Bookkeeping by Gaslight

5/28 before lunch

I walked into the apartment with my most grave face on. After all, I had things to tell Lo’Gosh that he might not want to hear. I had a reasonably well thought out strategy to gaslight him, developed in concert with Onyxia and Vanessa, and it needed to be done carefully. He may be captured, but he’s not like Abby or Doris. I can’t rebuild his entire personality on a whim. I activated the “speaker” on my amulet as I began talking.

“I’m sorry that we have kept you all here for so long; I trust Katrana has been keeping you informed of the situation?”

The group of adventurers looked at me with unamused faces. “She’s come by a few times, but we haven’t been told much.” Thargas chimed in.

I nodded apologetically. “I am afraid we have not told you everything. You see, we have been researching who Lo’Gosh here might actually be.”

Broll cocked an eyebrow. “He’s king Varian Wrynn. That was established quite a while back.”

“Well yes, but also I’m afraid not. We have a king Varian Wrynn, whom we have verified. He is the king. Which means that either there are two Varians, or you are not who you believe yourself to be. Our current theory is that you are one of the king’s guards, captured and experimented upon when he was kidnapped, and you had the memories of King Wrynn implanted into you.”

Lo’Gosh crossed his arms. He didn’t seem particularly inclined to believe me, but Vanessa was quickly implementing a set of traits on his necklace as we spoke.

“What proof do you have of this? It sounds ridiculous.” His face was a stormcloud.

I pulled out a scroll of minor agility enhancement, bought for a few silver in Darnassus. “It’s just a theory for now. I have the counterspell here; if it doesn’t do anything then we will know we were wrong, and can proceed from there. Will you allow me to cast the spell?” As he considered it, Vanessa was rapidly typing out her preplanned gaslight special on the other end of the communication channel.

Attempting to remember details of life before becoming Lo’Gosh: momentary amnesiaAttempting to summon emotions regarding pre-Lo’Gosh life: emotional numbnessDenying things said by Erius: shame, mildBeing biologically female: Euphoria, mildAccepting or learning about your new identity: affirmationAttracting sexual interest from men, especially {Erich}: pleasure

“I suppose there wouldn’t be too much harm in testing it.” The warrior king grudgingly conceded.

Broll seemed alarmed at the idea. “Varian! At least let me examine the scroll first.” Yeah, no, in retrospect it was an obvious flaw in the plan, but I couldn’t let Broll do that. It would possibly make the other non-captured people in the room suspicious. Long term that wouldn’t matter, but it would lose me several days of their service. I just went ahead and started reciting the script Onyxia had developed for me. It was magibabble; if I’d been on the Starship Enterprise, multimodal reflection sorting would have come up. Enough to fool someone with only a passing knowledge of arcane magic, though.

As I did, Varian started to change. He shrank an inch or so shorter, his bulging biceps became less bulgy (though no less powerful), his stubble fell out, and his overall look softened. Every individual change was pretty small, but collectively the effect was striking. Lo’Gosh was now a woman.

https://imgur.com/a/uZjd9OF

I feigned surprise and went through a stack of papers containing the SI:7 dossiers of every member of Varian’s personal guard that was with him at the time he vanished. They were all dead, naturally. Onyxia had made sure of that personally. They had all been men, but that’s why I’d had an extra forged for one Gina Whipple. She was a young noblewoman from southern Duskwood who had gone missing eight years ago, along with her entire family. Probable cause of death was Worgen. Records were currently being amended to show that she left for Northshire Abbey and later joined the Royal Guard. My dragonspawn would naturally confirm this to anyone who asked.

I pretended to read through it while everyone freaked out at the sudden transformation. It painted Gina as a dedicated, incredibly talented warrior who mostly kept to herself and had turned down promotion to command multiple times. Essentially, we manufactured a backstory for a woman that fit Lo’Gosh as best we could. Naturally she wouldn’t remember any of this, as it’s a load of bullshit, but thanks to the necklace it would all feel right.

“Well. Gina Whipple, then. It’s the only possibility, and you do resemble the sketch, other than the hair.” I handed her the file. She was very much thrown off by this, and I needed to act on that. While she was off balance, Vanessa theorized that she’d be more likely to cling to any information she was given. To their credit, Broll, Valeera, and Thargas all focused on comforting and supporting their friend, promising that they would help her work through this. “Gina” was focused on reading. The information in the file would all feel correct, but not actually familiar.

I did note that Broll seemed unusually pensive, and a quick check of his profile confirmed that he was at least trying to be suspicious. 93 ETE was a pretty big jump up from where he’d been when I entered. Windsor was also very suspicious; he knew the Royal guards, mostly by name. There was no Gina Wipple, certainly not one that looked like a female copy of Varian. Alas, he just couldn’t bring himself to say anything. That was forbidden by his collar. I’d need to isolate the two, perhaps?

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that it’s all flooding back to you? No… no it appears this will be a long recovery. I'm glad to see you won’t need to face it alone. At the moment, the only comfort I can offer you is an opportunity to work out your frustrations in the field, if you’d like. It won’t be in Stormwind; the situation is still too delicate, but there’s quite a lot that still needs to be done and I’m sure you could do it.”

“Yeah…” my newly minted muscle mommy grumbled. “Point me at something to kill.”

••••••••••

Far be it from me to ignore the wishes of a lady, so I proceeded to start working through my missions and objectives, making sure everyone was doing something productive.

I assigned the Classics to Helcular’s Revenge. They will need to put on disguises in order to contact the apprentice, but if I remember correctly, the ritual involves several things that can be found in an alliance friendly town near Southshore. Being a bunch of attractive human girls should help with operating openly in the town.

Emeriss and Dremuus’s team were going to go into the Wailing Caverns now, and hopefully give them a good seeing to on their way to save Naralex. It seemed likely to be the biggest fight today, and would definitely be heavy on spellcasters, so I was sending Lillibeth to silence and soak experience, and ten Royal Guards to hold the front line. Any Druids of the Fang that died would be handed over to Tara, anyone put to sleep would be put in my inventory. Any that didn’t fit would instead go to the prison in Undercity, where some of the more useful inmates were being “released for good behavior”.

Speaking of possession and shadow magic, the ladies of my recruitment team were doing their very best to process the Worgen, but only one could be shifted back to human form per hour with the medallion, and it totally exhausted Natalie to try to calm them down any other way. It’s a lot harder for the ghosts to get a handle on worgen that are actively raging, so instead they were using any excess time and resources to capture the Furbolgs from Ferocitus’s clan.

We only really needed five or six decent possessors to keep up with the Medallion, so I was thinking we needed to start spreading the ghosts around. The ones that were most lucid also tended to be exceptionally bad at possession, so I was having them tested most vigorously for their aptitude with magic and the like. Those who cast would become the mage contingent for Corpse Party. Those with sharp minds who could at least possess the mindless or willing would be sent with field agents, especially my rogues, to act as assistants, spotters, and occasionally possess someone who is knocked unconscious.

Those who had a bit more aptitude for possession, but who didn’t have amulets of their own yet, would be emulating the strategy that the banshee of Undercity were using: passing around one communal amulet. They would be going to the irradiated outskirts of Gnomeregan, and picking up leper gnomes for practice. The poor bastards were completely fucking insane for the most part, so they would hopefully be easy pickings. They were intelligent when healthy and incredibly numerous; I was almost certainly not going to run out of leper gnomes to capture in any kind of time frame that matters, and each of them would be restored to their natural state as cheerful, industrious, community minded nerds.

Lo’Gosh, no, Gina and her crew would be tracking down the Earth Sign in the Badlands and returning it to the high elven mage. Psychic paper seemed like it would be very useful, and fighting a small band of ogres seemed firmly within their wheelhouse. I could start sending them after regional targets later, once they were all captured and I could round them out with Nathanos and whoever gets Calia’s powers. If they all got upgrades, I’m pretty sure this team could get to a fairly absurd power level.

The Gates were split up and on standby; Tara was helping to teach shadow magic to the ghosts and could resurrect any corpses sent to her, Abby and Eliza were apparently studying how to make pacts with demons, assuming they weren’t just fucking in Ursula’s guest room.

Also in Stormwind was one ambitious ghost that was having difficulty possessing a night elf ambassador to get her to fuck a snake oil salesman. She appeared to be inside the night elf’s mind, but she wasn’t having much luck with overpowering the will. I might check in on her; a quick seduction from a man she trusts might go a long way.

I didn’t love the prospect, but I think it might be time to start on Bloodlust. I was going to send Tony and Talaada to watch whenever Sally brought someone back. They should, by all rights, be able to learn how to do it too. Once they can, she can show up in Menethil Harbor, make some friends, recruit some people to the retinue, and then publicly resurrect some murder victims. Is it overly elaborate? Sure. But if they don’t accept the resurrection from Sally I’d be stuck having Tara reanimate them, and that’s definitely not the same. They’d need disguises to go back home; it just wouldn’t sit right with me. Turning it into a publicity stunt to get a major port to buy into my cult? That I could get behind.

With only the Rogues left of my field teams, I decided to assign Darcell the Test of Faith mission. She would be using company assets left and right, so I’d only be getting the base reward. The bonus reward was good, but not all that good. The rest would be headed to Caer Darrow to scout.

Once Kathra’Natir was captured tomorrow, I was going to send Valeera into Scholomance to kill Krastinov and plant a Scarlet Crusade banner in his corpse or something. A bit of preemptive research would not go amiss. If Keryn and Varvara can come up with someone a little more disruptive to pin it on than their nearest enemies, we can go with that instead. I definitely didn’t want another penalty.