Chương 203: BS Quest Design
6/1 just after midnight
Baristolth felt it in his bones. The enemy stirred within its prison, and would only grow in power if things remained as they were. The Silithid had seemed a manageable threat at first; stupid animals, if unusually vicious ones. For generations their growth was managed through routine purges.
All had known that they were spawn of C'thun, but they had been weak. Unfocused. In the last week they had sought to coordinate far more than they ever had before. It was concerning, and could only mean that they were somehow receiving instructions. Giant territorial insects were one thing. Ones that were as smart as humans which used increasingly complex strategies? Too dangerous to be allowed to live.
He approached the Cenarian hold and called to their commander. "You must call for aid, Mar'alith. The enemy is growing too powerful for us to contain alone"
"Who would you suggest I call for aid?"
Did it matter? No, not really. Their numbers were surging, as if they had been waiting for this moment. "Everyone. You ask anyone who will accept the messenger."
6/1 Morning.
What the fuck, company? I recognize what you're trying to do here, but seriously! What the fuck! You're making me recreate the AQ launch event, but alone. This is an event that is supposed to be handled by an entire server's worth of players! I'm one guy. Admittedly one guy who can make a case for being the most well connected person on the planet, but still, just one guy.
Let's go through the requirements, eh?
Kill 20,000 Warrior caste Silithid. Worker caste Silithid count as 1/5th of a warrior, minor silithid such as eggs and light sources count as 1/20th of a warrior.
Silithid are a type of giant swarming insect made from the biomass of the old god C'Thun. They are probably among the weakest of the servants of the old gods on average, but they make up for it with their endless, near infinite swarms. Also, weakest doesn't mean weak. They are probably about on par with the soldiers in most of the armies of Azeroth. Running the numbers, I needed to kill 1428 per day to pull this off as my first mission. A bit shy of 60 bugs per hour if I were going full blast all day long. It seemed plausible, but would be a pretty grueling grind.
500,000 gp is a hell of a lot of gold. I was given a delightful new sense for the sake of this mission, assessing the standard prices of anything I looked at which would qualify. The healing potions that I pass out to my fighters, which are real life savers? 75 copper. Less than 1% of one gold piece, because they were made from fairly common weeds.
The magic wands I've got someone making, at the rate of about 5 a day? Five of them together would come out to a bit more than 25 silver. He isn't exactly burning the midnight oil, mind you. If I provide him with enough materials he can probably make around twenty higher quality wands per day, which would bring his daily contribution up to around 3 gold and 7 silver. A bit shy of 43 gold pieces over the course of two weeks from a guy earnestly working a full time job. That's an income that could support a family. Pretty easily, in fact, even factoring in the price of raw materials eating half of that.
Currently, I had somewhere in the area of 900 non-combatants in my retinue, which I defined as anyone beneath the overall level of a professional soldier. Many of my worgen fell under this, as well as a decent number of my high elves so far. If every single one of them had a craft that was equally profitable to my wand guy, and they don't, they would crank out product equal to 38,700 gp.
Obviously just grinding away at it won't do the job. I'll need to reinvest any profits I make heavily and take an active hand in finding and fulfilling market needs. If I was very lucky, for example, the price for a magic wand would go up substantially when the general populace learns that we are going to war with a civilization ending threat. Then again, maybe not. Wands are useful weapons, but much harder for a non-spellcaster to learn how to use than, say, a rifle.
Supply wouldn't be the only problem either, my customer base only had so much money to give. The Horde and Alliance both operated on the gold standard, so they couldn't just conjure money out of thin air. Stormwind had maybe 15,000 gold in reserve after rebuilding the entire city only a few years ago, even after totally fleecing their workforce. The Undercity was in debt already, taking out loans on credit based on the fact that they were holding off a tide of the hungry dead. They had gold in their vaults, but it was mostly budgeted towards one thing or another. I doubted any of the other major cities were drastically better off.
Ironforge, being the one city that wasn't still paying off the debt of building or rebuilding a capital city less than 20 years ago, had a better financial situation. Unfortunately the majority of their excess wealth was tied up in programs to help with the gnomish refugee crisis, what with their closest ally and neighbor blowing themselves up and irradiating their whole damn capital city. Governments, even relatively fiscally responsible ones, do not sit on giant hordes of liquid assets set aside for a rainy day. They use most of it, ideally in the form of wise investments.
500,000 in contributions is almost certainly possible, but not something I'm going to be able to manage in 14 days without channeling the full might of capitalism. Which might include some market manipulation, naturally. I was forbidden from profiteering by brainwashing a quartermaster into giving me an absurd price, but if the actual market value for something became absurd… well, one could hardly blame me for charging what my product is worth. Even if I just donated, the market value would dictate how much my contribution was worth. I think.
The Scepter of the Shifting Sands was one of the weirder quest chains out there and almost certainly at least partially non canon. The scepter was a key. A glorified magical mallet which can bang a gong to open the gates of Ahn'Quiraj, the giant nigh-impenetrable prison/fortress of the old god C'thun. After the first War of the Shifting Sands, the scepter had been given to the commander of the night elven forces, Fandral Staghelm. Grieving the fresh loss of his only son during the war and probably already compromised, Fandral completely missed the point of having a key so they could go in and manage things if needed. He declared that C'thun would be sealed forever within Ahn'Quiraj and smashed the scepter.
His draconic allies, seeing this abject stupidity, looked at each other and decided they should just split up the pieces among their champions. After all, if there's a legitimate reason to open the Scarab Gate, they will probably all agree that it needs to happen and be able to promptly come together to reassemble it. That worked great. For the bronze dragon champion Anachronos, the only responsible one of the four.
The blue dragon champion stowed it somewhere safe but entirely inaccessible, where even he can't easily get his claws on it. The green and red champions went the opposite direction, and insisted on carrying their fragments on their persons at all times, even while going into potentially deadly situations. It's a good thing I was already planning on saving Eranikus, because he's got the green fragment.
The red guy was currently infiltrating Blackrock Mountain if I remember correctly, which meant that if I wanted to get his fragment I'd need to track him down while he is actively trying to not be found in the middle of enemy territory. I didn't want to blow his cover, but if I remember correctly he canonically gets caught and Nefarion steals his fragment, then destroys it if you don't retrieve it quickly enough. More than any other part of this mission, finding Vaelan and getting him (or at least his part of the scepter) out of the line of fire was time sensitive. If I was very lucky I could get a top tier red dragon and avoid a messy, time consuming conflict with Nefarian when I had other, more pressing concerns.
Hopefully the bronze dragonflight wouldn't be upset about me sequence breaking and not coming to them first. It really shouldn't bother them, but they were the guardians of the "one true timeline" so what do I know. I just hoped that they'd be cooperative.
C'thun is an old god. He's strapped down to a table and forced to use a tiny fragment of his power, but might I point out that the Silithid, a continent threatening force on their own, are essentially the dust from his skin flakes infused with his malevolent will? I'm not going to be able to take him out unless I manage to capture him, and he's powerful and crafty enough that I am legitimately nervous that he will fake me out somehow. I dunno. Bait me into using a stamp on a giant beetle he carefully bred to LOOK like one of his tentacles. Then make it explode in my face.
Compared to the rest, Ossirian was pretty straightforward. He's a big brutal brawler with a bird head, made out of magical crystal. In a straight brawl he's probably one of the most dangerous individuals I've encountered, but he's literally just a huge guy that punches things. By the time I have the gates open, his primary role will be as a pit stop on the way to C'thun. A secondary objective to pursue while I am killing the armies of the old god. Ok, so maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty, but by that point I should by all rights be backed by the joint assault force of the Horde and Alliance together, and I'll have weeks worth of Doan's students and ancient-trained troops to draw upon. Hopefully it'll all work out.
The rewards were, admittedly, good enough to make this worth pursuing. Irritatingly enough. The house upgrade would be nice to have but not really substantial, but it was the rewards after that where we started to get into the fun stuff.
Broxigar the Red was a novel only character as far as I know. He had a small problem: he was too badass to die. He literally could not find anyone that could kill him in a fight, and he was wracked with survivors guilt over it. He tried, too. During the battle for Mount Hyjal he was a one man battle of Thermopylae, holding wave after wave of undead and demons alone as his entire unit died around him. In the end he managed to die, of course. Wouldn't have been a very satisfying storyline otherwise.
Naturally, as any person hoping to absolutely definitely die in a blaze of glory would, he leaped through a portal to the Eredar homeworld of Argus, holding off an entire army of demons long enough to draw the personal attention of the Dark Titan himself. That was a depressingly short fight; Brox only got one good hit in, but that was enough. While Sargeras was distracted for just a moment, the portal was closed in his face. All of this happened ten thousand years ago because time travel, incidentally. Needless to say, this is a guy I wanted on my team.
Succubus Kerrigan would be extremely handy; even without her leading a swarm of Zerg, adding another demon to my team that is extremely good at killing large numbers of weak enemies very quickly would be a godsend. If I sound less excited about her than Brox, it's because I am. She's going to be great, but I'll almost certainly be getting her after I finish my Silithid genocide objective. Hot women being added to my retinue is always welcome, and she's going to probably be about as dangerous as Brox, if not more so, so I'm definitely looking forward to her. Just hard to get excited about a severely nerfed version of a character.
Xal'atath is… well I'm not sure what exactly she is. She's the shadow priest Legion legendary weapon, an incredibly trustworthy magic talking knife. What I can tell you is that she knows enough about shadow magic to make Natalie look like a chump, and she speaks casually about the old gods as if they are her peers. If captured, I have zero doubt that she'd be one hell of an ally against an old god, or just about anyone or anything else. As to the last two… do I need to explain why a permanent, general use, upgradable orb of entrancement is good? Or 100 credits? No? I didn't think so.
I had missions that I still wanted to chip away at, Lillibeth was still going to Scholomance for example, but I think each of them is likely to end up with a skeleton crew. I was still going to try to complete or trade out at least one mission per day, and today that meant Bloodthirst. I had a team of banshee possessing a dozen Menathil Harbor Guards right now, and most of them were already captured. It would be no trouble at all to introduce each of them to Sally and then have Doris abruptly murder them. One resurrection and apology later, they would head home with no real harm done and try to figure out how they can do their part for the Alliance war effort.
Sylvanas would be recruiting for the foreseeable future. I had 6 necklaces per day after taking down Serpentis, and Sylvanas was now incredibly trustworthy. The Horde's top brass had a surprisingly large number of very old badasses; Cairne Bloodhoof, Drek'thar, and Broxigar's little brother Varok Saurfang all sprang to mind. Once those three, Thrall, and Vol'jin are all collared I'll be the Warchief in all but name by the end of the week. This will literally take a couple days worth of effort, at most, followed by three to seven business days for the amulets to do their work.
In fact, by the middle of next week, I will rule all major Horde and Alliance factions except the ones living in Ironforge. Which is good, because that is basically my goal. Racial tensions will persist for a time; Theramore is proof of that, but this was a start. Close cooperation during this war will set us on a good trajectory, and I'd make sure that everyone played nicely. Even Shadowforge is coming along well, and I'll hopefully be able to take Ragnaros down soon. If I could be sure to come in contact with him by flying into the Molten Core, I'd do it today. I had a plan. Instead, I'd need to wait for Thaurrisan to be captured and see if he could get me in to see the firelord in person.
Finally, the Archdruids were all receiving notice through swift green dragon messengers, provided by me, that there was something vitally important that they needed to discuss. As they arrived, mostly via apportation, I would explain how important it was to inoculate oneself against the Nightmare and pass out amulets. Everyone should be collared by the end of the week.
If I can get a single extension on this mission, from either the kill quest or the scepter probably, I should have the necessary resources to do the other three that don't require entering Ahn'Quiraj in good time. The game was afoot; I teleported to Shadowforge. Let's see if I can find Vaelen.
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