NOVEL NEXT Channel Surfing
6/14 Night day 2
After nearly a full day of sightseeing and a good night’s sleep, Lividia and I both agreed it would be best to take another shot at productivity. Lividia, for her part, would attend classes with Doan; she was behind on the latest developments after all. I decided that I wanted to see just how effective my new Glamor really was. To that end, I was headed to the local tauren’s tribal lands.
On the way, I checked up on what the hell Gamon was doing. As I flew, I split my focus between gliding along and watching the highlight reel of Gamon’s first day in Dun Morough. Unlike the others I’d checked in on so far, he hadn’t gotten a new look when he’d showed up. He was a tauren in the middle of Alliance territory immediately after the world wide series of natural disasters known as the Cataclysm. The active uses for his necklace, like disguises and race swapping, were disabled, but he still remembered the 5 basic circles I’d taught him. More than most could say so far, but it was good to know for sure that was possible.
Lucky for him, his natural inclination when dropped in the middle of a dwarf vs Trogg combat was to start swinging his axe at the violent savages in the hopes that the more civilized dwarves would take him prisoner or something. The dwarves were willing to take the help when their home was under attack, and let their two enemies have at it. He didn’t even realize he was completing the Battle for Anvilmar quest until he’d already earned the reward. In a battle between 3 foot tall cavemen and 4 foot tall mountaineers, the 9 foot tall guy had quite an impact on morale. He was a pretty mid fighter for a tauren, probably around the same level of skill as Tony when I first met him, but he had about 50% more height and 100% more mass and that was more than enough against people who had no formal training at all.
Battle for Anvilmar
Assist in the battle for Anvilmar, meaningfully helping to repel the Trogg forces attacking the dwarven hold.
Reward- Friendly with Ironforge: Any dwarf affiliated with Ironforge will instinctively be able to sense Gamon is “one of the good ones.” They will grant him and his companions the benefit of the doubt and generally treat him as if he were a member of the Alliance, including vouching for him in mixed company, as long as he maintains good conduct.
Sponsor- 1 credit
He was extremely confused to, upon being taken in after the battle, be handed a hastily modified breastplate with the seal of Ironforge on it and a small pouch of spending money. They welcomed him into their home as a mercenary, and once his wounds were treated they directed him to assist on another front. He might seem like a decent guy to the dwarves, but they didn’t have any resources to spare on 9 foot tall freeloaders. He did think to examine his necklace, so he knew his next mission before he was thrust into the middle of it.
The Troll Menace
End the Frostmane assault on Anvilmar
Reward: Mercenary camp training: Frost Troll Berserker
Sponsor: Gigi Littlewhisker’s songs will gain a supernatural ability to make non-dwarves gain an incredible preoccupation with and reverence for dwarven culture. Her own songs will define their understanding of dwarven culture, even if entirely inaccurate.
He’d been assumed to be a big dumb beatstick and pointed at the nearby villages where the trolls were massing to attack, and he’d done just that, but he’d also pulled a rather innovative stunt out of his ass. Whenever he badly injured a troll, he didn’t finish them off (which is typically the best way to deal with their regeneration). Instead, he scooped them up and retreated into the woods nearby, where he captured them by ritual circle. Moving an injured troll is relatively unlikely to cause lasting damage due to regeneration, and thanks to body tune up they were instantly put in peak health and physical condition when he finished the 7 minute chant. It was a brutal method of capture I wouldn’t suggest using on anyone who didn’t have incredible regenerative abilities, but it worked here.
He interrogated the new members of his retinue (unless I showed up or they were sent back through death, the binding was keyed to him) about their plans, and found out that the Frostmane tribe had a rather powerful fire elemental pushing them to higher levels of aggression. The recent cataclysmic earthquakes had opened a short lived portal to the Firelands, and some asshole had popped on through to cause a bit of havok.
To my shock, Gamon caught onto what he was capable of with magic circles and red string of fate incredibly quickly and was willing to go hard to secure the advantage. His new retinue members reported back to their villages, lured friends and family away, broke said friends legs and gagged them, captured them, and repeated.
The small, close knit Frostmane community would have certainly noticed something was wrong soon, but the speed and brutality they could employ while chain-capturing one another meant that Gamon had a pretty functional army of 50 warriors in peak condition ready to rush the cave where their shaman were working with the fire elemental. He’d lost nearly half of them, who had apparently showed up in my extraplanar front yard after death, but in return he’d captured the majority of the spiritual leaders of the trolls in this valley. It was reckless, it was ballsy, and it had worked.
He’d used the Mercenary Camp Training to turn himself into a frost troll berserker unit. He got an infinite supply of throwing axes and regeneration, and his Friendly With Ironforge perk was still fully in effect despite now looking like an unusually tall and bulky troll. 50 pound brass balls swinging in the wind, he strolled right up to Grelin Whitebeard, apologized for the recent unpleasantness, and offered peace terms followed up with a mercenary contract with the southern half of the Frostmane tribe, whom he now ruled in all but name. His trolls would help mop up the Troggs, and in return the dwarves would respect their tribal lands as long as the trolls didn’t do anything aggressive.
The field officer didn’t have the authority to offer anything more binding than a temporary truce when fighting a common enemy, but Gamon took it. He had work to do and when he looked at his list of missions across the central dwarven kingdoms it looked like basically all of it would be easier if his new army was on good terms with the dwarves. In particular, he was planning on bringing a permanent end to the low level warfare still going on between the northern Frostmane Clans and the dwarves.
And so, after an incredibly successful first day on the job, he went looking for the tallest and most muscular among the captured troll girls and celebrated his success. He preferred tauren women, but by the time he fell asleep he was thinking he needed to be more open minded in the future about such things.
••••••••••
Speaking of tauren women, when I arrived in the Highmountain village as a nomadic tauren hunter, I had no intentions of leading with slavery. Not directly. Instead, I just turned on the charm. Both charms in fact; both Azshara’s normal awe/admiration aura and the new lust/infatuation aura. It might not have been the best idea, actually. It was hard to talk to anyone when any tauren woman who heard me speak and saw my muscles started to fall for me immediately.
I decided to say fuck it and lean into it, calling in one of the seductive ghosts of Kharazan to just layer on more power. The result was that I had a dozen new love confession captures following me around the farmer’s market and a few dozen more trying to talk to me, all while their fathers and husbands largely accepted it. I was just too cool to hate, at least when I wasn’t actually doing anything to overtly encourage the shameless behavior.
Unfortunately, the ride had to stop somewhere. I had a fairly extreme mana capacity and recovered quickly as a hero, but Azshara’s spell had been designed with the fact that she had an infinite wellspring she was attuned to always on hand. I hadn’t actually learned much about tapping the Well of Eternity yet, as fully catching up with Doan would take 3 days and I wanted to focus on the flashier abilities, so I burnt through my internal reserve pretty quickly. About 20 minutes had been enough to get a bunch of tauren girls eating out of my hands when you layered on multiple auras and lures, but I was exhausted.
I’d been warned not to let Azshara’s aura drop when I was surrounded by people affected by it; it made them suspicious and more resistant in the future, but I wasn’t sure if blinking away was the right move. As I was starting to feel woozy, I asked a particularly fetching young tauren girl if she’d like to go hunting with me alone, and politely but pointedly asked everyone else to fuck off.
Purely to avoid being accused of false advertising, I fucked her brains out in some bushes and accompanied her while she was hunting. I wasn’t really all that into the hunt, but she didn’t seem to mind too much, especially once I made it explicitly clear I wasn’t actually a hunter except in the most euphemistic sense, and I was just out here to try to recharge my energy. It could potentially take hours, unfortunately, but honestly I thought I had made a good dent for a first pass with my new aura. I found a nice comfortable tree, conjured a bottle of mineral water, and caught up on my shows.
••••••••••
Imriss was being terribly cautious in his role as Garrosh, future Warchief of the Horde. He was terrified someone might notice that he was acting out of character; he was a chieftain of the Mag’har orcs in Outland, but that didn’t mean he was above scrutiny. In what I can only describe as a panic, he declared that he needed to go on a vision quest to seek a cure for the illness of the elderly orc shamaness Geyah.
Based on his internal monologue, he was going to try to piece together the ritual circle while he was away. I genuinely didn’t know if he could do it, but if he did puzzle out the ritual that would definitely fix any illness the Greatmother was facing. After all, I’m pretty sure the real core problem she was facing was that she was an octogenarian under a substantial amount of stress. I didn’t have a clear number for how old she was, but her grandson Thrall was in his mid 30s at least. Joining the retinue and getting the body of a woman in her early 20s would dramatically reduce the toll on her body.
Thrall’s grandmother was no big deal compared to the top tier in my retinue, but she’d be a heavy hitter compared to anyone else Imriss/ Garrosh had close at hand. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know how that panned out for a long while; his stated intent was to leave for a week to go to the Crown of the Elements for guidance from the spirits. It wasn’t a completely stupid strategy, especially since he didn’t have any guidance in the form of missions, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to pan out quickly.