On the outskirts of the great city of Nuln, there sat a red-bricked manor in which a family of minor nobility once lived. The locals knew this place as nothing more than the house of some once proud family, but Joheim Burgenston knew it as home. During his youth Joheim had attended the prestigious Nuln Gunnery School, showing an aptitude beyond his peers for the science of artillery. Joheim's fascination did not go unnoticed by instructors, who soon recommended him for service in a regiment of Wissenland artillery. His father protested the idea profusely, making claims of a conspiracy against his son by the instructors, who he claimed wanted his son to die on the field of battle because his ideas of warfare frightened them.
It was too late, as Joheim himself had been swept up in a storm of patriotic fervor and he slipped out from the sheltered manor of his childhood to go and see the world for himself. His father, devastated by the betrayal of his son, developed a wasting sickness from which he never recovered, and died months after Joheim had left. His mother had been gone long before this, already embraced in Morr's garden from a plague of Red Fever. Now when Joheim made his return, hobbled and wizened by the horrors he had been witness to, the house lay silent, untouched for the whole of his absence.
The cannoneer would not have asked for anything different though, as it was the perfect lair for secluding away from the very empire he had fought so hard to protect. A few weeks after Joheim had returned, before the ringing in his ears had even stopped, he began to find himself waking up in strange locations about the grounds of the manor with various objects held in his hands. One morning he awoke to find himself in the kitchen holding a head of cabbage before his oven, as if rolling a shot into a cannon. Another day, he blinked awake whilst ducking behind a large overturned tree, hiding from what appeared to be a small bird doing an impression of an arrow's whistle. Finally he decided that something had to be done when he found himself stranded on the manor's pond, packed into a rowboat alongside a large wheelbarrow, which he assumed to be his "cannon" during the slumbering adventure. So, the artillerist took to finding a solution, he spent his days in the study trying to find a meaning behind his night-time misadventures, and he spent his nights retracing the paces of the war in his sleep.
After a month of research Joheim was ready to give up and accept his fate as the midnight cannoneer as no book in the whole of the library spoke about anything like his condition. Some spoke of the ringing in his ears, calling it tinnitus, some spoke of the shaking in his hands, calling it shell-shock, and one even spoke of the strange feeling where his leg used to be, calling it phantom limb, but not even one mentioned anything like his sleepwalking. Deciding to finally swallow his fear, Joheim resolved to go into the town bookstore and inquire about a medical text pertaining to afflictions of the mind. He decided to avoid going on Marktag, as it would certainly be the busiest day, and settled on going by Wellentag, as everyone else might be at work elsewhere. Food of course had not been a particular concern of his ever since the wondrous invention of canned meals, Joheim had spent the greater half of his career collecting canned foods to take home with him and could've subsisted on them until Sigmar himself returned.
Joheim had another problem, however, in his youth his father had picked his garb and his regiment had as well during his service, now he did not know what the usual attire would be, nor where to find such a garb. Had anyone of them visited the man they would have seen such a display of eccentricity that it would've made the town news for a week. A one-legged young man who looked and acted as if he had lived three times his age. A man who wore his tattered uniform around his moth-eaten manor and marched off into the night fighting battles in his dreams. His clothing garments lacked much to the same effect that his mental garments did, especially in matters dealing with those unfamiliar to the true nature of his previous line of work. Joheim pondered the conundrum of needing to go into town to purchase clothes that he could wear to go into town for several days before settling on taking the dilapidated clothes of his youth and patching them together into a makeshift cloak. A day later and his patchwork cloak was complete, which to an outside observer would have looked completely mad, but seemed perfectly fashionable to the sleep deprived and half-delirious Burgenston. Joheim donned his cloak whilst tucking a stick under his arm and pilfered the chest of coins his father had nestled away beneath the floorboards of his bed, then set out into the inner city of Nuln, confident in his handiwork and cunning. Moments later a scream arose from a passerby alarmed at the shambling madman who had gone loose in the city.