Burning Books

6/3 Early afternoon

Keeping in mind that I was going to the Molten Core in a few hours, I decided to stop globe trotting for the moment and focus on things I can do in my home base. That meant bookkeeping, mostly.

I was happy to see that I’d successfully gotten an affection starved but badass teenage girl into a relationship with an arbitrarily chosen guy for my own profit. Which I think we can all agree is a responsible and ethical thing to do. But, your honor, the rewards were pretty good. Lilian herself would probably be an excellent addition to my ranks… which is saying a lot, given the power creep already on display in my retinue.

The power trader would probably go towards another round of making Doan the most powerful mage in history. Arranging it so that he knows, and is able to teach, every spell that both Aegwynn and Jaina have ever had access to at the absolute height of their respective power curves would definitely result in me having a small army of gods by the time I want to open the Scarab Gate. If I could pick up Malygos and Azshara and repeat the process for each of them, I’d have an army of mages that can rival the titans.

The scroll of resurrection and stealth skill chip were, in contrast, kinda cute. The scroll was essentially redundant with the warranty plan, though it would let me bring someone extra back in between refreshes. The stealth chip could potentially be useful, but my current procedure of having one of my sneaks get in close and then summon everyone else has generally been paying off.

So. What’s the new mission?

Big Dreams

Convince Gigi Littlewhisker, Boulderslide stone keeper, to pursue her dreams of being a popular musician. Bonus if she can do this with her clan’s blessing.

Rewards: 1 credit, Reversing Mirror

Bonus: Geomancy skill chip

Ok, hear me out: Mass capture by Sylvanas. Gigi can become a diva as a human/succubus hybrid and recruiter so much more efficiently than as a kobold. It’s for her own good, you see. Actually, shit, did I ever make use of that Piccolo? No. No I did not. Either way, I was having Sylvanas run out and bag fifty new prospective demons a day anyway. You don’t have to worry about your community’s opinions if you can rewrite them at a whim, you see.

The reversing mirror was a bit quirky, but powerful. I genuinely didn’t know how useful the Geomancy chip would be. As far as I knew, Geomancy was basically just a kind of bootleg shamanism, and this would probably be another casualty of my success. The time when I would kill for the powers of a midrange kobold spellcaster are long gone, when I have a crop of four dungeon boss tier mages ready to go and will have an equal number of freshly trained archmagi by the end of the week.

I took a look at my options for rewards for Mukla slaying, and it was down to two options. The obviously useful one, or the riskier one that has a higher potential power ceiling. Intelligence would give me a low end hive mind effect on my entire retinue. At least equivalent to letting everyone share senses. I could think of a ton of potential uses for it, in and out of combat.

But… Backroom Deals gave me a new way to make and spend credits. The ability to sell company assets back to the company for one credit or more was potentially a game changer. After all, did I really need performance talent? Did I really need three paralytic poisons? Was I ever going to use this temptress bell? Would it be a good idea to liquidate the combat applicable skill chips that my companions could outshine with a weekend correspondence course? Could I get a market value for my bed of Fading Dream Mushrooms good enough to outshine one blank slate a day, especially with Sylvanas getting way more disposable minions in the same time frame?

In the future, easy missions with shitty rewards would always have the backup option of cashing out; a dedicated team could crank out two to four credits from minor missions on a good day. Buying mission rewards or sharing lures was also damn promising; picking up another reward for service or giving every one of my recruiters alluring whisper would be very handy indeed. I picked Backroom Deals because I had stars in my eyes, simple as.

I was informed by my gnomish engineers that to make an arcanite buoy I would need to provide arcanite and elementium bars. Unfortunately, the only people around that knew how to smelt elementium were the technicians found in Nefarian’s lair. Arcanite could be provided by the fine people of Shadowforge, at least, though it would be expensive.

Fucking Azuregos… I’d figure it out after finishing with Ragnaros. Maybe I could use the pen to take over the whole Blackwing lair and everything in it? A guy can dream, right? Still seemed like this might be the longest and hardest part of assembling the scepter. I needed to check in with the Bronze dragons for their scepter piece, too. Another case of something I’ll need to do after I finish my mission in the Molten Core.

People for the raid were starting to assemble, including a very bedraggled Valeera. Apparently the hive was a bit too densely populated for her to get in and capture one of the target Silithid without raising an alarm. She had one of them in Kathra’Natir’s inventory, having paralyzed it with a company supplied dose of poison, but it would have to do. We turned it into a sheep and popped a collar around its neck; it should be captured in three days, or whenever it calms down enough for Valeera to assassinate it.

Speaking of Kathra’Natir, even if he was doing a good job paired together with Valeera he was almost certainly hamstrung by being trapped in her body. I grudgingly dropped 340 gold on giving him his own body as a heroic Dreadlord.

While I was at it, I also sent two wisps to establish new bases in the Emerald Dragonshrine and Bough Shadow, the portal in Ashenvale where so many night elves were currently camped. Between mass transformation and drawing in every green dragon to sleep around my trees, I suspected that I’d be getting quite a windfall of energy over the next handful of days.

With that in mind, I picked up druid of the claw adept training and built two more moon wells at the trauma center. The druid upgrade would give them a rather beefy healing spell; usually redundant but good to have. It also just generally made them better in every combat relevant way. Small offensive boost, more hp, more mana, faster mana regeneration; the works. Supported by a handful of magic-immune dryads as specialists and tanky mountain giants as tanks, I think Druids of the Claw are likely to be my next most common unit after huntresses.

••••••••••

My raid group was assembled, and I realized that I had light damned raid group of more than forty people. I couldn’t pull a raid like this too often; half of the people here had other jobs, but if I was fighting a small army in enclosed spaces, this seemed like the right play. I sat down and got to work; there was much to do.

I would do my alternating waves strategy again, but with far higher quality units. My demons and Lividia would be held in reserve, to be deployed if one of my teams got thrashed badly enough that they couldn’t step in on schedule. Most of my B-listers were keeping up the skorpid genocide like the Worgen, prepping to lay siege to one of the Hives like Tara’s undead troops, or were otherwise occupied like Ysera and the Green Dragonflight.

Broadly speaking I split my Vanguard into team Stormwind and Team Darnassus, with the plan being to cycle back and forth so we are always fresh.

Team Stormwind

Tanks

Varian, Katherine the Pure (a human Paladin captured at the party, who had been promoted to a hero unit in the process), Noboru

Dps

Gina, the Black Bride (a newly captured forsaken champion), Darcell, Valeera, Varimathras

Healers

Sadie Paletress, High Priestess Laurena, Mary

Ranged DPS

Nozara, Nathanos, Sylvanas, Larimaine Purdue (a mage from Stormwind), Elsharin (same), Natalie Selene, Abby

Team Darnassus

Tanks

Archdruid Andrenius, Archdruid Hamuul Runetotem, Onyxia

Melee DPS

Broll Bearmantle, Fandral Staghelm, Kathra’Natir, Archdruid Glaidalis, Tony, several other Druids

Healers

Tyrande, Archdruid Lillandra, Moira

Ranged DPS

Naralex, Shandris Feathermoon, Elrethe Renferal, Archdruid Lathorius, Jaina, Dremuus, Aegwynn, and the rest of Doan’s first batch of students

Stitches and several dozen royal guards would be collectively screening the backline and serving as reinforcements to plug holes. Everyone would have a shadow priest observing them, ready to pull them out at a moment’s notice if anything went wrong, or support them with shadow words. If this was not enough to get through a substantial amount of the Molten Core, this mission was going to royally suck.

••••••••••

Natalie looked around the group with a clinical eye and an irritated voice in the back of her head. Not the ghost; she’d booted that one out almost immediately. Her backup. She would never become that woman again unless it would somehow benefit Erich, but she definitely wanted to know what she thought.

It was actually kind of funny; she found herself idly repairing the backup frequently. The amulet seemed to think that the shreds of disloyalty contained in it were too big of a weakness, and she might become the pre-necklace Natalie at any moment. She suspected that she wasn’t catching all of the little changes; by keeping external notes already caught three inconsistencies between the worldview she thought she once had and the one she had written down, all in favor of Erich. Her taste in men, her opinions on centralized power, and her stance on summoning demons.

Probably she’d eventually reach the point where her backup was begrudgingly in support of every decision Erich made, just from small changes made over time. Her primary mind found that irritating. How could she observe technique if she was compromised too?