"Dwarves? Yes, I do... Though now I am wondering if it might be an example of invention beyond Dwarven craft."

Dwarves?? What is this, Tolkein? They live underground, right? Well, there are already dragons. What about elves? Goblins? Trolls? Giant spiders, orcs, and Balrogs? Or some genre of fantasy derived from it more like... Like some damned anime. Ugh.

"Dwarf gun-smithing far exceeds human gun-smithing, if you can afford it. You'll be able to see an example of it in action, hopefully, we're trying to coordinate our purge with another purge from the other side from the Zhufbar Throng."

"I have a few hundred rounds of various types left still. Some twenty bombardment, two hundred guided, one hundred piercing. I can convert them with time. Perhaps I could serve first as scout or courier and use what I have sparingly for now, though forgive me, you don't seem like a field commander."

Mathilde allows some of her terror at the possibility show through. "No, on the battlefield I'm a good obedient soldier. More useful than a regular knight but not a qualitatively different thing. I have other strengths. Here, my job is to make sure that you're an asset at all, and to advise the commanders on how to think of that asset."

Not Bureaucracy. Intel. The strategy is much the same, though.

"I had a command position before suddenly and inexplicably turning up here. Alas, there is nothing I can do for my comrades now, so to the future, no? I'm sure my cached tactics and doctrine are largely irrelevant here, of course. And I'm sure you will arrive on a judgement of my reliability quite on your own. For what it's worth, I understand the nature of incentives."

Shyish is creeping up her body, adding to the faint hints already present. Kind of hard to make out against the bright sun of her operation orb and torso, though.

"I will take your information under advisement, though I suspect you will not have a command position under normal circumstances - Battle Wizards are expected to focus on not blowing themselves up, and literally everything else up to and including basic social skills comes second to that. Are your capacities typical of mages, where you come from?"

"Imperial mage doctrine is centered around the flight boot and operation orb, each of which can maintain a single spell at a time. A matter of skill in not blowing oneself up, allowing more unstable tools- I can maintain four spells plus flight at once, making me a remarkably potent and flexible combatant even by Imperial Mage standards. Particular focus on ranged combat and aerial maneuvering, less so the melee."

That's ... got a lot of implications, honestly. "So most mages would not be able to do what you did, at the Blasphemy of Blood?"

"Not alone, at any rate. A full squad, let alone a platoon, could certainly have managed it. A sitting target like that, though, that's what you call in the big tubes of divisional artillery for. I was showing off and demonstrating my willingness to oppose whatever the fuck that actually was."

"I don't think anyone really has a good idea of what the Blasphemy of Blood actually was. I was going to follow up on that now that the region is safer to investigate, but, well. You seemed more important."

Shrug.

"I know what I am, and that's not an engineer or spy. A clerk at heart, and soldier by necessity. I'll shoot or scout or slice and dice gribblies to earn my not-put-to-fire-and-sword for now, and everything else can be worked out later."

"Very fair. Is there anything else you want to have communicated to the commanders of this army, other arrangements that will enable you to work better with them during this interim period?" 

"I would appreciate some general background information? Oh, and mission, enemy, terrain, time. The mission is to destroy all undead in the area, or a sufficient number to establish dominance, yes? Good to always keep in mind what you actually want to do. Enemy, I need to know more about how they work. There was some sort of regeneration going on. Are there venomous specimens? Magically dangerous ones? Ranged attackers? Notable weaknesses? That kind of thing. Terrain is obvious enough if I do a few overflights. Maybe I can make maps. For time, how long is this overall campaign set to last? It's clearly not a lightning assault, that wouldn't work with horse wagons for supply trains."

"So, to summarise the background of the conflict - this is the provincial army of the province of Stirland, under the command of Elector-Count Ableheim Van Hal, and the area we're in is the Haunted Hills area on the border of Sylvania with Stirland. Sylvania fell to corruption when their counts married into vampire bloodlines and have been a blight on the face of the empire for hundreds of years since. 

The current campaign's goals are primarily to destroy as many minor to medium sized monsters and problems - things like the Blasphemy of Blood, while we have the military, diplomatic, and economic slack to do so, to ensure that when the next real war occurs whichever necromancer is running the other side can't drag all of these things up to supplement their army. Secondary objective is to build a road to enable further campaigns through these hills. A complete purge isn't realistic; the terrain is to too broken. Even if we achieved a total victory and killed every necromancer in the region forever, the land is so poisoned and there are so many little hidden caves, that even in five hundred years time there will still be ghouls and skeletons popping up. 

How undead work - obviously the exact details are classified, but the broad strokes of fighting them aren't. Many of the undead we'll be fighting are spontaneous and self-motivated products of the corruption of the land but intentionally created undead can often be killed by disrupting the formation they were raised in sufficently, or by killing the guiding necromancer. Many undead, especially vampires, can regenerate - though not forever, unless they're Vlad Von Carstein. If you do kill a vampire, keep track of the remains, though, and hand them off to a specialist for storage. A necromancer actively maintaining an army can repair and reanimate the fallen of both sides in real time - all the more reason for someone like you to focus on taking out the head. Some undead are quite venemous, yes - ghouls in particular. If they're ambiguously alive and unambiguously ravenous, that's probably a ghoul. Vampire and Necromancers often know dangerous magic, including spells intended to slay instantly - sometimes even on the scale of entire regiments. I doubt that we'll face anyone of that callibre in this campaign, but you can never be sure. Specters and banshees are also capable of striking through most mundane defences, and the latter have a killing scream as well. The only ranged attackers they will have are whatever local militia with shortbows or crossbows they've managed to press-gang, and precious few of those - even the most powerful necromancers often don't want to bother with the logistics burden of peasent archers in an army with otherwise perfect morale and no hunger or exhaustion. Instead, you should be wary of flying monsters - swarms of giant bats and vargeists are likely the worst we will see, but terrorgeists and reanimated dragons are not in principle impossible. 

Terrain-wise, these hills are some of the most broken and innavigable hills I've ever seen, and if we get through them, then on the other side is a nice wide stretch of cursed swamp and blighted forest, and on the other side of *that* is the thin strip of whatever excuse for farmland the Sylvanians have managed to maintain in the face of the levels of dark magic they have to deal with, and then somewhere on the other side of that is the World's Edge Mountains into which the Zufbar dwarves are dug. Hopefully, they'll be able to send us reinforcements, but they're busy dealing with some underground war of their own for now, against beastmen of some sort. 

Timing wise, this campaign was set to be three months but it's looking like it will drag out to longer. Less than a year, though, if it takes that long we'll have to pack up and go home." 

"All understood. I'd bet on passive shell to stop specters but don't know about active shell stopping heavy enemy magic. I'd also appreciate if a selection of whatever kinds of oil you have could be made available- Not food oil, alchemist stuff. For the flight boot. Some of it will be sufficient, I'm sure. Plus clean cloth. Aside from that, I'll need to talk to a Dwarf about replacing my ammo eventually, but I'll just use my bayonet on the fodder, if they want me to hunt fodder. All this is to maintain peak readiness. I'd also appreciate some sort of pay, eventually, or at least access to study materials. Well met and fine conversation. I'll submit myself to the command of Stirland." 

She snaps to parade rest with a salute.

Because being a good, zealous little weapon is what the Charters are aimed at. Better to be on 'best behavior' right away.

"I'll put in a request with the quartermaster, and see if there's room in the budget for fair wizard's pay for you. There should be, but I'm not the accountant." 

No need to alienate the archmage by stiffing her on a minimum wage she doesn't technically qualify for, after all. 

She turns to leave, striding with her best air of mysterious importance off to her tent, where she can start work on all the reports about this which desperately need to be written and sent off to her various masters. 

Tanya waits for a bit and writes notes.

She can't easily go exploring without being incredibly suspicious to everyone so she has to stay present and visible. Tragic.

And she'd rather stay busy and not think about the Rhine, her comrades, Being X...

The immediate future will be tricky what with everyone being suspicious of magic, but if she hangs around offering to go fly reports or stab zombies surely that will give her something to keep busy with eventually. She acts serious and diligent at all times, for days if necessary. She's literate, is that particularly a thing where help is needed?

There is much work to be done, but not much of it is 'worthy' of one of her importance (and terrifying-ness). She is asked, in the next week, to fly rapidly to reinforce three units - twice, to find a small knot of infantry holding against a larger force of zombies and skeletons, and one to find a sort of horrifying giant bat-wolf thing working it's way through devouring a pile of now-dead soldiers, but other than that, she is left largely alone and the common soldiers tread on eggshells around her. She is given her own tent, and meals are brought there unless she makes a point of trying to obtain them somewhere else. The quartermaster offers her a selection of of several kinds of seed oil, lard, and rapidly imported oil of vitriol in an attempt to satisfy her request, as well as a monthly wage of sixty gold crowns (minted with the face of a long-forgotten warrior-queen), a quantity which seems to be entirely sufficient to live a noble, albeit not extravagant, lifestyle.

It almost seems like they're following a script, for how to handle terrifyingly powerful mercenaries. She is, after all, not the only one they have.

She very thoroughly deals with the gribblies. Mage Bladed bayonet in high speed flying passes, for the chaff, and a single Guidance formula into the eye followed by a series of brutal Mage Blade slashes until it stops trying to regenerate, for the bat monstrosity.

It's clear they don't want to deal with her. Fine. She'll cultivate a businesslike persona, paying the quartermaster or equivalent to obtain bits of leather, a spare knife, paper and ink, a little bit of coffee or tea, books (preferably rented or borrowed rather than bought), perhaps new clothes, and so on. One of the seed oils ends up... Close enough, to keep lubricating the mechanisms in the flight boot.

She takes up trying to get the camp smiths to make something that can receive an overpowered Transmission Formula, and making topographical maps of the Haunted Hills. What an evocative name.

Many of these things - books, civilian clothing, and at great expense, tea and coffee, must be obtained from the merchants who swarm around the camp like flies around a cowpat, but nothing she wants is impossible to obtain.

One of the more adventurous camp engineers is willing to play around with copper wire and iron superstructure according to her instructions; he would otherwise be hard at work trying to replicate a design he once saw for a spring-loaded land mine in his spare time between cannon-maintenance tasks. He is missing two fingers, unrelatedly.

The command centre is happy to receive her reports and add her maps to the pile which invariably covers every table they have. If she's looking, how are these various towns which are notionally-sort-of-maybe sworn vassals of the empire doing? Do they still exist, even?

Oh! She knows how land mines work! The spring can bounce the explosive to a perfect height to burst apart mid-air, enhancing the effect of shrapnel! Reliable Sparking mechanisms for black powder are really tricky, though... Maybe he could try this, or this...

She makes sure to inspect such isolated villages from a great distance. Stealthy recon is best recon, and binoculars are great. They appear to have living people doing farm things, for the most part. This one is empty and dead. This one seems fine, as do those two. This one had a lot of undead activity around it.