Spoils of Atal’Hakkar
6/1 evening
Aegwynn was still tired, but she’d recovered enough that I could use another time-stop trick on Eranikus. Apparently it was much, much harder to pull on someone his strength, but she managed. I, on the other hand, didn’t. Eranikus was not physically here, exactly. We tried to restrain him; Ysondre was able to take her full sized form in the great vaulted room he was being kept in, and she could overpower this shadow of Eranikus easily enough. No wonder the time stop had been relatively easy.
I’d known that he wasn’t entirely present from my prior knowledge, but I’d hoped that I could collar him with ghost hair. I could get it around his neck, but he was only a projection; a living nightmare like the ones Sadie can manifest. The only physical part of Eranikus left here was a giant emerald the size of my fist; I shifted to green before touching it. When I picked it up, I heard a deep rumbling voice in my ears. “Brother? Little brother? You are unknown to me, but I need your help. In Ysera’s name, put this gem in the essence font I brought with me. I sense it nearby.”
“Yes sir.” I started to look around until I saw some kind of brazier full of green fire. “Ysondre, can you look this over? Eranikus wants to go into something called an essence font and I don’t want to just blindly throw him in in case it’s corrupted.”“What? Ysondre is there? Give my essence to her! She will be much more able to assist.” I shrugged and did as he asked. I tried wrapping a necklace around him first, but it seems that a neck is one hundred percent non-negotiable. Ysondre took the essence gem and looked over the brazier before shaking her head.
“I’m sorry father. It’s been here for too long. If we placed you in here, it would only corrupt you. Don’t worry. We have developed several methods of purification; you are one of the first who was defeated by this new enemy.” She looked at me hopefully. I shrugged.
“I’ll figure something out. Hopefully a stamp will work; if it doesn’t, we are going to need to rely on Tyrande, or maybe Talaada could charm him. If that doesn’t work… eh, I guess we are brainstorming. I’ll definitely be asking Ysera, but most of the Green Dragonflight’s tools seem ineffective against the nightmare, so maybe the Cenarian Circle?” She nodded, and rephrased my explanation to the gemstone in her hand. I finally found something that communication talent was not giving me any insight on, but at least he was just as unaware in the other direction.
“Alright everyone. Do a sweep, take anything that seems useful or valuable, and we can clear out. No need for to drag this out.” My deathguard and dragonspawn did a sweep through the temple, and the Atal’ai did indeed have some wonderful toys. Most of it would need to be tailored in order to be usable for someone without the lanky build of a troll, but I had tailors now. Looking it over, I could probably donate or sell the weapons, armor, gems, and precious metals as-is for around 400 gold before we even get into the magical equipment, and there was quite a bit of used cloth and leather that could probably be cleaned up and turn into something more useful with an afternoon’s worth of effort, as well. Bandages if nothing else.
While the temple was being ransacked, Ysondre gave me an explanation of eactly what the gemstone was. Apparently some green dragons can stow a fragment of their soul inside of a gemstone, typically when they are about to go through a particularly trippy part of the dream. Something that could disconnect them from reality. Using an essence font, they could reassert control over their dreamself. It sounded like a kind of mental savestate to me, not that she’d use those words. It was the kind of thing you normally took a few days in advance to do, so the fact that Eranikus seems to have improvised it was very impressive.
More importantly, it didn’t actually work on the nightmare. Ysondre had prepared one, and as far as she could remember when she tried to fix herself the backup psyche had just reset the process of corruption, which didn’t do more than slow it down. If we captured little Eranikus, hopefully the process will go differently with someone sporting corruption resistance. He also knew where he had the Green Fragment stowed; actually getting him back into the fray was an excellent bonus objective, but not as vital as it might have been. We could send all of our green dragons to the small dream sanctum he had in the mountains near Moonglade for a smash and grab tonight. Naturally, he’d stowed it in the dream, but as long as Xavius didn’t know we needed the scepter or where it was, we wouldn’t have too much trouble.
Hopefully, this part of the job was in the bag. Wait a second. “Ysondre, didn’t I send you to Wyrmrest to ask about Vaelen?”
“Yes. I put in a request and have one of our drakonids waiting for a response. They have an amulet; you shouldn’t worry so much.”
Thank the Light for competent minions.
••••••••••
I received a note from Xylinnia; apparently the assault on the portal would be happening early tomorrow morning. She’d been informed that the Horde was coming to support them in force, and when I checked where Sylvanas was now, it made sense. She was moving north through Azshara, and when I checked in with her she was coming with a star studded team. Varok Saurfang, Vol’jin of the Darkspear tribe, and the Warchief, orc Moses himself, Thrall son of Durotan.
I almost regretted using all these amulets on dragons today. Almost. Definitely knew where tomorrow’s budget was going, though.
••••••••••
There was no movement in the Wyrmrest temple, yet, and I think Azuregos was laying low while there was an army in the area, so I decided it was time to play with my new toys. Specifically, Hybrid Runes. I gave the description a once over.
You can now alter the Tempest-wearing members of your retinue into hybrid races (human, kitsune, vulcan, etc.), limited by the natural examples of such races that you have in your retinue. There is no theoretical limit on how many races you can hybridize into one individual. However, the result having all of the strengths of both sides and none of their weaknesses is only guaranteed when there are only two donor races present. More complex combinations are increasingly unreliable. The effects of party-wide Heritage perks such as Dragon Thrall do not count against this limit.
It seemed pretty cut and dry, honestly, and I could already think of several uses for it. Troll regeneration, gnomish intelligence, tauren mass, and demonic immortality all seemed like they would be incredibly powerful if applied properly, and in theory they could all stack. I could play with Lego genetics and I was going to make full use of it.
The most obvious place for experimentation would be on the demons; even if larger combos proved unstable, giving my new Satyr the physiques of tauren would let them fight in the manner they were accustomed to as ogres. The Succubi could pick up the powers of imps, perhaps? Unfortunately, literally all of my demons were quite dead for the moment. The Atal’ai we’d taken prisoner would be joining them soon, I suppose; I can’t really think of a better use for a bunch of fanatical murder trolls than turning them into demons to fight and die in my name on repeat forever.
I didn’t have time to do an in depth analysis, so I called in a group I had been largely neglecting. I had about 20 gnomes, rescued from the outskirts of Gnomeregan one at a time by a team of ghosts passing around a pair of necklaces. They were a random collection of gnomes who had been teleported to Tinkertown in Ironforge after essentially being cured of a radioactive zombie plague. Their friends and families were, of course, thrilled to see them, and happy to accept the story that a wandering priest from the Brotherhood of Love had found them and healed them of their affliction. Gotta get that branding in somewhere; soon the High Tinker might be contacting me to ask about my methods.
Anyway. Gnomes have a far better grasp than most in Azeroth of how to study and test a phenomenon, and these twenty weren’t doing anything too important. Picking up the pieces of their shattered lives after a tragedy which killed or mutated 90% of the population of their capital city. Etc etc. Nothing major. So I could give them a task once I gathered them together. It wasn’t too hard; Tinkertown is a dense neighborhood and my gnomes were clinging to one another just as hard as anyone they knew from before the fall of Gnomeregan.
“Alright. I have a task for you all.” I pulled out my necklace. “I need you to study the newest function on this.”
The group of pint sized, brightly colored men and women waited for a moment before one, a girl with pink pigtails, spoke up. “Uh. Sir. Of course. But what exactly do you want us to do? We can’t disassemble the amulets. We’ve tried.”
“I have other people working on that. What I need from you is to try every combination of species that this amulet is capable of transforming someone into and tell me which ones work well. The strengths and weaknesses. Which ones pair well, which ones have negative synergies, and what the impacts of stacking multiple genomes on top of one another are. Take extensive notes; I’m pretty sure this is going to have quite a few knock on effects.”
The gnomes looked at one another and nodded gravely. “We can’t dedicate every moment to it. We have been trying to start new jobs. But we will do what we can.”
“Excellent. Oh. By the way. If you can get any kind of job in the area of manufacturing things that would be useful in a war, do those. I am pretty sure demand is about to skyrocket, what with the war that’s about to start.”
Beat. “May we ask about the process of how you get these missions? Who assigns them? How do they know about these world shaking events in advance?”
“If you figure it out, let me know. Ta ta for now.” I walked out, and the gnomes dutifully shrugged and started working.“Oh!” I poked my head back in. “Avoid Nathrezim. It appears to be too extreme a change at the moment. Seems fatal.”I had a few more things to do before bed; it was good to have that much taken care of.