Forsaken Negotiations
5/22 Afternoon
Gretchen was captured, and I checked on her point of view. She was currently trapped inside of a small cell. Classy, Sylvannas. Very classy. I considered how to go about deploying my troops through the undead seamstress, and settled upon the simplest option. I settled into a chair in Abby’s shack, mostly because I didn’t want to alarm Valeera, and opened a line of communication.
“Gretchen. The amulet has finished its work. Are you able to request a meeting for me? I need to use your amulet as a jumping off point to deploy my troops against the crusade.”
“Oh. I can ask.” I heard a knocking noise and a small pause. “Apothecary, Lord Bismark would like to request that I be released.”
A guttural laugh. “Oh does he, now? Well, you will be taken to Lady Aelthalyste first for examination.”
I responded through the amulet. “Oh, that’s alright. I’m actually a bit curious what you might find. I generally know how my amulets work, but I’d love to find out more.”
I alternated between looking through Gretchen’s eyes, speaking through her amulet with minimal responses given, and occasionally swapping my point of view to someone else watching. If nothing else, I wanted to see what Gretchen looked like now.
https://imgur.com/a/PAlU3bA
We walked together, surrounded by guards, a fairly long distance. The river of faintly glowing green sludge and generally dim lighting made for an interesting but not very pretty bit of sightseeing. The ladies of the undercity were far more enjoyable to look at, but they weren’t what Gretchen was focused on most of the time.
We eventually were escorted to an office in an imposing building, where Gretchen was sat down in front of a banshee. Lady Aelthalyste appeared as a particularly pale woman in a white dress that trailed away into nothing, and Gretchen’s guards absolutely deferred to her. I wasn’t sure exactly what the plan was until I sensed another mind entering Gretchen’s head with me.
https://imgur.com/a/qMVkYYC
Aelthalyste cocked her head, “Hmm. I see I’m being watched. Impressive, Mister Bismark. I’d love to know who mentored you in the ways of the Forgotten Shadow.”
Ahh. She was a shadow priest. Probably one of their stronger ones. I decided to assume that she could do everything I could with shadow magic, but better. She was already talking while probing Gretchen’s mind; I sure as hell couldn’t do that. I was still very much a dabbling generalist. “Oh, here and there. I picked up an old book by Natalie Seline a while back, and I only recently managed mind vision. Shadow words are a bit easier.”
“Yes, and your technique for Read Intent is a bit strange, but you’re quite talented in that area. Quite talented indeed.” Read intent? Oh. Was there a spell that replicates communication talent? Which, incidentally, was telling me that she didn’t believe I was self taught, but wasn’t going to press me on it right now.
“I’m flattered. So, what did you need Gretchen for? Melisara and I have cobbled together a plan for the Scarlet Crusade, and I need Gretchen, at least for the start of it.”
“Oh, just to probe her mind. She appears to be fully in control of her own faculties, but her priorities were rearranged. It’s fascinating stuff, really. Especially the part where I don’t know if I can undo it.” I felt someone placing something on Gretchen’s head, and found myself ejected from her mind.
“What the hell just happened?”
“They put some kind of circlet on my head, sir. I feel very awake and aware of my surroundings.” Gretchen responded through the amulet.
“And now we are taking it off. Hmm. Interesting.” Aelthalyste was obviously using Gretchen as a lab rat. I wasn’t exactly opposed to learning more as long as this didn’t escalate to torture, but that was entirely on the table with the Forsaken.
“May I know what that was?”
“Oh, just a little something that has been known to undo mental domination. It had a very limited effect, unfortunately. There go the hopes of using these things to undo degeneration and then freeing the poor dears.”
“I fully support that use of my necklaces, you know.”
For what it was worth, she seemed amused. “I’m sure you do, given the side effects of the treatment. Very well. We have finished our initial examination, Gretchen may go as far as the outer courtyard. Work out your deployment from there. Is there any chance that you would provide us with one of your amulets for study?”
“I’ll have to think about that. I’m almost certain that you would primarily be trying to figure out how to undo the effects, which wouldn’t exactly be to my benefit. If we were closer allies perhaps, but I’d be taking a risk right now.” On the other hand, if there was even a slight chance that they would find something useful, I’d really like to see it. Then again, I had Eva, Xylinnia, and Hahrana. They didn’t have masters of shadow magic on hand to assist, and none of them specialized in jewelry, but they could probably examine the necklaces too.
“Unfortunate. Well, we will still be examining Gretchen here.”
“Be gentle. Believe it or not, I try to repay my servant’s loyalty with an equal level of concern for their wellbeing. I’ll be checking in on her from time to time.”
“Yes, and it would be rather difficult for us to strike at you in Duskwood, I suppose.” So they knew where I was now? Probably wouldn’t have told me if it had been somewhere they could actually target. It was a little unsettling, but between communication talent and stress defense, it fell a bit flat as a power move.
“Oh, nice. You’ll need to tell me how you did that at some point.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
••••••••••
I went downstairs to check on the worgen, only to find that the cages were empty. I was worried at first, but when I checked my amulet and searched by the shifter tag I found 11 worgen. Well, I found 3 labeled Worgen 1-3, presumably the ones who ate mushrooms, and another 8 names I didn’t recognize as dragons, demons, or Druids.
They mostly had fairly standard human names except for one: Sildia Fogrunner. Did a night elf get mixed in there? If I caught one of the old Druids from when the worgen curse started, that was pretty neat.
“Talaada. Where are the worgen?” I’d put her in charge of processing them, and apparently she was doing well with it. Perhaps too well; if I didn’t have more worgen waiting to be processed, they weren’t being captured as quickly as needed for peak efficiency. I wanted a small backlog so Talaada wouldn’t lose any time. Maybe I could put Emeriss or Ysondre on that? They had that sleep fog spell.
“I sent them to our new settlement. It seemed the safest place, no? Lady Vanessa can’t be training them in mixed company, can she?”
I’d asked Vanessa to try to train the blank slates as infiltrators. It wasn’t going great; she could imprint beliefs on them or change their bodies however she liked in the first 24 hours, but they needed to learn basically everything past feeding and dressing themselves from scratch.
They didn’t seem to have any particular aptitude for anything other than going into a feral frenzy. With disguise etiquette they could blend in, but anything more complicated than going along with the crowd was beyond them. I was totally fine with that; a few low ranked no-names seeded in at the Scarlet Crusade farm would be a very welcome addition, as long as they kept their jewelry hidden from any enchanters.
I sent Melisara a note to get in contact with Vanessa. The Defias leader was still mostly busy coordinating with Onyxia to fake the conquest of Westfall; I believe Irma was a landed lady already. She wouldn’t be likely to take too much of a direct hand in subverting the Scarlet Crusade initially, but she did have a small network of humans trained in infiltration already, plus a few experimental werewolf agents. I promise this is a good idea.
I’d sent Melisara alone to Gretchen, just in case it was a trap. She hadn’t immediately been seized, so she’d flown off to the Agamand Mills. After that I’d sent the rest of her team for this assignment: Abby, Eliza, and Lillibeth to command the undead, Sha’ni equipped with a ghost-hair woven amulet and ready to learn about possession, and the druid triplets to handle any of the undead that objected to my necromancers’ work. Maybe they could learn how to possess people too? They’d be even more useful if so.
Sha’ni had asked that she be allowed to go and see her husband, which seemed like a reasonable request to me. He was also stationed in Kargath, the Horde outpost closest to Blackrock Mountain, so it seemed prudent to keep an eye there. If I was wrong and the Horde forces were planning on assaulting Thaurissan, I definitely wanted to know before the 29th. I sent Emeriss; he could show up and drop off Sha’ni, who should know the basics of possession by then and would hopefully be accepted back postmortem. She might need to officially register with the Forsaken or something, but that didn’t seem implausible to me.
The last thing to do was, of course, assemble my team for raiding Bough Shadow. I wouldn’t be participating myself; too many close calls already. Instead I’d be watching through the eyes of an elite team of my very strongest dragons, fully intending to get in and out with no casualties on our end. The Nightmare knew what I was capable of. I wanted to even things out there before fully committing.