บท 65: Shack Sweet Shack
5/7 evening
Abby's shack was as we'd left it. The door was hanging open, so I sent Lillibeth in first. Everything was clear, so I went in and closed the door. I made a few calls, first to Drusilla, telling her to finish whatever she was doing and teleport to my location. I figured that I could learn a few more warlock spells before dusk. After that, I contacted Eliza.
The line opened and I heard nothing. Total silence. "Eliza? You there?"
"I am." Quiet, no follow up. There was a pause.
"You… you doing ok?"
"I await your orders." She said it with virtually no inflection, a far cry from the vengeful petulance of last time. She sounded exhausted when I was expecting antsy.
"Have you decided to become my knight?"
"Nothing would bring me more pleasure, my lord." She certainly didn't sound eager. Yeesh.
"Alright. Well. I'm releasing you from your grave for now. When dusk comes, come to the shack. I'll have a task for you today or tomorrow." As I spoke, I was fiddling with the settings on her collar. Obviously, I removed the prohibition on leaving her grave, but I also wanted to smooth the transition in relation to her newly young, hot, and female husband.
Thinking of Abercrombie as anything but Abby as she is post transformation: pain
Accepting the version of events Abby believes to be true: validation
I'm gonna call that the gaslight special. Hey, here, have a known objective falsehood. Accept it and be happy or deny it and suffer. If it works, I'm probably gonna use it again in the future. That said, she was creeping me out, so I decided in advance that I'd encourage her to act more like a living person when her third obedience unlocked tomorrow.
I sat around waiting for Drusilla for a bit, fiddling with my amulet. Em, Ruk, and Dee were captured and standing by, ready to be cannon fodder. They were endearingly stupid enough that I'd be upset if they died, but if it was all three of them or literally anyone else in the retinue, I'd sacrifice them in a heartbeat. Even Irma, and I hadn't met her yet.
I had an update for my missions; Keryn had gotten herself fired. One credit and a tantric rod were in the bag. I wasn't sure how I would use the rod, tantric magic seemed complicated, but from the looks of it I might be able to do some rather remarkable things with the right ritual. Massive preparations would be in order of course, but capturing everyone in a large structure or sniping a high value target with their guard up would be much easier with a ritual than it would be with my jewels or a stamp. I was starting to see the inherent drawbacks in my chosen binding. Regardless, I had a pair of new missions to check.
100 Wolf Moon
Restore sanity to 100 feral worgen of the Nightbane Pack in Duskwood. Gain a bonus if you receive no assistance in doing this from local non-captured humans.
Rewards: 10 credits, Deluxe Mission Ticket, Extra Stock
Bonus: Potpourri
What the hell is wrong with these people? How am I supposed to do that? I'm pretty sure mental resistance would bring them down off the ledge, but capturing a hundred unwilling people? I suppose I could capture them one at a time and throw amulets on them, or my brilliant alchemists could try to make a similar formula to the one in the worgen starting zone. Or both. But that's an order of magnitude higher investment than anything else they've asked of me.
I definitely wanted the reward, though, so they were doing their job there. The deluxe mission ticket was apparently an enhanced ticket that would dismiss a moderate mission and give me the reward, including any bonuses, as if I'd done it. I wanted it for all the same reasons I wanted a normal mission ticket and more. That said, I had another moderate mission too.
Arathi Basin Resources
Secure and defend one of the five contested bases found in the Arathi Basin in the name of the Alliance for 7 days. If any major raids or assaults on your position go unanswered, you will be penalized.
Reward: 5 credits, disposable company stamp, memory charm, Service's Reward
Again with these absurdly high end missions. Did these things scale? Was I getting this kind of thing now because I had a tiny army? If I took over Stormwind was I going to get gnoll genocide as a moderate mission?
At least the rewards seemed to be scaling too. 5 credits from a moderate mission, and three bits of magic swag? Magic swag that actually had tool tips now? The company stamp was exactly what it sounded like, I'd already used it and it worked. The memory charm had come in clutch even when I didn't know what it did. What is the description on that, anyway?
Memory charm: replace up to 30 minutes of target's memory. All memories before and after that point will be altered or rationalized to make those 30 minutes fit. You have control only over the target's perceptions and actions during those 30 minutes, sufficiently extreme rewrites will result in instability.
So… I could have done a lot more than just make an old lady calm down with that thing. I doubted that it would let me turn someone into a willing slave without using a real binding or a love confession, but it still seemed extremely abusable and it worked quickly.
Reward for Service was new, one use, and seemed a bit more fiddly, but powerful.
Reward for Service: when you do a task which benefits a person or group, you may whisper a reward into the mouth of this horn, and that will be the reward you are given. All involved will accept it as an appropriate reward. The request may be unrealistic or presumptuous, but must be logically connected and at least loosely proportionate. Buy a girl a drink and she will sleep with you (unless she thinks you are a danger), spare an enemy and gain their service until they save your life, save a distressed damsel and win her heart and hand, drive out the invaders and be given lands and a noble title.
This was huge, at least potentially. I might have to do this one just for Reward for Service, or hold onto it for however long it takes to get a deluxe mission ticket. On the other hand, it would be a massive time sink and sending my people into a hot war with the Horde is a good way to get them killed. Gonna put a pin in that one.
My inventory was all in order except for a pleasant surprise: three company credits. I had spent all five on Vanessa, then got back one for Keryn's quest. Where the hell did those other two come from?
It took me a solid ten minutes exploring the app to figure out: Vanessa had an associated rebate for body defense. When I purchased her, she retroactively gave me a discount on body defense equal to 40% of its price. I got excited for a moment, flipping through the catalog, and then saw that most characters from the more limited Warcraft catalog I'd been given either didn't have associated rebates, were unpurchasable "generic" characters like classes of demon or "human paladin", or were well above my pay grade. The rather small number of exceptions were all characters from overwatch in Warcraft-compatible skins.
Hanzo, Zenyatta, and Symmetra each had my beloved stress defense. Symmetra and Ashe each had information defense. In practice this meant that I could get a blood elf version of Hanzo, a Faceless One version of Zenyatta, or a black dragon version of Symmetra for 6 credits, and if I ever got information defense somehow, I could get Symmetra and a warlock version of Ashe for free. Of course, I never played Overwatch, so the only one of those four I knew jack about was Hanzo, and that was all from heroes of the storm. There were several other Warcraftized Blizzard characters, most of whom I recognized as HotS skins.
Rebates seemed exploitable, but I needed to figure out how. I also wanted to know if those generic entries still counted if I captured someone that fit the bill "in the wild." If so, I could get a lot of credits and defenses by hunting down the right targets. Gonna throw that onto the to-do list though; Drusilla has arrived.
"Hey, so what do you have left to teach me?"
She scowled. "Not much I'm afraid. You learn too quickly. I think I have figured out how to instill fear into someone by studying Bishop Seline's work, and I can teach you the curse of weakness, but other than that the only thing left to teach is how to infect someone else with fel magic. It substantially harms them; it's essentially what would happen if we were to draw it in without releasing it. Oh, and we should probably have you practice using fel to shield yourself when cursing. I saw you nearly pass out while we fought those orcs." I blushed. Yeah, that wasn't a winning strategy to rely on.
We did as she suggested, at least what we could. Curse of Weakness could serve as a shadow word, and we practiced with it in both configurations. Her fear spell could also be adapted into a shadow word, but only in theory. Inducing fear in yourself to make someone else terrified is a thin margin to walk along, and without stress defense blunting my fear I'm actually a bit of a coward; company defenses don't work against deliberately self inflicted wounds, so I probably wouldn't be able to terrify anyone of note in a world like this. At least not without wetting myself and running away screaming.
Slightly disturbingly, Lillibeth eagerly offered herself, or rather Prudence, up as a target dummy for the curse of agony and fel corruption. "She'll be healed up once she becomes one of us, and I'm really curious about how it feels."
I paused and considered my next question. "Do you see any sensation as a bad thing anymore?"
"Nah. Pain hurts, but who cares if I'm getting fixed up after? Don't worry; I'm not going to start hurting myself for no reason. If there is a reason though…" She looked at me with bright eyes. She was really into it.
After a few hours of practice, during which I healed Prudence frequently and started having flashbacks to watching Konosuba, I was pretty confident with my casting. Tony arrived via apportation wearing my Otto face, and shifted back when the room stared at him confused.
"Hey bossman. Hope said she should have this sewn up by tomorrow morning. She wants to know if you can send anyone that can fight people without killing them. Ya know, just in case it turns into trouble."
I looked over at Drusilla and Prudence. I didn't have many people who fit that description, and they were both in the room with me as far as I knew. Crowd control was criminally underrepresented in my harem so far. I'm pretty sure I was the only person who could completely lock someone down, and then only by incapacitating myself. Drusilla making someone have a panic attack might let Lillibeth throw them into my inventory, but we haven't tested it. I guess that'll be the plan, though.
We ate a late dinner and sent Tony, sans red bandanna, along his way to Lakeshire. I told him to go back to the Defias or stay with the Lions at his discretion. He seemed inclined to head back to the Brotherhood, and I didn't mind. If he could salvage his job it would be good to have someone reliable embedded in that new base.
We sensed Eliza before she opened the door. There was a rhythmic vibration around her, which let us sense her entrance as she circled around the house at dusk. When she opened the door, I was able to confirm that she did not look good. She wasn't exactly a ghoul, or at least she wasn't a normal one. She had the claws and her mouth was too big and toothy, but there was more. There was a huge gaping hole in her chest, and I saw something red in the depths of that hole, pumping in time with the vibrations. I didn't particularly want to spend much time with her, so I gave orders and sent her on her way. Tomorrow at dusk, I intended to finish my first major mission, whatever else I needed to do.
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