Transitions

5/1 evening

I was banking on the armor, you see. As far as I knew, the most dangerous things I’d be likely to encounter in the woods would be spiders and maybe one or two stray ghouls. If I saw anything I couldn’t handle pretty easily, I teleport back to Drusilla and Darcell. I don’t think much could kill me in ten seconds around these parts if I was wearing armor, at least as long as I didn’t pick a fight with the colony of insane green dragons in the deepest part of Duskwood.

So, using my map, I made a beeline for the river on the border between Elwynn and Duskwood. I did my best to avoid any spiders I saw, and kept my weapons at the ready. It went more smoothly than I expected. I blasted one skeleton in the back of his head before it saw me, but other than that everything was nice and uneventful. Once I reached the river, I followed it downstream towards the bend, around where Elwynn gives way to Westfall.

The sun was starting to go down when I saw it, a couple of guys on a small island in the river. They had a fire pit and some supplies stacked up, and seemed tense when I approached, at least until they saw I was both human and alive. “Hey! Room for one more?”

“Sure! I’m not gonna leave you to fend for yourself over there.” The man speaking was a grizzled older man, long blonde hair bound up in braids. I forded the shallow bit of river that the two men indicated, and pulled off my helmet, revealing a brand new face I made just for this occasion. “Edward Fonn. May I know the names of my hosts?”

“Sven, Sven Yorgen. This is Lars.” He indicated his much younger companion, a guy in his mid twenties at the oldest with his hair tied back in a brown ponytail. I’d known Lars at a glance of course, but that would be creepy if they knew. “What brings you here, stranger.”

I did my best disgusted look as I surveyed the camp looking for swords. “Patrol went wrong and we got separated. I joined up a team looking to try to clear out this place a bit, and then half the squad were greenhorns that scattered the moment they saw a few spiders. It’s good they had the guts to volunteer, but I’m pretty sure those lads are going home. Hopefully on their own feet and not in sacks.”

Sven had a blade at his hip, but Lars’s sword? That was sitting out, propped against an old stump. It wasn’t in very good shape, my newly specialized sword and torch knowledge informed me. I’d be doing him a favor. I went over to sit on the stump.

“So, what brings you two here? I can’t imagine you just love camping so much you couldn’t stay in town.”

“Around when all this started, my home was the first one hit by Dark Riders from Kharazan. I figure that if I figure out what happened to my own family, I might be able to start undoing some of this mess. Someone’s got to; the night watch are too focused on maintaining the status quo. Having a safe road is nice and all, but it won’t be enough to bring back Brightwood.”Well damn. That’s brave, if a little foolhardy, for a couple of random guys to be trying. “Excellent. We need more people working towards a better tomorrow. It’s a shame that things are bad all over; my organization is just doing an initial sweep to investigate, otherwise I’d suggest we cooperate.” Add whatever the hell these guys were doing to my to-do list, which will almost certainly just keep getting bigger.

“So what do you call your outfit? Doesn’t sound like you’re actually in the Stormwind Guard.”

I shrugged and frantically started thinking. “Formerly. Now I’m with Bismark’s Irregulars. Name’s a work in progress. Might change.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Move from region to region and cut off the head of the beast in each one. Focus our efforts, remove at least one threat, and move on so the locals can clean up. We are simple folk, there’s a lot of things in this world that just need a few dozen strong men to run up and stab them. We intend to do that.” No need to mention that we will be doing that because of regional missions, it’ll be altruistic looking, if sloppy, in practice.

While we chatted, I pulled out a couple spider legs. “Sorry, that's all I’ve got. I imagine you’re sick of them.” When the two got to work cooking the leg, I quietly reached over and grabbed the sword, which I promptly shoved into my inventory. Theft accomplished, and confirmed in my app, I pulled out a sword belonging to a member of the Northshire Militia. This one had a scabbard, and was probably in better repair. I put it right where the old one was, and checked my next mission.

OverwatchKeep Watcher Paige from returning to Darkshire in the next 24 hours.Skill upload: animal skinning

Uh. No. A mission that, at best, would take a full 24 hours to complete would not be making the cut unless it had a mission ticket attached. I’d need to dismiss this in the morning and hope. I was quiet, and it occurred to me that this was a spooky place and the two men had their backs to me. As night fell, I simply used apportation to go back to my lovely little abode. Let them think they met an apparition that left them a new sword, no clean up required.

When I got there, I noticed something which I’d normally be thrilled about. The house didn’t smell like corpses. That was bad, in this case. I pulled out the death perfume and rapidly ran around the house reapplying the horrid scent to all the doors and windows before dusk came. When I came inside, I checked the girls in the bed. They could move their heads and hands with very little coordination, and could even speak in a severely slurred way.

Tessa and I fed them the last of the stew from this morning, and I enjoyed Tessa’s flustered lust quite a bit. So far the lust seemed to scale to some degree with how intense a task she was helping me with, or at least that’s what I assumed based off of the impromptu makeout after that fight.

“Unfortunately, we are going to need to stay alert as long as we are here. Which means no fun times. You’ll need to wait for those,” without waiting for an answer, I turned away from her, and held my amulet up to my mouth. “Bismark to Ellerian. Are you in private?”

“Oh. Yes, other than Anetta. We are sharing a room at the inn.”

“You left Northshire together?” I suppose the binding page did tell me that my retinue members would be somewhat drawn to one another. Also, damn, I’d been planning on capturing someone in that abbey as a sleeper agent. Whatever, I never had enough necklaces to pull anything like that anyway. I’d just let one of the militia go home with a necklace, it’d be fine.

“Yes. I thought I should keep an eye out for her. What’s the point in joining a conspiracy if you don’t cooperate?”

Anetta chimed in from her own necklace, “I just wasn’t sure if you needed me. You’ve probably gotten even stronger since you left.”

“You might be surprised. Anyway, there’s two things I need you to do. If you can find a woman named Keryn Sylvius, try to convince her to either come with you or take an amulet. Then, if you can, go to Lakeshire and see if you can join their guard. I need to be involved in a specific raid they are planning if at all possible.”

A long silence, followed by an exasperated sigh. “So why exactly do you need to be involved in a specific raid?”

“It’s a long story. Hold your gems and ask for missions. That’ll explain a good bit.” We had a back and forth about how missions worked. Auffrey noted that I had the mission to destroy Hogger, and called me on intending to use her as a proxy. “You could just tell us what you want, Erich. Open communication is useful for quite a large number of things; I suggest you switch over to that going forward, hmm?”

“With you and other members of my retinue, I fully intend transparency. With that in mind, you should know that my retinue is also my harem. You are both going to be my lovers at least occasionally. I intend to let you act autonomously, Auffrey, but I’m going to give you marching orders. Hopefully once I have more people working for me, I won’t need to throw out conflicting orders so often. Until then, it’s reasonably likely at any moment I might need to call you in to help me with something, such as this situation with Redridge.”

We hashed it out. Auffrey gave me a lot more pushback, but always with a constructive tone. She accepted my control the same way one might accept a friend who insists on a certain restaurant you don’t like. Annoying but not worth getting worked up over. It occurred to me that I’d probably have to figure out some kind of organizational structure. At the moment I only had about ten people even partially in my retinue, but I don’t think it will surprise any of you to discover that I wanted more. For now, though, an A team and a B team covered my needs just fine, and Auffrey was doing fine as B-team’s squad leader.I’d be kidding myself if I pretended that the makeup of The A team would be based on anything other than who I enjoyed the company (and “company”) of most, with maybe a few specialists thrown in to fill weak points and a couple heavy bruisers to round things out.

Drusilla and Darcell were in no state to protect themselves if something happened, so I picked them each up and sent them to stay in Auffrey and Anetta’s room instead of this moth eaten bed. They could teleport back to me in the morning.It would have been nice to get my rocks off, but I’m familiar enough with horror tropes to know that when two people are alone together in an undead infested city they should not start fucking. Instead we brought in Auffrey and Anetta to keep watch so we could have a bit of a roll in the hay in their room, on the rug.

Tessa was not a crazed lover, or hyper submissive, or anything else like that. She was really quite vanilla; she wanted missionary position mixed with a makeout, and I didn’t see any reason to object in the slightest. We slept on the rug, all the tension of a few days in dangerous territory leaving us.

••••••••••

5/1 morning

It was infuriating. Unfair really. Nobody had seen that random peasant die, but the guards still wanted to question Lividia about his vanishing, apparently because she was “the last person he talked to”. How could they possibly have made the connection with their feeble minds? It was mystifying.

All told, it made Goldshire much less fun to visit. There weren’t even many people in the tavern, apparently because it was morning? What did that have to do with anything? When she grilled the serving girl for an explanation she discovered another fascinating human innovation. Because of their terrible night vision, tendency towards fatigue, and short lifespan, humans carefully scheduled their days so that they worked outside during the day. They couldn’t afford to waste any time.The human method was almost depressingly simple as she learned more about it, but effective. Don’t waste time, focus leisure into times and places where work is difficult, actively do difficult things to get better at them. Humans really were brilliant in their simplicity; she suspected that dragons simply overthought the matter of self actualization most of the time, being far more intelligent and self aware.

The innkeeper was terribly confused, expecting pay after she ate something that was her rightful tribute, but that was easy. She just slipped out and flew away when nobody was looking. Goldshire had proven that it didn’t have anything else to offer her. She would have to seek a perfect male to serve elsewhere. She’d have liked to go to Stormwind, but mother might still want to kill her. Lakeshire was surrounded by jealous brood-siblings who might seek to end her as a threat, which would be annoying to deal with.

As such, she went south towards a town called “Darkshire,” which sounded just lovely when she’d commanded the traveling peddler to describe it. She could have taken human form, but she wanted quick results and was feeling a bit lazy. He was so cooperative when she landed in front of him and asked nicely. She might try this approach more often.

It was a total bust. The place was too foggy, nobody bought her drinks, and hardly anyone could even generously be described as worshiping her. She stalked out into the night, trusting her gut. In her mind's eye, she saw a map of the region, with a glowing dot in a small town to the west. Given her brilliance, if her mind supplied her with instructions that clear the only thing to do was to make haste to that location. She’d had a terrible day. Maybe things will go better in this new town of “Raven Hill”.