Waking after the Nightmare

5/31 Midnight

I blinked in again, grabbing the corpse of another fallen sentinel. I could drag bodies into my apartment, so I was taking care of a lot of the more difficult retrievals. After the Wailing Caverns were cleared, I’d come to Bough Shadow to help reinforce the battle; the biggest thing I contributed was the use of Vengeance. I had honestly just forgotten about it in the heat of battle, but seeing the corpse strewn field I’d known that this was the exact situation that ultimate spell was made for. It didn’t turn the tides on its own, but a wave of angry spirits had slowly grown around the towering feminine silhouette, and then flowed out across the battlefield to bear back the enemy and allow for a more orderly retreat by the Warsong Clan.

••••••••••

5/31 morning

Fandral’s participation in the Battle of Bough Shadow was a hell of a surprise, and I did my part in helping to retrieve the dead. In retrospect, I may be a little bit too sloppy with my control. I needed to keep a closer eye on my new “recruits.” Not only did it lose us the battle, it almost lost us Fandral.

In general, really, I needed an HR department. Both to improve operational security and to make more efficient use of all my people. Splitting them up into groups with their own immediate managers is great and all, but I needed some people who could keep tabs on everyone and educate new recruits on the way we do things. This would be most important for people like Fandral that I knew had the capacity to betray me, but Gretchen hadn’t exactly been bristling with red flags either.

I decided that the team would be headed by Aelthalyste, Natalie, and Vanessa. Aelthalyste would run general management. She was a spiritual leader for the Forsaken already, not quite as fervent as Talaada but a lot more measured and cerebral. She also had experience making heavy use of shadow magic for state intelligence purposes; that was the real benefit.

Natalie would be training a batch of appropriate people in shadow magic, especially the utility spells. A team of 40 people in a large room casting Mind Vision on everyone in the retinue on rotation could head off quite a few problems, especially if a few of them kept tabs on high risk individuals in shifts. If I gave them each amulets, they could also function as a kind of call center for resources, backup, and information. To top it off, they could manage the wave tactics that worked so well in the Wailing Caverns. They basically didn’t need any spells other than mind vision at all, though I would need to ask Natalie what Mind Vision + Shadow Word Charm would do.

Vanessa would learn shadow magic, something I suspected she would take to enthusiastically, and would be in charge of problem cases. She would monitor and manage anyone that seemed like they may be a danger to the retinue, and correct those acting outside of appropriate parameters. The Defias were much less volatile now that Westfall had been reintegrated and all of the (female) officers and leaders had been given titles and captured at the party; Vanessa needed a new job.Speaking of Vanessa’s job, she hadn’t made much headway on that minor mission. She dropped off a beacon in Booty Bay, but she hadn’t even talked to the target, or found a Buccaneer to serve as the customer. We had all been a little preoccupied yesterday, after all.

Valeera had gone above and beyond on her mission. I wasn’t entirely thrilled at how casually she was using company resources, but couldn’t honestly call anything she did wasteful. She’d managed to stamp a teaching assistant and a researcher by the name of Vectus by arranging accidental contact. Two more sleeper agents inside the Scholomance would be a huge advantage for Lillibeth when she made her way there, which should hopefully be within a few days.

I looked over my missions, and I had a lot of things where I was just planning on sending someone to go handle it. Vanessa in Booty Bay, Onyxia with a Hypno app should hopefully be able to handle Theradras, Lillibeth was going to school once I talked to Pai, Sally could hopefully play matchmaker for Voss. I’d decided to possess my targets for Bloodthirst; murder is fine if everyone comes out of it alive, right?

One more mission, then.

A Damned Fine JobHelp Deathspeaker Selendre of the Eastern Plaguelands get posted in the dread citadel of Naxxramas. Bonus if you accomplish this before 6/6.Reward: 1 credit, Power Trader, pickup line,Bonus: power swap: Necromancer

Eh… on the one hand I would love an inside man in Naxx. On the other hand, getting a promotion in the Scourge has got to be a process that causes a lot of pain and suffering. I was inclined to let this one go, but I wasn’t sure if I’d do so with a normal or deluxe mission ticket. For that matter, befriending the Bloodscalps seemed like a real pain in the ass too. I might just want to trade those missions out. There was no particular rush to do so, I didn’t desperately need either set of quest rewards and I’d only get one new moderate mission a day no matter how many I dismissed. Just something to stew on for tomorrow.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to spend credits on, so I went with something relatively safe: Trace defense. I’d be getting more credits in the coming days, and once Jaina was captured in a few days I’d get the credits back via rebate. It was essentially just a way to feel like I wasn’t sitting on the credits, and I acknowledge that.

I was coming up on the point where I would be able to be a little more self indulgent with my credits. I would probably buy martial talent, and I already had almost every defense. Covert talent sharing might be good too, but I already had a spy network. I don’t necessarily need everyone in my entire retinue to be good at everything, especially when every new skillset requires its own training. Past that, there were a lot of fun utility options, some things that were frankly just toys but that I wanted anyway, some incredibly strong big ticket items, and the possibility of just buying my enemies outright.

••••••••••

I checked in with the corpse pile. Unfortunately, despite burning the midnight oil and drinking the entire contents of the moonwell and our potion stores, Sally had only been able to resurrect about half of the dead sentinels and orcs. Innervate helped too, but there’s only so much her body and mind could take, no matter how much magic was flowing through it. Talaada, wearing Sally’s face, was covering for her at the monastery today. Poor dear was passed out in one of the guest rooms of Stormwind Castle; I really, really needed some other people to learn how to do what she does. A 24 hour window is enough for skirmishes and accidents, but not total war; this was a bigger battle than the last, but I was sure I’d face bigger ones eventually.

The Druids of the Fang were split into four groups. The dead, the drugged, the forsaken, the captured. The dead were pretty obvious, I think. These were the fine people that we had been forced to kill during the attack. The living were drugged out of their minds thanks to Vanessa’s special stores while being kept awake. They were generally tied down, and about half of them were turning into snakes and back again at irregular intervals. I kept them under heavy guard.

The medallion of the Alliance was being used on cooldown, so we had about six new recruits among the living. We’d tried possession capture; they were high as fuck after all, but as it turns out the mind of a nightmare corrupted person is a scary, hostile place where my half trained brain spelunkers were in quite a lot of danger. I had four badly injured ghosts flickering in and out of existence while they recovered, and one had just flat out vanished. I’m pretty sure he was destroyed, and not a single one of the Druids had been successfully captured in the process

Tara was resurrecting the dead in her own way, and the new unholy abominations were being consoled by former holy priests from Undercity. Harnea and her companions were technically undead, but they were also powered by life magic. Astral projecting spirits who had been cut off from their own bodies. These new forsaken Druids would have difficulty calling upon nature magic in a way similar to undead priests with the light, because they were animated by profane death magic. Hopefully they would be open to retraining into a new field, or able to adapt their practices just like those same priests, but that would probably only come after they were captured. Tara’s mark of domination would hopefully turn that into a foregone conclusion, for now they got therapy.

The last group, my own injured, were stable and healing. Anyone who lost a limb or was so injured as to need severe surgery had been handed a necklace and turned into a troll. Trollsblood potions would help accelerate healing further, but anyone that was capable of basic functioning was just a troll now, and would stay that way until they finished healing.

There had been some reasonably useful magic items among the Caverns, which we distributed among the troops as marks of honor and the like. I took a bow I recognized, called Venomstrike, for myself. It wasn’t anything too special, but its ability to infuse arrows with deadly poison would be applied to my moonblade, and it was a better bow than the mass produced non enchanted one that the Farstriders handed me.

All that, and I’ve barely started my day. There was so much work to do.