5/20 late afternoon
I had a pretty free afternoon ahead of me. Emeriss was captured, Ysondre was headed north, and nobody but Abby was too badly hurt. I'd been really worried for a moment; I'd almost considered using my reanimate scroll on her. She was just too useful. Thankfully, instead she was just a disembodied spirit incapable of using most of her magic without a host and with almost no proficiency with possession. Lucky for us, her own undead could be possessed easily enough.
When I approached, I found Eliza and a human faced anime dog girl examining one of the dragonspawn corpses. The gnoll zombie turned towards me and nodded. "Ah. Master. I'm sorry for falling. I hope you weren't overly nervous about my fate?" She had a high pitched voice, but from her necklace and her manner of speaking she was clearly Abby.
"How exactly did you just..?"
"Exit my body without being cast into the great beyond? Easy. Eliza here already contained the majority of my vital force, as represented by my still beating heart, so I am tethered to her. When my soul was released from my body, the tether drew me here quite rapidly."
"Are you ok, though? That sounds traumatic."
"By all rights it should have ripped my soul to ribbons, yes. It didn't though. I suspect your amulet had something to do with that. I am quite weakened, however. This one," she gestured at the rag clad body she was inhabiting, "was a student of shadow magic. Barely. I can use my magic as well as she could use hers."
"Which isn't much, from your tone."
"No, as it turns out I surpassed a savage dog's magical prowess at some point. I'll figure out a way to address the problem eventually. Until then, I haven't forgotten any of my alchemical knowledge and Eliza has grown moderately proficient. We can still make the dregs you have had us creating, so long as you provide raw materials."
"Good. We can try to remedy this. Why didn't you use your full heal? That might still be able to repair your body."
"I didn't want to waste it, and I knew something like this would happen. Besides, you'd certainly prioritize me over a few practically untrained adolescent dragons when you acquire that resurrection magic all this is in service of." She had me there. I'd have to think this one through.
"Well, I'm sure we can make it work. At least you can serve well as a ghost."
"So long as I stay within thirty feet of Eliza, yes. The tether starts pulling upon me if there's more than that much distance. Even tearing me out of a borrowed body."
"Of course it does. Well, slightly fewer options, but I think you're probably going to be fine. We can still use this."
••••••••••
I flagged Sadie down for a lesson. I wanted to keep my repertoire of spells growing, and I had given her a mission. The rest of the retinue was starting to disperse; most would return to the area near Quel'Danil until passage via dragon could be arranged to teleport them home. Imriss would fly to Raven Hill to drop off Eliza, Abby, and Stitches, for example.
I insisted, over her objections, that we should absolutely focus on mind control for today's lesson. She was too squeamish about it, and it was honestly one of the spells I most wanted to learn. Especially if, as she claimed, it was an extension of Mind Vision. I brought Lillibeth in to serve as a target dummy; she had been on the road with Auffrey and Prudence towards Menathil Harbor, so she didn't really have anything particularly important she should have been doing.
The process was incredibly fast once I pressured Sadie into honestly trying. Like most forms of mind control I've seen since coming here, it consisted of substituting someone else's will with the caster's. It also had that classic shadow magic drawback of affecting the caster too. While dominating someone else, your will wasn't piloting your own body. In game it had taken the form of switching to playing the target, and that wasn't entirely wrong. While your own body was still theoretically conscious and aware, it had absolutely no desires; not even self preservation was online, since every driving part of the mind had been transferred to the other guy. It seemed pretty subtle though; for the most part it just looked like Sadie was zoning out while she controlled Lillibeth.
Lillibeth danced, sat down, tidied in the kitchen, and recounted what little she could remember of her life. It just seemed like she was deciding to do each thing in turn.
"I died during the darkening. I can't remember much about my life before that. I believe I had a family, and we were happy enough. I was going to follow my mother in her trade? I wouldn't do that very well now. I've lost too much. I'm really happy to have the ability to touch and feel things again, but actually having to do maintenance on myself is much more annoying than I remembered. I also feel useless and want to help more; I liked being always useful. It made me feel special." Her eyes were turning downcast.
"Don't worry Lillibeth. We will figure something out. We have a relatively free day ahead of us while Doris makes her way to the portal in Ashenvale, so we can afford to work on secondary projects. That includes getting you back into a more prominent position."
She nodded, wiping a bit of moisture from her eyes. She'd gone from one of my most in demand girls for day to day operations to one of the least useful. That had to hurt. Sadie, for her part, broke the connection and rushed over to give her a hug. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dredge up pain like that."
"No. No, it's fine. It's temporary, right?"
"Right."
We all took five and had some water before getting back to work. I had watched Sadie's spell earlier, and I was pretty sure I could reproduce it. It took six tries, but I'm pretty sure that would have been days or weeks without soul talent. I looked out through Lillibeth's eyes, and at first it felt just like mind vision. I was a passenger; I didn't get any insight into her thoughts, at least no more than communication talent gave me, but I was reading all of her senses. I felt her dress against my skin, I saw how big I was compared to her, I heard Sadie speaking.
"Alright. Now will for her to do something. Anything will do to start." Looking over at the blonde, I had a slightly wicked thought. It took a few tries to frame it correctly. I couldn't think of an order or a request, I had to just focus on wanting something, and I had to think of Lillibeth's body as my own. The priestly mental gymnastics continued; I wonder if Lividia would be good at it? Anyway, when I wished with all my heart to walk over to Sadie and kiss her, Lillibeth did just that.
I felt her cheeks start to burn, especially when Sadie didn't initially reciprocate, and I felt a force trying to push me out of the body. I was able to hold on very easily. It was like a sudden gust of wind; sure it was a force against me, but there was no way it would knock me over without me already being in a precarious position.
I also checked if my lures worked through mind control. That is definitely why I had Lillibeth try to seduce Sadie; a spirit of scientific inquiry. The fact that I was experiencing everything Lillibeth did first hand and I still had some pent up energy from the fight had nothing to do with it.
The results: communication talent still worked to some degree, but it affects me, not her, so I needed to constantly update her orders, telling her exactly what to do. I don't know if alluring voice worked or not actually, but my communication talent enhanced skills of seduction were apparently enough to get a short makeout session out of a pair of women magically compelled to see each other as acceptable sexual partners. Like I said, it was a poor test; both girls obviously knew what I wanted to happen and were submissive to me by default. Fun though, and I was able to track Lillibeth's resistance to my orders by the level of pressure I felt.
Walking over to Sadie had been easy, going in for the kiss had been a slight pressure, being rejected reflexively had been a surge, and the high point had been dirty talk with the priestess, not that even that had threatened to push me out. Once they had started actually kissing, the resistance had ebbed away pretty quickly.
When I severed the link after around fifteen minutes, I had a moderate case of mana fatigue. I'd had worse but I definitely needed to take a rest and have some water. Lillibeth didn't stop kissing and pawing at Sadie for a few moments, but when she noticed I was watching she turned beet red and stepped back. It wasn't that she had an audience; she just realized she wasn't being mind controlled anymore. She and Sadie were both fairly flushed, but seemed inclined to move right along.
Lillibeth didn't prove a very good target dummy in terms of testing limits. She had very few things she wouldn't do for me, and more importantly she knew that she was being controlled. Naturally, that meant we took Lillibeth's necklace off of her for the moment and slapped it onto another of Vanessa's entourage as she was pulled out of the inventory.
The woman in question was a fighter, not a lover. She was skeletal, with hollow cheeks and bony limbs. The fact that she was glaring at us with undisguised hate also contributed to her unattractiveness. I'd put a limitation on her getting down off of the table, which we had cleared off for this purpose. Sadie was far better at this than I was, so she went in first.
She knew what the holy grail would be, so she started angling for it. I, for my part, started talking and trying to get this girl on the right page to make it easier.
"You know I'm not the monster you all seem to think I am."
"Can it. I don't care what you say, no one should be using magic like you do. I love you." She didn't register that she said something strange there, instead blanking out and saying it in a monotone. So obviously she had the wrong mindset.
"Oh come on. You saw how quickly Vanessa slapped those collars back onto my girls. You really don't have the moral high ground here. Neither do I really, but we can be friends. We want the same things."
"Yeah, sure. What things?"
"You've been asleep for a while. Vanessa, Edwin, and I worked out a deal. I have the king under my control and we are quickly ending the war between the Defias and Stormwind. The Defias shall receive reparations and most of Westfall will be ceded to the newly ennobled leaders of the Defias. Peace, so we can stop stabbing each other and starving people while the nobles are only hurting in their purses." I kept going, framing everything that I was doing as a class struggle and waving away my extracurricular activities as the results of a few early accidents.
Communication talent was on the fritz, or her opinions were changing rapidly. At first she was barely restraining herself from interrupting, and then she started nodding and saying "yeah" at all the right times. Apparently, if she wasn't made to do something too out of character, she'd stay cognizant. As I continued my rant on autopilot, straying further and further from my own actual beliefs in order to get her to buy in, I checked my own necklace and saw her ETE plummeting. When it got under the 120 hour mark, I put in that good old validation command for her and digressed into something for Sadie.
"So yeah. I think you're ready to join the team. You'll be a great addition, and I think you'll love it."
"I love you. I love you." The first time she said it, she sounded a little confused. It was borderline at best. As she said it for the second time, however, she underwent a transformation very similar to Kriss's a few days back. She went from scarecrow to slim, and her brown hair went from the consistency of straw to a healthy mane. It had taken about fifteen minutes of coaching and feeding into a line of bs to go from hatred to love. I'd reinforced her own view of the world and convinced her that I was some kind of communist revolutionary by the end of it, but she was in the bag.
https://imgur.com/a/faith-b2QHFOi
Sadie almost collapsed when she returned to her own head, unfortunately. Shit. She was going to need to go back to the Argent Dawn soon, too. I handed her my arcane orb to help her recover. I called off mind control practice while the new girl, Willa, went over the last fifteen minutes in her head, realizing that she'd just nodded along with everything I said. "You asshole! Was any of that true?"
I was a bit surprised. She was actually angry at me. She was also captured of course, but my freshly caught revolutionary had given a love confession under false pretenses. "Bits of it, mostly that first part. I do want to improve things, I'm just not much of a "burn it all down" kind of guy. Don't worry, I'm also not going to turn you into a fuckdoll. That's more of a Vanessa thing." She stared at me in horror. "Yeah I didn't have the process down when I captured her, so instead of turning into what I wanted, basically just a lieutenant, she got really religiously into the submissive thing. She's a good lieutenant too, so I'm keeping her around, but she also tends to send back anyone I put her in charge of training as a slutty maid in addition to whatever I actually wanted. Oh. Also. Sorry about the table thing." I walked a short distance away and teleported her off of the table.
"Don't get on any more tables in the next day or you won't be able to get back off, alright? You just wait there, I'll figure out what to do with you later. Feel free to have some lunch, but don't pull anyone else out of the closet."
I turned to Sadie, my new binding buddy. I was pretty sure that "willful young woman with some knives" was Sadie's upper limit as far as how strong of a mind she could capture like this, but it was a higher limit than with the ghosts. I was going to have fun with this. But first, I had a bit of information to get out of Sadie.
"So, you prepared a list of enchanters as the chapel. It's a lot; can we go over them before you go back?"
5/20 late afternoon
I brought up the list of enchanters at Light's Hope Chapel, and it was both long and distressingly impressive.
"So you're telling me that there are sevenenchanters, and one of them is an Archmage?"
"Yes. It's apparently very common among the higher ranked members of the Brotherhood of the Light and the Scarlet Crusade to learn how to craft armor, at least for yourself. Some of them are very specialized; I was especially confused to find out that Rohan knew how to make armor out of necrotically charged bones."
"Who is Rohan, exactly?"
"He's a fantastic dancer and a master assassin for the Scarlet Crusade. He actually commutes to and from the chapel somehow."
"Commutes? Through the plaguelands?"
"Somehow he is able to get to a place called Gadgetzan to attend a discotheque most nights, assuming he doesn't have a mission."
"Gadgetzan? The city on the southern tip of Kalimdor?" The Plaguelands were on the northern tip of the Eastern Continent.
"Is that where it is?"
"Ok. We are going to stick a pin in that one. So… Mataeus the Wrathcaster?"
"Horrid man. I don't know why even the Scarlet Crusaders tolerate him. He uses fel magic, and I think he might only be here for the opportunity to destroy things without punishment. But he is very powerful.
"Ok. Scary guy…"
"All are of roughly the same caliber, save Wilhelm. He's probably the most widely skilled at crafting and repairing magical items, but that is all he does. The rest have various other duties and a more specialized understanding of how to make their own equipment."
"So, what? Half the top brass at this place are all enchanters?"
"More like a third, and all of them affiliated with the Crusade are only there sometimes. To negotiate and coordinate."
We went over the rest of the list and I quickly realized something: this was not going to be easy. Hell, it might not even be possible. Unless I could simultaneously collar eight fairly high ranking members of the Argent Dawn and Scarlet Crusade at the same time (yeah right), I'd need to use alternative methods or catch them outside of the chapel. At which point I'd probably have to kidnap them, or get them distracted for a week, or something like that. Did I have the time to invest in this?
I let Sadie go back with a letter and a bag of dry beans one of the girls had picked up at some point. I was just promising them support if they needed it; I had other things to do, but if the chapel was assaulted, I'd be happy to send in Ysondre. Or Noboru; that might go over well.
••••••••••
I had one more prize from capturing Emeriss that needed assessment: the mushrooms. When I checked my inventory closet I found a small tray full of dirt holding a single white mushroom with a cap the size of my fist. I went over the description in my inventory.
Bed of Fading Dream Mushrooms: Generates one Fading Dream mushroom per day, which rots and becomes useless after 24 hours. Any being who eats a Fading Dream mushroom will be instantly captured, however they will also undergo near total amnesia. They will forget their name and past, as well as any and all skills and learned powers which would elevate them above tier 1. Nothing prevents them from relearning those skills, but the initial knowledge and capabilities are irrevocably lost. Abilities which are instinctive or innate to the target's species are unaffected.
So, instant capture of literally anyone is great. I will not knock that. The part where they are reset to factory settings is just a bit more questionable. It would be a massive waste to capture anyone who brought anything to the table with this, not to mention kinda evil. So basically I needed to think of this mushroom as equivalent to killing, morally speaking. It's a deadly poison that will leave behind a blank slate.
The fact that it's a pretty big mushroom isn't ideal either. I can't exactly slip this into someone's drink. So basically only for prisoners or people under the effects of mind control, barring elaborate mushroom based culinary substitutions.
So in summary: these mushrooms will allow me to, once per day, kill someone that I can force or convince to eat a large white mushroom, and as a result get a captured person with minimal skill in any given field. Yeah. I can probably use this.
I had about seven prisoners in my closet right now; I could probably get together with Sadie or Talaada and capture all of them with mind control, but I could also just force feed them mushrooms. Lucky for them, I had something more pressing to use these on.
The worgen were pretty ideal. They were already pretty close to being completely lost. "You could have saved them" is a lot easier on the conscience than "you destroyed them," especially when the person you didn't save is living a happy and productive life under a new name. Unfortunately, Imriss was only about halfway across Duskwood; I had an hour to kill before I'd have access to captured worgen.
I talked it over and ended up sending Faith to work with the Rampant Lions, where she could hang out with at lease a small number of Defias mages and not have to see Vanessa in her new state just yet. That conversation ate up maybe ten minutes. Mind vision practice it is!
••••••••••
I checked up on Nadira first. According to my map she was near the Crossroads, a large Horde town, moving Northwest. Hoping that it would work, I'd firmly grasped my amulet before starting a mind vision spell. When I tried to speak through it, no dice. I looked through her eyes and saw that she was jogging and occasionally consulting a map; a real map, on parchment. I briefly considered using mind control to make her speak and try to communicate with her that way, then realized that would be both exhausting and stupid and ended mind vision.
"This is Erich Bismark. Report your situation." I heard her continuing to jog as she answered through the amulet.
"Yes, Warchief. I've been given a list of places that match your description. I'm headed to one now. The bull man-"
"Tauren."
"Yeah. That. They offered us silver if we brought back water and plant samples from all the oases." That sounded familiar. I think that's the quest chain that leads you to the caverns in the first place.
"Well, gather them while you're there. If there's someone else looking into this place, I want to work with them. In fact, let them know that you're working for the green dragon Erius." If it gets back to the Cenarian Circle somehow, which is very possible if a Tauren surveyor is involved, I want them to be able to connect the dots. Erich can be the guy building up Stormwind, Erius will be the young green dragon single handedly coordinating a war against the nightmare in Kalimdor. In fact, maybe I needed to talk to this guy? If he has any pull I might be able to get a bit of support, or at least legitimacy, from the Horde in Ashenvale.
I checked Imriss's progress and decided he was close enough. I took my dragon form and appeared in midair next to him, waving him off to keep going. We were flying over the woods to the north of the Night Watch camp, and I had a plan. I'd been mulling over how to make use of Emeriss, you see. I think I came up with a good option.
I pulled the corrupted dragon out of my inventory, and for good measure summoned the three druid spirits. I had a very bad man who needed killing, and he had an army of undead. I also had a group of four complete fucking psychopaths that were at least partially compromised by a force that probably hates me and at the very minimum has noticed my existence by now.
Remembering how they thought of me, I decided to go evil overlord on this one. "Kneel" the women, one grotesque and three uncannily beautiful, fell to their knees immediately. "There is a male necromancer to the west of us. He has occupied a building in a graveyard." I showed them the headshot of Morbent fel, each in turn, though only Harnea had an amulet. Each got a set, steely glare in their eyes.
"I want you to largely ignore anyone alive except that man. Tell anyone else to leave, beyond that do not harm them, or corrupt them, or capture them, or otherwise interact with them unless they attempt to harm you. Have I made myself clear?"
"Yes master. It shall be as you say."
"Good. Also, don't get yourselves killed, don't get yourselves too injured, and do not corrupt the ecosystem further. I don't want to come back to a field of poison mushrooms and evil thorns and whatnot."
"We obey."
I took off. I didn't think that having a high level druid or another greater dragon getting a regional upgrade would be a bad thing, Nightmare shenanigans or not. More importantly, I could hopefully strike Morbent Fel off of the to-do list. I'd need to wait and see how it went, but I sincerely doubted that he'd be much trouble for this team. In an extreme worst case scenario he might seize control of one of the Druids, but even that would be temporary with mind defense.
••••••••••
By the time I arrived at Raven Hill, the undead hadn't started acting up yet. I was glad of that, it meant I could sneak into the shack where Eliza and Abby, in her gnoll body, had already set up shop. I warned the ladies, who were in the process of preparing a few dragonspawn corpses for reanimation, that Morbent Fel was about to be attacked. It seemed unlikely that his initial response to a random dragon attack would be "better lash out at my dangerous neighbor," but better safe than sorry.
"Also, Abby. I want you to take on an apprentice. I want to see if possessing someone can be used as a training aid and this is a pretty ideal time to find out."
The gnoll had a pained look. "Who is it?"
"Lillibeth. I'm hoping that she will have an affinity for it, because she was undead herself for a time. If not, no harm done except a week or two of headaches for you."
Her eyes softened a bit. "Fine, but I don't intend to go easy on her." We summoned our dear former ghost girl, and I left them to it. I had worgen to capture. I had the medallion of the Alliance ready to snap them out of rages. I had a mushroom that would wipe someone and capture them instantly. I had a mission asking me to gather them up.
I started with the girl I'd collared the day before, who according to her profile page was named Dasha. "Morning, Dasha. I'm sorry I startled you. Are you more ready to talk now?"
Alas, it was not to be. She was getting ready for capture, but for now getting her to swear her devotion was still the big sticking point. She was just too awkward; she still panicked and wolfed out. I needed to sooth her next time, I think. Or add an obedience that reduces negative emotion. I was wasting medallion charges this way, and I wanted this automated enough that I could get three or four worgen per day.
The male worgen in the left cage was a much more cut and dry capture. I mind controlled him and commanded him to eat the shroom. I had a bad headache after that, but it had taken around 30 seconds to capture him. He stood and looked at me, head cocked to the side, still seeming quite feral but submissive to my authority. I checked my app and the ticker did not consider him to be restored yet. So what the hell am I doing with him now?
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GOT IT