My dear gentlefolk of the thread, you supporters of Panoramia, Johann and yes, dear Oswald! Let us join together in opposition to the Omegabloc. Indeeed, we must form... an Alphabloc!
We must form a plan that allows us to socialize with our chosen love interests and prevent the dread Omegans from crushing us. Remember, though diverse, with unity we can hold the line.
Yes, I acknowledge that to embark upon this path would be to engage in a long and arduous Cold War, but we must remember what we fight for.
Imagine the horror that might come if the Omegans rule unopposed. How long before they grow intoxicated with voter supremacy, and slide more into temptation. You know where it leads... to foul necromancy and worse... turning Mathilde into a harem protagonist, maybe even with Abelheim at its head.
No. We cannot, I beg you. Join the Alphabloc, and the forces of Order will stand tall against such temptation!
A sad day, but perhaps it was inevitable this would come to pass.
[*] Plan: Fight Dragon with Dragon
-[*] MAX: Receive dictation.
-[*] JOHANN: Write a paper: Ratling Gun mechanism and countermeasures
-[*] DUCK: Spend time with Hubert to try to ensure a good relationship between him and magic, and between him and his identity as a Wizard.
-[*] EIC: Lend the services of the Hochlander, and the EIC's intelligence and contacts, to Roswita to help track down the Talabeclanders buying peat from the vampires.
-[*] Commission an altar based on (boosted) Transformation of Kadon.
--[*] Able to transform non-wizards.
--[*] Optimized to reduce destructive consequences in case of miscast.
--[*] Can only be activated by a Dwarf not currently being transformed.
--[*] Can only be activated with one of three keystones.
--[*] Transportable but heavy and unwieldy enough that even the resulting dragon can not just carry it away.
--[*] COIN: The Gambler
-[*] Travel to the Grey College and attend lessons there: Staff Turning
-[*] Attempt to interest a prominent and knowledgeable Runesmiths in the interaction between Runes and Vitae. (will start at the top and work your way down)
-[*] Dictate papers:
--[*] Queekish-Reikspiel Dictionary, including spoken Low Queekish
--[*] Insight on Skaven tactics and strategy
-[*] PENTHOUSE: Have a tower built atop Karag Nar
-[*] SERENITY: Write a paper: Brief observations on Eshin Sorcery
You brief the Hochlander - he has a name, but it sounds so very mysterious to just call him the Hochlander - in a gyrocopter headed north, telling him his task is to provide what support he can to Roswita in the matter of tracking down whoever is bankrolling the remaining land-holding vampires in Sylvania by buying peat from them. Not only is it a worthy task, but it will also give you a better idea of how he operates, whether he works through the EIC, establishes an entirely new network, or tracks the merchants personally.
You drop him off in Nuln for him to make his own, less attention-getting way to his task from there, and then move on to Altdorf. You have a massive commission on behalf of King Belegar to drop into the laps of the Amber College, one the result of a great deal of thought on your part. You spent a great deal of time consulting your library, trying to decide which piece of battle magic would be most helpful in a fight against a dragon, but in the end you realized you were coming at it from the wrong direction. The Dwarves are entirely capable of directing a bewildering and varied barrage at a dragon, should the need arise, and it makes no major difference to add a magical shot to that volley. What is needed is a reason for the dragon to expose itself to that barrage in the first place, and though you spent some time considering mental trickery to accomplish that, eventually you decided you needed a genuine motivation, one that did not require directly influencing the foe.
In the end, you settled on Transformation of Kadon. How better to counter a dragon, than another dragon?
Through the process of internal requests that the Colleges operate on, you've received word that the person to talk to on this matter is Lord Magister Luuk Schild, as well as allowing you to arrange a meeting. It is oft said that the Amber Order has no College in Altdorf - you may have said it a time or two yourself - but while that is true, they do have a tower, if something so squat and festooned with gargoyles can be described as a tower. Built before Teclis reached an accord with the shamanic brotherhood that is the ancestor to the modern Amber Order, it exists today solely as a letterbox and very occasionally as a meeting room. It is said that the door appears only when the Amber Wind blows strongest, but that would be extremely impractical.
Lord Magister Luuk is a squat and muscled man, hairless except for bushy eyebrows and exuding an aura of Ghur that puts your teeth on edge. He is a man of few words, and when you explain to him the specifics of what you want, he furrows his brow and says a single word: "Why?"
"To fight other dragons," is your wonderfully succinct answer.
"What sort?"
"Our main concern is ice."
He wrinkles his nose, and then nods. "Come back at midwinter."
You're quite pleased at how simple that was to commission, but you can't help but go over the final words he said as he walked out: "It'll be uglier than you think it'll be."
---
Staff turning, you quickly discover, is all the most boring parts of enchantment made even more boring.
Everything needs to be perfect, because it is to have every ounce of power a wizard wields run through it, as well as helping absorb ambient energies to cast those spells in the first place. There's no creativity, no cleverness, no puzzles. You make it as conductive to the Wind in question as you possibly can, and the only variation in results is in imperfections. There can be more to staffs than this - the Bright Order in particular delights in ones able to amplify specific spells - but that's not covered by the class.
Day by tedious day, you rote memorize the various ways to attune materials to a Wind. If you hadn't already spread word of the bounty on dragonbone, you might be tempted to drop the idea altogether and be satisfied with your sword and guns. But at long, long last, the day finally comes that there's nothing more for them to torment you with, and you flee before they change their mind.
[Skill added: Turning]
---
Returning to the sanctuary of your home, you settle in for a just as quiet but infinitely more interesting task. Once more Max and Johann are calling your Room of Serenity home while a bevy of papers are prepared, with only minor hitches as Johann experiments with different types of metallic inks to allow him to proofread his own work. This time, however, you're not quite able to fully lose yourself in the comfortable routine of academia, as you have to be careful exactly how your insights are presented. All three of the papers currently being written use understandings that you owe to the Liber Mortis, either directly in the case of Skaven strategy or indirectly via the understanding of Dhar it gave you that allowed you to puzzle out both the Ratling Gun and Eshin magic. You do have very good alternate explanations for how you could have come by that knowledge, but you'd much rather not have to explain in the first place.
The Ratling Gun paper is simple enough, as you have to rewrite a set of your notes for Johann anyway in inks visible to his Windsight; you simply leave off some of the more exact details of the firing mechanism, leaving it explained as a Warpstone-induced explosion instead of explaining precisely the flash-decay that the Warpstone firing crystal induces. The rest requires no more than an Apprentice-level understanding of magic's nature, as the attraction between Dhar and other magics is warned against early and often.
The second part of the paper is trickier, at least for Johann: countermeasures. He gets as far as Fault of Form and speculates on whether Law of Gold would be applicable, and runs out of steam. You take a break from your own papers to sketch out a few ideas, then a few more, and next thing you know the sun's gone down and you're looking at half a manuscript that spells out exactly how anyone with a modicum of magical talent can turn a firing Ratling Gun into a rapidly expanding cloud of shrapnel. Johann is more than happy to append it to the end of his effort and call it a day.
[Ratling Gun paper: Learning, 11+16+10(Breach the Unknown)+15(mostly thorough notes)=52.]
[Ratling Gun countermeasures: Learning, 6+16+9(Library: Warpstone)=31.]
[Mathilde interrupt: Learning, 100+27+5(Tactics: Skaven)+9(Library: Warpstone)-20(multitasking)=121.]
[Internal Mechanisms of the Ratling Gun, and How to Foil Them, 2483. Subject: Rare, +1. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Dull, -1. Precious, +1. Thorough, +1. Tactically Significant: +2. Classified, -2. Total: +4.]
Your work with Max quickly falls into a rhythm of surging forward with the paper on Skaven warfare when inspiration strikes, and falling back to the Queekish-Reikspiel Dictionary when it flags. There's no lack of information to draw from, ranging from your own experience, to that of human and Dwarven authors in your library, to the precious few texts on the subject you have from Skaven writers, to the insights provided by Qrech. And, of course, most precious of all, the war diary of Frederick van Hal, containing not only his own keen intellect but a few pearls of wisdom that must have come from he who would become Vlad von Carstein.
(You're distracted from your task by a while by an unexpected pang of regret that you levelled Castle Drakenhof. How much could you have learned from but a single book written by him?)
The paper does, you feel, suffer from the need to conceal the greatest source of your knowledge, as you're forced to reverse engineer plausible chains of logic of how you could have derived that information from your experiences or from more suitable texts. But Max once more rises to the occasion, and he manages to wrestle many a clumsy passage into submission where you were on the verge of excising it completely. The final product isn't as great as it was in your imagination, but so very little is, and it's readable, accessible, and delivers a lot of very useful information in a way that doesn't, you hope, raise questions. That's enough.
Writing the lexicon is, in comparison, no effort at all. Every possible stumbling block has already been encountered and defeated in the process of writing the Khazalid equivalent. You do spend some time on the side trying to come up with a better pronunciation guide, as well as spending a fair bit of effort on excising the text of any linguistic flourishes that you feel are identifiably yours or Max's, but it's more to keep your mind occupied while doing the long and dull task of cataloguing an entire language than anything that has much of an effect on the final product. After some discussion you label it simply: Queekish.
[Queekish, 2483. Pending.]
The final paper is more of a report than a full essay as you distil your lingering memories of the Eshin Sorcerer, and the notes you took at the time, into as much raw data as possible. Grey Seers are notorious and feared, as are the Warlock-Engineers of Clan Skryre, but the existence of an Eshin-specific brand of warp magic was known only by a few dubious accounts and mostly thought to be fictional. You saw proof to the contrary, and saw one wield magic that seems to be to Ulgu what necromancy is to Shyish, and thus is completely distinct to the magic of the Grey Seers, and disproving theories that the possibility of such a hybrid with Dhar was unique to Shyish. So even with its brevity, and even with the necessity of secrecy, you've no doubt that even this short a paper will turn some heads.
When you return to Altdorf, not only will you be collecting a Battle Altar, you'll be dropping quite a payload of intelligence upon the Grey College. You can barely wait. The only question is: who will you present this linguistic coup to?
[ ] Emperor Luitpold
[ ] The Imperial Spymaster
[ ] Supreme Patriarch Dragomas
[ ] Magister Patriarch Algard
[ ] Other (write in)
- There will be a two hour moratorium.
- The identity of the Imperial Spymaster is unknown to you, as they officially do not exist. But this could get you a meeting.
- Whoever is chosen, it will be kept as secret as the Empire is capable of keeping it, and it will get to where it needs to go.
Through the process of internal requests that the Colleges operate on, you've received word that the person to talk to on this matter is Lord Magister Luuk Schild, as well as allowing you to arrange a meeting. It is oft said that the Amber Order has no College in Altdorf - you may have said it a time or two yourself - but while that is true, they do have a tower, if something so squat and festooned with gargoyles can be described as a tower. Built before Teclis reached an accord with the shamanic brotherhood that is the ancestor to the modern Amber Order, it exists today solely as a letterbox and very occasionally as a meeting room. It is said that the door appears only when the Amber Wind blows strongest, but that would be extremely impractical.
Algard is great. We have previous headpat-moments to play off, he'll be very appreciative (unlike those low-Intrigue Dawi), and he's witty and fun. Let's give it to him.
Joking aside though, Mathilde's getting a reputation by this point, huh?
"The one you talk to when you really want our enemies to have just no fun at all", huh? Between the "How to fuck Greenskin Magic" seminar, to the "How to counter one of the most dangerous anti-infantry weapons ever made that even an apprentice can do", to "How to just generally fuck the Skaven over because seriously they need to stop being cheaters"
Literally any of those 4 is capable of seeing it disseminated through the Imperial and allied hierarchy, albeit some with one or two more steps Than the other.
I'm inclined to give it to Patriarch Algard, as this is from "Magister Grey" and the fewer people who know who that might be the better. They'll probably have their suspicions, but the Grey Order aren't usually forthcoming about their information sources and I doubt Algard would be too chatty on this particular one, given its importance.
I think we should go Algard. He's our immediate superior, and I think he'll net us more favor and renown than a spymaster we have no rapport with. We don't know anything about this guy.
Question: Will we, or will we not, also be delivering the tech library? Because I'd rather have a solid answer than speculate endlessly, and this really does seem like the perfect time to turn it over.
