章 144: Morning on a Day for Meetings
5/22
I woke up with Galiena and Lividia on either side of me. A bit of advice; if you are ever playing a game of fuck, marry, kill and one of the options is a dragonspawn, strongly consider them for the fuck category. Galiena was beautiful and even fairly smart in a limited sense, but her fervent devotion to pleasing me and Lividia was basically her only personality trait. If you want a stepford wife, go for it, but I'm pretty sure I'd get bored of Galiena as a sexual partner very quickly. She was a lot of fun, but already felt more like a mobile sex toy than anything else after one night together.
I checked my app only to find that I had notes requesting meetings from Onyxia, Melisara, Ysondre, Keryn, and Nozara. Onyxia had prepped an assembly of black dragonspawn for me to capture after lunch. Melisara had plans for how to approach the Scarlet Monastery, Ysondre had news about Ysera and plans for how to accelerate her capture, Keryn had seen Lo'Gosh's team arriving, and Nozara was hoping to plan out what to do with her limited supply of jewels. I also had a few updates for missions; at least Varian was headed to Ironforge today, so I didn't have training planned.
Of those, Keryn definitely seemed to have the most time sensitive information and she'd only made the note a few minutes ago, so my first reaction was to cast mind vision on her. The royal party had arrived by zeppelin early in the day, arriving in the military airport behind Ironforge. They were an extremely visible bunch; the towering purple man with antlers being particularly obvious among the elite troop of royal guards. Keryn was shadowing the group, and noted that a blood elf among the team was walking unsteadily.
She had strange, bright green markings all over her body and seemed to be surreptitiously performing some kind of spell frequently on nearby passers-by. When I looked through Keryn's eyes, I could identify a sort of low impact mana draining. Combining my old world knowledge, my intuitive understanding of magic, communication talent's analysis of her body language, and my recent interactions with high elves, I concluded that this lady had a mana problem and might actually be overdosing.
That made it easy, actually. I had a moderately large collection of Quel'dorei, including two mages, who had very recently discovered a "cure" for mana addiction. Assuming that Broll and Varian weren't totally oblivious pricks, they probably would want her to get help, especially now that they had the full force of a major world power backing them up.
"Keryn. I'm going to send you Kriss and Aurora. Get somewhere out of sight so they can show up." I quickly changed channels. "Kriss. There's a blood elf girl that looks like she's having some severe mana problems. I'm pretty sure that the amulet can cure her, but I need you two to go to her and offer her a treatment plan without letting anyone know about them. You're high elves in good health despite actively using magic; that should be all the evidence you need, right?"
"I suppose? We will certainly try."
"Ok. Coordinate with Keryn for when you can teleport to her. This woman is the companion of someone who is very dangerous to me, so if we can get her into the team, it will be a huge help."
Hopefully I'd be able to capture Valeera by offering something that she would hopefully want. Hopefully her team would go along with it. Hopefully she had enough pull in the group that after her "detox" she would be able to leverage Lo'Gosh and Broll into collars of their own before they caused problems. There were way too many hopefullys in that plan, but it's what I had right now, and I could hammer out the rest of it after Keryn and the elves did phase one.
That meant I had a minute to go over missions; I sure as hell didn't want to start something else I couldn't put down right now. Onyxia killed the target as I hoped, though she didn't manage to make it a surprise, so I was up to 10 credits. I spent them immediately on addiction defense; it just seemed like a smart play. If I ever went to Quel'Thalas and started capturing blood elves left and right I'd make back the credits pretty quickly. It was an investment; I'd make back every credit with interest.
The mission ticket went on top of the pile; I'd be happy to have it at some point, but it was just filler right now. The ore tracker was something I would inevitably be glad I had at some point, but until I put together a survey team to gather thorium or something, it didn't really do me much good.
••••••••••
"Yes! Yes! This is exactly what I needed!" Nozara was thrilled when she saw this new addition to her toolkit. She had placed one of the necklaces on Zelena's pet Gan'arg Zorba, naturally, for security reasons. The other had been issued to one of the Wormtongue laborers, mostly because Master Bismark wanted one of them collared for whatever reason. It was on his list; she had no particular reason to question it.
She'd been planning on having the creature use the herb tracker to gather felweed; the blooms could be used to create a rudimentary magical barrier, and had a long shelf life. They would help meet her quota nicely if she could gather a bushel of them. Now, instead, he could survey for Bavira's miners! It would be vastly more efficient! Master Bismark was a genius!
••••••••••
Of course I didn't get the bonus fiendish contract, and it looked like the demon squad got slaughtered, but that wasn't that big a deal. Just meant I'd have a smaller number of disposable mooks for the raid on Bough Shadow, and I'd need to resummon them tomorrow morning. I wasn't pleased, but I'd given her a job at 11 PM on a work day and told her to get it done quick. Sloppiness was understandable. I'd gotten what I wanted out of it: a credit, a moderate mission, and a regional mission.
Savage Fronds
Provide the druid Rayne, found in Light's Hope Chapel, with 30 "Savage Fronds." You will be penalized if you do not hand them to her personally after introducing yourself honestly.
Reward: 1 Credit, instant Capture of Carlin Redpath
Not amazing but not bad. I vaguely remembered Carlin as a mid tier Argent Dawn grunt, mostly important because of his family-wide tragic backstory. I'd take him, assuming I could find savage fronds. I'd need to have Sadie ask Rayne about those, I guess? I had no clue what they were or how to get them. If they weren't too hard to find I'd happily have a team harvest a few of them so I could get another credit and a dude that was almost certainly at least as much of a badass as Tessa, maybe more, just based on where he has been spending the last several years. Overshadowed by giant dragons, sure, but still badass and well positioned in a group I wanted to take control of.
Tanaris: defeat Chief Ukorz Sandscalp
Reward: Sacrificial Knife
Sacrificial Knife: the first time this dagger is used to kill a target, it converts their powers/skill set into a sphere that can be used as template stacking or power swap (one use)
Theoretically useful, but in most situations where I could kill someone with a knife I could also wrestle them down and collar them. So I guess this is for people where I want their powers but I don't want them? Unless I could do something psychotic like copy someone's powers by killing someone in the retinue, then resurrect them? Eh. Doesn't matter. I'll be doing it for the regional upgrade eventually. Probably.
••••••••••
"Please! Please, miss! You seem to be in distress. We can help!" Aurora called the poor girl. She was so young, perhaps as young as thirty. Hardly more than a child, whatever the humans might say. The band turned to her, laying a collective skeptical gaze upon this strange high elven woman.
The girl was immediately skeptical, but the tall Kaldorei was the one who stepped forward to respond. "Though she may need assistance, why should we trust you to give it?"
"She is our countrywoman, and she is obviously dealing with a high level of fel magic corruption. We can help purge it, if she consents, after which we have a small wellspring of mana she could rejuvenate herself with." Not entirely false, but not entirely true either. She'd be rejuvenated when she was captured, that much was true. More importantly, the child seemed enthusiastic about the prospect of a speedy recovery.
"Really? How quickly can you get it done?" She asked.
The Kaldorei gave her a disgruntled glare. "Valeera, we don't even know these people, and if all they are going to do is remove the fel energy and then feed your addiction, it might do as much harm as good in the long run."
Aurora forged right ahead. "I've seen it done over the course of a few hours, but it can take up to a week. You'll need to be in a calm, quiet place with as few people as possible. I assure you, we focus on bringing the body into balance and managing the cravings."
That description seemed to mollify the antlered man, but turned off the girl. "Eh, I'll think about it." The child turned away.
"We will keep you in mind, but I hope you understand our caution." The human finally piped up. "Where can we find you if we need your services?"
"While we are still in town? We haven't chosen an inn yet. We are from Stormwind, most recently. If you contact the palace, I'm sure they can get you in contact with our organization quite swiftly." It was probably the wrong thing to say; his face turned into a stormcloud at the mention of the palace.
The dwarven guards stepped in, "Lad. If yer done, we've got tae get moving."
"Agreed. As I said. We will keep you in mind." The party walked off. Well… they hadn't said a complete no, right?
••••••••••
Unfortunate. Not entirely unexpected, but I had been hoping for a better result. Neither Aurora nor Kriss were diplomats or salesmen, but apparently a fairly natural level of distrust from a group of people fleeing assassins, combined with the angst of a young person with a drug problem she was barely admitting she had, won the day. Luckily, Keryn was still keeping an eye on the group from a distance. She'd turned herself into a dwarf to make it easier, and was managing to stay pretty close to the group. We could try something else, and at minimum we could monitor the group closely.
I summoned Melisara, finding her currently in the body of a troll; a captured one, thankfully. "We can talk while we work; get into my body as a passenger. I have a job for a banshee." Time to stress test the limits of my new recruit's possession abilities.
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