Chapter 1: The Letorneau Plantation

In the Basement - Dezire

The woman continues sobbing, "Heidi. Please. No more. I'm not a misting. Please." It is clear to Dezire by the way the woman talks that she is skaa.

Dezire finds a jug of water and offers some to the woman. She drinks deeply. The shackles are heavy and iron. It would take a great deal of strength, or the key, to get her free.

"But you'll get me out? Oh please. I haven't heard them say anything about a book. All I know is that they feed me metals, and then a man sits in a chair and watches me. They take notes, then they beat me until I retch. There were others." She glances around, and Dezire notices two more sets of shackles, empty, "They're gone now."

In the House - Hiram, Declan, Lynch

Hiram surges forward in a sudden burst of speed and wraps his arms around the guards neck and begins to apply a choke...

To recap -- you need to roll 10 dice and have 1 free nudge...

EDIT, you're probably getting exactly what you want as the guards result is 0 with 2 nudges.

The guard barely resists Hiram's pewter fuelled choke, and quickly goes limp as his consciousness drifts away. It was a risky maneuver, as most pewterarms struggle to control their application of strength, but Hiram manages to disable and not kill the man. He drags the guard back towards the rest of the group and lays the guard down on the floor. The pewter's influence fades and Hiram feels weak and vulnerable again.

The guard is wearing a chainmail shirt and has a polished short sword on his hip. He has nothing else of note.

The hallway you are in leads into an open chamber. To the right a swinging door goes to what is probably the kitchen, on the left is another hallway lined with doors and straight ahead an open archway leads towards a yet larger open chamber - probably the main entrance hall of the estate.

"Please..." the woman pleas as Dezire leaves the room. The door opposite the stairs leads into a room the same size as the cell. A few book shelves have been placed here, there is a desk, ink pots, piles of blank parchment and notes. A quick skim of the notes confirms that they are experimental reports. Mostly they contain information on alloy creation, the stability of the alloys and tests on traces of metal.

The third room has a workbench that is covered with lab equipment. There is an apparatus filled with water connected by hoses and clamps to a burner than sieve system. It looks like it would be used to extract trace metals from the water.

Dezire makes it back to the obligator's chambers without event. The guard movements are like clockwork, and she's already snuck around them once this evening.

Around this time, Mateo sits back in the chair and sighs heavily. While his search has turned up some documents that will make his work the following day more efficient, he failed to turn up the journal they were searching for. His eyelids feel heavy and the weight of a day of travel, and a tiring search of the office, begin to wear on him. Knowing he'll have plenty of time to continue his search the next day, he leaves the office and returns to his chamber. There he finds Dezire, waiting to share with him news of what she found in the basement.

I think it's fair to use the same check - nothing has changed yet, the commotion hasn't drawn attention ... yet. Mateo, you're back in the game!