Last Morning as a God

5/24 Morning

I woke up entangled with an athletic redhead with glowing blue eyes on one side and my prime consort on the other. I heartily recommend beta testing for the company if you can get the gig. I checked the lower value packages, they still seem like a solid deal, assuming you’re in a world with a reasonable number of safe places and pretty girls (or guys. Either or). So probably say no if they offer you the Ishimura in Dead Space; other than places like that you’re golden. Even then, if you can get them to promise you a more comfortable gig after that testing Pokémon or Harry Potter, fucking do it; wizard Hitler in power or not.

Anyway, I extracted myself, told my elven paramour a very abbreviated explanation (she could ask Caledra for details if she wanted), and got up to go to work. Xylinnia informed me that the army was ready to attack, so I in turn told my dragons to be ready, and sent some stealthy chaps to fly to a reasonable staging area. I probably wasn’t going to be participating directly in any of that; I had a busy day planned and I haven’t been the biggest contributor to any of these fights recently. Officially, Ysondre was the leader of the group of green dragons defending the normal world from the nightmare. The plan, according to Xylinnia, was to make the assault tonight if Tyrande arrived; the name “night elf” wasn’t just a reference to their darker skin tone. They were a nocturnal species with several minor magical abilities that only worked at night, up to and including a minor healing factor.

I checked on Valeera, and found that she was in the middle of planning out the raid with her team. Hopefully the extra information she contributes will lead to a lower body count. Valeera, as we had planned, was not flaunting her necklace either. Officially, she’d flushed the fel magic out of her body and then replaced it with nice, clean arcane energy, then bummed a ride via teleportation to get here. Broll clearly didn’t like the explanation, but he seemed more inclined to let his objections wait until they were somewhere safe. It ran counter to his understanding of blood elf mana addiction, probably due to everything I told her being utter bullshit.

Importantly, with Valeera embedded in the team I could redeploy my Nightmare Skitterer. It couldn’t teleport without my help but it was insanely fast, so I just told it to go to a cliff overlooking the Scarlet Monastery and hide. It was moving so fast that I could easily see it creeping along on my world map; I’d give it a few hours to arrive.

While I was doing that, I overheard something through the open line that made me choke on my breakfast. “It’s like Aegwynn said, you need me.”

Now, I don’t know if you all know about Magna Aegwynn, but I legitimately thought she was dead at this point. Finding out that she’s alive and has had contact with someone in the process of joining my retinue made me shit bricks. This was one of the most powerful mages in history; she had thrown hands with an avatar of the Dark Titan Sargeras and come out on top. One of the only individual humans who could rival her power was her own son, Medihv, whom she had essentially groomed from birth for that explicit purpose. She has personally crafted at least one major artifact because the one she already had, A’tiesh, wasn’t good enough for her. I didn’t want her anywhere near any of my necklaces in any way other than it being around her neck.

Of course, in addition to shitting bricks, I also very much wanted to capture her for all of the same reasons she scared me. If I get her into my retinue, Ysera will possibly not be the most powerful individual I’ve encountered. The Green Aspect was plenty powerful, but at least some of her tier 8 ranking comes from the legion of giant acid spitting lizards under her command. Aegwynn fought a god in a Denny’s parking lot and forced him to play dirty if he wanted anything better than a crushing defeat.

On a positive note, as far as I knew she was single, had preserved her youth and beauty for at least a few centuries, and has had a child (which opens up stud service working on her). Maybe if I’m very lucky I’ll be able to seduce her with a cringeworthy but Company provided pickup line and slip an amulet onto her in the afterglow. With someone this powerful I don’t even know if I want to risk trying to charm her until she’s already in a vulnerable state.

That’s a problem for later though. If she’s magically monitoring Valeera for some reason I’m probably fucked anyway. I took a deep breath, and got back to my to do list for today. I confirmed that I had the resources for an Altar of Elders. I’d gotten around 250 energy and 40 essence at midnight, resulting in a total of 317 energy and 105 essence. The altar cost 150/60, so I could build it no problem. I would be losing essence income when I started converting wisps into ancients and didn’t want to be floating too much gold, so I also put in a work order for two more wisps. That brought me down to 37/55, but I’d be able to afford an Ancient of War or a Hunter’s Hall tomorrow as long as I kept the majority of the elves here.

It seems that my retinue members produce income as long as they are living in and exclusively working for this community. Leaving to fight a battle for me would detach them, but leaving to hunt spiders to clear the area, chop down trees for new construction, and gather mushrooms to eat? Totally acceptable, apparently. The rangers and some of the more outdoorsy civilians had done just that, were still dedicated, and had contributed energy just like everyone who stayed home. I’d need to see if things like trading with Darkshire still counted, and even more importantly if hunting Worgen counted. A lot of rules were, unfortunately, still pretty fuzzy.

While I finished up my breakfast, I went through my missions to see if there was any movement. Sha’ni had apparently been “mysteriously resurrected” and woke up her husband for some passionate lovemaking in the middle of the night. Good for them, now I just needed to start capturing the people at Kargath. That could wait, though. Nothing too urgent there. It meant I had another Censer of dreams, which pretty much guaranteed that I’d capture Moira with one unless she was extremely cooperative.

Apparently Imriss had been flying over the Stonetalon Mountains when sweet sweet troll lovin was going on, because my next target was at Stonetalon Peak.

Burn. Her. House.Destroy the house of Illyane, the clothier of Stonetalon PeakRewards: Tailoring Skill chip, Keeper Albagorm will have an immediately positive reaction to any members of the retinue he meets, company stamp, paralytic poison

Why? First Bloodlust, and now this? I mean. I’m going to do it, burning down a house is way less egregious than being a serial cop killer, but what the hell? Probably going to just send in a squad of dragonspawn to do it and leave, but only after kidnapping her and robbing her blind. Yes, once again kidnapping has been rationalized as the good guy thing to do. Probably with the old possession trick; I’ve missed it so. Well, that’ll be on my to do list at some point today when I’m low on mana. It doesn’t seem like it will be too terribly hard with possession/fade and a ghost, so I should be able to rebuild my mana while I do it.

Speaking of, I needed to go and spend some mana.

••••••••••

Magglish snuck through the Wailing Caverns silently. I’d needed to push him a bit for this, but he was the best sneak I had available, at least for spelunking. He was actively avoiding any kind of combat. I’d been thinking about something for a while; did Fading Dream Mushrooms have any special interactions with people who were in the catalog?

I’d decided to test it on Lady Anacondra, one of the earliest bosses of this dungeon. She was, unfortunately for her, pretty replaceable in a way that most of the people in the catalog weren’t. She had almost no lore associated with her, no political or social connections outside of the Druids of the Fang, and her powers were very modest. If nothing special happened, I’d have removed a dangerous impediment on the way to Naralex and would have a pretty silver haired girl to train as an archer or infiltrator later. If it did work, I’d have another powerful druidess and would know the benefits and drawbacks of serving magic mushrooms.

Magglish just needed to lay eyes on a specific woman and stow a mushroom somewhere in the cave where it won’t be snatched up by a scavenger. I’d mind control her into going and eating it, then Magglish could teleport her out. Easy.Unfortunately we failed at the second hurdle. When I managed to push Anacondra into the small alcove where Magglish had hidden the shroom, we found a raptor happily chowing down. On the one hand, shit, on the other hand I suppose this is a legitimate use of shrooms too, because that raptor rapidly bulked up and looked at Anacondra questioningly, sensing my presence.

“Come, beast! You shall accompany me to the surface!” She shouted at the raptor imperiously, which essentially shrugged and fell in line. My directive had been to tell it to follow her while she left the caverns, which she did, so I couldn’t complain. The two of them could fight through most things on their way out quite effectively, though it was a somewhat brutal and slow egress. I could feel my mana fading as she fought her way out, and I was just hoping that Dremuus and the gang would know what I wanted when I had her make her way to the camp.

That part worked out fine. I just about passed out from the strain, but as my vision was starting to go dark I saw his big blue hands wrap a necklace around Anacondra’s neck like a garrote. I pulled out and gave her a paralysis order. She could eat a mushroom tomorrow. I needed a nap in a dark room right now.