NOVEL SIMPLE Moving Right Along
6/7 morning
I flexed my newly regrown fingers and wiggled my newly regrown toes. They worked, but damn it all if they weren’t sensitive. I gave Lividia a long kiss good morning before summoning my demons and putting them to work training. They’d been little more than fodder at Blackrock spire, so I wanted to be sure they’d be better equipped next time.
I was more than a little bit surprised to find that yesterday’s minor mission hadn’t been completed. Apparently Moonglade’s guards didn’t allow the undead, and they had multiple wards against such intruders. The banshee and undead shadow priestess that Aelthalyste assigned to the task had been coldly turned away by the guards. A reminder that while I may control the archdruids, the Cenarian Circle wasn’t totally dominated at every level.
The backup plan, one of Vanessa’s best behaved shadow operatives, had been assigned the task of capturing her overnight with a necklace and aggressive initiations. Apparently he’d been instrumental to some new plan Vanessa had come up with, so he got a reward. In Vanessa’s mind, women were to be rewarded by being dominated, and men who weren’t me were to be rewarded with the opportunity to dominate women. Works for me, I guess, as long as the flight master was ready for a threesome with his undead friend by lunch. She seemed more than half captured, based on her profile, so it didn’t seem likely to be a problem.
The other mission, putting a bounty on Sister Hatelash, had gone well for me, but a lot worse for the group of young hunters who had seen the promised reward and rushed out with gold coins instead of eyes. Two of the six had died and two more were in critical condition; Hamuul had needed to track down the shell shocked young tauren. They were holed up in the mountains, trying to survive. Good thing they managed to kill Hatelash before retreating, or we wouldn’t have known to go looking for them.
I assigned Tony the task of healing the injured and tracking down the ravaged corpses for resurrection. Accompanying him was, of course, Sylvanas. She’d skipped a day for mass capture so that she could properly train Gretchen and the other Huntresses as dark rangers, and was ready to get back to recruiting for Valhalla. She could yoink the disorganized tribe of harpies in the name of Lord Bismark while we properly repaid the greenhorns that shed blood for me.
Mulgore: defeat Magatha Grimtotem
Reward: 5 Credits, Paralytic Poison, Tauren women will be redesigned to appeal to a less furry aesthetic.
Only the women? Alright, company, you do you. Magatha wasn’t exactly a surprise. She was a powerful tauren shaman known as “the crone,” and the leader of the Grimtotem, probably the single most powerful and vicious tribe of tauren. They weren’t formally members of the Horde, as they were rabid tauren nationalists who wanted to drive out all the “lesser races” from the continent of Kalimdor, but they still received most of the benefits that came with being Tauren. Partly because the average orc or troll didn’t know much about internal Tauren tribal politics.
Magatha was nowhere near as bad as Fandral in the “respected and powerful spiritual leader is actually evil” department, as she wasn’t corrupted by the old gods or anything. She was just a power hungry and ruthless politician hoping to usher in a tauren ethnostate, fully willing to kill anyone that disagreed with her if she could get away with it. No tragic backstory or other easy excuses. So. Arguably worse, and just a little too real. I would have gotten to her eventually either way, but at this point in the timeline she was still mostly just playing politics and occasionally burning down a building that offended her.
On a more personal level, she also hadn’t appealed to me or stuck out in my head as a potential target because she was both an old lady and a furry. Between Everlasting Talent and the mission reward for “defeating” her, neither of those were going to be a major concern anymore. I figured I could probably get Cairne Bloodhoof to put the amulet on her somehow. He was due to be captured tonight, he was a badass, and though she resented it he was still her direct superior. More importantly, Cairne qualified for a regional upgrade per my policy of major faction leaders of tier 6 or higher getting priority.
In addition to Cairne, both Thrall and Vol’Jin would be captured by the end of the day. With those three under my thumb, I’d be the absolute ruler of the Horde. Hell, when Magatha joined that lineup I’d even have substantial influence over one of the loudest and most violent dissenting voices among the Tauren. So: come on moderate quest, give me something good.
Totally how diplomacy works
Convince the Night Elves of Auberdine to completely cede all control of the coastal area known as Mist’s Edge to the Greymist Tribe of Murlocs.
Reward: 1 credit, mission ticket, corruption fruit, the Greymist Tribe will instantly become trustworthy friends, allies, and trading partners for the Night Elves
Ok, on the one hand the rewards are ok. On the other hand, the mission requires me to take over a town or at least wave my dick around and apply a lot of political pressure. Tyrande and Malfurion can probably send out an edict ordering that the mission be completed, but this is probably going to be disruptive and might not happen overnight. Oh well. I sent Tyrande her goal and let her figure out how to make it happen.
I brushed myself off and went over my to-do list for the day. I needed to check in with Zagara to see what was up with her, see if my crafters had finished the Arcanite Buoy and use it if they had, I wanted to see if I could progress either of the titanic watchers I had in Twilight Grove, touch base with Anveena to see if she could start in on the plan yet, try to find any evidence of Nefarian now that I was a bit more prepared for a duel, keep training and getting stronger, and very importantly I needed to start in on using the tantric rod to good effect.
Before all that, I opened up my base tab, and found something new. A new tech tree: Nerubian. Probably associated with Zagara. I sighed at the prospect of starting a whole new tech tree, but at least it appeared to use the same resources, Energy and Essence. That was probably for the best. For now I only had one building I could construct: a hatchery. The core building in a StarCraft Zerg base. Two things leapt out at me about it, though. It was a bit cheaper than a tree of life in terms of energy cost and had no essence cost at all. Oh yeah, and there was absolutely no visible restriction on where I could build one.
Not wanting to risk infesting a healthy area with blight or creep, I ordered for it to be built on the isle of Caer Darrow. Whatever form it took, there was no place more likely to be able to explain away a weird new nerubian structure spitting out minions than the Scholomance. Plus, if it worked the same way as a tree of life, this would let me harvest energy from the students and faculty of the school. That would pay for the cost of the Hatchery within the day.
••••••••••
Zagara stood up straight, eyes wide open, caked with the gore she had been absorbing and converting into essence. She had a task to complete for her master. She walked on her six legs through the halls of the school, where the students dared not question her actions. Though she had only been spawned into existence less than a day ago, she was quite pleased with the prestige her supposed nature as “an experiment” afforded her.
She searched around the island, looking for a space that could fit the Hatchery. It would be a rather large building after all, despite existing to support only three life forms at a time. Eventually she found a large field; once upon a time it had been a beautiful garden, now overrun with weeds. The crypt queen placed her hands upon the ground, and slowly a green glow came to envelop much of the field. The summoning had begun.
Those familiar with such things would note that the “hatchery” looked quite a lot like a grounded Scourge Necropolis. Ghostwalker would reply that it would make sense; the Scourge used Nerubian architecture after all. One might also note, if one looked at the other basic buildings found within the “nerubian” tech tree, that the evolution chamber looked quite a lot like a scourge graveyard, the spawning pool like a Ziggurat, and the roach, no, the Scarab Warren looked an awful lot like a standard Crypt. Ghostwalker would reasonably respond with a thrown pen and a reminder that this is a beta, he only has a limited budget to stop time for programming, and a few reused assets never hurt anyone.
The hatchery would prove safe enough for the environment, spreading no blight or creep. It was, after all, a totally original tech tree and those mechanics wouldn’t make any sense for the Nerubians. Any similarities to the Zerg in this translation are purely coincidental.