Franz Lohner's Chronicle - Contraptions

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.

Bardin’s been back in the workshop again. How can I tell? Well, apart from all manner of clanking and hammering at all hours – not exactly conducive to me getting some much-needed beauty sleep – the mountainside’s increasingly strewn with all manner of failed experiments.

Of course, Bardin being Bardin, must of them are weapons, refinements on various designs he’s accumulated over the years. There are handguns, pistols, cog hammers – you know, the usual stuff – but there are also plenty of oddities and all. A self-loading longbow he whipped up for Kerillian. Went down like a lead airship, it did. An axe with some kind of whirring, mechanical teeth, which I think Saltzpyre would have taken to, were it not for the face it kept breaking down and was easily twice the weight of a normal one. 

What gets me is when the designs get a little more, shall we say “unusual”? That mechanical pigeon, for example. No idea how Bardin cobbled the thing together, or why, much less how he trained it to drop those bombs while on the wing. Says he was inspired by something the Imperial engineering school whipped up, and that much is true enough. Only the Altdorf engineers use flesh and blood pigeons, rather than cog and steam. Unnatural, is what it is. And for what it’s worth, the flesh and blood ones are rather brighter than whatever horror Bardin hammered together. His just flies in circles, and unerringly drops payloads of rotten fruit on Kruber, regardless of the target it’s been given.

Hang on. Maybe Kruber’s the real target, and everything else is just an excuse? Yeah, I can see that being the case. Funny sense of humour, that dwarf.

Anyway, I can see I’m going to have to have a word. The rest of us need a bit of shuteye every now and then. More than that, Bardin’s been muttering about a much larger project. Won’t say what, of course, secrecy’s like breathing to a dwarf, but I think I’d like to put a stop to it before he cobbles together some cog-driven dragon, or tries to staple bloody great legs to the keep. I mean, it’ll be a spectacle for sure, but it’s one I’d rather watch from a distance and with a solid forty winks behind me, if you know what I mean?