Johann arrived in Altdorf a few days before you did, to report his progress to his superiors and see to other internal matters of the Gold College.
Oh hey, our surprise social is Johann!
But the night before you were to arrive, he began a long and arduous process that was one of the most precious secrets of the Gold College: the distillation of magically-attuned Conceptual Gold, all you know of which is that it begins, in this case, with about six pounds of pure gold.
A pound of gold is about half a cubic inch. Six pounds of gold should be about as large as a clenched fist?
Or considering what happened, his eyeballs.
The Gold College is not just the wealthiest of the Colleges of Magic, but one of the wealthiest organizations in the entire Old World. The structure of the College itself is not hidden in any way, nestled into the corner of the city walls and the Reik for all to visit, or at least those wealthy enough to afford the products of modern alchemy, from pigments and dyes to medicines and poisons to magical elixirs. It might seem strange that the exterior of such a wealthy organization is so plain, boxy, and utilitarian. But as Altdorf learned during the fifteen-year siege of the Colleges during the reign of Deieter IV, the College being built beside and partially upon the Reik was not just to turn waterwheels and cool forges, as the low-lying streets that surround it were flooded by hidden sluices, turning the College into a formidable fortified position.
Transform and Roll Out.
...doubly so considering that those with Gilded lungs can do, any attackers are going to be facing wizards who can fight underwater in an amphibious assault. Any attempt to bridge the moats are faced with wizards who can command metal to disintegrate and flying over is asking to be filled with Silver Darts...
The growing picture of the Siege of the Colleges was basically the Emperor going "Mistakes Were Made".
If I got a spare moment later I'll see if I can go over the thread and list out what !!!Fun!!! each College used.
But the impression of defensibility evaporates as soon as one enters the College itself, as the reception area of the College is luxurious enough to make the wealthiest of clients feel at home, with thick carpets, velvet curtains and gilded statues displaying as little subtlety as the average Gold Wizard.
Mathilde casually tilting at the Golds. Heh.
Granted I'd not be surprised at all if the carpets concealed trapdoors, and the statues had missile launchers built into them.
When they do finally arrive, you tell them your business here, and are lead deeper into the College and down flight after flight of stairs. The ground floor is for books and business, and it is below that the real work happens, where the forgiving earth can absorb the consequences of any missteps.
I sometimes wonder whats the dissipation rate from this particular heat sink. Is it even possible to reach saturation on grounding magic in soil?
The laboratory you are lead to is far from the stereotypes, as it is clean, well-ventilated, well-lit, and empty of clutter, as alchemists that tolerate distractions and variables tend not to last too long.
*Eyes the RL guy who discovered phosphorus after leaving his basement full of buckets of piss and then forgetting about it for a few years to investigate the residue afterwards*
If they're lucky they could.
Johann looks up from a crucible as you enter and closes the lid on a chest of tools of some sort before rising to greet you. "Thank you for being here," he says, and there's a moment of awkwardness where he hesitates between holding his hand out to shake and going in for a hug, and you resolve the dilemma by stepping in. From touch alone, it's impossible to tell that the skin beneath his robes is at all abnormal.
This bodes well for his husbando prospects!
All the benefits of metal, none of the drawbacks!
"Of course," you say. "But I'm still not sure why. It's far from the first time you've done this."
"Arms and legs are one thing," he says as he turns back to the crucible, keeping a close eye on the simmering molten metal it contains, "and I had my former Master with me for my lungs. But she's busy siccing Golden Hounds on ghouls, and this was the only timeslot for the- for some of the tools."
Considering the way he closed the toolbox when he arrived and the way he's needed to rephrease himself here, he's a lot more nervous than he pretended to be.
Also those tools are probably Gold Order secrets he's being a little careless with.
You nod. "Alright, so what are you gilding? Another organ?" You glance around the room for surgical tools, and are relieved not to spot any.
"My eyes."
Scratch the relief. "Your- how?"
"It's a slightly different process. The vitreous fluid is replaced, and only the iris is gilded."
You grimace as you try not to imagine exactly how that occurs. "And you want me to be your spotter? What do I have to do?"
Well, they're all a wee bit crazy to get this high up.
Nice to see Mathilde is being direct about her shock and confusion for a change though.
"No, the part of the ritual that contains the potential damage also makes any intervention impossible. I just..." He looks up at you, and you can't help but notice the bags under his eyes before he turns back to the metal. "Someone to be here, and to get me back to the Karak if it goes wrong."
...uh Johann, you sure you want to do this ritual while on insufficient sleep?
Fifteen minutes of awkward small talk later, punctuated by the occasional bursting bubble of slowly boiling metal, the last of the preparations are complete and Johann has wheeled out a horrific-looking pair of metal funnels on a stand, which he adjusts to match the distance between his eyes.
"Both at once?" you ask.
"Might as well," he says with false bravado. "The ritual encompasses the optic nerve, so if I do one and it goes wrong, the heat will still radiate from one to the other."
You offer to help set it up, but you're quite relieved when he rebuffs you, and after filling the funnels with alchemically-altered gold, bolting them onto the bench, and fitting himself with a truly horrifying-looking headset that straps his eyelids open, he climbs atop the bench top and aligns himself under them. "If all goes well, this should only take ten minutes or so," he says.
*Screams internally*
"And if it doesn't?"
"Oh, we'll know right away," he says with a tense little laugh.
[Rolling...]
You know right away.
Ranald: "Oh its fine, nothing to worry about."
Reminds me of that fateful roll in Forge of Destiny where we were doing unspecifiec coinflips and it turned out to be literally 50% chance of no save just die.
Johann squeezes the bulb on an end of a pipe that opens the funnels, and somehow manages not to flinch as twin strands of gold with the consistency of honey stretch towards his held-open eyes, but though screaming is entirely appropriate given the situation, you've heard more than enough screams in your time to tell between terror and agony. The funnels snap shut as Johann drops the bulb, and you pull him out from under the mechanism by his feet so that the still-suspended gold can splash against the bench instead of Johann's face. But after that, all you can do is hold him as he thrashes and screams and his eyeballs boil away in his head.
Aaaaaaaaaa.
Holy shit re-reading it didn't make it less queasy to read.
But it DID show that the setup was pretty well thought out - the gold spigot is on a dead-man switch, if they fail the flow will stop and there'd probably be enough left to bury or regenerate. Also some of the gold is still unused and thats a plus.
And doing this without someone you trust on hand has got to be
terrible for concentration.
"That could have gone better," he says to you again. He's said it several times that morning.
"It could have," you agree again.
"Could have gone worse, though," is the next line, and you nod in agreement, before remembering that he can't see you nodding. The magic to bind the Conceptual Gold to his eyes had failed, but the magic to contain the effect to his eyes had not.
"What's the plan from here," you ask, as he seems to be a little more sure of what he's saying, and you hope that means he's come to terms with it. "Jade College?"
"No point turning back on gilding," he says, holding a hand up to touch his blindfold. "It would be years before the Chamon fades enough for another Wind to heal the damage. Once the scarring is complete, I can attempt it again. I've got enough savings for a second attempt once the failed batch is salvaged. Assuming it succeeds, it will be like it never went wrong."
It's clear he's as much reassuring himself as he is telling you. You consider reaching over to pat his hand, but you don't want to startle him. So instead you murmur agreement, and lead him to the waiting gyrocarriage to take him home.
Hmm, could be an opportunity to work on his magesight?
I don't think anyone'd begrudge a vacation slot with his work action next turn.
It's out on one of these platforms that you find the Chief Bombardier of the Undumgi, who's focusing most of his attention on the slate in his hands, though with regular glances out at the view. Following his gaze, you see flickers of colour far below as tiny marker flags flap in the breeze. You know that the entirety of the firing arc of these guns have been ranged and mapped in advance, but that doesn't remove the need for the Gunnery School to teach trajectories and trigonometry to their students, and it seems the master of those students is a believer in keeping his skills honed.
Hmm, wonder how big a factor wind drift is here.
"This is my magic," he says proudly, looking up at you and tapping his chalk against the slate. "We follow the ritual of cleaning and loading, we do the arcane calculations, we make an offering of fire, and if we did it all just right, thirty-six pounds of iron travelling at a mile every four seconds goes exactly where I want it to."
"That would make for a handy spell," you say with a smile, "though most Wizards tend to prefer more portable foci."
"Seen a Battle Altar or two in my time that would disagree."
He's seen a Battle Altar in action huh?
*eyes the Anvils of Doom*
They're a sight to see alright.
"Speaking of, how goes their formation?" you ask, taking a seat beside him on his bench.
"Tricky, tricky," he says, waving a hand. "Aloof and aloft would come all too natural, with these cannon perched up here. A separate class of professional artillerists is the natural answer, but that dragon of yours has me nervous."
"My dragon?" you ask.
"You're the one that made friends with it, aren't you? Same as that one in Sylvania."
You open your mouth, and then mentally shrug. "Sure."
"Not many dragons around, but there's wyverns and manticores and fell bats in these mountains, and that's just the start of it, and you can't make friends with them all. And it would be a terrible waste to leash the gyrocopters to us. So every gunner, says I, must be as adept with steel as the rest of the Undumgi, and I turn them over to Soizic on the regular for them to be terrorized into competence. So they can defend themselves against flying gribblies, and so they can march shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us if we must fight outside the shadows of the Karags."
Hmm, wouldn't be as good at their trade as a full specialist, but it doesn't take much to at least be able to put up a fight if a wyvern deep-striked the artillery instead of just dying without a save.
The really hard part is maintaining the drill discipline needed for pike on top of wielding artillery...but keeping their pikes isn't a bad call for an artillerist, pikes should be pretty good against any winged fliers short of a dragon(which would just strafe and fry them), especially if the closer ranks formed up against the flier while the further ones prepare for danger close artillery.
You consider his words. Specialism as a doctrine reigns supreme over the Empire's modern military theory, but modern military theory is based heavily on a core of semiprofessional regiments stiffening up a largely untrained militia. The Empire's few truly professional soldiers are specialists to balance out the huge supply of effectively generalist amateurs. There's an argument to be had here that the Undumgi as an entirely professional force should break with traditional thinking. But even if there wasn't, interfering now would do more harm than good, undermining the existing command structure and breeding resentment where currently there is harmony. "The Dwarves would likely agree," you say. "Every Dwarf that marches to war is trained to a standard at least equal to that of the Empire's swordsmen, even the gun crews and Thunderers and Quarrellers."
Kragg: [Grumbles nervously while eying his Ancestor Runes]
Its...I'd hazard to say theoretically achievable, but they'd need to dedicate an inhumane amount of their free time to maintaining fitness in both fields...at least, if it worked like regular humans.
The Gauntlet is not a place of glory, not any more. It is a place of endless mechanical precision, where the regular rabble of greenskins forced down the Underway path are mown down as dispassionately as water is pumped out of a mine below the water table. The passage itself is harshly illuminated by a series of polished bronze mirrors redirecting the light of several constantly-burning bonfires, and though the Dwarves keep the passage clear of solid remains to deprive would-be invaders of any cover, no amount of cleaning would manage to clear away the layer after layer of bloodstains that have formed. Only a cunning series of bellows to force the airflow towards Black Crag prevents the smell from being overpowering.
Must be terrible footing, thats like, enough blood to be visible archeologically, and in the underground environment it'd be getting poor ventilation, so its likely to remain in a moist state as the surface dries, which means good odds of slipping on a run if you hit a wetter spot. Amazing growth environment for mold and fungi too, if not for the bellows and the dry heat of their braziers, mold would be a serious problem on the fortifications.
Reminds me of the stains-on-stains-on-stains of Dwarf Fortress.
Also I like the mirror setup. Is that a repurposed lighthouse beacon construction?
But it's still far from pleasant, and you find yourself breathing through your mouth as you consider the sign in Khazalid mounted above one of the watchposts.
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE FROM THE SPIDERS
IF YOU MUST APPROACH, BE SURE THEY HAVE SEEN YOU FIRST
DO NOT MAKE SUDDEN MOVEMENTS NEAR THEM
Considering the Hunters here would be operating on instinct and instruction, rather than a live connection to the We, it's a sensible set of precautions. Looking up at the roof, you can see the lines of webbing that allow the Hunters to move even faster than they usually would towards their unconventional hunting ground.
Running on autopilot.
This does explain their Food, Not-Food, Sometimes-Food terminology, its something they can remember even while disconnected and working on individual processing. Don't need to remember why, just to know that dwarf, halfling and human are Not-Food
Also thats neat a spider highway. Better grip than the blood slick ground too.
"How have they been doing?" you ask the Longbeard currently in command.
"They stay up there, we stay down there, and everyone's happy," he says with a shrug. "They wander up the Gauntlet to try to pick off greenskins when it's quiet, and seem to be doing alright at it. Half the time the first warning we have of an incoming assault is a bunch of them coming back at once and all the rest of them darting into side tunnels to wait until the shooting stops. Then they pick over the battlefield and take away any of them still wriggling, then the Halflings show up for the rest, then we wait for the next lot."
Some unexpected side-benefits. Spiders acting as expendable forward scouts and early warning systems lets the cannons and guns maximize effectiveness.
Also Panoramia's compost heaps must be pretty amazing by now.
Just how much Karak Drazh biomass are we heaping onto that?
"No problems?"
"Some idiots that don't read signs," he says with a shrug. "The venom mostly wears off, and what's left over is a cheaper lesson than most in doing what you're told on a battlefield. Thre's some grumbling, but no more than normal."
Theres always going to be Some Idiot doing that sort of thing.
As injuries go a paralytic bite before the We realizes what they're biting and cancels the attack order is pretty mild.
And if they got the Longbeards okay with it the dwarves are okay with it.
"Karak-We-green-food is five-eighths sufficient," the We spokesspider relays to you from its position of pride on one of the We's golden walls of tesselated coins, "Hunting in..." it pauses as it considers the phonetics, which is no mean feat for a species that communicates non-verbally. "'Black-Crag' is two-eighth sufficient. Final one-eighth from Karak-We-gold-food. This is a suitable many-food."
So the cannons account for 5/8 of their dietary needs, which is semi-expected, those weapons kill a lot of orcs, not many proportionally alive enough to capture for food processing(based on RL spiders, they CAN eat dead meat, but the Hunters likely won't cart corpses back because they can't do complex logic and they aren't starving enough to expand the definitions of Food.
Hunting in Black Crag of course captures ALL live prey which goes directly to food budget.
Eyeballing: if we assume the guns leave one in ten crippled but alive(this is mostly arbitrary, orcs are ungodly tough biologically but I'm assuming rake them till they stop advancing would approximate similar ratios), the We must be putting a significant, though not serious dent into the orc population with their live caps.
"Are the Black-Crag-green-four-legs becoming more sometimes-not-food?" You'd consulted your notes on the speech patterns of the We in preparation for this meeting.
"Green-four-legs-sometimes-food are very sometimes," it says, and though the circlet does not relay tone, you can sense the frustration with greenskin unpredictability that is common to so many of their enemies. "But the We have hunted green-four-legs for many-Echo. If they become more sometimes-not-food, we will learn how to make them more sometimes-food. We do not wish a no-food."
This is a beautiful turn of phrase and I hope we steal it sometimes.
"Nor do we," you say with a smile, and mean it. The We are undeniably strange beings, but under their alien mindview was a charming and unselfish simplicity of being. "Into what are you growing your not-food-gold?" They'd stumbled onto the concept of accounts, by splitting their Karak-We-gold into food-gold and not-food-gold. You're starting to wonder how the economists of the University of Altdorf would react to the creatures.
...they figured out investments on their own!
I'm guessing from their perspective its like...the money is basically dumber Web-Weaver castes, you can store them to use as food when times are lean, or you can put them to work so that you need less food/get more food.
Except with the market for silk they gained the concept of Non-Food Value, and that you could convert food to it.
So why not set aside enough money to buy enough food(Esmeraldan principles - always have enough food to not go hungry) to avoid starvation if the orcs dry up, and then invest the rest into increasing worth?
"We wish to know of not-We-Wes," it says, with a happy chitter of its mandibles. "The Karak-We is part of the Karaz-We, which is in a many-food with the Empire-We, which itself is made up of smaller-Wes which are made of smaller-Wes which are made of smaller-Wes. And each not-We is alone in its We, but it still seeks bigger-We.
You know, that sounds a lot like a course on diplomacy, politics and history?
They could join Qrech in their correspondence courses.
They could buy a LOT of correspondence courses, the limitation would be memory efficiency. Or Extensive book collections.
It is frightening and inspiring. Any other-We with a single Egg-Layer would be frightened, would seek only the safest food. But not-We are only ever one not-We, but they still hunt, and they hunt such that if they were other-We, we would consider it mating-suitability.
The We are learning from the Gauntlet the lessons of teamwork and unity. And it looks like we may have accidentally discovered the Giant Spider Hive Romance section.
Even you hunt, and you are the most-Echo of the not-We, who must know how only one you are."
You take a moment to digest that. "I do know how only one I am," you say. "But I will never not be only one. So I would rather hunt well, than not."
Echo is usually used as a measure of time, but also of memory so hmm, terminology wise this is basically most-experienced?
Don't let the longbeards hear.
Taking from another perspective, this seems to refer to our bond with Wolf, they can recognize that we are a pair of linked minds somehow. Investigating how their communication and thoughts work sounds fascinating.
It chitters again. "We are glad to be in a many-food with your Karak-We."
Love ya too spooders!
They prepare 'meals' for the other castes by regurgitating digestive fluid onto their paralyzed captives, as the other castes are incapable of producing that fluid and cannot digest solid food.
Huh, interesting. For RL spiders, producing the digestive fluid is an extremely biologically stressful activity, which greatly shortens their lifespans(spiders fed exclusively on already liquid food live much longer than spiders which must produce digestive fluid).
Also that makes them basically spider-cooks.
When two Hives are in proximity, Web-Weaver 'messengers' are exchanged to communicate, and it is neither uncommon nor considered noteworthy for one or both to 'keep' a messenger from the other.
Hmm, so:
-Web Weavers are mindless, can hibernate and can carry messages between hives.
-Hunters have animal intelligence, cannot hibernate and cannot carry memories between hives, they are reformatted after they switch hives.
-Egg-layers are never exchanged. They can both think and remember.
It sounds like the reason Hunters need to be reformatted on adoption is that their memories are structured as executing thoughts, while Web Weavers are plaintext data storage.
