone)=110.]
Hmm, theres a few obvious ones:
-If the barrel is clogged by
anything its going to blow up. Theres too much energy involved per shot.
-If you speed up the flywheel enough its going to blow up. The ammo cycles too quickly for the operator to notice in time if multiple rounds wind up in the firing chamber at once.
-Actually just shoot the bloody backpack. It'd blow up.
In less explody senses, knowing exactly how fast the things operate and how many rounds they can go before reload is tactically very significant.
Johann's research into the gem hits an early stumbling block after he cast a spell on it, froze up, and staggered out of the laboratory. For the next week, he refused to do anything productive and had his wolf-rats fetch him food. "Just once," Johann says to you after emerging, "just once I'd like to cast Tale of Metal and find myself watching a master craftsman explaining the process to an apprentice or something. Not experience two hundred semisubjective years of the life of the world's most boring tree."
Johann just has no luck with these things huh?
You turn your gaze to the black gem. "It's... what, a fruit?"
"Charcoal, I guess. It was growing at the base of a volcano, and the volcano eventually erupted. Immediately afterwards people appeared - Cathayan or Nipponese by the look of them - and dug the tree out of the solidified lava, found a piece of it they liked, and cut and shaped it like a gemstone, which is when the spell ended." He sighs and grimaces. "At least the birds were nice. I named them."
Bolded for emphasis. This is...deliberately set up? Otherwise people wouldn't have harvested that quickly.
Also :3 he likes animals. Named the wee birdies too.
Without anything further to go on, your attention turns to the other spell at Johann's disposal, which he has to spend some time convincing himself to cast.
His poor brainmeats.
"Oh," he says as the magic sinks into his brain, as he frowns and screws his eyes shut. "Oh, that's got a lot of foreign concepts tied into it. Oh, I don't like that." He stands up and walks around the room on shaky legs. "Emperor Luitpold is a person, right?"
"Yes," you say cautiously.
"Then I guess we can confirm this as Cathayan, because my brain is insisting he must be a dragon. Oh, that's going on the cognitohazard list. Okay. It's repellant antimagic, except for Divine magic."
Does this happen at all often with Breach the Unknown?
"Okay, Arcane antimagic. That's straightforward enough."
"Except Divine is- no, it isn't, but according to the system of values that..." He takes a deep breath.
"Are you okay?"
"It's fine, it's temporary, it will pass, I was trained for this. Okay. Divine and Arcane are - by them - divided differently. They consider High Magic and Dark Magic to be Divine, and other magics to be Arcane."
"Antimagic that doesn't work on Dark Magic," you say with a frown.
"Yeah, I just scrambled my brain twice for the world's stupidest talisman. I'm going back to bed."
In the beginning, there was the Absolute(Sevir).
It divided into two. Yang the radiant, creative force(Qhyash) and Yin the hungry destructive force(Dhar).
From Yin and Yang forms the Ba Gua, the Eight forms.
Theres more to the rock...if only we knew enough Cathayan magic theory to aim our guesses at stuff.
Guess we can hope the translated books show something good?
