but it's still something you've been meaning to correct with when you had a spare moment.
remove "with"?
That could breach the compartment. Something materializing inside something else is often as bad for the something else as it is for the something.
I don't understand this argument. If you are trying to enter a room for rescue (as in the update), these are the two events: 1) Mathilde tries to enter it. 2) Mathilde pushes a stick in to check if there is light.
In both scenarios, the room risks breaching if there is light. 1) Mathilde breaches the room by merging her own body with the door. 2) The stick breaches the room by being merged. I do not see any scenario in which 2) is worse than 1). Alternative 2 tends to lead to a smaller breach since the stick is smaller than Mathilde, it also has less risk of death for her.
The only scenario in which using the stick might be bad is if Mathilde refused to risk herself at all. In that case, the alternatives would be 1) Using the stick. and 2) Not attempting to enter at all. That is not what happened, though.
The Bandits are 100%, absolutely positive, a patsy. They almost certainly have no idea who they're working for, and probably don't even know who they were attacking.
Chasing them is a waste of time at best, and getting led by the nose at worst. They are a red herring that has no real way of escaping in the long run.
And you're acting like the one who 'Put them up to this' wasn't also a patsy.
Like in order to hire someone, you have to show up in your real persona, as the actual person who wants it done.
This is Big deep play here, if it's Marienberg--we'd need to chase several layers of proxies to get to the bottom of this because they do not want the Karaz Ankor to have an official Causus Belli on them. The other factions have actual magic that can make them functionally untraceable, which kills the trail there too.
Assuming that whoever ordered this
was smart and connected enough to use several layers of proxies… I still don't see how chasing them is a red herring unless you mean "catching the outermost layer and then immediately giving up."
If you want to unravel several layers of proxies, going from one proxy to the next is the obvious way. Indeed, the simple confirmation that there
are people who have hired the "bandits" (and what those exact orders were) would be a boon. Similarly, finding out whether the mine was magical/mechanical or both would similarly tell us more about who might have organized this.
Ideally, Mathilde would chase down whoever hired the attackers, find out who hired them, find out who hired them, find out who hired them, etc etc until she found the real culprits.
