BAWMU

The Bi-Monthly Assorted Workers of Mining Union — the labour union of the Menagoles mine in the years before the fire. Governed by a committee filling posts by vote, meeting bi-monthly, taking minutes, and adjourning for snacks and tea.

What the minutes show

For an organisation with a comic name and a tea break, the one page the vault has is grim. The committee was not the workers' shield — it was the crown's instrument:

• It rebuked its own members for striking ("too little backbone"), rather than representing them.
• It dismissed the safety concern the workers actually raised — the Queen's digging machines — and answered the folklore about digging too deep with "but myth."
• It carried the Queen's offer to the floor: pay off the quitters, and make nobles, with manor and land, of whoever dug until they found "something of note."

The union, in other words, sold the depth. The people who died in the deep were talked down there by their own committee.

The argument they lost

The safety debate did not stay in the minutes. It is answered, in the same document, by a man who was underground when it mattered:

The committee (p.7): "The adages of digging too deep are but myth."
Vara'nak Gar-Galdar (p.5): "'Never dig too deep' is the forewarning of ANY dig op. The idiots."

Vara'nak had forty-five years in those mines. He was on the site the committee was voting about, he watched the Queen's boring machine go past the veins — "They didn't stop for veins, they dug deep for something" — and he died in a pit at the bottom of the hole the vote authorised. Page 5 is the shop floor's verdict on page 7, and it was written after the fact, in the dark, by the man the world then blamed for the whole thing.

The bribe worked, and page 5 is the proof. The committee promised titles for finding "something of note"; Vara'nak, watching from below, could see the dig was no longer looking for ore. Whatever they found "screamed an unholy noise."

The union's place in the operation

The three known pages of the mine journal show a site with three layers, and the union in the middle of them:

• Above it, the army. Foreman Brent Pallwath was a "Sergeant of Laewendas' Army" (p.5). The committee was negotiating with, and relaying the Queen's offers from, a serving officer — not an employer in the ordinary sense.
• Beside it, the research. The staff mage Dillbert was logging crystal by depth and sediment and had established that crystals turn up more often the deeper you go (p.6) — the technical case for exactly the depth the committee was selling. Whether the committee ever saw his data, or was simply handed the conclusion, is unknown.
• Below it, the diggers. Who struck, were told they lacked backbone, and were offered manors.

Set beside Dillbert's page, the union's dismissal of "digging too deep" reads less like folklore-scoffing and more like a line that came down from somewhere. The mine had a mage on staff producing depth data and a Queen personally promising land for depth results; the committee's job on page 7 was to make the workers accept it.

Known members

• Javosi — committee member; resigned (Menagoles Mine Journal p.7).
• Aedeldor — committee member; resigned (same day).
• Liliana — committee member; resigned (same day).

All three quit in the same session that dismissed the digging-too-deep warning and dangled titles. No other member is named. Whether they walked because of that vote — and whether any of them lived — is open.

Session 53

• A second agenda, recovered. Digging out a sealed meeting room deep in the mine — behind a wall a spectral miner had been trying to open for years — the party finds furniture, letters, journals, instructions and another of the union's meeting agendas, this one listing snacks and tea. The room doubled as a place to sleep. The crew who used it died in the rockfall they triggered tunnelling south toward the Foredweller lab, stopping a few feet short of the water tunnels' first bricks. Contents beyond the agenda are unread.

Connections

• The mine's workforce is otherwise known to the party only through its dead: the ~40 who survived the fire and starved in the sealed quarters (Session 51), the fifty-plus in the base chamber, and the orc luggers in the pit with Vara'nak Gar-Galdar (Session 50). These minutes are the first record of them alive, arguing.
• Vara'nak Gar-Galdar worked those mines for 45 years — long enough to have been a member, and possibly to have been in the room for this meeting. Unconfirmed; page 5 shows he knew the argument, not that he sat on the committee.
• The "adages of digging too deep" the committee dismissed are Ulda Golgain's 600-year-old charge, verbatim in substance (Session 47).
• Nobody in the union's own paperwork is the villain the world was told about. The two men the official story blamed — the orc who "burned the mine" and the "Mage-Man" Pentuckle still points the finger at — are, on pages 5 and 6, the two who tried to stop it. The fire was the foreman's.