Coming Down From That
5/23 morning
I woke up with a moderately attractive woman I knew almost nothing about. I remembered loving her to an unhealthy, obsessive degree. I remembered her responding with fanatic devotion of her own. I remembered some very enthusiastic sex between two people trying their hardest to please one another.
She was still a stranger to me though. When two people are utterly obsessed with each other like that, they apparently don’t immediately start swapping life stories. I felt a certain fondness for her, but it was a bit like the fondness I still felt for a girl I had a crush on in high school. The echo of emotions that have absolutely faded.
Harnea was sitting in the corner, fiddling with her necklace. She smirked when she saw that I was awake, and I noticed there was a bit of actual warmth and amusement in the expression. I’d gotten used to the Druids being kind of psychotic, but with that little gesture she felt like a person for the first time. It looked like corruption defense was starting to bear fruit.
“I see you are awake. You are no longer enchanted?”
“Yeah. That was pretty intense. I’ll need to remember to be judicious with that.”
My paramour was waking up as well. She looked at me, furrowed her brow, and sighed. “So, you got me. That was quick. You do that to every girl?”
“Nah. That was actually an experiment. I got a little carried away; unless I’m really desperate, you’re probably the only girl who is going to get me in that state.”
“Lucky me, I guess. So where are the others?”
“Well, Prudence and Irma are both ok. Vanessa… well, I had to brute force her; she’s gotten a bit weird about being my obedient harem girl. She’s still as smart as ever, though. The guys are in stasis like you were, and there’s one other girl in there who hasn’t joined up yet. The rest of the girls… Well, they basically tried to perform a coup and kill me. I didn’t like that, so I sent them to Vanessa to deal with them.”
“Vanessa… who is weirdly into being your harem girl?”
“Yeah. She went a bit overboard. Come on, lets get breakfast.” I got off the bed and headed towards the common room. “What’s your name, by the way? It just never occurred to me to ask.”
“Paige. Paige Doyle.”
“Alright Paige; tell me what you’re good at.”
••••••••••
I spent about half an hour working out what to do with Paige. She was a stealth specialist, apparently. Good as an ambush predator and moving around unseen, but a bit shit at fighting in the open. Same niche as Keryn, really, and I always found work for Keryn. She decided to go back to working with Vanessa, since that's what she knew. She could even understand Vanessa’s insane obsession with me, given her recent similar experiences.
With that determined, I had to figure out what to do next. I didn’t actually know if I had time to wait until tonight to get to Windsor. If Lo’Gosh’s team was moving quickly by griffon, they might make their attack today. It seemed unlikely, but I didn’t want to risk it. I teleported to the campsite in Duskwood to pick up Valeera.
When I arrived, I looked around and checked in with Talaada. Not all of the high elves she captured were coming here, but many were. Quel’Danil lodge didn’t have enough space or resources for so many people. There were only about 30 high elves in my retinue, but testimonies about an end to hunger were making the rest of the nearly 200 elves very curious. Talaada was capitalizing on that, and getting more converts every day.
Generally speaking, the lodges held two types of people; normal refugees that just didn’t want to drain the life force of magical creatures to survive, and ruggedly individualistic rangers that were already disconnected from city life. The normies were less immediately useful, tier one or two, but easier to capture by a mile. They were scared, hungry, and desperately wanted a new normal to cling to.
Talaada had been focusing on the Rangers, but I suggested that she shift her focus to the normies. Groupthink was powerful, and quantity was a quality all of its own. Plus, each of them that moved here full time was worth 1 or 2 points of energy per day. Right now I had 60 energy and 65 essence, and ten of that energy had come from the refugees that stayed while all the rangers went to war. They were also mouths to feed, but for now we could afford it. Especially when it turned out that the tree of life was bearing fruit.
This morning the tree had wordlessly passed out 8 melon sized green fruits, one for each point of unused supply, which had each been enough to feed two or three people for breakfast. They were even charged with magic. I suspected that they were each enough to feed someone for a day. I certainly wasn’t going to build the base around these fruits, but they were nice to have and would save me a bit of money on bread.
I found Valeera eating a large slice like it was watermelon, savoring the mana infused juice. Most of the magic was flowing directly to Kathra’Natir, but she was retaining enough to get by, as long as she didn’t start casting spells. I was pretty sure she was sated enough to do a quick infiltration with me.
“Hey. We’ve got a man on the inside of Blackrock Mountain. I think we can bust in and at least scout the place for your friends. Deal?”
“Hell yeah. This place is nice, but it’s so damn boring.” She sprung to her feet, in better spirits than I’d seen her before now. Despite her words, she was enjoying a bit of safety, a bit of support, and a lot of love bombing. I trusted Talaada to work her over and add her to the retinue with a bit more time.
It was easy enough to teleport her to Kam, after a quick check to make sure he was alone. Valeera was perfectly happy to be disguised as a dark iron dwarf; Stealth is great and all, but being able to blend in was even better.
“I’ll guide you to him. I have a scrying sensor that I can use to find him, and can communicate with you through the necklace.”
“Alright, I can work with that.” As she turned to leave, I stopped her.
“This is only for scouting. We are absolutely not going to pull him out today. Don’t get into any fights.” She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. Keep a low profile. I’ll be fine.”
As she left, I summoned the Nightmare Skitterer. I cast mind vision on it, and it worked. It’s vision was a bit off putting, as it had tiny eyes all over its body, but I could track it. I wanted to see how it worked.
“Alright. Find Marshal Windsor. Do not capture him, just observe.” The moment I shut my mouth, the creature seemed to vanish; I just barely caught a blur leaving the room. I cast mind vision to watch, and it was rapidly skittering out of the building and into the road outside. It’s eyes flicked around in every direction, making me nauseous as it shifted from alcove to alcove, mostly running along the wall. It never stopped for more than a few seconds. “Stop!” I willed as it became almost too much to bear.
It stopped, stark still, and I was able to look around. I noted a large statue to use as a point of reference, and I told Valeera about it. She responded affirmatively, and I had the Skitterer continue on its path. It seemed to know where Windsor was somehow, following inhuman intuition to find its target.
We continued like that, with the skitterer moving in short bursts and Valeera getting a far clearer idea of where they were going, memorizing the path. The homing functionality was so useful I briefly considered keeping it around, but honestly there was far too much value in using it for its intended purpose. I’d checked the catalog; the people that this little guy had a company signed 100% success rate on were too good and too numerous to pass up.
Today would be a setup day. I wanted to teach Charm to either one of my priests or one of my warlocks, I wanted to see if Ursula and Drusilla had found anything on Kathra’Natir, I intended to swap in someone else for Windsor, I was going to start disassembling Moira’s entourage, and I was planning on using this little bastard to cut through a Gordian Knot. Oh yeah; I also needed to test out the curse version of this charm spell, and I knew just the goblin to try it on. In the unlikely event that I had spare time after all that, and assuming that Tyrande didn’t show up to kick off a pitched battle with Lethon, I’d do some book keeping and try to plan out what comes next after the last of the dragons is dealt with.