The Maiden Expedition, without Maidens
The rumours were correct on every account.
There was a portal, a neat and tidy affair that did not look like anything affiliated with Chaos - those tended to have rather more tentacles and blight and screams of the damned.
This portal was a round, black hole, floating unassumingly in the air. It was wide enough for five men marching abreast to enter, and as such it was certainly wide enough for the Hi Ho Tank to pass through.
The tank chimney whistles with scalding steam, causing you to jump from your precariously close seat.
"Nutters!" you curse.
"Can't you shut up for a second, human?" shouts the dwarf below.
"The steam, Bambi, my boy, the steam!" you holler back. "Watch where it goes!"
"The name's Banbhe, and you better watch your mouth or I'll use you as kindling. Boy? Pah!" The dwarf begins to grumble.
You give a nervous gulp and concede the argument. It was tough, even with the widespread gossip, to find anyone willing to take a impoverished human noble all the way through the portal. It was doubly tough to find anyone willing to take Baron von Schwartznatter, lest they angered the powerful metalsmithing clans of Stonehamster. They had never really gotten over the whole beard and charcoal incident.
Your only option had been to ride with a particularly eccentric and disgruntled engineer on a test voyage of his steam tank - he too was desperate for an assistant. Banbhe claimed that the Hi Ho Tank was well equipped for extra-dimensional travel, with an air-tight covering, its own oxygen supply and a design that allowed it to traverse both land and water (with inflatable balloons).
"It is all-terrain." he claimed proudly.
"It can't fly." you pointed out.
"Not yet." he grudgingly admitted.
So here you were, a (former) Baron of the Empire, shovelling coal into the steam tank's furnace. That is fine. Soon you will be shovelling gold!
The passage through the portal is much more mundane than you had expected. It is as if you had just passed through a doorway from one room to another. One moment you were in the rocky wasteland of those blasted mountains, the next, you were in a sea of sand.
"Lovely place." you mutter. "Where's the gold?"
"On the bright side, there's no sign of those Chaos bastards around, laddie. It looks like a pretty normal dimension to me. We can probably breath the air." says Banbhe, lowering the glass port-hole covers and turning off the oxygen tanks.
"I would have expected it to lead somewhere more... civilized," you complain. "This is the middle of nowhere. Where do we go from here?"
Your query is answered instantly. A loud horn is sounded, and a horde of camels crest the sandy dune. There are humans riding them, and as they approach a few of them begin firing their weapons at the Hi Ho Tank. The bullets plink harmlessly off the tank's plating, but Banbhe seems to be quite scared of their appearance.
"That's it, we're getting out of here. I'm not about to drive around the desert fleeing from some camels. I need to build some anti-camel countermeasures before I return here." mutters the dwarf. "Camels. Camels. Damn my beard, camels camels camels! Everywhere I go there are camels!" It seems that he has some sort of camel-phobia.
He begins to throw the tank into reverse, but you stay his hand.
"What?" he snaps. "What is it you want now? Get back to shovelling the coal so we can get out of here quickly!"
You...
***
A. FIRE THE HI HO CANNON! No camels can stand before the might of 40 pounds of Imperial iron hurtling towards them at ludicrous speed!
B. Attempt to negotiate with the camels, or at least their riders. You have no camel-phobia. To turn tail and flee the moment you set foot in a new land is unbefitting behaviour for a Von Schwartznatter. You should at least plot up something here before you do.
C. Return to Stonehamster so that Banbhe can build his anti-camel countermeasures. You can never have enough countermeasures, particularly against camels. Nasty creatures, you avoid them whenever you can.
