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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Jan 27, 2022 15:59:56 GMT
January the Twenty-Seventh Sounds of excited packing came through the door of the bedroom on the second floor balcony. The ruffle of clothes, the clinking of small metallic tools, and the hurried footsteps of small feet darting back and forth around the room could be heard from downstairs in the office below, on the same side of the house. Something big was amiss, but it was a secret!
Nat sat in her office chair, lovingly shut out of the bedroom by Celeste while she packed some secret things that might give away the surprise of where they were going that day, and precisely what they were doing. She had no choice but to wait to find out. All she knew is, the Dordy Bubble, the bulletproof glass ball with the pedal-controlled fins and ballast for rising or diving that would allow Dordy to go diving with them, was finally about to be put through its paces for real, as well as the maiden voyage of the Wave Dancer, or at least, its maiden voyage beyond just a few test runs to try out new additions around Turtle Bay or do a bit of fishing just outside the house. Now, at last, Nat was going to see Celeste’s grand plans for their diving adventure… All she had to do now was hurry up and wait!
In the meantime, she decided to sit down to her desk and pull out her diary. A good way to kill all this anxious time would be to pace around and go nuts with anticipation. A better way would be to write her weekly diary entry and record her busy week for posterity! She took her diary from the bookshelf to the left of her desk and sat down to her desk, opening the diary to the next empty page. From the uppermost of the two large side drawers came her cherrywood quill case and inkwell of purple ink. She opened both, withdrawing her ravenfeather quill and dipping it into the purple ink, tapping off a bit of excess and trying not to squirm too much with anticipation as she began to write.
Dear diary,
AAAAAAAAAA!
The day has finally come! It’s the day of the diving adventure Celeste has had planned for so long! We’re going to get Dordy into his Dordy Bubble, the diving orb Celeste engineered for him with the pedals and fins and ballast and cool stuff, head somewhere awesome, I’m sure, for the diving, and dive from the Wave Dancer, Celeste’s tinkerer’s angling boat I made her for Winter Veil! It’s going to be so great! I can’t wait to go!
What I don’t know is WHERE the heck we’re going! Celeste isn’t telling, and she’s packing things in the room that might give a hint, but I can’t go in! She’s keeping me out! AAAA!
Ah, well, I’m sure I will see soon! In the meantime, I suppose this week’s adventures should be recorded in this little book of memories. There wasn’t much that went on this week, but Deathrolls was super fun and hilarious as always, and the weekly Whitewind Company adventure was really exciting too! And all before that was a trip with Cari to the South Seas as she led the Voyagers’ archaeology department on an archaeology expedition!
We met up on one of the Voyagers’ ships and headed south. The ship sailed all afternoon and all evening, and the sun was far to the west when we reached our destination. Some sort of islands were here that the trolls had inhabited for a long time in the past, though they were now apparently a hideout for pirates and other seafaring types. The buildings here had blue tile roofs, which was a good sign, as that’s what the Alliance uses on their buildings’ roofs. When we got their, we took a rowboat to shore after the ship set its anchor, and found a local inn to investigate. People were roaming around inside and outside, listening in on the locals and hoping to find a clue. I didn’t find a clue myself, but there was a pair of pirates chatting. Apparently, one pirate captain was upstairs in this very inn, and the one guy was telling the other guy that he’d better clear out after finishing his drink, because the pirate crew that this pirate upstairs had apparently recently raided knew he was in the inn and were about to raid it this very evening! I got out and went and told Cari right away, and, between that worry and the fact that others had found clues as to the troll and Kaldorei artifacts Cari wanted to pursue, we decided to leave the inn and go further inland.
We were making our way through the tropical island town when suddenly, a massive group of trolls made their way through in a big, noisy, musical parade! Apparently they still inhabited the island after all! They were calling their parade “The Thunderhunt,” and were snagging the unwary and adding them to their ranks, making them dance in the parade with them! Three of the guys and one of the girls, a Dark Iron woman, were snagged by the trolls, and they were led off to their dancing. Cari granted them leave, as they wanted to pursue a clue someone had overheard about trolls and Kaldorei finding a secret spot of some sort in the seemingly most impenetrable point in the jungle and disappearing right into it somehow. So with that, four split off from the group, and one lead was being investigated.
Others were splitting off around the town as well, and Cari was juggling each group as well as she could. I found myself with Maya and this young human woman named Arissa, and we were investigating around and found this Makrura (a type of giant lobster that is sentient and speaks Nerglish, the murloc language) speaking in rapid Nerglish with a goblin who was apparently after something that was glowing blue in the Makrura’s pack. The goblin eventually left, looking quite disgruntled that he was coming away empty-handed. Arissa, Maya, and I approached the Makrura next, figuring that this might be just the sort of potentially Kaldorei artifacts that Cari wanted to come here to find for the Voyagers’ archaeology department.
Unfortunately, none of us knows Nerglish, and the Makrura can’t speak anything else, so we were in a real pickle here. Arissa and I opened our purses and showed the Makrura our assortments of gold, silver, and copper coins, then pointed at the glowing blue light coming from the Makrura’s sack it had in its left claw. The Makrura made a lot of words in Nerglish, shaking its armored shellfish head, its eyes on its eyestalks swiveling around rapidly. It didn’t seem to like the brilliantly-glowing coins. It shook what looked like a sculpted coin at us, only this one was made of bright pink coral. Maya figured it wanted coral for the glowing blue thing, whatever it was, and she took off in her own form to go and retrieve a bit offshore. When she came back, the Makrura shook its head, held out the coin-looking bit of coral and pointing at mine and Arissa’s coinpurses. It seemed the Makrura wanted the coral coins for the glowing blue thing, not just standard coral, and it didn’t want our metal coins, either. I was suggesting that where there’s one Makrura doing business, there were likely more, and, in a place where multiple currencies were being used, there was likely to be a coin exchange place as well. I was suggesting that we go and find one and come back with the right sort of currency, but then Arissa simply offered the Makrura some food from her pack, and this seemed to also work for the lobster person. The Makrura accepted the food, then dumped the glowing blue thing from its bag. It turned out to be a glowing blue orb, brilliant and beautiful in its soft glowing blue light, and it was covered in algae. Arissa and I weren’t sure about touching the obviously magical artifact, but Maya, bold and brash as ever, simply picked it up and stuffed it into her pack! Arissa and I waited with wide eyes and baited breath, wondering if Maya was about to be turned into a newt or something, but no such thing happened. Maya smirked and led us back to Cari.
By then, the other groups were returning, and the trolls that had snagged people up for their parade had finished their parade, and were making no move to stop people from leaving them, which they did. The four that were snatched up for the parade returned to us, with the Dark Iron lady, Benny, telling us that she heard mention of the secret place the trolls go into in the jungle or something. We think it might lead to the place Cari wants to find, which is an old Kaldorei temple that had been built upon a far more ancient, but abandoned, trollish ziggurat that dates back to before the Sundering! What an archaeology trip this is gonna be! That was all we had time for that night, so we headed back to the ship, careful to avoid the inn in case that raid happened like those sailors said it would. From there, we were able to take a portal back to Stormwind without it being open to the denizens of the island to come through after us. Cari set up another portal anchor to the ship so we could come back next week. I can’t wait for Monday to come around, and we can resume the adventure!
“NAT!”
Nat looked up, then out the door of her office, startled out of her thoughts for a moment by Celeste’s call for her.
“YEAH?” she called back out of the office.
“Where’d I put my-…” Celeste started, then cut herself off again, muttering a bit. “Never mind… that’s a spoiler too… I think I left it by the…”
“AAAAA!” Nat blurted out, the anticipation, the excitement, and the unknown destination seeming to make her want to burst like a balloon. She heard Celeste laughing on the balcony, her footsteps heading to the spiral staircase down to the ground floor, then continuing on downstairs to the workshop, Dordy on her heels, excited by her excitement and darting around. Much metallic clanking sounded from downstairs. It sounded like a toolbox was being emptied out, tools not needed for the day’s trip being unceremoniously tossed aside and clanging on the floor. A moment later, Nat heard a triumphant exclamation from Celeste, and her footsteps darted back up the spiral staircase from below, continuing on above, then along the balcony to the bedroom door. Dordy’s tiny footsteps pitter-pattered along with her into the room, and the door slammed closed. Celeste’s footsteps darted around the room again, and Nat was so full of curiosity and anticipation she thought for half a moment about cheating and going to the wrap-around balcony on the second floor and peeking into the room from the sliding glass door on the outside wall of the master bedroom. But, that would definitely spoil the surprise and the exciting feeling of anticipation, not to mention being a deed that does not exactly engender trust, so she kicked her feet a little under the desk, heaved a sigh, and went back to her writing.
Then the next night was DEATHROLLS! Mags suggested the location for us, an awesome little spot in the hidden cove where we stowed away to Freehold during the Tidesage hunt. We’d noticed a few sailors and naval academy cadets hanging around the place, and that they’d set up a few bits of entertainment for themselves out of the watchful eyes of captains and naval academy officers, but we went by it so fast that evening that we never really stopped to take a good look at it all. Turns out it’s a place where the Quicksilver Company, Mags’ family’s company, went to go train at the obstacle course there, and then apparently relaxed with other sailors. There is a horseshoes game set up, and another table with BEER PONG! There’s a fully-stocked bar down there, and even a cave to go inside of to sit and drink if you don’t want to be outside, or in case the weather turns. It’s a super cool spot! I’m glad Mags found it!
Unfortunately, something came up at the last moment for Mags, and she didn’t get to come with us to the spot she was so excited about. That sucked! It was a really good time! The ones that did come were me, Maya, Cari, and Zarshal, as well as one new friend named Tinarys, that goes by Tina. She’s this excitable little gnome that was hanging out with us at the Recluse before we went to the game, and wanted to join us to play. Nah, unfortunately, was busy with Company paperwork and meetings concerning the return of control of the Whitewind Company to Lady Whitewind, and was too bogged down to join us. That sucked too!
Anyway, the game night was so much fun! Right off the bat, when we were rolling the initiative roll to see who goes first, Cari rolled a 69, which, according to our rules, if you roll it, you have to point at someone you’d do that with. It doesn’t have to be a serious answer; you can make it a joke too! Cari, though, said that she would go with the obvious answer, as her fiancée Maya was sitting right there next to her. She pointed then… but at ME! I blushed SO hard! It was so embarrassing! Maya thought it was a riot, getting me to blush right off the bat before we even did any Truths or Dares yet! GOSH! Then Zarshal and I both rolled ones; Zarshal during the Deathrolls, and then me out of twenty on the Truth or Dare rolls to try to get to be the one to get Z, so then I had to join in instead, and Maya won it. As she does at least once per game most games, she decided it was table dancing time, and Zarshal and I BOTH had to dance! Z has some good dance moves, but of course mine looked like some sort of tropical island native’s mosquito slap dance or something… and that was only until I fell down and sent cups flying! I even almost kicked Zarshal in the shins, and almost got Cari right in the dang head! Oops! And then, as it turns out, two or more people rolling a one in a given round was a theme that night. The very next turn, Maya lost the Deathrolls, Tina rolled a one on the Truth or Dare rolls, and Cari won the Truth or Dare rolls by rolling a twenty out of twenty, which means she gets to choose Truth or Dare FOR them both! Full power to Cari! So she Dared them both to clean the place up… it was filthy, seaweed slopped over everything! Only they had to make it a wig for Lex, a reference to the old joke that Lex’s long, pretty black hair was actually a hairpiece, and he’s actually bald. HA! And Maya had to model it for Lex, and Cari wanted to make sure it worked, so Maya and Tina had to collect the seaweed, weave it into a wig, and plop it onto Maya’s head! It smelled horrible, and she looked like a sea monster! Then another time two people rolled ones came soon after that, and I got to Dare Zarshal and Tina! I had them go get a couple of big jugs from the bar that were merely marked with big, black Xs on them, and CHUG! Then I led them to the beer pong table! Three rounds apiece, and whoever loses has to chug again! Poor Z didn’t make a single toss, and Tina made two of hers, the last of which bounced off the rims of several cups before finally sinking into the last one! Z’s last toss went around and around and around the rim of one, looking like it was going to eventually fall in, but then it rolled out right as it lost momentum to keep going around the rim, bounced along the table, and landed on the boardwalk! Z had to chug the hard stuff again, and he was SO sloshed for the rest of the night! It was great! There were some funny truths as well, like the one where Maya had to admit to picking a Draenei’s nose and eating it in a game from last year. That was so gross that night! I got Dared some good ones myself, one of which I had to pretend to be a Makrura, one of those lobster people from the ocean. I did one better, using my illusion magic to become a huge one, and click-clacking my claws at Zarshal! The next one was from Zarshal, and it was another seaweed Dare, except he said use other things as well to make myself a costume. By the time I was done, I had a giant like, almost Vrykul-sized beer mug upside down on my head for a helmet, a tricorn had on top of that, seaweed tucked in all around the mug helmet and twisted up to look like dreadlocks, seashells cupped over my ears and dangling off them, a scrap of mooring rope for a scarf, and spectacles that made my eyes look like dinner plates. I was supposed to wear it all for three rounds, but it got so many laughs and was so fun to wear that I just wore it the rest of the game! HA! There were so many more great Truths and Dares, and the game was just so much fun! We never did get anyone Dared to play a drunken game of Horseshoes where that game was set up at… Maybe next time! But yeah, what a fun night!
Nat looked up again as she heard the bedroom door open. Celeste’s and Dordy’s footsteps came darting down the spiral staircase at top speed, and then could be heard approaching the office. Celeste came in with a grin, shooing Dordy into the office with Nat and closing the door behind her as she left.
“Sorry,” Celeste called to them, her voice muffled coming through the door, “but I gotta get this stuff in the Wave Dancer now, and it can’t be seen just yet! And Dordy, you’re too underfoot right now for me to carry things down the stairs!”
Nat looked bewildered at the door, wondering just how much stuff Celeste had packed. Dordy reared on the door, not wanting to be closed into the office while something obviously exciting was going on out there. He made a rapid digging motion at the door with his paws, causing the door to thump and bump in the doorframe, but there was no lenience. Eventually Dordy gave up, giving a disgruntled huff and growling out what would likely have been grumbled complaints. Nat giggled, reaching down to lift Dordy into her lap, making her own good-natured complaints with him and reassuring him that a fun, exciting adventure would come soon. Dordy, of course, didn’t understand Common, but he was mollified anyway, and went to the floor under the desk to lay at Nat’s feet while he waited for the adventure he knew was coming soon. Nat giggled again, reaching for her ravenfeather quill to continue on with her writing. She had an adventure of her own to write about next!
Last night was the weekly worknight for the Whitewind Company, the one where we take on a contract for an adventure! This week we were going to go and do that raid on Tarren Mill to catch that orc warrior that escaped us last week, the one that the Stockades warden in Stormwind told us seemed to be going to Tarren Mill next, but the return of Lady Whitewind still has the Stormwind House of Nobles all stirred up, and all the meetings and paperwork concerning return of the Whitewind Company to her control took up my bestie Nah’s night again, so we couldn’t plan the raid.
We did, however, receive another contract that someone in the Company had secured at the last second. I don’t know who found or accepted the job, but it had Lady Whitewind’s stamp of approval on it, so we decided to take care of it! It was a contract from a Broken Draenei in Zangarmarsh, of all people and places, to recover a deeply revered artifact that had been stolen from them in the night!
I sat inside at the Recluse, sipping a hot spiced apple cider and going over a Zangarmarsh map while people began to drift along for the adventure. Zarshal showed up first, then Sparkles, then Mairy later on. I figured the four of us should be plenty for the mission, so away we went, up into the Mage Tower, through the Shattrath City portal, and out the northeast corner of the city, where the path leads up and over a hill and down into the marsh with all the towering mushrooms that seemed to reach up to touch the sky itself.
Luckily, the village we were looking for, Umbrafen Village, was right there on the other side of the hill, right as one comes into the marsh from Terokkar Village. The Broken Draenei there looked quite wary at our approach, and the huge hut that towered over all the little tiny huts in this corner of the marsh had a pair of Broken guards at the bottom. We explained we were from the Whitewind Company, and we were there on a contract to see their Elder about a stolen artifact, and they let us through, as the Elder had instructed them to be on the lookout for us.
We went up a spiral staircase that goes through the center of the hut and up to a third floor and found the elder up top, peering out the south opening and looking into Terokkar Forest. We waited for him to turn around and acknowledge us, which took a bit, but he eventually did. He told us that the artifact that was stolen was a powerful totem called the Life Force that gave them power over the water to give them clean water to drink, to grow their little crops, and even had healing properties with its water magic. The Life Force sure sounded really powerful, and I could see why it was so important to them to get it back!
The Elder told us it had been stolen in the night, and they could see the silhouettes of huge, hulking creatures that had darted in, stolen it, and fled into the night, heading north. He told us that the normal Draenei, who always looked down on them and treated them like a lower class or lower caste, lived in that direction, and that the huge, hulking creatures reported in the village must have been them. It seems the Draenei had stolen this artifact from the Broken, which didn’t sound like something the Draenei would do at all! Then the Elder told us that the normal Draenei live in some sort of “sky village” up in the north, which put me in mind of the Draenei’s space ships and stuff. That was all the information he had for us, and we set off, assuring the Elder that we’d get the Life Force back for him!
The walk through Zangarmarsh was actually really beautiful! The whole place has an eerie blue mist to it, somewhat dark, though not dark as night. I love dark, pretty colors, so it was great for me! We strolled through the scenic marsh with its towering mushroom stalks rising all around us and the mushrooms atop them spanning distances that rivaled large buildings. The land was dry on the road, but sort of soft and springy, like we were walking on deep moss or something. When we had to cross water, there were long, winding boardwalks for us to get across the little wet spots, often spanning a long series of the scenic little pools. We had to be careful, though, because glowing bees that were nearly as big as us, and definitely bigger than the gnome Sparkles, were buzzing around, and we even passed these giant stalking plant creatures that looked like jellyfish walking on land, including one that was as tall as the mushrooms we were passing!
As usual, Sparkles was pressing Mairy’s buttons, the two of them going back and forth calling each other all sorts of hilarious names and uttering funny threats like more catapult rides and such. It was good for a laugh as we went along, and the two seem to actually like and perhaps even respect each other despite the lengths their banter went to. It passed the time as we made our scenic hike!
Eventually, we came across something we weren’t expecting… Kaldorei buildings! Night Elves, right here on this other planet, with an established home! Turns out it’s a long-term expedition from the Cenarion Circle, the druid council, to preserve one of the last intact regions in which nature hadn’t been destroyed on this planet. The massive amount of wildlife, the flora and fauna, was in their care here, as they explained.
I asked the one that seemed to be in charge, Ysiel Windsinger, if she knew anything about a “sky village” to the north that a bunch of Draenei lived in, and about the Life Force, and if she knew anything about a heist. It turns out she DID know of the sky village! It seems the Broken were referring to Telredor, a village of Draenei that had been built upon one of the tallest mushrooms in Zangarmarsh and was accessible by way of a Draenic magic-powered elevator that floated up and down without a pulley system. She didn’t know of a heist, nor of the Life Force, though she did seem quite interested in its propensity for nature magic, or water magic, more specifically. She didn’t attempt to prod us into bringing it to her instead, which was a good sign, and she even wished us good luck and for Elune to light our paths, which was nice!
We waved farewell to Ysiel and went a bit further north, with the road starting to bend northwest a bit now. We came to a fork in the road, which we hadn’t been warned of, but that was okay, because it had a sign! The left fork, according to the sign, led to Telredor! We set off that way, now more sure than ever that we were going to find the Draenei responsible for the theft and recover the Life Force!
Along the way though, we were met by something the road sign warned us of… It had pointed to another town it called Zabra’jin, which is definitely trollish. And sure enough, blocking the way onto the next long, winding boardwalk were a pair of troll scouts!
We tried to talk them into letting us pass, but no joy. All they wanted to do was take us back to Zabra’jin to EAT us! One of them was even saying that if we were lucky, they’d eat our heads first… How horrible! They were about to attack, but Zarshal acted first. He went into stealth and stole around behind them, hoping up onto the plank boardwalk from the side before the slope got too low to do so, came in behind one, and got him with his dagger pretty good! I was flinging frost spells at the other, Sparkles had sent in the J.E.F.F. bot, the Jovial Explosive Freedom Fighter, to attack them, and Mairy was… stretching? Doing warm-ups? I dunno, but she seemed to not be perturbed at all by cannibalistic trolls, having “thumped” quite a few in her time, as she says. It didn’t take long. Between the three of the rest of us (mostly quick knifework by Zarshal), the trolls fell where they stood, and we were able to escape being dinner!
We moved on from the crazy trolls and, by the time we reached the other end of the boardwalk, we were able to spot Draenei architecture atop the tallest mushroom in the distance ahead, as well as, sure enough, a seemingly magic elevator platform that that backed away from the village, then lowered itself down, then moved forward to a low platform accessed by stairs. Draenei guards and patrols were everywhere, seeming to be guarding the village from the ground. We were able to move past them freely, returning the friendly smiles and waves and words of greeting as they offered them to us. We went up the stairs and onto the platform, waiting on the elevator to come back down again. The elevator ride up was spooky! We went up higher and higher and higher, no machinations in evidence holding us up, and we weren’t on our flying mounts, either! Mairy, being a Wildhammer Dwarf, felt quite at home in the skies, but for me, without Onyx flying me, that was a real doozy!
We reached the top quickly and found a guy who looked important enough in the middle of the little compound. Anchorite Ahuun, he said his name was. He was bald and had no face tentacles and wore pink robes, but he was powerfully built, and his friendly tones and demeanor had some sort of subtle, but powerful, authority behind it. He freely acknowledged that the youngest of the Draenei warriors did, indeed, look down on the Broken, though they were continually admonished for it. He also was aware of the Life Force, though said that even the most boisterous of young Draenei would never stoop to sneaking around at night and stealing things held dear by the Broken. He suggested that something even more huge and hulking than a Draenei warrior had done the dastardly deed… Naga myrmidons! Apparently the night before, the guards had actually seen a few of them coming up from the south, darting past the village guards without attacking and hurrying on to Serpent Lake in the west. It seemed that the Naga, and not the Draenei, were responsible for the theft!
We thanked Anchorite Ahuun and made our way back to the elevator. As we rode down, I knew it was time to switch back to fel powers again. Simple ice spells might perforate armor, but the Naga myrmidons were fierce warriors, and I knew I’d have to resort to less socially acceptable magic that I was far more adept at than I was at ice.
I’d need to do some more fel summoning.
Another fel spell I knew we’d need, as a fight in a lake with Naga almost definitely meant we were going into the water, was the water-breathing spell. As we reached the vast lake, I cast the water-breathing spell on everyone, which would also improve our swimming speed. One thing that caught our eyes as we did so was the massive edifice in the center of the lake, the huge pump that the Naga had installed nearly twenty years ago that still stood to this day, a pump that was designed to suck all the water from all the lakes in Zangarmarsh and take them to the late Lady Vashj’s underwater lair, the Coilfang Reservoir. Eyeing the huge machinery, we waded into the warm water, grateful it didn’t smell as fetid and stagnant as the water in most swamps, quickly finding the water over our heads. We looked around, finding algae-covered knolls rising and falling all over the over the lake bottom, as well as even more of the giant Naga pump visible underwater in the center of the lake, looking to be built to dive through the ground into some unseen underwater cave.
Nearer than that, between two giant pipes coming in from other lakes, were a trio of Naga myrmidons and some sort of metal box with a control panel on top that sported a huge lever and several buttons of varying sizes. Two were watching while a third had the side panel off the box and was working inside it. We watched as they worked. Sparkles was getting the bombs out of her pack she was so fond of, wanting to just blow them all right out of the lake, but I knew we needed to investigate what this was and see if it would provide a lead to the Life Force, so we dove in a bit more.
Zarshal, stealthing again, dived all the way down to them, coming up behind one and surprise-attacking with an attack that seemed to come right out of the shadows themselves. If they were surprised to see a humanoid-looking black wolf that was nearly as big as they were appearing at the bottom of a lake out of nowhere to suddenly stab at them with huge daggers, they were VERY surprised to see one of them suddenly squished into a red cloud of Naga chunks by a sudden increase in water pressure that existed only around him. Mairy, a shaman in addition to being a Wildhammer gryphonrider, had beseeched the water spirits of the lake to assist her, and, being quite upset with the dastardly deeds of the Naga, they were only too happy to assist. Mairy had squished the myrmidon working inside the metal box, leaving one injured and one healthy myrmidon left. Still not feeling like it was time for half-measures, I summoned Mek-barash, my Wrathguard, and sent him at the Naga. The hulking warrior demon darted at them with his double-bladed axe and wounded the healthy Naga, putting a huge gash right across his chest! Sparkles sent JEFF into the fray, but the Zarshal had ambushed turned around for a downward thrust with his trident and stabbed it right through the robot’s head! It sank deep, and JEFF seemed to need repairs now. This enraged Sparkles, and she swam in quickly, helped along by the swimming speed boost the water-breathing spell grants. She pulled out two of her beloved bombs from who knows where, took advantage of the two Naga both being wounded, and swam in too quickly for their injured selves to react. She stuffed a bomb apiece into their hissing mouths and thrust their jaws upwards. The blasts sent a shockwave from either that threw unspeakable sights from what used to be their heads into the water, and blew us back a bit. That gnome is INSANE!
While I was recovering from a sight I had not expected to see (and hope never to see again), Sparkles went to the metal box to have a look, as all three Naga were now finished. She reported seeing a cluster of khorium power cores, felsteel stabilizers, adamantite tubes, and a number of other engineering parts crafted from Outlands metals, all bolted into place with fel iron bolts. She said it was a power transformer! Zarshal found another conduit outside the machine, and went to go see where it led to. We all had the sinking suspicion of where it might lead to, and turns out, we were all right! The conduit, as Zarshal reported when he came back, led right into the pipe going down into Coilfang Reservoir!
Before we entered the pipe, I turned to Sparkles. I told the bomb-happy Gnome that that power transformer seemed to be really important to the Naga, and, as such… she knows just what to do with it! Sparkles grinned one of her most maniacal grins yet, and nodded quickly, and dove for the transformer. She pulled out several bombs, protected from the water by waterproof bladders, and swam into the side of the power transformer where the Naga had the side panel off. Upon reflection, it was a wonder that we weren’t all getting shocked from the underwater power transformer, but the Naga seemed to have waterproofed that as well. When Sparkles returned to us a moment later, detonator in hand, the crazed look in her eye was one of the most worrying I’d seen from her yet! She activated the detonator on her remote control, and the power transformer exploded with such force that we could even see a gout of water blasting upward past the surface of the water above us and shooting dozens of feet into the air before raining back down on the surface like a monsoon! Sparkles was so excited by the explosion she was doing her I’ve-just-lost-my-fudging-mind flailing and cackling, and, even under the water, the maniacal cackling was loud, audible even over the echoes of the explosion! She’s INSANE!
After that neurotic scene, we went to the opening of the pipe to enter. The plan was to let Zarshal go in first so he could stealth through and warn us if it wasn’t safe to come out the other end of the pipe. There was nothing in the water at the other end, so we made for the surface. What we saw up on the rocky floor of the cavern, though, was definitely NOT safe!
There, in front of the waterfall that pours over the entrance to Coilfang Reservoir, was a rebuilt FEL REAVER!
The fel reaver looked like it had been carried to the cavern in its disparate parts after having been dismantled by adventurers or something, and the Naga had rebuilt the thing, but with water magic instead of fel magic to power it. Where most fel reavers tend to have eyes and other little spots that glow fel green, this one had spots glowed with the blue hue that Zangarmarsh is known for. What’s more, the conduit we had been following was leading right to it, plugged into the back of its torso! It was surrounded by Naga sirens and Naga myrmidons, and the sirens were trying to keep containment on the thing, which was why they paid us no mind when we came in. Apparently the explosion outside had stopped it powering up before it was ready, and they’d anticipated their magic bringing it under their control by the time it finished powering up. The disconnection from its power source, which apparently was converting the lake water outside into a power source, had activated it, and it was now roaring at all the Naga at the top of its lungs, which was painful to hear! And, last but not least… There was something I’ve never seen on a fel reaver’s head before… a water totem that looked like it belonged to a water shaman! This must be the Life Force we were after! It was attached to the top of the fel reaver’s noggin, siphoning in water from the waterfall that veils the entrance to the Coilfang Reservoir and bringing it into the aquatic fel reaver for some sort of water magic!
The towering mechanical abomination started roaring then, and the myrmidons were screaming at the sirens to get it back under control. The sirens were panicking because they couldn’t, and, next thing I knew, the fel reaver had gone nuts! It started stomping and swiping around, and had the entire small army of Naga squished… and then it turned and saw us… and started coming RIGHT FOR US!
The thing that had just mowed down a couple dozen Naga was now stomping toward us, towering over us and roaring with its deafening mechanical voice! We had to think fast!
Mairy had the first idea. She turned to us and grinned, and I thought she was going to use her shamanic power over water again to disable the aquatic fel reaver. She told us, “Dunnae worry. I’ve trained fer this moment all me life. I knoo wot tae do…”
”Yeet th’ Gnome.”
Then she grabbed hold of Sparkles and LAUNCHED her into the air, sending her flying right up to the top of the fel reaver’s head! Sparkles called down furiously, “A little warning would have been nice!” but then she started that mad cackling of hers again. From her pack came an armload of explosives, and she started scrambling all over the fel reaver, placing them at all the giant robot’s joints. Bomb after bomb went on, and, when she finished, she scrambled up to the top of the head again. Silhouetted impressively against the bright waterfall behind her, she began her neurotic cackling and flailing her arms and legs around again as the timers on the bombs ticked the seconds away. Then…
KA-BLOOOOOOIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!
Explosions inside caverns are VERY undesirable, for the ears and for the risk of cave-ins, but did that stop Sparkles? NOPE! The arms and legs were blown to pieces, and the torso, with the head intact and Sparkles still cackling and flailing on top, fell down to the stone floor, somehow remaining upright. The totem on top, right behind Sparkles, glowed, and the fel reaver’s eyes glowed brilliantly blue with it. Then they launched a powerful jet of water right at the largest target in front of it, slamming into Zarshal’s chest and crumpling him to the ground, right after a trio of his shurikens bounced harmlessly off the fel reaver’s metal head! That blast of water looked like it really hurt!
I responded quickly, summoning a whole cloud of wild imps and sending them into a hole at the waist of the torso where it rested on the stone floor of the cavern, aiming this Implosion to detonate inside the thing instead of outside of it. Meanwhile, Mairy was finally beseeching the water spirits for help, and her shamanic magic worked! Just as the Implosion – an old joke warlock name for blowing up imps as an attack – went off, the waters inside the fel reaver seethed and boiled, roiled and bubbled, and then paralyzed the fel reaver before leaving it to flow toward the water we’d just swam out of. Without the water powering it, the totem fell from its head and clattered to the stone floor. Zarshal was on his feet by now, and he Shadowstepped behind the thing, bending the shadow magics rogues are usually adept to using for stealth around his daggers and making an armor-piercing Gloomblade! His strike made its way to what turned out to be another cluster of khorium power cores, and that final detonation that resulted was the last thing needed to finish the aquatic fel reaver for good! A loud, hollow, metallic-sounded BOOM echoed from within the torso, and the head was blown clean off, arcing through the air and landing behind Mairy and I with the force of a cannonball, and the resulting veritable tsunami to boot!
Zarshal had escaped the blast cleanly, but we couldn’t find Sparkles! We looked and searched around the cave, but if she was still alive, she wasn’t conscious… Crazy though the little gnome might be, she’s my friend, and I was really worried about her. We had to find her quick!
Then Zarshal caught her scent, reporting smelling nitroglycerin, dynamite, seaforium explosives, gunpowder, and burned fuses coming from somewhere above him. We looked up, and, sure enough, one of the pipes coming from another lake and going along the ceiling had an unconscious Gnome sitting on it! I dismissed Mek-barash then, summoning Myrlia, my succubus. I directed her to fly up and retrieve Sparkles and bring her back down. She started flirting with Zarshal pretty hard when she came back, making lewd gestures and stuff, and I had to reprimand her in Eredun harshly for that! She pouted at me and followed her instructions to pass Sparkles to Zarshal and head back to the Twisting Nether through a dark portal I opened for her. Once she was gone, Zarshal looked so thunderstruck that Mairy had to take Sparkles from him until he snapped out of it. Mairy, with her love-hate relationship with the maniacal little Gnome, tossed Sparkles unceremoniously over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and we headed back toward the water as I refreshed our water-breathing spells.
I found the Life Force where it had fallen off the aquatic fel reaver’s head along the way. It turns out that this thing was just a standard water totem used by all shaman, but the Broken, devolved, warped, diminished versions of Draenei that they are, revered the simple tool’s magic and had given it its grandiose name. Still, it was important to them, and it improved their quality of life, and they were paying us to retrieve it besides, so we headed back to Umbrafen Village to return it.
The long, but scenic hike back to Umbrafen Village was much more peaceful with Sparkles unconscious, and Mairy regaled us with tales from her Wildhammer adventures with her clan in the Twilight Highlands, which she and the other Wildhammer Dwarves call Northeron. The long hike seemed short with her storytelling, and we made it back to the two guards at the foot of the ramp into the tallest hut in what seemed like no time at all. The guards let us pass, relieved and grateful to see the Life Force again. We made our way up to give it back to the Elder.
The Elder was quite glad to see us return, and excitedly trotted across the top floor of the big hut to take back the Life Force. He darted over to a rickety little shrine along one wall, placing the totem in the middle of the shrine and returning to us. I was not expecting what he said next.
”Thank you, Queen Tasha of the Purple Purple Tickles and Boop-Snickers!” the Elder said, seriousness and respect deep in his voice.
I was like, “Queen Tasha of the Pur… The… Wait, WHAT?!” Then I noticed the Elder had called me Tasha in all that, which only ONE person ever calls me. I put two and two together, and facepalmed HARD. I was like, “BESTIE NAAAAAAH!” Mairy had already fallen over the floor, laughing so hard her face turned red and the tears poured. Zarshal was snickering up a storm himself. Miss Troublemaker has much to answer for! HA! Except not, because it was actually a really great joke. Plus, now the mystery of who had accepted the contract for this mission that I mentioned at the beginning of this bit was revealed! How funny!
Anyway, it was late by this point in time, so we collected our pay from the Elder – an assortment of coins that looked like mithril, except with a brighter sheen and a darker hue – and headed back to Shattrath City. I figured we could exchange the coins for Azerothian currency there, then head home, so we did that. It was dark and cloudy in Stormwind City when we finally got back, and threatening to storm, so we made our way home quickly from there, though I had to make a stop by the bank to deposit the Whitewind Company’s share of the contract first. It had been a tiring night, but, once again, a successful contract for the Whitewind Company! YAY!
And now Celeste seems ready for that diving adventure, so it’s time to wrap this up. I can’t wait to go and see what we’re about to go diving for, and where! I’m so excited! This is going to be so much fun! It’s adventure time with Celeste and Dordy! WOO!
Nat giddily tapped the excess ink from her ravenfeather quill, replacing it in its cherrywood quill case and replacing the cap to her inkwell. These went into the drawer, and Nat rose to go to the door. She let Dordy out, who darted to the front door, where Celeste seemed to be calling for her wind serpent, Cloud Dancer. Dordy bounced and yip-yip-yipped around Celeste before going off into the yard to do his business, and Nat raced to go get her own things she’d packed and change into her bikini. Before she went out into the yard, she returned to her diary, as the ink on the pages was now dry. She closed it and replaced it on the bookshelf to the left of her writing desk, then darted back outside with her pack. Nat and Celeste mounted up on Cloud Dancer, a rare treat of a ride on the undulating serpent-like dragon that Nat usually didn’t have, as she generally rode Onyx around. Today, Celeste wanted Nat to ride with her, so Nat held Dordy while Celeste held the reins. It was just a short up and down flight down to Angler’s Wharf, where Dordy was passed around from Pandaren friend to Pandaren friend, receiving all the attention he could ever want while Celeste loaded closed-up packs into the Wave Dancer and wouldn’t tell Nat what was in them.
Soon enough, however, the Wave Dancer was heading out into the bay, Celeste at the pilot station, Nat forward in her chair with the waterproof cushions and the purple parasol, and Dordy darting all around the boat to bark at the underwater wildlife visible through the bulletproof glass bottom. Celeste opened a portal in front of them, and the Wave Dancer zipped through it, outboard engine roaring loudly. Nat was gleeful and giddy with excitement; the mysterious, long-awaited underwater adventure with Celeste and Dordy was now about to be revealed! YAY!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Feb 3, 2022 16:23:23 GMT
February the Third The desk in the corner office of the home atop the rock spire in Turtle Bay had a new addition to it. One blue pearl the size of Nat’s thumb tip, several white pearls, one black, and one small golden pearl all sat in a saucer at the back of the desk under the window. The pearls looked a hodgepodge of beautiful little orbs that needed something done with them. For now, they simply sat in an unorganized fashion in a saucer.
The saucer was to keep them from rolling around on the desk at the slightest opening and closing of drawers, as Nat did now, taking out her cherrywood quill case and her inkwell of purple ink. And unlike a bowl, the saucer would keep the pearls displayed better, lacking walls as it did. Nat just needed to figure out something cool to do with them.
Nat’s diary already lay open to the next blank page. Her ravenfeather quill came out from the cherrywood quill case next. She uncapped her inkwell, dipped in her quill tip, and tapped off the excess ink. She gazed fondly at the pearls next, her thoughts taking her to a far-off land with gorgeous scenery and an excellent adventure that had stirred up a new mystery to pursue. She reminisced happily on the fun and the dazzling beauty of the locale they’d adventured in for a time, then brought her quill tip to her diary and began to write.
Dear Diary, Whaaaaaaat a week! It’s been jam-packed with adventure from start to finish! Gosh!
First up was finally discovering the nature of Celeste’s diving adventure she’s been planning for Dordy and I ever since she conceived of the idea of building the Dordy Bubble for him to dive with us in! And what an awesome dive it was! PEARL DIVING!
I remember last week I left off my entry at us finally packing up the Wave Dancer to take it out on the water for the trip to wherever we were diving. Well, what I did NOT expect is that Celeste would take us right to BOOTY BAY! She used her Booty Bay boots that teleport the user there to make an anchor for a larger portal out on the water in the middle of Turtle Bay, and piloted the Wave Dancer right through it! We came out in the middle of that pirate town, of all places, which was a real surprise! Celeste said that the Booty Bay resident she wanted to avoid hadn’t been seen there in ages, so there was no issue for her going there. That was good to know! Celeste kept piloting the boat, though, taking us right out of Booty Bay and up the west coast, narrowly avoiding a full-sized ship we’d teleported out in front of. That was close! But we kept going! It was a really scenic ride, bobbing up and down on the gently rolling waves as we headed up the coast, the ocean on one side, the jungle of Stranglethorn Vale on the other. The scenery was beautiful. The ocean spray was misting gently in my face. Dordy was darting all over the boat to check out as much of the scenery as he could. He was so excited! I had my black bikini with the purple trim on, and Celeste had on a white bikini with a light pink pareo. Everything was so serene and beautiful as Celeste piloted her motorboat up the coast, and the whole rest of the morning was just getting to the spot, and enjoying a very pleasant boat ride in the meantime!
We eventually came to a stop at the Vile Reef, a coral reef that turned out to be anything BUT vile. There were no Naga as far out as we were, which was a relief after dealing with all those Naga earlier in the week in Zangarmarsh. Celeste also showed me how to operate this vibrating thing she dipped into the water that turned out to be a sonic shark repellant. Her invention worked pretty well… There wasn’t a single shark spotted the entire time we dived, even as conducive to sharks this locale was! It was free from sea giants as well, as they typically roamed the other side of the peninsula. The water itself was warm, crystal-clear, and had lots and lots of really big clams all along the seabed. That was when Celeste told me about the pearl diving part of the trip! It was such a great surprise!
The plan, Celeste said as she dropped anchor, was to get in the water for an initial scouting dive to get our bearings, find out where the clams were most plentiful, maybe collect a few early samples, and then return to the boat for lunch before beginning the dive in earnest, as it was already getting close to lunchtime. Celeste had goggles and diving helmets for us, as well as, of course, Dordy’s Dordy Bubble, the bulletproof glass bubble she’d rigged up with the pedal-controlled fins and the air ballast for diving that she’d trained Dordy to use over the last couple of months in Turtle Bay. As a back-up to this, I had my water-breathing spells that Uncle Kanrethad had taught me growing up, which also had the added benefit of increasing our swimming speed. We decided to forego the diving helmets at first, as we were just going to go for the scouting dive initially. We got our goggles on, and Celeste got Dordy out in the water in his Dordy Bubble.
Immediately, Dordy put a paw on a trigger on the lower part of the sphere and the ballasts released some of its air, making the bubble sink. The molten corgi started walking in place, triggering the fins all along the sphere’s spine, moving away from the boat. Celeste laughed and turned to me, saying that we should get going or we’d lose our pup!
We dived in after Dordy, water-breathing spells in effect, looking around through our goggles. We found out what he was already chasing after, a large jellyfish. I went down with Celeste as Celeste made it to Dordy and tapped on his bubble to get his attention and get him to follow. I was peering around through my goggles at the lovely underwater world. Brightly colored fishes of a wide variety of species and shapes and sizes darted around in schools, while the odd barracuda poked around different hidey-holes in the reef for a morsel. We spotted a pair of sea turtles about fifty yards or so apart, and, in the distance, a little three-foot nurse shark meandered slowly along the sandy bottom, far enough away from us that the shark repellant wasn’t really bothering it. I swam with Celeste, the odd underwater sounds of the currents, Dordy's quiet machinery, and other unidentified, distorted sounds making the beautiful place also an eerie one. Added to that was the way mine and Celeste's hair sort of fanned out a bit in the underwater world.
I let Celeste have my hand when she reached for it and followed her pointing to the seaweed clump and another school of fish. I gave Celeste a quizzical look when she did a bit of Charades, but then realized what Celeste was communicating and nodded, making an OK symbol with her hand and swimming in that direction to have a look around as advised. I made it to the seaweed clump along what looked to be a rocky outcropping and began searching around while Celeste made for a trench in the seabed. Dordy seemed torn between who to follow, but he didn’t seem to like the look of that trench down there I guess, so he came with me for now. I felt thrilled at the adventure already! Diving with Celeste and Dordy was just so cool!
The section I reached had an oddly triangular shape. As I started searching, I realized that the outcropping isn’t part of the reef, but rather, the prow of a ship that sunk quite some time ago. The wood was covered in corrals and anemones. There were several fist-sized clams, and even a few as big as me! They were all stuck to the deck of the ship! Dordy’s bubble came along next to me. He gave me a few barks then turned to chase after a large octopus crawling along the remains of the ship’s figurehead. It startled me to see how close that thing was to me! I kept one eye on him as I began looking over the clams, Celeste’s clam-opening tools in my little waist pouch and at ready for use. I was wondering idly whether the ship had been some sort of treasure ship as I made for one large clam about twice the size of my fist, leaving the me-sized ones for when we started diving in earnest later, if I made my attempt on those monsters at all. Those would take a lot of strength, even with the tools, to open! I was in luck with the one I chose first… There was a golden pearl in there!
Just as I got the thing out, though, there was a sudden churning of wet sand right near me, and something long and squirmy darted out… an EEL! ICKY! And it was swimming right toward me! It was so weird-looking! It had a large jaw, a sinuous body, and was sandy brown, speckled with large darker spots. It swam right around me and slithered between two tall strands of algae. Thank goodness it was only just passing me! I could see it threading through the aquatic plants, waiting, or simply looking for prey. There was no need for the defensive spells I was ready to cast, because Dordy, bored with the octopus now, was already furiously paddling back, barking his little head off and growling at the eel. The eel, perhaps thinking this was far too strange for even it, swam away from Dordy and down the side of the ship, where it was darker and more normal. Dordy paddled close to me and stopped, tilting his head to the side as he examined me and panted, a bit overexpended from what was already his third aquatic chase.
I gave Dordy a few more pats on the Bubble, praising him for his guard dog work, though of course it wouldn’t really have been necessary. Dordy bounced around inside it, causing it to bob and weave erratically a bit, yip-yipping his excited triumph in response and posing like a mighty hero. He’s so adorable! I went back to my clam, reaching in to pull out the golden pearl and admire it. It's a beautiful piece of art, shimmering gold in the sun gleaming through the water, perfectly smooth, and perfectly spherical. She added it to my small diving pack, securing the bag closed again after depositing it. I looked for another clam of similar size, wondering if I might get lucky twice in a row.
Looking around, I spotted more of the smaller clams and a few larger ones closer to the broken main mast of the ship. I swam through the weeds, sparser and shorter here, stirring up a school of tiny purple and blue wrasses. The crystal clear water gave me a splendid view of the myriad of brightly colored corals, slowly crawling starfish, and gently bobbing jellyfish that were, thankfully, floating a good bit off the starboard side and not approaching us. The scene was surreal. Quiet, colorful, bright. Coral reef diving, especially along a sunken ship, is something I’ll never forget!
More barking behind me made me turn. Dordy was looking through a hole in the rotted planks of the ship, barking like a nutter at something. He was furiously paddling to break through the hole, soon succeeding, as waterlogged and rotted as the planks were. The Dordy Bubble broke through the ship’s old hull, lifting a tiny cloud of silt, and disappeared into the dark interior of the ship. Dordy’s barking faded quickly as he pedaled quickly down into the darkness. I gave chase quickly, abandoning the pearl search for now to make sure he was okay, wondering what I might see inside the ship.
Dordy’s firelight allowed him to be easily spotted in his bubble deeper into the ship. He was growling and barking like a crazy thing at what looks like a metal gauntlet, still in good shape, crawling around on the outside of the Dordy Bubble! It looked like an enchanted gauntlet had latched itself onto the side! Dordy turned this way and that, excited, tail wagging, as he tapped his paws noisily on the glass. The weird gauntlet, whatever it was, seemed content to simply crawl around the bubble without harming it until it got snagged against one of the hoses connected to the ballast and accidentally tugged it off. The ballast quickly filled with water, and the bubble started to sink deeper into the ship! I dove after Dordy, wondering what the heck the metal gauntlet thing was. Was it a lobster, or is it literally a gauntlet, still animated by some old magic spell cast upon it? I had no time to investigate at first; I wanted to get to Dordy and reattach that ballast hose! I dove after him, catching him as he sank and treading water as I looked the apparatus over and worked out how to reattach the hose and reactivate the ballast, all while keeping one eye on that metal gauntlet creature on one side of the sphere.
Up close, the mystery of the gauntlet was partially revealed. It turned out to really be a gauntlet, and a hermit crab seemed to have decided the gauntlet would be a suitable home! As I caught the bubble, the crab crawled to the other side of the it from me, pointy legs clicking against the glass and clinging to the paddles. Dordy turned to me, barking and gazing at me, tail wagging like mad. He seemed to be having the time of his life! Attaching the hose while holding on to the bubble was no easy feat, though. Fortunately, the hose was made to be easily reattached! Celeste must have planned for emergency repairs underwater! Meanwhile, up close, I could now see the gauntlet. It’s not all that large; in fact it looks like it was made for a smallish hand, like a child’s, or maybe a dainty little woman. The glove was intricate and beautifully made, covered in flowing lines and a mix of blue and golden metals. Celeste has it down in her workshop now, looking at how it’s crafted, as well as checking out her mother’s old notebooks for any matching markings on the thing. Being a budding engineer, I was able to get the hose reattached as I examined the gauntlet myself. The ballast would now work properly again!
Next up was recovering this treasure to show Celeste, which would mean somehow dislodging the hermit crab inside. At first, I tried giving it a few gentle shakes, making it uncomfortable enough that it would exit the gauntlet. That didn’t work; in fact, it did quite the opposite! The crab went deeper into the gauntlet, not a single leg sticking out any longer! I looked around the sandy bottom of the wreck. There were other shells here, empty ones, and it looked like the hermit crab used these as his shell changes. I released Dordy, now that his Dordy bubble was repaired, and arranged the other shells to be open toward the gauntlet, then placed the gauntlet down with its opening facing the other shells. I had to figure out how to coax the thing out. Maybe chilling the gauntlet slightly with a frost spell would make the crab not want to be in there anymore?
Before I could act, though, I began to feel the water-breathing spell wearing off. That would mean that Celeste’s would be wearing off in a bit as well, so I got Dordy to follow me from the ship to go find her and see how her own hunt was faring while refreshing the spell for her. I figured, as it was dark in the ship, and I think I read once that hermit crabs change their shells at night? that the crab might depart the gauntlet and go for a normal shell while I was gone to check up on Celeste.
It was spectacularly bright outside the ship, and I had to wait a moment for my eyes to readjust. Dordy was blinking as well in his bubble. Once we were adapted, we swam for the trench Celeste had been heading to, diving in and looking around.
Celeste was nowhere to be found though. A few small opened clams showed where she’d passed, and then, nothing! Looking around, I found nothing more than the same tranquil, beautiful scenery stretching out before me along the trench. A few distant and tinny yips drew my attention to the Dordy Bubble, settled on the reef floor a ways off. Swimming there, I found one of Celeste’s harpoons and her pearl net, caught on some particularly prickly coral in a beautiful red hue. Several thumb-sized pearls were scattered around the corals. Dordy looked at me and whined a bit, sensing something wasn’t quite right…
I looked around, swimming a full circle around the coral knoll here. Worried now that something more than just Celeste's water-breathing spell having worn off, she searched and searched, wondering where Celeste had gone, and what had happened to scatter her net, harpoon, and pearls all over the place like that. I then ascended through the water for a higher vantage point, peering around for some further hint to Celeste's whereabouts as Dordy whined and bobbed in the water next to me, looking around as well for the source of the unrightness he felt. That they both felt.
Dordy’s worried whine turned a bit strange, a sound he doesn’t usually make. It was full of confusion, fear and something else. Turning around though, I couldn’t help but laugh: there was Celeste, swimming to reach them, her diving helmet on her head, air hose swaying with the water currents from her head to the boat! Undoubtedly Dordy recognized her, but not her oversized metal head and the magnified face caused by the forward view port of her Deep Dive Helmet. “There you are!” Celeste said, smiling at us. “I didn’t think about the water breathing spell fading, and when I realized I needed to get back to the surface, it was nearly gone. My net got snagged on a piece of coral. I had to cut it loose or risk drowning. I’m ok though! How did you guys fare? I see you found a real nice one!”
I realized then that I was still holding the golden pearl. I barely registered that fact, though, so relieved was I in seeing Celeste was okay! I was like, “"Ohmigosh you scared me! I found all your stuff scattered all over and thought you'd been snagged by a Naga or something! I'm so glad you're alright! From now on, we should stick together! Want another water-breathing spell so you can get free of that hat? Also, yeah, I did find a good one, and something else as well! We should go get all your stuff back and gather up all your pearls, and we can go and check out what I found together!" and Celeste was like, “Something else? I didn’t think there was much here beyond large clams and beautiful corals. What did you find? Also, noticed the lack of sharks? I think the repellent is working!” Celeste seemed happier about her invention working than any treasure in the sea, though it was clear that my find had piqued her curiosity. “Yeah I’ll get my things and we can see what you found. I don’t mind the helmet so much. I best keep it for now in case we need it for emergencies.” I nodded agreement there, and we went back to the sunken ship while I exclaimed my impressed, delighted agreement that the shark repeller had worked so well. We went back and gathered up Celeste’s scattered gear and pearls, then headed to the ship. Celeste went into the hole first while I fed her air hose in after her, hand over hand, making sure it didn’t get caught on the jagged boards and ruptured. I went in after her and told her about how Dordy had been such a good boy, chasing away an octopus and an eel for me, as well as leading me to this find. Celeste’s voice was distorted as she spoke through the diving helmet, and my own voice sounded funny in the water, bubbles streaming from my mouth as I spoke. It was so weird!
When we found the gauntlet again, the crab had indeed left, so I didn’t need to make him cold with a frost spell after all. That was a relief! I handed it over to Celeste to examine. She found markings on the inside of the gauntlet, though it was a bit too dark inside the ship to see them clearly enough to figure them out. Celeste suggested we go ahead and get the aforementioned lunch on the Wave Dancer and examine the gauntlet up there. She said she needed to charge the shark repeller anyway.
Soon everyone was back aboard the Wave Dancer. Dordy, out of his bubble now, was given water and Dordy noms while Celeste and I shared shrimp and mango tacos with a glass of light, fruity pink wine seasoned with fresh raspberries. “It’s an unusual find,” Celeste was saying, “and quite the mystery. I suppose you’re right in that the crab must’ve moved the gauntlet from somewhere else on the ship. I wonder who it belonged to. Some sort of ancient hero? A princess in exile seeking to reclaim her throne by slaying her evil stepbrother who usurped her kingdom? What do you think, Nat?”
I sat back in her chair under her purple parasol, smiling and relaxing with my shrimp and mango tacos and enjoying the perfectly-matched wine. I couldn't help but slip Dordy the odd bit of shrimp once he finished his own Dordy noms (which always takes almost no time at all). I gazed fondly at my two loves in between gazing serenely around us at the gently rolling water, peering below the clear blue water (whether through the water, or through the bulletproof glass bottom of the boat), and gazing around at the jungle as I spoke.
"I dunno. The slender build and the elegant design kinda look elvish to me, and yeah, probably female. An elven princess? It could be, if she were Quel'dorei; the Kaldorei haven't operated as a monarchy in eons. I don't remember any Quel'dorei princess coming this far south in my history books off the top of my head, but there is a lot of Quel'dorei history we humans don't have recorded, and the Quel'dorei lifespan is the blink of an eye to a Kaldorei as well, only about three hundred and fifty to four hundred years... So yeah, it could be that there was an elven princess that we humans don’t know of, or some other high-ranking elven lady that sailed this far south for some reason, yeah!"
We continued our speculation through lunch, eventually deciding that I’d take the gauntlet to the Whitewind Company as a lead for a new adventure once we wrap our current mystery up (Celeste says she prefers her finds dug directly from the sand, not chased in iffy leads with old stories and clues all around the world). After lunch, it was back into the water!
The rest of the dive went more peacefully, without any more tense moments. Dordy tailed Celeste this time as we split up once more. After a few hours of swimming, we returned to the ship. Together, we’d managed to find several more pearls! Celeste said she has a plan for them, though I don’t know what it is yet! Then she brought out her S.E.L.F.I.E. camera. We gathered around Dordy in his bubble and smiled, our faces flushed with the warmth of the sun and the excitement of the day. Celeste then declared the day a success and brought the Wave Dancer back to Booty Bay. To my immense surprise, she had rented a room in the ship-turned-inn! I wasn’t expecting that at all! We were actually going to stay overnight in Booty Bay instead of avoiding it and returning home to avoid… people! So there we lounged in relative comfort, enjoying an amazing seafood dinner, and, when we got tired of watching the stars from their balcony in their tropical getaway, Celeste brought out her last surprise: pirate costumes for some roleplaying fun! Oh, if the real pirates could have seen and heard us, they’d have laughed themselves silly! HA!
The workend passed quickly after that, and soon it was minication again! Celeste and I stayed home Monday, and Tuesday, I went back to Stormwind City… it was time for DEATHROLLS! It was me, my bestie Nah, Mags, and Zarshal, with Mairy coming in Cari’s place and Sparkles coming in Maya’s place. There was also a guy I’ll call Bob that’s been playing with us the last few weeks. I hesitate to put his real name into writing, as he has been keeping a low profile and leading a sort of clandestine life of late, so Bob he shall remain! We played in Binan Village in Kun Lai Summit in Pandaria, in the inn with the gaming table. That and a bar and grill was a great setting, especially with the back porch overlooking the pond! The game started off crazy right off the bat, with me rolling the first roll of one, and Mairy rolling a one in the Truth or Dare rolls. That meant she had to join in, and I had chosen Dare, so Sparkles Dared us both to swap accents for the next three rounds! It was so silly! I kept messing up the accent, and Mairy was having to talk super slow to get the Wildhammer Dwarf accent out and enunciate her words more, as well as continually catching herself nearly using Wildhammer euphemisms. Then I rolled another roll of one the next round, and got Dared to use what I thought might be a Wildhammer pick-up line in my Wildhammer accent on Mairy. So I was like, “Yeh look pretty, I like yer ‘air, ‘ere’s yer drink, are yeh ready NOW.” That made me blush a whole bunch, and everyone else was cracking up! Nah even pulled out her notebook and drew a quick sketch of me saying that in a thought bubble. She said she was going to give the pick-up line to First Mate Nate! The very next round involved me again, except the tables were turned – I got to Dare Mairy! So I gave her a Whisper Dare… In three rounds, when no one expects it, without warning or context, just suddenly jump up and go stand between Nah and Sparkles, and bed and plead vehemently for them to tickle her, as though it were a life-or-death situation! When she did, they were SO confused! HA! But boy, did Mairy get tickled good! The very next Dare, I got Nah and Mairy both having rolled ones, so I got them to serenade Mags and Thyzz the plushie giraffe she usually has with her! Nah got out her harp and sang about how great Mags and Thyzz are, rhyming off the top of her head as easy as breathing, and Mairy did a traditional Wildhammer dance on the table to the tune of a totally different song simultaneously, singing about meeting Mags and Thyzz on the banks of the Verral River in the Twilight Highlands, where she’s from. It totally didn’t mix well, which was totally the intention of the Dare, and both songs totally flattered Mags and Thyzz, which was also intended. Mags was so happy, she was even moving Thyzz to dance along with the songs on the table. It was great! Mags got Dared to rhyme everything she says for a few rounds. She sure was relieved when that Dare was over! Sparkles wanted to blow stuff up, so she got Dared to let loose some of her more harmless bombs… which, unfortunately for me, meant glitter bombs and flour bombs on two different Dares (the former of which Bob had been Dared to throw at me), both aimed at me. Bob Dared me to do cartwheels across the floor of the inn, which, clumsy as I am, meant I ended up tumbling right out the front door, down the stairs, and into the dirt! With an earlier Dare having had me jump in the pond, I was now soaking wet and covered in flour, dirt, and glitter! Honestly, the state I am in after many of these games when I come home from Deathrolls, I’m surprised Celeste hasn’t had me committed to an insane asylum! HA! I think my favorite of the night was when I gave Bob a Whisper Dare to yoink a tuft of fur from Zarshal’s back, arrange it into a flower, go to Mairy and get down on one knee, and present the fur tuft flower to her with flattering words, including telling her how good she looks when she shears sheep! I love giving Whisper Dares that will confuse people, hehe! Bob covered the true nature of the Dare quite well, walking over to Zarshal (which immediately made Zarshal suspicious and nervous about what this Dare must be), and saying, “Man, I don’t know about this Dare. I don’t think I can just walk up to Nah and plant one on her.” Mairy was like, “She already got a plant on her head!” referring to Nah’s decorative Kaldorei hair vines and leaves. Nah was smirking, and Bob was just like, “Kiss her. She wants me to kiss her. I don’t know if I can just walk right up to her and be just like, WHAM, bam, hello!” Then he put his hand on Zarshal’s shoulder, and he was like, “How do I do that, friend? Everyone knows I have a crush on her by now, and now this!” Then he just YOINKED a tuft of Zarshal’s fur out! Zarshal was just like, “OW! You have quite a grip there, friendo!” Bob was just like, “Sorry, friend, I am just nervous, you know.” Then he came back to sit next to me, where he was before, and was fiddling with the tuft of hair for a bit while everyone had themselves a good laugh over what he’d said and done. After a bit, he got up again, went over to Mairy, and held the tuft of fur up to her. Sure enough, it was shaped just like a flower! Mairy took the fur tuft flower and just sort of didn’t know what to do with it. She was now holding hair. She looked really confused by it, and Bob being down on one knee in front of her. Bob was like, “My lady, your beauty is beyond compare. Even Jaina Proudmoore is envious of you.” Mairy was like, “Aye, that’s right, she ain’t got all this!” and motioned up and down herself. But then Bob was like, “When you sleep, your beauty increases one hundred fold.” That was confusing even to me, because I definitely didn’t Dare Bob to tell her he watches her sleep! Bob looked at me and was like, “Did I not hear you Dare me to tell me she looks beautiful when she sleeps?” And then the lightbulb went off. I had to whisper to Grim what I REALLY said, and then he turned around and said it to Mairy. “No that was not it… You look beautiful when you shear sheep!” Mairy was just like, “…..I’m keepin’ me gryphon Twitchtail close t’ me when I sleep tonight…” HAHA! There were tons and tons more hilarious Truths and Dares, and some really deep Truths as well. It was such a fun night! I LOVE Deathrolls!
Nat placed her quill in her inkwell for a moment, sitting back to remember the fun of the week. The diving adventure, the lunch of shrimp and mango tacos aboard the Wave Dancer amidst the beautiful scenery just off the coast of Stranglethorn Vale, the seafood dinner in the sailor and pirate inn at Booty Bay, the sunset watch that turned into stargazing as the brilliantly orange sun and matching strips of clouds high in the sky darkened to give way to one lone, bright star, and then another, and another, and another, listening to the bustling sounds of strutting sailors and pirates and goblins, watching ships come and go, until finally the night life took hold, and the sky became a dark purple velvet background dotted densely with sparkling diamonds. The waterfalls surrounding the plank stilt town had roared in the distance all around them, and eventually the day full of adventure and bellies full of outstanding food had them retiring to their room in the ship-turned-inn, where they’d roleplayed as pirates until sleep took them and they’d slept in their pirate costumes. The Deathrolls game, with all its laughter and hilarity and chaos, also with good food and drinks from the Puli the Even-handed, the Pandaren bartender and innkeeper there. Such amazing times with her friends and family! Nat heaved a happy sigh, reliving the times for a while, then returned to the present, snapping out of it. She reached for her ravenfeather quill, wanting to write of the next adventure they’d had that week. She tapped off the excess ink and returned the quill tip to the pages.
Last night was another adventure, though it was a good bit more hairy than the others. Nah was going to lead us back to Tarren Mill for the raid to hopefully find our abducted friend and coworker, Aedie! Lady Aedalia Songbird, the Quel’dorei archmage that had taught me to use frost magic, among so many other magus abilities, had been missing for some time, and the trip to Tarren Mill was made with the goal of recovering her, as well as that orc warrior that had fled from us twice and the Stockades once. So I met up with my bestie Nah, Sparkles, Mairy, and Zarshal up at the front porch of the Blue Recluse. Annasanna Moonblossom, the Worgen druid that handled a lot of our healing needs after missions, actually came along with us as well! Another last-minute surprise was Bob himself, now in his spooky armor, with his two huge swords strapped at his back! I hadn’t seen him in action in months!
We got to Gavin’s Naize, overlooking Tarren Mill like we did before, and Nah set us up with her plan. She and Zarshal, the stealthy types in the group, would infiltrate Tarren Mill while the rest of us distracted the icky hordies at the opposite side of town. Bob and I would set an ambush on that side of town, where the hordies would be drawn en masse due to Mairy’s usual ear-scorching insults and Sparkles earth-scorching bombs. As I’ve been returning more and more to fel summoning over what seems like much less potent frost magic lately (likely due to a lifetime of fel summoning and being fairly new to mage abilities), I was send Mek-barash, my fourteen-foot-tall Wrathguard, in to fight next to Bob at the west of the road into town… right next to the tower Sparkles had blown up last time, which seemed to be repaired. Then Sparkles and Mairy would assist in our fight there.
It went off quite like we expected, which was a pleasant surprise. Mairy flew Sparkles in on her gryphon Twitchtail, shouting awful insults at the horde, and airdropped Sparkles (who was all dressed up in super spiky plate armor) onto the tower roof as before. Mairy flew around shouting herself silly and waving her Stormhammer around, riling up the hordies and challenging them, then leading them west to the tower. That’s when Sparkles started running all around the roof, throwing bombs in every direction and turning the whole crossroads there into a cratered, smoldering zone of chaos! As usual when she gets to blow stuff up, she was cackling like a mad fiend and flailing her little Gnome arms and legs around, which only stirred the hordies up more. Once the hordies were herded to where we wanted them, Bob leaped heroically through the air and into the fray and started laying about left, right, and center with his swords, Mek-barash there right along with him, fighting furiously with his axe and roaring in Eredun in his impossibly deep voice. Sparkles changed the focus of her bombing to further back from the front line of the fight, bombing the rear of the hordie deaders responding to the ambush. I kept Bob and Mek-barash supplemented with reinforcements as much as the Forsaken commander on the scene, whose named turned out to be Lord Larry Lazybones. Dreadstalkers, wild imp swarms, vilefiends, demonic tyrants, shivarra, felhounds, and many, many more, I poured them all out through nether portals to back up Bob and Mek-barash. It was SUCH a huge fight! And it was so scary! Bob and Mek-barash were going nuts, and it was demons versus zombies as much as it was a human versus the orc shaman that waded into the fray with his elementally-enhanced weapons. It was an all-out battlefield, complete with Mairy’s divebombing on her gryphon and Sparkles raining down everything from explosive bombs and bombs of sticky slime and nets meant to snare the hordies. It was all-out CHAOS!
And chaos is precisely what we wanted, to cover Nah and Zarshal! We could hear them over the comms making their progressions. They quickly and quietly dispatched a pair of orc warlocks guarding a barn that they’d seen the orc warrior we’re after going into. When they got in there, though, that was the horde’s own ambush! The warrior seemed to be expecting someone to try and get in there, and he locked the door from behind them and attacked! There were lots of loud fighting noises over the comms, and then, finally, a pistol shot! After that, the fighting over the comms died down. Nah spoke up next, saying they were locked in the barn and had no way out! Sparkles flew to their rescue, now that the horde opposite was dying down from where the rest of us were fighting. She leaped off the tower and used her glider to soar over to the roof of the barn. But then something very unwelcome happened… Sparkles said “OOPS!” over the comms! It seemed she’d activated a bomb that was going to explode very soon, and it was plenty big enough to destroy the barn and everything – and everyone – in it!
Sparkles moved fast after that, giving her robot J.E.F.F. a pair of door-breaching charges to blow up the door with. She had Nah and Zarshal stand back, and then, BOOM! The door was blown to smithereens! I could see and hear the explosion from all the way across town! Nah and Zarshal ran from the barn at full sprint, and Sparkles used her glider again. The three of them made it out only just on time… the barn went up in the biggest KABOOM! of the entire night! We could feel the shockwaves all the way across town, and a huge mushroom cloud went up over where the barn was. Debris flew in every direction. I was really worried about that; I didn’t want my friends to be blown up!
Thankfully, we could hear them on the comms. Nah and Zarshal had made it out just fine! Sparkles, on the other hand, had gotten her glider stuck way up high in a tree, and couldn’t get free! Mairy peeled off from the fight at our side of the town to go pluck her from the tree on her gryphon while Bob and I held things down on that front, but when she searched, she couldn’t find Sparkles! Too many trees! Zarshal suggested using a signal flare to show Mairy where she was. Sparkles didn’t carry signal flares around in her pockets, but she did have her Gnomish lighter for her bomb fuses. That little miscreant then proceeded to SET HER OWN TREE ON FIRE! Mairy saw her quickly at that point, and dove in and yoinked her out with Twitchtail only just on time, and Sparkles was cackling maniacally over the comms again. We could see her in the distance, flailing around like mad again as she cackled, dangling there in Twitchtail’s talons. What an insane Gnome!
Nah and Zarshal stealthed their way back to us and west out of the town, heading behind us so we could break off our attack and escort them back up to the huge Dwarf encampment up on Gavin’s Naize. I poured in several more fel minions to cover Bob and I as we broke off from the attack, and we hurried over to the cliff behind us, where I used a demonic gateway spell to give us a fast route up the hill, then dismissed the gateway behind us. Bob, Nah, and Zarshal all followed me up, and we met Mairy there as she flew in with the still cackling and flailing Sparkles. Sparkles looked like she’d just had the time of her life, which figures, as she’d just set off HUNDREDS of bombs on a horde town!
Nah and Zarshal had the orc warrior all bound and unconscious. I was surprised he was still alive after hearing the pistol shot! Turned out Nah had shot him right in the helmet, knocking his helmet off his head and knocking him out cold. Zarshal was also carrying a body bag, just like the one we’d found Lady Whitewind in! It had all the same chains and locks and magical runes on it, and the person inside seemed to be under a stasis spell to keep them alive in there, just like Lady Whitewind had been. But, Zarshal said the bag was really heavy, which kinda took the wind out of our sails just a bit. Aedie, a small Quel’dorei mage woman, is not heavy, so who was this we’d found?
After that, we started on post-excursion tasks. We got the body bag and the orc warrior secured to flying mounts, with the intention this time of keeping the orc warrior in the brig on the Whitewind’s Grace instead of in the Stockades, and in solitary confinement, so he couldn’t plan and conspire with anyone else. The body bag was going there as well, for safekeeping until we could figure out how to open this one. Hopefully it would be just like the last one!
I helped Nah when we got back to Stormwind, and Mairy was there hanging out with us as well. Once we had the orc and the body bag secured, we realized how late it was. We had to be getting on to bed! So we said our goodnights, and headed out. We’d had a great victory with zero casualties, which made it a successful night, though we still have to figure out where Aedie really is. Hopefully we figure it out soon!
In the meantime, there are future trips to plan. We gotta figure out what’s up with this elvish-looking plate gauntlet, and I still have Celeste’s surprise adventure in store for her for this coming week or next! I can’t wait to uncover the mystery of the gauntlet, and I can’t wait to go on this surprise trip with Celeste! Life still has so much in store for us, and I can’t wait to see what it is! YAY! Nat smiled in happy anticipation as she tapped off the excess ink from her ravenfeather quill’s tip into the inkwell of purple ink. She replaced it in her cherrywood quill case and capped her inkwell, placing both in their home in the side drawer on the desk. She sat back and reminisced at length over the fun Deathrolls game, over the huge triumph at Tarren Mill, at the powerful RUSH that flowed through her when she experienced and unleashed the full power of her fel summoning, and especially she reminisced over the beautiful, riveting, absolutely fun diving adventure with Celeste and Dordy. She was SO ready to do some more of that!
After a time, she sat back up, closing the diary, the ink now dry on its pages. She returned it to its place on her bookshelf to the left of her desk, then headed downstairs to Celeste’s workshop to see if she’d found anything on Quel’dorei armor in her mother’s old notebooks. Nat knew Celeste wasn’t super hopeful; Eowithiel had been Kaldorei, not Quel’dorei, after all, and the two branches of the elven kingdom had been at odds for millennia anyway. Still, who knew? Mostly, though, she just wanted to hang out with Celeste and Dordy. It was sure to be a peaceful rest of the day in a life filled with such great days!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Feb 10, 2022 16:51:02 GMT
February the Tenth Two women sat in a broad cave the size of a very large room. Not a damp, cold, uncomfortable cave; at least, not any longer. This cave was filled with camping gear and camping furniture, much like a tent. A canvas camp bed, big enough for two, sat at the back middle of the cave. A thermal cell hooked up to a power cell sat in a brazier that warmed the entire room, as did the smokeless campfire (courtesy of one of the women’s fire magic). Additional lanterns, also hooked up to the power cell, lit either side of the room. A camping table (with a few camp dishes on it) with two chairs, along with another table with maps and engineering blueprints all over it with another pair of chairs, sat on either side of the brazier. A pair of dog bowls sat on the floor on one side of the camping dinner table.
Nat sat at the latter table, the one with all the blueprints all over it, covering it still further with her diary, cherrywood quill case, and inkwell of purple ink. Celeste was working nearby, just across the table from Nat, working on the inner circuitry of a brand-new device, covered in grease and dirt stains as she worked with her sleeves rolled up to install a few more parts. Dordy the molten corgi was lying on the canvas bed on his belly, head on his paws, watching Celeste work with idle interest. As Celeste and Nat worked on their respective projects, the cave was filled with the sounds of Nat’s writing and Celeste’s metallic clanking, or the whirring and grinding of gears, or the soft sounds of cables being run through the new device’s chassis.
Nat smiled as her love worked on the odd new device, completely engrossed in her work, adding her happy humming of old Kaldorei songs to the sounds her hands and tools made as she progressed on her project. Nat decided to progress on her own project, her ravenfeather quill in hand, its tip already coated in purple ink.
Dear diary,
It’s a total engineering week!
Well, Deathrolls wasn’t engineering this week, but the rest of it has been! We’re in MECHAGON! Well, not IN the city proper, but we’re on Mechagon Island camping right now, Celeste and I, and Dordy and Onyx are here as well! Nosebleed has been in and out of the portals from the Krasarang jungle, Cloud Dancer is still in Pandaria, and Ebonhoof is hanging out with his buddy Nosebleed in the jungle as well, but the rest of us are here!
But yeah, Deathrolls was first, and it was a HILARIOUS and utterly blushworthy night! We played at the Beer Garden behind one of the inns in Dalaran, and it was me, my bestie Nah, Mags, Maya, Cari, Bob, Cletcher, and Zarshal! Maya went and rolled a one out of one hundred on the initiative rolls to see who’d roll first, so right off the bat, she had to do a Truth or Dare, AND join in the next one, as the roll-one-out-of-one-hundred rule goes! Then she rolled a one on the Truth or Dare rolls on the very first round, which meant she had to join in that one, which delayed the joining in from her original one out of one hundred joining in another round. All told, Maya had to do a Truth or Dare three rounds in a row without actually losing a single Deathrolls round! HA! She ended up having to answer a VERY embarrassing, spicy Truth that I would blush too hard to write here, something about her favorite way Cari makes her happy in a certain way, then she had to answer another Truth about her favorite pick-up line, which turned out to be when she first met Cari and Cari pointed to the bar and simply said, “Let’s go,” and then she had to do a skit to re-enact one of her most romantic times with Cari she’s ever had… except she and Cari (who rolled a one herself on this round of Truth or Dare rolls, HA!) had to do it as Mechagnomes using engineering innuendos to profess their love! It was great! The game remained risqué throughout, which had me staring at the table when Nah and Maya both lost their clothes. It got worse when I had to close my eyes entirely when Nah and Maya both rolled ones and had to sit in my lap and feed me grapes and wine. ACK! Cletcher had me sing a shanty about love on a Dare, which turned out to be me making it one up as I went along about a pirate that falls for a mermaid, only to discover, after his drunkenness wears off, that the “mermaid” is really an octopus! Nah had to propose to Mags’ giraffe plushie Thyzz as romantically as she could, and she really cheesed it up, too! Cari and Maya rolled ones together again, and Cletcher couldn’t take his eyes off Maya, so Maya got Dared to lie on the table in front of Cletcher while Cari did a body shot off her. That was more of me just staring at the table in front of me and not doing jack squat! Mags said that she and I had totally been talking about exactly this already, which we had; when I told Mags we were playing at the Beer Garden behind one of the inns in Dalaran, she said she remembered it from last time, when Nah had taken her shirt and started running around like that. Then she had a Dare that saved us: Maya and Cari had both rolled ones again, as had Bob this time, so they had to find a cloth or something for Nah, who was… more undressed that Maya (even as little as Maya had on), and chase Nah down and wrap her up. Whoever caught her was the winner, and could get her covered up so the game wouldn’t be so bad. Doggone Kaldorei and their cultural disregard for modesty… Bob took off his cloak, and Maya and Cari took down a Kirin Tor banner and held it by either end. They did their best, chasing Nah all over the garden. I could hear them running all over the place, even without looking! And then apparently Bob got Nah in between himself and Maya and Cari and herded her that way. She tripped over Maya, I think? And then Bob dived on her with his cloak and wrapped her up from neck to toe! It was safe to look again! Cari ended up Daring Mags to be a plant. She had to bring over one of the potted plants and pose in it for a round, talking and moving really slowly like a plant. And that’s when Zarshal arrived, having had to come in late for this night’s game. Zarshal was pretty taken aback at the scene: Cari was only just remembering to put her glasses back on from Maya’s body shot. Maya was still nearly entirely undressed. Nah was totally undressed, wrapped up in Bob’s cloak. I was still blushing hard and not looking up from the table. Bob was continually checking out Nah and Maya, and Mags was standing in a potted plant all posed like a plant. He was SO CONFUSED! HAHAHA! Zarshal soon found himself the target of a Dare for Mags, having to go make Thyzz pet Zarshal’s newly trimmed and dyed mane, which made him look even snazzier than usual, and explain to Thyzz why Zarshal was so perfectly suited to having us throw turnips at him all the time the way we do. Mags explained to Thyzz that pelting Z with a turnip gets you TWO turnips in return while having Thyzz pet Z. Z just had this expression like he wanted to facepalm the entire time. Then Bob Dared me to get on the table and dance (a weekly embarrassment for me). But the twist? I had to do so with a mug of ale on my head! Predictably, the ale fell off, and soaked Zarshal by landing on the table in front of him and splashing it out all down his front! GOSH! Hehe… There were a lot more really funny Truths and Dares, and the game went late into the night. I love Deathrolls nights!
Nat looked up then, hearing Celeste call her name, checking out the new device Celeste was working on. The P.I.E., or Perimeter Intrusion Electromagnet, was nearly complete. It was a device to repel metallic intruders, and she wanted to plant it out front of the cave, where the entrance sat at the bottom of a shallow ravine that could only be entered by coming in from either end of the short ravine-like crevasse. Celeste was ready to set the thing up, and she just needed Nat to hop into the MUTT and hold the frame. Nat placed her ravenfeather quill into her inkwell of purple ink, obliging by Blinking up into the MUTT’s cockpit and turning its engine over. She checked the dials, making sure all systems were nominal, then, satisfied, she showed Celeste a thumbs-up. She then has the MUTT hold up the frame of the P.I.E. so she could finish wiring it up.
Once completed, Celeste had Nat walk the P.I.E. outside and install it across the way in the short, shallow ravine in a location Celeste figured would have the best angle at repelling all metallic creatures in the night. Nat planted it where instructed, then, at Celeste’s wise suggestion, took the MUTT back into the cave and parked it all the way against the far back wall. When Nat came back out front again, Celeste had an iron bolt in her hand, ready to test out the new device! The results of the test are awesome to Nat, and she is happy she gets to write about it soon! She had a bit more conversation with Celeste, then headed back inside to her diary.
The rest of the week has been all Mechagon stuff (or planning and packing for Mechagon, in the earliest bit of the week)! Celeste and I went to the old waterfall we fished at to camp. We were thinking of setting up our tent next to it, but then we decided to camp in this whole huge cave that’s right next to the waterfall, so that’s a unique new adventure for us! We ended up making this big cave look kinda small with all the engineering and camping stuff we put in here! Celeste has been working on the Perimeter Intrusion Electromagnet, or P.I.E., which works the same as the charm bracelet she gave me that repels metal things with a repulsion shield, so I’ll be safer out on missions, except this one is way, way bigger. It’s so big and heavy, I have to use the MUTT to hold it for her now! It’s really cool how it works!
Earlier today, we were at Junkwatt Depot, scavenging for parts to restock Celeste’s workshop with, as well as build new things for the MUTT and other stuff. Celeste also has a new plan for a cargo lift for the rock spire the house is on, so we don’t have to use fuel to fly everything up we get! That’ll also make for a dock at the bottom of it for the Wave Dancer, so we don’t have to take up the dock space at Angler’s Wharf, so that’ll be handy too! While we were there, Celeste wanted about ten feet or so of copper wiring, a power cell, a power cell casing that’ll fit it and be watertight, a control module, a working winch system for the cargo lift for the house with several hundred yards of cables, stuff to build a wind turbine for the house, and a way to recharge power cells. So we looked, Celeste in the MUTT, and me using my Wrathguard Mek-barash to do our heavy lifting for us. I found a whole spool of copper wiring! We also found plenty of power cells and power cell casings. And then we found a junked spider tank the Mechagnomes use! We started taking it apart, and I found a power cell in the back that was hooked up to some sort of machine at both ends of the power cell. This machine was also connected to a sort of black glass-looking panel on the back of the spider tank that was warm to the touch. Celeste said it was a photoelectrical panel, which uses solar power to perpetually energize a machine. She said that that must explain how the robots the Mechagnomes build maintain power around the clock, charging up all day and able to run around all night. Imagine that in the MUTT and the Flying Nosebleed instead of burning fuel!
While we were there, though, this aerial drone zoomed down out of the sky, spending a while hovering overhead of, and in front of, Mek-barash. While it was hovering there, a narrow cone of green light emitted from the drone, shining down to swirl around him in a neat little figure eight for a while as Dordy went nuts, barking and yipping and bouncing around below it. It moves on to me aboard Nosebleed, who was along to haul our finds, taking nowhere near as long to scan the two of us. Dordy got a short scan too, and then Celeste and the MUTT together got a really lengthy scan, just as Mek-barash did. Finished with its work, the aerial drone beeped and booped a few times, then flew off. I was really hoping that wasn’t a bad sign! Celeste said the Mechagnomes must just be curious about us, and it likely wasn’t a hostile gesture. I sure hope she’s right! The Mechagnomes are a part of the Alliance. I want to stay friends with them!
Anywho, we ended up finding all the parts Celeste wanted and then some, so we headed back to the cave campsite for lunch. Celeste wolfed down her sandwiches without taking her eyes off her P.I.E. schematics she was drawing up, and then quickly set to work building the thing as soon as she was done eating. She’s so adorable when she gets so immersed in her fishing or engineering, especially when she hums all these happy songs she does as she works! She got the P.I.E. put together pretty quickly, and then we took it out front to test it. I had to park the MUTT in the very back of the cave so it doesn’t get damaged, and then went out front to watch Celeste test it. She had an iron bolt in her hand, and had me go to the opposite side of the P.I.E. from her, I guess so the bolt wouldn’t fly at me. Then she turned the thing on, and there was this low, quiet hum, and the bolt just suddenly flew right out of her hands, across the campsite, and right into the pond with the waterfall! It was SO COOL! Celeste says she has the thing set to just pulse with an ebb and flow instead of being constantly on, which will save it power through the night. She showed me where the switch is, which makes it easy to turn on and off. We just gotta make sure we aren’t bringing metal with us, whether wearing it as jewelry, or carrying it in our hands, when it’s on! Also, other critters or even Mechagnomes that are partly or totally metal will have a low field of repulsion to discourage them while they come in at a distance, so they aren’t just suddenly flung, giving them the chance to move safely away. Celeste has thought of everything! She’s so very smart!
I gotta work this weekend, but she still wants to do more fishing and scrap-searching and engineering this week. I can’t wait to take her on more trips! I’m glad she likes the trip so far!
Also in Mechagon this week, by complete coincidence, as Nah didn’t know Celeste and I were camping here, was a Whitewind Company contract mission! There was this Mechagnome that wanted us to come and help test out this HUGE spider tank she called the G.U.A.R.D.I.A.N., or Gigantic Utility ARmed Defender against Irregularities and Antagonistic Nuisances. That was a real mouthful, so we definitely decided we’d just stick with GUARDIAN! The only problem was… she wanted us to test it out by FIGHTING it!
The Mechagnome that designed the rotten thing had it set to non-lethal ordinance, thankfully, but it still SUCKED! It took me, my bestie Nah, Sparkles, Cari, Bob, and Zarshal FOREVER to floor this thing! To start off with, we tried going for its legs. It was resisting everything we threw at it, though! Eventually we DID get five of its legs blasted, cut, or snapped off, and even then, it could sprint really fast as a tripod! This thing was really well-designed! It also had this eye on top of its head that locked onto a target and zapped it with a laser beam! This one was set to non-lethal, but still, it really makes you feel like you’re on your last legs! I got hit with it once, my bestie Nah got hit with it TWICE, including being blasted right into a junk heap with it, and even its legs were kicking people around, and one even pinned Zarshal to the dirt for a while! Its eventual downfall was a pistol shot from Nah that penetrated its armor. I had Mek-barash working on breaking its legs off, so while the spider tank was busy with it, Nah, Z, Bob, Mairy, Sparkles, and Sparkles’ robot JEFF (Jovial Explosive Freedom Fighter), I summoned a vilefiend and sent it after that bullet hole. Its teeth and corrosive venom widened the hole about as wide as a Mechagnome. That’s when Sparkles and Mairy got the idea to leap RIGHT ONTO THE SPIDER TANK like the degenerates they are! Mairy was shocking the pie outta it with her shaman abilities and beating the poo outta it with her Stormhammer, and Sparkles was trying to disable the eye laser beam thing by covering its targeting sensor up with some kinda purple goop she uses to plant her bombs on things. The eye wasn’t able to hit with its laser too accurately after that, fortunately for us! After that, it was just a matter of taking its legs off with Mek-barash and Grim, Nah shooting at it with her pistol, and Sparkles and Mairy ripping that hole open wider and deeper through the layers of armor. Eventually, they broke through! Then the scariest thing happened… Sparkles started cackling maniacally, which meant something was really about to go BOOM… and it did! She triggered every single bomb she had, dropped down into the hole, and blew the thing to pieces from the inside! I thought it had been a suicide bombing, and for what? To field-test some stranger’s battle tank? But then, right when I felt like I might cry at the loss of my insane new friend, she got shot right out of the wreckage, skipped across the junkyard in the dirt, and landed a good distance away. Two of her mechanical legs had come off her! I retrieved them for her and ran over to her body… only, she was ALIVE! Turns out she’d had her shield up when she went in! That crazy Mechagnome! About broke my heart! She reattached her legs – turns out they’d just come off at the attachment joints – and then got right up. She was fine all along! GOSH! But we did it! Field-tested the tank! The other Mechagnome was bummed the tank got blown to pieces, but she was happy it held up against so many fighters all by itself! Imagine throwing LOTS of these GUARDIANS at the horde! Anyway, it was a successful mission, complete with extra danger pay even though it was non-lethal settings, so we all went home happy and that much richer! Good mission night!
And now, Celeste and I are about to do a bit more engineering work. Maybe even a bit more scavenging work! I’m gonna get back to it! What an amazing week of total engineering immersion! I can’t wait to see what we find and build next! This is so much fun! YAY!
Nat tapped off her ravenfeather quill tip into her inkwell of purple ink, dropping off the excess ink into it. She replaced it into her cherrywood quill case and capped her inkwell, depositing these in her pack. She rose from the table, fetching a few tools for Celeste, then rolling up her own sleeves. She was glad she was wearing old pants and a shirt today instead of a dress; it was time to get dirty! Together, she and Celeste work with this and tinker with that, the random bits of twisted metal all coming together to create things that worked and served various functions.
Asked two years ago if she’d ever find herself messing around with machines and being a mechanic, she’d have been aghast at the very thought of getting all dirty and greasy, doing work she had mistakenly thought was strictly men’s work. But now, thanks to Celeste, she saw that engineering was an endless supply of fun logic puzzles, ones with very satisfying and useful functions once solved. And with this Mechagon trip, they’d have ideas and a supply of parts to do far more than they had before! Learning engineering from Celeste over the past year had been one of the most enjoyable experiences of her life, and she was looking forward to doing quite a bit more!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Feb 17, 2022 14:17:22 GMT
February the Seventeenth A robotic beetle wandered along a shallow ravine, picking its way through the grass on its own by a combination of tiny gadgets: visual sensors, an automated environmental analysis and response chip, a motivator chip, and automated legs. Other gizmos could likely be found within as well. The Mechagnomes that created this beetle were centuries ahead of all other races in terms of technological advancement, though what the purpose of automated robot beetles were, only they could really rationalize.
The beetle continued its scurrying along, going around or over rocks or sticks in its path, meandering constantly in its unceasing travels. It wound through the shallow ravine, a short ravine that a Mechagnome could walk through in under half a minute, though to a beetle, this was quite a journey! Undaunted by that fact (or, more likely, unaware of that fact), the beetle continued along, skittering and scurrying relentlessly.
What the beetle could not have anticipated was being suddenly repelled by some unseen force. It pressed ahead, trying to move forward, but every fifteen seconds or so, it would find itself blown backwards, its metallic body sometimes ending up on its back several feet behind where it had progressed to. An automated self-righting system would kick in if it landed on its back, one wing or the other kicking out hard to launch itself into a small roll that would land it on its feet. The beetle would then try again and again and again, but it would never penetrate the small clearing in front of the cave it was absentmindedly trying to pass through. Not with the Perimeter Intrusion Electromagnet set up by the two human women camping in the cave switched on!
One of these women, utterly unaware of the beetle’s predicament or even its existence across the clearing and hidden in the grass, sat at a campfire in a camping chair, a small folding camp table set up to her right containing an inkwell of purple ink and a cherrywood quill case, the former being uncapped and the latter being empty, its ravenfeather quill in its owner’s hand, who also had her diary open in her lap. The other was out fishing with a new Mechagnome friend.
Natasha Ebonlocke had had herself quite a fun week, though it was heavily marred by the tragedy of the previous night. Mixed feelings stirred in her heart as she thought back on the week, which had been filled with fun, adventure, laughs, and loss. She sighed heavily, the desire to write about the positive and the fun seeming insensitive to write when she also wanted to write about the sadness. Heaving a sigh, she dipped her quill into her inkwell of purple ink, tapping off a bit of excess ink and bringing the quill tip to the next blank page in her diary.
Dear diary,
It’s been one of THOSE weeks again. The roller coaster. Fun and very much not fun rolled into one series of days that makes me wish time travel and changing the past was safe to do!
I don’t want to end my entry on a negative note, even though the most recent event, just last night, was, chronologically speaking, the last event I experienced before this entry. I think I’ll just get into that one first, as its scope and scale likely merit anyway…
Last night was the weekly Whitewind Company adventure… Only we didn’t go anywhere. We (me, Nah, First Mate Nate, Mairy, Sparkles, and Zarshal, Bob having not arrived in Stormwind that night until much later) met aboard the Whitewind’s Grace, where Nah had news for us. She’d been able to get the bodybag we found last week open, but, as suspected with the weight of the bag, it wasn’t Aedie (our dear friend Archmage Aedalia Songbird, Quel’dorei archmage of the Kirin Tor). Instead, the corpse of a nasty undead Forsaken guy was in there! We’d been had! All that chaos at the Tarren Mill raid last night was for nothing! Well, except for having captured that orc warrior yet again and imprisoning him in the Whitewind’s Grace’s brig this time.
We had no idea where Aedie was, then, so we didn’t know what to do next. All we knew is, we didn’t want this corpse getting up and wandering about again, it being a Forsaken and all, so we weighted it down in a net and dropped it to the ocean floor under the ship to be crab food. Nah and I are supposed to get started on searching for new leads as to Aedie’s whereabouts soon, so we can go and rescue her. I hope she’s still okay, wherever she is!
We were all discussing ideas when suddenly Nah’s ears perked up while she was about to start eating an apple… She said we weren’t alone on the ship! Something that wasn’t us, Captain Tiala, or the ship’s crew or prisoners in the brig was with us, somewhere! We started searching around, using mundane and magical searching abilities to see who or what Nah had sensed. Nah and I found nothing, but Mairy kicked a suspicious-looking crate, which produced a muffled yelp! Sparkles was questioning a limping, suspicious-looking, hooded deckhand who was sweeping the deck with a broom… which was upside-down, bristles up in the air! Then, suddenly, a shuriken whizzed RIGHT by Nate’s head, embedding itself in the far wall! Nate yelped, and then the hooded deckhand threw off his hood to reveal himself to be ANOTHER FORSAKEN! Forsaken rogues were popping out of the shadows all around us, one of them for each one of us! IT WAS AN AMBUSH!
Everyone was out on deck at this point except Nate, and all we could hear from inside the mess hall was Nate and his water elemental in a fight with another Forsaken! Sparkles was fighting the weird limping “deckhand,” and almost immediately got punted off the ship and into the water… big mistake, if you ask me; Gnomes HATE being punted! And Sparkles is a crazy bomb maniac anyway! Mairy was fighting the undead in the crate she’d kicked, having dumped him out or something, and was beating him with the crate while the undead was trying to beat her with the crate lid! Nah was fighting with style, as she usually does, having thrown the apple she was about to eat at the Forsaken to distract it, but then thrusting her rapier right through the apple and into the undead’s gut! She dodged its counterattack and blew its head off with her pistol, which was super gross! Zarshal, who has apparently been working on projecting the void shadows he stealths and uses for his shadowstrike and gloomblade attacks, was hurling shadowbolts and voidbolts and such at his rogue. I think he’s learning to be a shadow priest! Weird!
Meanwhile, in all this, my rogue was trying to figure out a way past me, as his back was to the edge of the deck and he was in danger of being knocked off the ship, and I had my charm bracelet switched on that Celeste had given me last Winter Veil, among other gifts, that works like the P.I.E. to repel metal, which pretty much meant the rogue couldn't do much to me with his weapons. But all I could think of was that each one of my friends was in danger, and having to deal with that danger alone, everyone facing off one-on-one with their own foe! So I summoned my voidwalker, Thogthang (what the heck is up with that thing’s name, anyway?), with the idea that the shadowy miasma that surrounds them will reduce the visibility of all enemies within line of sight of it, manipulated to not do the same to my friends. That helped all but Nate, who was inside and sounding like he’d knocked over a table and was trying to support his water elemental, which was struggling with his rogue, by casting from behind it. The shadowy miasma seemed to really give us an advantage, as did Nah having dispatched her enemy so quickly. Sparkles was on the boat again next, having done one of those heroic leaps that warriors do, smashing back onto the boat and throwing her rogue off balance. Nah was next helping Nate inside, who didn’t have the advantage of my voidwalker, and then those guys were outside again. I had a pack of wild imps out helping my voidwalker at that point, while Mairy was still brawling and yelling obscenities in her Wildhammer accent and Sparkles had somehow gotten onto her rogue’s shoulders and was pounding him on the head while the rogue was swinging around like a bucking bronco to dislodge her. Thogthang and my imps soon dispatched my rogue, just as Zarshal finished his rogue off and then made sure it wasn’t going to get up again after that by smashing its head off with his shiny new shadow priest mace. The head went flying through the door and into the mess hall, bonking off the head of the rogue in there from what Nah tells me, distracting it long enough for Nah and Nate to finish it off. That just left Mairy and Sparkles fighting! I made sure mine wasn’t going to get up either, summoning a Vilefiend, a lean, curve-spined fel beast like a really warped-looking dog with lots and lots of long, sharp teeth, allowing it to devour the corpse of the Forsaken the rest of my minions had roasted and pummeled. He’s not going to get up again if he’s vilefiend poo! Just then, a horrifically awful odor came from Sparkle’s direction, along with a shriek of agony… She’d just shattered one of her acid bombs over the thing’s head, and it was melting into a disgusting puddle right there on deck! We all rushed over to help Mairy, but she didn’t need it, as she was now angrily pummeling a clearly finished-off undead on her side of the deck. We’d won the night, and without a single casualty!
Or so we’d thought…
What was left of any undead on the ship was weighted to the bottom of the sea to join the one from the bodybag to be crab food, so we didn’t have to worry about them reanimating at some point and walking around again. Then I raised the obvious question… If our crew had turned out to all be Forsaken imposters… then where was OUR crew?
We searched the ship. I found blood and a few bits of torn clothing on the staircase to the top deck, and others were searching crates that looked out of place and in dark corners and under staircases. Our crew was soon accounted for… and none had been left alive! We’d apparently gotten to the ship after a brutal and fatal battle that had apparently happened so suddenly that the crew couldn’t get a warning out on the comms! This is getting out of hand! We’ve got to find whomever keeps attacking the Whitewind Company and STOP them!
We went to the brig next, to check on the prisoners, and to look for Captain Tiala, the Whitewind’s Grace’s captain, and Nate’s immediate boss. She had last been heard from down in the brig interrogating the prisoners, which now includes Lucina the blackmailed Kaldorei rogue, Telrissa the blackmailed Illidari, a Quel’dorei monk named Lumin who strangely seems indifferent to her captivity and had been forthcoming in her information that had led to Telrissa’s capture, a Shal’dorei elf Telrissa had been captured with, and the orc warrior we captured (again) in the raid on Tarren Mill the week before last. The elves of various sorts were all there, all covered up and sleeping under blankets, which I thought was suspicious… And Captain Tiala was not in the brig at all! The orc warrior was also obscured from view under a blanket. Nah and I were immediately worried as we looked through the brig with the others standing guard topside, and I sent Mek-barash into the cell with the orc to see what was REALLY under that blanket. And it turned out to be…
Captain Tiala and Lucina, both unconscious, lumped together to look like the orc was still under there! The orc was gone! Lucina’s cell revealed a lump of straw under her blanket, though the other elves were still in their cells, also unconscious. Lumin was awake, but wasn’t saying much that was useful. We’ll have to try to talk to her again soon. Meanwhile, it looked like the attack on the Whitewind’s Grace was to get this orc warrior freed! He must really be important, given the leadership role we always see him in, and a full-scale raid to free him!
Nah and I went back upstairs after getting Captain Tiala out of the cell and Lucina returned to hers, delivering the latest bad news to the crew. Now not only do we still have no lead on Aedie’s whereabouts, but the Whitewind’s Grace also needs an entire new crew hired on (I just hope people will be willing to fill the roles after what happened to the last crew!), the orc is free AGAIN, and the crew of the Whitewind’s Grace has been killed! That’s so sad! They’ve always been so nice to me! I have no idea why Captain Tiala was left alive, but I’m glad she’s okay! But now Nah has to write the bad news to each crewman’s family, as well as write obituaries. It’s so sad; they were all such good men, and such hard workers, and had hearts of gold! I will really miss those guys! I hope nothing like this ever happens again! It’s so heartbreaking!
Nat thrust her quill into her inkwell, flopping back in her camp chair and sighing heavily. She’d cried many tears last night, her heart broken even though she hadn’t really known the crewmen that well, as they all had separate jobs from hear and had their own, separate lives to get to when not on duty. Yet not having gotten to know them somehow made it bad in its own way, a feeling of guilt for not having gotten to know those she oversaw when sailing, or doing other work aboard the {i]Whitewind’s Grace. [/i] Her heart ached for their families, who would feel their loss far worse than she would. She could, at least, take solace in the fact that Lady Cellica Whitewind was a caring, benevolent boss, and would use her wealth to make sure the families would be completely taken care of in the absence of the men who did so up until yesterday.[/span][/div]
Nat sniffled slightly, then wiped her eyes dry, resolving to honor the lost lives by being steadfast and resolute in seeing to the administration of justice for their murders, and that the Whitewind Company, all its members, and all their friends would be kept safe from then on, and not only that, but that they’d also thrive and prosper! With that thought in mind, she resolved herself to move forward. She picked her quill out of the inkwell, tapping off a bit of excess ink and returning to her writing.
I, along with the rest of the Whitewind Company and our friends, will see to it that justice is done, and that all who yet remain thrive and prosper! Nah is sure to make that part of our mission moving forward. We will see justice done for this atrocity, no matter what! And those who yet live will protected from now on!
But it hasn’t all been sad… In fact, aside from a bit of a sad tale from a Mechagnome, it’s been downright fun! Fun is something we should all have, in honor of those fallen. They wouldn’t want us to stop living our best lives! And living our best lives is one thing Celeste and I are all about, especially after the horrible person we had to deal with last year! A wise man once said, “Live well. It is the greatest revenge.” And that’s what we intend to do! Well, not because we want to do so just for revenge or something, but really just because we wanna be happy!
As such, Celeste and I have really been living it up on our Mechagon Island adventure! We even made a new friend here! It started off kinda weird… All last week, both during adventures with Celeste and last week’s G.U.A.R.D.I.A.N. super spider tank field test adventure, that we were being watched. Sometimes I’d see a small shape over a low hill or a junk pile or something out of the corner of my eye, but, when I’d look, it wouldn’t be there anymore!
Well, as it turns out, it was a Mechagnome!
There we were, sorting through junk piles at Junkwatt Depot’s junkyard for stuff we could salvage and use, when suddenly, Dordy started going NUTS, barking at one of the junk piles nearby, yip-yipping and bouncing around and just generally sounding the alarm. Celeste went for her rifle, and I was ready to cast any spells needed, but then, from behind the junk pile, came a little Mechagnome, short even by her own race’s standards! She had like almost no “upgrades” at all; just what looked to be the skeleton “bones” of metal arms and legs! Most of them have like lots of cool features inside their prosthetics to enhance them further, but she merely had bones of prosthetics with no additional features. She also had completely natural flesh eyes and ears and jaw and stuff, no mechanical features at all there!
The little Mechagnome came around the junk pile with her hands raised, fear in her eyes at the spellcaster, the riflewoman, and a furiously barking dog made of actual magma that was as big as her. Yet on she came, her face set. She was asking Celeste not to shoot, saying that she needed our help! Celeste lowered her rifle and we got Dordy corralled, and we got a good look at the Mechagnome.
Not only was she only barely “upgraded” by Mechagnome standards, but she was also limping… her left foot had been attached BACKWARDS! She looked like a normal Gnome more than the Mechagnomes do. She has pale skin with a just a few freckles under her eyes, kinda like Celeste. She has dirty-blonde hair that she keeps in a ponytail with a cog for a hair tie. Her head is a bit oversized, the way Gnomish heads are, and she has big, wide green eyes, full lips, a cherry nose kinda like mine, and wore what looked like a sort of yellow jumpsuit that stopped at the top of her metal legs, leaving them exposed. She seemed to be sort of embarrassed at her exposed metal prosthetic skeleton limbs, especially at her backwards foot as she limped towards us.
Celeste and I were instantly wanting to help her out! Celeste worked the MUTT’s hands into a sort of two-handed cupping position, inviting the Mechagnome, who said her name was Penny, to sit in it while she takes a look at that backwards foot. She then figured up a list of parts she’d need – a new actuator (it seems this one was too short, and whomever had assembled Penny’s prosthetic had put the foot on backwards to compensate), pistons, and something to buff them up with and oil them. I was able to find those parts easily enough, as they seem to be commonplace in Mechagnomish robotics found around the junkyard. I got them back to Celeste, and, after a time, she had the old actuator taken off, the new one on, new pistons installed, and everything buffed up and oiled! She was saying that Penny should not only walk normally now, but be able to move about faster and even jump much higher! Penny was THRILLED! She sprinted around the clearing in the middle of the junk heaps that we were working in, which got Dordy all excited and he ran with her! Penny wanted to be able to pay for her help, but she has no coin, so she wants to work it off. Celeste told her about the underwater irrigation system she installed at the Halfhill farm we got at the end of last year that I wrote about a month or two ago, and how there’s a shack at the farm she can stay at while she works the farm for us and maintains the mechanical systems Celeste engineered there. Penny was thrilled at the idea; she now has a temporary home as she works off her upgrade fixes!
The rest of that day just entailed dinner and fishing, with Penny given a spare Pandaren bamboo fishing rod to keep that we cut to half its length to suit her size. She loves fishing, as it turns out! I’m so glad we were able to help her out!
We are still working on salvaging all the items we were searching for that I wrote about last week. We’ve got a bunch of them, but we still need a lot of the others! The fishing has been fun, too! A lot of the fish are mechanical and just caught for sport, so I had to pack us lots of food. It’s made for an interesting twist to camp food, having normal dining room food along! This trip has been so much fun so far!
In other news, the Whitewind Company has two new members! It’s a pair of Lightforged Draenei women, though they didn’t know each other prior to joining up, and I still don’t know if they’ve met each other yet or not, even! One’s name is Aedia, which is super similar to Aedalia, the missing Whitewind Company officer we’re searching for, though she goes by the nickname “Star,” due to her astronomy passion. She’s a mage! The other is Tisaani, a paladin specializing in healing! They’re both really really nice!
Also fun this week was DEATHROLLS! It was me, my bestie Nah, Maya, Cari, Mags, First Mate Nate, Bob, and Zarshal! We played at Pinky’s Groggery, the open-air bar in Upton Borough in Boralus, where Celeste first revealed her feelings for me over lunch while we were waiting on her plushie, Frank the Fae, to finish being crafted. I LOVE that place! So much nostalgia, and really nice and pretty besides! Also, we hadn’t played there in MONTHS!
The game was so fun, and so funny! It kinda started off with some really interesting Truths that revealed some interesting life stories about people, then got into people acting crazier and crazier! And something rare happened too: we have this rule where if someone rolls a twenty out of twenty on the Truth or Dare rolls, they get to choose Truth or Dare FOR the person who rolled a one! And the rarely-needed rule on top of that is, if multiple people roll a twenty out of twenty on those rolls, then they EACH get to choose a Truth or Dare for the person who rolled a one! Well… this week, it happened FOUR TIMES in one night! It was CRAZY! People were also rolling ones during Truth or Dare rolls a lot, meaning, they had to join with the person who rolled the original one! So there was a lot of mass chaos going on! It was great! I got an early one of these involving Nah and Zarshal, so I gave them each Whisper Dares! I Dared Nah, in two rounds, when people are least expecting it, without warning, without context, to go to the bar and get a drink, any drink, and bring it back to Maya and Cari, only she had to tell them they REALLY needed to try out this new mixed drink called “Troll Sweat,” a concoction of boogers, dolphin saliva, whiskey, whine, and sporebat eyes. Then Zarshal’s Whisper Dare was to, in two rounds, when people are least expecting it, without warning, without context, go to Nate and drop to one knee, and propose MARRIAGE! He would have to tell Nate that Nate must accept, because he is handsomer than any man, woman, cat, dog, giraffe, pizza, tree, moon, or sun! Two rounds later, Nah and Zarshal were confusing pretty much the entire rest of the table, and Zarshal’s claims of how handsome he is was cracking people up! Meanwhile, Maya, who once had to pick someone’s nose and eat it as a Dare (YUCK!), was protesting having to do so a second time! HA! She took the drink bravely though, which actually turned out to be merely a Hinterlands single-malt! Nah had a Truth to tell a recent embarrassing story, which turned out to be a GROSS story, in which she’d accidentally consumed a laxative somehow, and, due to her recent dabbling in learning engineering, she had stepped in a powerful adhesive on the floor and couldn’t move from that spot after the laxative had taken effect. EW! Not that that affected Bob in the slightest, who still has the hots for her! Maya had a Dare to be puppetmaster and narrator of a skit, using her hand as a spider and narrating it walking up Bob’s shoulder and across his head. Bob was gasping and staring at the spider with wide eyes, while Maya loudly proclaimed that the spider was out to bite everyone at the table! Then she jumped the spider off Bob’s head and at other people, which caused some MORE chaos, due to people diving across the table to get out of the way of the spider! HA! Then Bob had a Dare to pretend to be a kobold, which led to Bob proclaiming that no one may touch his candle. I tried to get it, but ended up yoinking his long black ponytail instead, which had him protesting in kobold-style speech to watch the hair, and, by the time his act was done, he was lying in front of the table in front of… who else but Nah? HA! He also said that if I took his candle, he’d kiss me, while puckering up his lips and making kissy faces at me. That sure made me stop! Hehe. I’m all about Celeste! Mags had a Truth for Nah to tell the weirdest thing she saw in Stormwind lately. Nah then told of a band of musicians and a singer that were performing just outside the Lamb. That’s weird, alright! Maya and Cari had a Dare they both ended up rolling ones for, which was cute, as it put the cute couple together! They got Dared by Nah to pretend to be each other for three rounds. Maya kept pretending to push glasses up on her nose and talking like a scholar, while Cari kept cutting herself off in mid-sentence, yelling SQUIRREL! and darting off after imaginary squirrel friends! It was so funny! There were tons more laughs and revealing Truths and hilarious Dares! What a great game night! I love Deathrolls!
And now to finish off the day with more engineering and fishing fun with Celeste, Dordy, and Penny! Penny is talking about heading out at some point, which will leave Celeste and I to enjoy the rest of the Love Festival holiday, which lasts for several more days still, together on our engineering/angling camping trip. That’ll be fun, even though we’ve had a lot of fun with Penny, and helping someone in need made the camping trip even more meaningful! For today, though, anything can happen… I might even end up going back to Stormwind for a bit of it, to help Nah with the investigation aboard the Whitewind’s Grace… We took a loss there, but the rest of the week has really shown the importance of continuing to live life as well as you can, to enjoy it, to embrace every moment of it, because you truly never know which day will be your last, AND because one of the great many reasons to do so is to honor those who have passed! And that’s what we’re going to do today, live life well, in part because we’re a happy couple and we really love each other and love our lives, and in part to honor those in our lives we’ve lost in our pasts. And for many more reasons too! Life is good! I’m gonna go join Celeste and Penny in the enjoyment of it and go FISHING with them! YAY!
Nat wiped a solitary tear from her eye, but was resolved to smile to honor those lost by continuing on living her best life, as they would have wanted her to. She tapped off the excess ink from her quill, replacing it in her cherrywood quill case and then capped her inkwell of purple ink. She put these back in her pack, then went to the cooler to find something to bring as snacks and drinks in addition to her own Pandaren bamboo fishing rod. She selected a few assorted veggies with a tangy, cool white dipping sauce, as well as a few bottles of water and a bag of mildly spicy beef jerky. Snacks, bottles, and rod gathered, she returned to her diary, the ink on the pages now dry, returning that to her pack as well. Feeling better with the fun about to be head in her mind, she hums happily as she heads to the nearby waterfall and fishing hole, finding Celeste, Dordy, and Penny, the first two looking quite large next to the diminutive latter. Two lines attached to bobbers were in the fishing pool, with Celeste walking Penny through some more basics while Dordy sat on the shore, watching the bobbers intently for his next chance to bark his head off at a floppy fish.
The two greeted Nat at her approach, and Nat cast a line with the group after snacks and drinks were shared, Dordy in particular going heavy on the jerky. Penny found the snacks delightful – it was a personal mission of Celeste’s and Nat’s to introduce Penny to truly tasty food, instead of the weird (though highly nutritional) tubes of paste the Mechagnomes consumed. Snacks now shared, Nat cast a line into the water with the rest, and conversation flowed between the three as they fought epic battles with the weird mechanical fish in the water, luring, reeling, wrestling along and having a blast. Nat smiled her way through the rest of the fishing time as she talked and fished, enjoying life to its fullest as she intended to when she came out here. Trouble may come and go, sad times may be had, but life goes on, and there’s nothing quite like filling it with as much happiness as you can while you have it!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Feb 24, 2022 16:35:28 GMT
February the Twenty-Fourth For the first time in a few weeks, Nat sat down to her own writing desk in her own chair in her own house to write her diary post. It had been a wonderful time in Mechagon, but she was also very happy to be sitting in the comforts of her own home.
Nat sat back in her chair, wondering what to write about in her diary post as she listened to Celeste and Dordy outside, playing with Celeste’s oldest wrench that Dordy loves chasing and running around with so much. Nothing had really happened this week. She knew of something that had gone on in the Company, but reports were thin at best. She thought for a moment, then eventually dipped her ravenfeather quill in her inkwell of purple ink and applied it to the blank page in front of her.
Dear diary,
This is almost certain to be a short post, as I have next to nothing to write about.
We came back from Mechagon this week, Celeste and Dordy and I, and it took EONS to get all the stuff we brought back from the junkyard up the rock spire to our house, and EONS more to unpack! But, we’re all done now, and Celeste’s workshop is full to bursting with the things she wants to work on around the house. You can barely even see the ocean and beach scene on some parts of the walls! So she’s been working hard at that, though she’s taking a break with Dordy, who needs some energy run off anyway. They’re outside playing with Celeste’s oldest wrench that Dordy loves so much.
Celeste has lots of projects lined up! She’s been organizing everything we brought in all week, as it’s caused so much clutter in her workshop. She’s been organizing that by project. She’s also designing some blueprints for the tool-hands Penny wants by taking apart the MUTT’s tool-hands to compare. Obviously tiny little Penny won’t be fitting giant buzz-saws in there like the MUTT’s, but she can get little hand-tools installed! At night, she’s had her mother’s old notebooks in a stack by her bedside table, scouring those in the hopes of some sort of vine that would be strong enough to operate a winch and heavy cargo lift pad and grow as long as the rock spire our house is on. She knows I have a couple of druid friends, too. Nah’s sort of a fledgling druid and doesn’t really practice her magic much, preferring a more roguish sort of approach, but Maya’s actually a TEACHER of druids, so she’ll know! Maybe those ironvines she uses sometimes? And then lastly, she’s been drawing plans to finally excavate the bottom level where the cargo elevator’s winch will be installed. She’s thinking of partitioning off that bit of the room from most of the rest of the room, as she still wants to use that floor for an alchemy garden and chicken coop. I love Celeste, she’s so industrious!
Monday was really the only time I had something going on. I went with Cari and her whole Voyagers group to follow up on the huge archaeology find she had a couple weeks before (we’ve been doing these expeditions every other Monday). The cane we found that didn’t have a head, that looked like some sort of huge jewel fit into it, was our next lead. Cari wanted to find the jewel, and had reason to believe it was on another South Seas island called Kajapopolis, an island run by goblins, run by the goblin Trade Prince Fozruk that the other goblins referred to as, “The Foz.” He was using the jewel for his own cane, as it turns out, and had made no secret of the fact! Where he got it was unknown to the other goblins, and HOW he got it was unknown to us. All we knew was, if we wanted to complete the star map we found last time, we needed to get that jewel back!
So, with a much smaller group this time (this week has had a lot of people gone from the Voyagers and the Whitewind Company alike!), we went to Kajapopolis. It was me, Cari, a young mage guy we’ve hung out with sometimes named Jayce that’s also in the Voyagers, and a new Voyager I hadn’t ever met before, this roguish sort of guy named Lashadek, that goes by Lash. We rode the Voyagers’ archaeology ship, the Discovery, to the island and docked there, and wondered how the heck we were going to get the jewel back. We were talking about how the only thing that impresses goblins is wealth, so Jayce did a little illusion on himself to make himself appear impeccably well-dressed and groomed, pretending to be a wealthy noble with a business proposition for The Foz.
I was dressed sort of ragged in a very light shirt and pants, as I had expected to be getting my hands dirty, so I played along, taking on a strong Westfall accent and pretending to be Jayce’s servant, following along behind him everywhere he went carrying the train of his cloak to keep it off the ground. Cari was the chauffeur, and Lash took on the part of bodyguard. All in all, we looked like an entourage a noble might bring with him!
We had our first set-back at the door to the inn where The Foz usually held court from a fancy sort of throne. There was a party going on, and it was invitation-only! That took Jayce aback, and he was claiming to have an invitation, but the bouncer demanded to see it! Cari and I also being mages, we went to work with illusion magic right away to make an invitation. I see these sorts of things from time to time at work in the Darkshire town hall, from the goblins in neighboring Stranglethorn Vale down in Booty Bay, so I added my own touches to give it their sort of flair, and we dutifully handed Jayce his invitation, because of course a noble wouldn’t lug all his own stuff around! The bouncer was satisfied, and we were allowed in!
The Foz was immediately apparent on the far end of the inn, sitting in all his pompous finery and surrounded by goblin bruisers that were repeatedly punting off admirers that got too close. Only problem was, there was no cane in sight!
We split up, attempting to sound out the other partygoers to see what might be up with the staff. Lash stuck with Jayce, as his bodyguard. Jayce himself was talking to a goblin about a business offer for The Foz, trying to gain audience. Cari went outside to secure our escape route once we got the cane. I approached this dwarf flying machine pilot and this drunken gnome girl he was talking to.
I approached, making small talk on the finery of such an event, segueing to chat of The Foz himself, and how splendid he looked, using my most backwoods Westfall accent as I went along. Then I said that I was surprised a guy like The Foz didn’t have a fancy cane to complete the look. The dwarf pilot said he DID actually have a cane, though he often took it upstairs to a room or something up there. I played along, saying it was likely in a safe or a tightly-locked room, as valuable a cane as a guy like The Foz must have. The dwarf, totally unaware of my fishing, bit, hook, line, and sinker! He said it was locked in an upstairs room, and that the Foz has the only key!
After that, the drunken gnome girl looked like she was going to pass out where she stood from all the alcohol she’d consumed, so the dwarf helped her out, leaving me free to go report my findings to the rest of the group. Lash, rogue that he is, wanted to pickpocket the key, but first, we’d need a distraction!
Jayce, meanwhile, had been successful in convincing one of The Foz’s goblins to go tell The Foz that there was a lucrative business offer being made, which got The Foz to grant Jayce an audience! The bruisers parted, letting him through. It was time for my distraction!
At first, I left the room, pulling out my old Hallow’s End horsehead costume from my magically-expanded pack, putting it on and walking in to creep out the guards, hoping that would free up Lash to pick The Foz’s pocket for the key. They were distracted, alright… but one of them grabbed the horse’s muzzle and pulled the costume right off me! I had to snatch it back and leave! Back to the drawing board…
I overdid it BADLY on attempt number two. I used illusion magic to become this like twenty-foot Naga and wandered into the room with THAT costume on. That nearly got me shot! I had to Blink outta the inn immediately before the bruisers could fire!
Attempt three was just me being the Westfall girl that had had too much to drink. I came back in, pretending to have had too much to drink, which would explain the horsehead costume from earlier, and now all that drink was kicking in even worse! I was making as much of an obnoxious nuisance of myself as I could, walking up to the guards and slurring my words as I staggered around telling them how handsome they all were, and that I wished a girl like me had a shot with studs like them. They were SO annoyed! They were trying to get me to leave, but I just stayed and got louder, using really cringe-worthy, cheesy pick-up lines I’ve heard guys use, which made a few laugh, but the rest of them just wanted this plastered girl to scram.
Just then, Lash appeared at my side! My distraction had worked; he’d gotten the key! The guards were distracted with me, and The Foz was deep in business talks with Jayce, and now Lash was trying to get out with the key under the pretense of dragging away this embarrassing servant by the arm. He took me out onto the front porch, just out of sight of the guards, showing me the key. We were halfway there! But I wanted to keep the guards distracted, so I did one last scene!
I pulled up the pants leg on my right leg, slowly extending my bare leg into view through the door, still pretending to flirt drunkenly with the goblins. Then I poked my head through the door, allowing my hair to fall over the right side of my face while I looked at them drunken-steamily through my left eye, and started to sing. “I’ve been a baaaaad, baaaaaaad girl,” I sang, making sure I sounded horrible even while pretending to try to flirt. Lash made a show of grabbing my arm again to drag me from the porch as well, and I latched on to the door frame with the arm he hadn’t grabbed, holding on tight to be able to poke my head in sideways now. I was the rope in a tug-o’-war! Lash was pulling hard, and my grip was slipping, so I started singing louder and more horribly as he tried to drag me away. “BAAAAAAD, BAAAAAAAD GIRL!” I sang loudly, getting worse and worse the harder the pulling became. “BAAAAAAAAAAAAAD, BAAAAAAAAAAD GIIIIIIIIIRRRRRL!” I’m sure all they could hear next, as I was finally dragged away, was my voice screaming from the lawn, fading as I got tugged further away. “BAAAAAAAAD BAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaa…….” Lash and I were both trying really hard not to laugh the whole time, and stay in character!
Once I had made the worst nuisance of myself I possibly could, and the guards were cringing as they looked out for my return, Lash used the opportunity to sort of parkour-climb up to the outside balcony from outside the inn, and sneak inside from the second floor to try and find a room that was locked. Sure enough, according to what he told us after, he’d found a locked door that the key fit, and he’d tossed the room haphazardly, finally finding the cane under the bed, which was just a mattress elevated on a massive pile of gold and emeralds, the latter of which he’d also absconded with, divvying a few up among us. Great guy, that Lash!
While he was doing that, I’d found Cari outside, having appropriated a goblin hot rod herself. Good as Cari is, she’d left a note about where it could be found, down on the docks. That was a risk! But she’s such a good person! I was surprised she’d gone along with filching keys and canes and hotrods to begin with! But, so much of goblin wealth is ill-gotten anyway, I guess. Anyway, I told her we were done, and ready to make our escape. She pulled the hotrod up to the inn’s entrance, and I climbed aboard the trike, sitting on the right wheel well instead of the sidecar, which would definitely be for Jayce, the noble. The loud engine and Celeste’s call through the door that Jayce’s ride was now here got him to wrap up his deal with the trade prince, and he sauntered haughtily from the inn, getting into the sidecar as expected. Lash had stealthed back outside, leaping from the second-floor balcony, as he’d overheard The Foz talking about wanting to retire to his room… which Lash had just ransacked haphazardly! We had to get out of there QUICK!
Sure enough, no sooner than Cari had turned the hotrod around, we could hear the Trade Prince’s screams of rage issuing from the still-open second-floor balcony door. Cari went pedal to the metal and got us back to the Discovery quick, where she hastily gave the orders to raise anchor and set sail immediately! We’d narrowly made it out… and Lash had the cane! Now we can complete the star map! YAY!
And that’s it; that’s been my week. Deathrolls didn’t happen this week, due to people being gone to different places. Same story for the Whitewind Company adventure, though our two new members I wrote about before, the Lightforged Draenei Star and Tisaani, had apparently set off on their own unsanctioned mission, wanting to rescue one of our two remaining abducted members, Cordala, a regular Draenei. I wish we could find a real lead on Aedie, the other missing member, and my teacher for my mage abilities to boot! Anyway, something about the wording of the unsanctioned mission made it seem like my bestie Nah, still a ranking official in the Whitewind Company even with the successful rescue of Lady Whitewind, had had her hands tied with the board of directors not wanting to spend resources rescuing someone that was technically a former member instead of a current one, even if she might rejoin, so Nah wasn’t able to be spotted going, nor authorize the mission. Yet something about it also made it seem like Nah had given the nod in a more under-the-table sort of way, likely granting the funds for the mission from out of her own pockets instead of from Whitewind Company coffers. Good ol’ Nah!
Nah had told me earlier in the week that two teams, ostensibly scouting teams for research and resource acquisition, had been dispatched to either end of Northrend, where Cordala had last been spotted. Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra teams had moved to nearly meet in the middle inland, and a lead from one of the teams placed Cordala somewhere in the Storm Peaks.
Star and Tisaani had followed the lead from the path up into the Storm Peaks from Crystalsong Forest clear to what must have been Ulduar, from their descriptions, and right into the Halls of Stone! Apparently, the Cult of the Darned had been holding Cordala there… and who else led them but one Richard Riggermotor, the brother of the wicked gnomish warlock Rick Riggermotor that had spent a year or two trying to kill Nah when she was still Illidari! I remembered all the times Nah had been in the hospital clinic in Stormwind a couple years ago after every time Rick had ambushed her, before she’d finally finished him off for good in a fight that had nearly killed her. How’s that for motive; vengeance for a slain brother being reason for all the attacks against the Whitewind Company, and the abductions for four of its members! Riggermotor now seemed to lead his own sect of the Cult of the Darned, and, when Star and Tisaani finally located the group in the caverns off one side of the Halls of Stone, they overheard him promising his cultists great power after the “sacrifice” was prepared. Apparently, the sacrifice was CORDALA!
The two Lightforged paladins immediately went to work, finding a pair of sentries at the entrance to the caverns within the Halls of Store. They were arguing with each other. One was wanting to spare the Draenei woman, as her beauty had captivated him, while the other was far more zealous and wanted Cordala to meet the end they had planned for her. He called the smitten man a lech, and got called a drunken lout in return, and the smitten man turned around and walked off, leaving the zealous man to stand guard alone. Tisaani used her sword to tap the walls and make a noise for the man to investigate, wanting to lead him from the cavern entrance, where the noise of a scuffle might echo a bit too much. It worked, from what I understand; the man had approached, thinking that more dwarves from the Explorer’s League had arrived, and he wanted to chase them off. What he did NOT expect was for a Lightforged Draenei, glowing brilliantly in white and gold armor, to suddenly appear as he rounded a corner and deliver a murderously hard punch to his gut, fairly incapacitating him and insuring he’d issue no yell of alarm in one move. Star crashed her fist into the back of the man’s skull, knocking him out cold, and that was that! They dragged the unconscious zealot out of view around the corner, hiding him from view.
The other sentry, the cultist smitten with Cordie, was returning. To apologize? To begrudgingly retake his assigned place as sentry? Star and Tisa weren’t really sure, and they didn’t care. Time to take this one out too!
The debriefing with that one really made me blush. Apparently the Draenei female fan was approached by Tisa, who was basically showing off and approaching him in a seductive sort of strut that made her look like she was interested in the zombie-lover. The cultist immediately bit the bait, allowing Tisa to get in close and slip her left hand around his waist and caress his face with her right, getting the information she wanted from him quite easily. Cordie was indeed in the caverns, awaiting sacrifice by “Master Riggermotor,” and would be sacrificed upon Riggermotor’s removal of Cordie to a new location when he returned. Tisa used her intimate position to caress down and under the man’s jaw, ostensibly still laying it on thick, but really to get a firm grip on his head. Next thing the lech knew, Tisa had stepped forward with her right hoof, kicking HARD in a sweep backward that upended the man, and the grip she had on his jaw allowed her to slam his head into the stone floor. The smitten man never stood a chance! Tisa and Star hid another knocked-out man, and entered the caverns.
The caverns were a loop that ended on an overhead ledge overlooking the cavern entrance, and the two made most of the loop before finding Cordala all chained up next to a locked-up chest, which Tisa had figured must be her armor and weapon. They snuck over to her, eavesdropping on the cultists, who were doing a perfectly fine job of distracting themselves and not paying attention further down the slope of the cavern where Cordie was, allowing Tisa and Star to reach them. Tisa had the thought that breaking the chains holding Cordie would cause enough noise for the cultists to finally spot them, which wouldn’t give them time to go and break the lock on the chest as well, so she went over to the chest, with the idea that Star would break Cordie’s chains and Tisa would break the lock on the chest on the count of three. They did so successfully! The noise alerted the cultists, of course, and Tisa barely had time to ascertain that yes, the chest did contain Cordie’s armor and weapon, though she wouldn’t have time to strap on her armor. Tisa called out to Cordie to catch, tossing Cordie her two-handed greatsword hilt-first, and the three sprang into action!
One of each of the three disciplines of a paladin was now represented. Tisa, the holy paladin, stood behind Cordie and Star, ready to heal as needed. Star, the protection paladin, did her best to shield the other two, and Cordie began laying about left, right, and center with her sword. Star did a nearly perfect job of protecting the other two, though the cultists noticed their was a healer among their foes’ ranks, and called out to focus on her. Tisa nearly went down when all five cultists’ shadowbolts, with one chaos bolt, struck her all at once, but a timely Lay on Hands prayer restored her to full fitness! She was able to keep the group on their feet despite being outnumbered, praying hasty prayers to heal blows struck by the casters, and, one by one, they fell, until two remained. The remaining man told the remaining woman to flee, and get word to Riggermotor, then did something truly awful… he raised the bodies of his fallen comrades as GHOULS!
Outnumbered once again, the fight resumed. Tisaani tried to call out to the fleeing woman’s conscience with a Repentance ritual, a move typically used to hold a foe still, and it nearly worked. The woman was able to clear her head, however, and get free. They’d lost her! Riggermotor surely knows what happened by now! I hope something far worse than abductions doesn’t happen as a result now!
Meanwhile, the others were focusing the remaining cultist, not wanting to knock over the ghouls only to have them raised again. It worked; the man was overwhelmed, and the ghouls were soon dispatched with ease. The Light and the Draenei had prevailed! They got Cordala out of there after that, taking her to nearby Dalaran for healing and rest from her ordeal, and the night was won!
Beyond the debrief, I haven’t really heard much more of a lead on Riggermotor, the escaped orc warrior, or Aedie. Hopefully interrogations of our prisoners aboard the Whitewind’s Grace (Lucina the Kaldorei rogue that had been blackmailed to attack the Whitewind’s Grace with Telrissa, the Illidari that had been blackmailed to do the same, and Elumin, the Quel’dorei monk who seems so indifferent to her plight in a cell aboard our ship) can turn up something useful!
And yeah, that’s been it for this week. Not much else has gone on besides transportation and unpacking of engineering goods from Mechagon Island, getting Penny used to living the good life on the farm in Halfhill, and the archaeology adventure. But it’s been an awesome week besides! Definitely good to take a break once in a while! Speaking of breaks, I’m gonna go outside and join Celeste and Dordy in their game, before her break ends and she wants to return to work in her workshop. I’m sure Dordy and I will have a pleasant time helping her in there, too! It’s going to be a super pleasant rest of the day! YAY!
Nat smiled, tapping off the excess ink from her ravenfeather quill and replacing it in its cherrywood quill case. She capped off her inkwell of purple ink, replacing it and the quill case in their drawer by her lower right leg in her desk. She sat back to take the time to finish off her coffee and let the ink dry on her pages, then closed her diary, replacing it on the bookshelf where it goes and taking her empty mug to the kitchen for washing. She headed outside next, joyful cheers from Celeste and yip-yips from Dordy welcoming her into the game. The two women laughed and cheered Dordy on as he “fetched” the old wrench, only to sprint off and play keep-away with it each time. The game lasted well into the early afternoon, and then the three retired to Celeste’s workshop, happily worn out. Dordy snoozed throughout, his company welcome and pleasant as Celeste and Nat worked on the various project Celeste had outlined and Nat had written about. The happily little family worked throughout the day, living the day like they lived their lives: to the fullest!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Mar 3, 2022 14:54:09 GMT
March the Third A unique workshop occupied the sublevel of the house on the spire, the only one quite like it anywhere in the world. How many engineering workshops sat in a sublevel that was still hundreds of feet up in the air? How many were surrounded by a saltwater bay on one side, and the open ocean on the other? How many were painted in three hundred and sixty degrees in an underwater scene that depicted the edge of a beach on the north wall, slowly descending into open ocean on the south wall, complete with two fisherwomen in a boat dropping a line into the ocean, a molten corgi between them with his paws on the wall, looking down into the water? How many had a fish tank with the oddest, most weirdly shiny fish in it? How many were currently being used by an engineer working on a pair of prosthetic hands, seated next to a writer with a diary, with a real molten corgi snoozing between them on the floor, and a gnome with four mechanical limbs seated on the engineer’s other side? Combine all the above, and you get the oddest, yet most homely engineering workshop around!
Nat sat a few feet to Celeste’s right, the former with coffee, diary, ravenfeather quill, and inkwell of purple ink before her, the latter with coffee, tiny precision tools, an oddly (for her) uncluttered work area, tiny parts for the prosthetics separated and labeled in various compartments of a tool tray, and a bright lamp strapped onto her forehead, with a soldering mask above that that she sometimes lowered to her face. Dordy lay curled up between the two in a ball, snoozing the time away until their next playtime or adventure or meal. Celeste and Penny were excitedly poring over Celeste’s blueprints for Penny’s new tool-hands, which would make her mundane prosthetic hands, already improved in strength by Celeste’s initial work at Junkwatt Depot on Mechagon Island, soon contain hand tools of a very wide variety, to be extended and retracted at need!
Nat was only just getting started on her own weekly project, now dipping in her ravenfeather quill into her inkwell for some purple ink, tapping off the excess, and beginning to write with a smile.
Dear diary,
It’s been a pretty cool week!
Right now I’m hanging out with Celeste and Penny in Celeste’s workshop. She and Penny are working on crafting Penny’s prosthetic tool-hands, so I’m just taking the opportunity to write in my diary in the meantime. Plus I’m here for opinions! Which they doesn’t really need me for; they’re already great at engineering anyway, but they like to get thoughts on aesthetics, so here I am!
The workshop has a new addition this week, too! A fish tank with mega-shiny fish in it, which Penny really loves as much as we do! It’s a bit of a story… Celeste and I went fishing to kick the minication off this week. She wanted to show me her trolling rig on the Wave Dancer. We loaded up supplies and food for a day of fishing, and headed out to the middle of Turtle Bay, where she brought the engines down low and cast four lines into the water from four fishing rods, each set to drag the bait along behind us in the water as we slowly motor along. That way, the Wave Dancer does all the dangling of the bait for us, and we just sit and wait for something to get a bite! Celeste explained to me that she set different bait at different depths, with bigger bait for the bigger fish that tended to be much lower down from the surface. Celeste wanted to see which depths were getting the most bites, and then she’d rig all four lines to that depth. So, we motored about in a broad circle around the bay, enjoying the sunshine and the scenery and the water!
It didn’t take a super long time to get a bite! One of the rods suddenly bent double, and I jumped onto it as quickly as I could. It was the shallowest one, so it wasn’t too strong for me! I fought and fought, reeled and yanked and lowered and reeled again, fighting the fish for all it was worth, and I was about halfway done with the fish when ANOTHER rod got a bite! Then a third, and a fourth! All four rods had bites at once, and there were only two of us aboard to get them! Celeste jumped away from the pilot console to help me, yanking on all three lines quickly to set the hook, then picking up one of the deeper rods, as she’s a lot stronger than I am. I got mine aboard after that, then started on the next-deepest one. Celeste had the third going for quite an epic fight, with the big fish coming up near enough to the surface to see the sun flashing off of it, when suddenly, the line SNAPPED! The fish got away! We’ll have to use some of Celeste’s elementium fishing line for those deeper ones, I guess! Celeste and I got our second rods going, fighting hard, and I was fighting mine while leading it away from Celeste’s so our lines didn’t tangle, and she was doing the same thing. She’s taught me so much, I knew to do so without even being told! Proud moment! Heh. I eventually got the thing aboard, adding it to the cooler with the first one. Celeste got hers aboard, and it turned out to be a REALLY big emperor salmon! It was so cool!
All the time we were fishing, though, Dordy was barking behind us, going even more nuts than he usually does when we’re fighting fish, and he was bouncing around on the bulletproof glass bottom of the boat, looking down through it. When we were finally done fighting our fish, we went back to go see what Dordy was barking at. Dordy sat down after we came to look, wagging his tail and looking all proud of himself for alerting us to what we saw next: an immense school of the most oddly brilliant, shiny silver fish ever!
The concerning thing, though, was that these fish were fish neither Celeste nor I had ever seen anywhere near here before. How did a brand-new species of fish suddenly just appear in this particular ecosystem? Worse, these fish had driven so many other fish up closer to the surface, scaring them all off and throwing them off their normal behavioral habits, which could cause long-term harm to the delicate little ecosystem down there. We knew right away we had to identify the fish and see if we could find a way to get them outta there and relocated to wherever their natural habitat was!
Celeste took off her pareo and fishing hat and grabbed her fishnet gun, wanting to go dive and take a look and maybe bring a few of the weird shiny fish up to the boat. She wanted me, meanwhile, to fill up another cooler full of seawater for them. I filled one up, then gave her another underwater breathing spell so she could take a prolonged dive, and she jumped overboard while Dordy and I took care of things topside. I watched through the bottom of the boat as she dived toward the gigantic school of shiny weird fish, keeping an eye on things. All the smaller fish were keeping to the surface, the larger predator fish were up there with them now, avoiding the shiny school of fish, and the shiny school pretty much did whatever they wanted, darting this way and that as though they were one enormous whale-sized fish.
Just then, off to one side, I saw a huge SHARK in the water! It was going at an angle more toward the larger fish near the surface than it was to Celeste, though I still didn’t want it near her. I considered sending in Mek-barash, my wrathguard, into the water, but then I remembered Celeste’s invention for the pearl diving adventure we had a few weeks ago, the sonic shark repeller! I went to the pilot console, switching it on, hoping it didn’t affect ALL the fish. Sure enough, the shark looked like it hit a wall as it got too close, and it turned and swam off so far, so fast, it disappeared entirely! Celeste’s a genius!
Meanwhile, Celeste had reached the school of fish. She got her fishnet-loaded harpoon gun raised, fired it into the school, and snagged several of the fish! She made her way quickly back to the surface, and I helped her aboard after taking the full fishnet and gun for her. We got the fish into the cooler quickly, and Celeste reached in and deftly plucked one out. Now we could see why they were so shiny… Somehow, some way, a school of MECHANICAL ROBOT FISH had gotten into Turtle Bay! It was like they followed us from Mechagon or something!
We talked about how to get rid of them, and I was thinking of reversing the Perimeter Intrusion Electromagnet that Celeste designed for our campground in Mechagon to attract instead of repulse. If we could get it powerful enough, we can troll Turtle Bay with it and find the school of robot fish again, switch it on, and ZAP, they’re all collected! Then we could open a portal to Boralus, fly the MUTT or the Flying Nosebleed through it with the P.I.E. on a winch with all the fish on it, then fly them back to Mechagon, dip it into one of the places they swim at there, and turn off the P.I.E., releasing them back to the wild! We may yet come up with another idea on how to handle that, as well. We’ll see what happens! Hopefully these things don’t damage the ecosystem down there before then!
Nat looked up from her writing, as Penny and Celeste were talking about a way to hide the many holes the prosthetic hands would have to house all the different retractable tools. Nat pondered the problem, then offered her own advice, describing how the Dwarves of Ironforge could build a wall that seemed like one solid, natural stone, simply by making very precise measurements in the stones they cut for the task. The corners and edges of the stones would then measure up so precisely, there wasn’t even a gap! The two stones would appear as one! Doing an entire wall the same way, it would look more like a wall was hewn from a mountain rather than being stacked and mortared rocks! Penny seems delighted at the idea, wanting to measure the butt end of each tool’s handle to make the holes for the tool hands, paint them all the same, and have them each look like they weren’t even there until retracted. Nat smiled a bit, proud of herself for having helped with Penny’s hands, even though ninety-nine percent or so had been ideas conceived, designed, and implemented by Celeste and Penny. The two thanked her, excited by the idea, and went back to work, as did she.
Then Tuesday was DEATHROLLS! It was the first game in two weeks, as most everyone had been gone last week. It was me, Sparkles, Mairy, Bob, and Zarshal, and we played in the Lakeshire inn in the Redridge Mountains! It turned out to be a much shorter game than usual, as Sparkles and Z-Man had to leave early, though it had its hilarious moments anyway! Bob and Mairy and I hung out and ended up just sort of talking for another hour or more after that, until we got sleepy and headed to bed. But the game itself was really fun! Zarshal had a Dare in which Bob and Mairy, both having rolled ones between the two different kinds of rolls one round, had to go outside into Lakeshire and bring back the first thing they see as “their favorite thing,” and wear it for a full round. So, Mairy, bold as ever, spots a guy outside, starts yelling at him to come along with her, and actually drags the poor confused guy inside the inn, yanking him onto her lap for the next round! The guy kept trying to make excuses as to why he had to leave, but that brash Wildhammer Dwarf wasn’t having it! HA! He took off SO fast after that round was done! Then Bob followed suit, only, without his crush Nah present, he decided to grab ME instead! GOSH! So I had to go in with Bob, and he sat right on the table, right in front of me, staring into my eyes for an entire round! It was so funny! Then, two different rounds, Sparkles and Mairy were in on the same Dare, and both times, they got Dared to hold me down and tickle me for as long as they wanted! GOSH AGAIN! Mairy went around behind my chair and basically bearhugged me from behind, holding me to the chair, and Sparkles set her mechanical hands to work, and boy, did that TICKLE! I was trashing around so wildly, laughing in like screeching laughs, kicking like mad under the table, and I couldn’t get free! I was SO out of breath by the time it finally stopped, both times! Zarshal got Dared to spend three rounds using his head as my hat, so I had to sit there with Z’s worgen jaw resting on top of my head. That was itchy! Sparkles and Mairy had yet another Dare together, in which they had to do a skit where they were arguing over who gets to date First Mate Nate, who they still both really have the hots for. It went from bad to awful really, really fast, and the things they were saying to each other about who gets to take him home with them got far too blushworthy for me to repeat here. It was SO bad! HA! There was another Dare in which Bob had to dance on the table, and, before we knew it, Sparkles and Mairy were dancing on the table with him! It may have been a short game, but it was a BLAST!
Last night was the weekly Whitewind Company adventure! It was all Lightforged Draenei last week, but this week, I was able to go! My bestie Nah had gotten a lead on our missing friend, Archmage Aedalia Songbird, the last of the abducted Whitewind Company officers still left to be recovered. Nah had had it from a Vulpera (non-horde sympathetic after all Sylvanas did) she knows that the orc we’d captured a few times was still trying to get his mission done, and was last seen with another body bag with lots of locks and magical runes on it in Gadgetzan in Tanaris, where he was offloading it and was going to take it to who-knows-where. We knew right away, now that the bodybag was spotted on the horde’s home continent, that we had to go and get it back with all haste!
So, we met up in Gadgetzan at the dock on the Whitewind’s Grace, which is now fully manned and crewed again, loaded up with supplies for the mission and prepared for all contingencies. It had set sail earlier in the week to make the trip, with First Mate Nate’s tidesage magic speeding it along as he timed its arrival to be just before our own so we could meet up on it after our own portals and flights. When I got there, it was my bestie Nah and I, and we hung out until Mairy got there, followed by this REALLY creepy void elf woman that had come in Sparkles’ stead, identifying herself only as “Misery.” SO creepy! Zarshal got there right in the nick of time, just as Nah was about to brief us on the mission.
Nah filled us in on her intel she’d gotten from the Vulpera when we arrived on the ship, stating that we were there to locate and snatch the bodybag, and we disembarked and went into Gadgetzan proper after that. Misery bribed the goblin guard at the gate to let us in, paying him five gold, which is usually the sort of thing Lady Whitewind reimburses people for, it being a Whitewind Company mission expense. Once we got into town, we looked around, and Nah suggested we split up and search. I went left, finding a weird sandstone dome building with weird writing over the arch, so I went into that one, which turned out to be a goblin bank. Mairy came with me instead of searching a building of her own, seeming to think I’d need help in a fight. I really would need help in a fight, but I can summon quite a bit of that! But on she came, which was fine with me anyway. I like having friends around!
In the bank, there was this really, REALLY fancily-dressed goblin woman arguing with one of the bankers. When they were done arguing, she turned and saw us, and started trying to… what else? Sell us stuff! Typical goblin! We were eventually able to get information on an orc that had come in with a very large, long black leather bag, big enough to put a human or a small elf inside of. The orc that had brought it in had already left town, so he was long gone and it didn’t look like we could recapture him this time around. We went back outside, and it turns out that the others had heard much the same thing, with the additional tidbit that the orc had left to scout out and secure a lane for his next caravan to get the bodybag wherever he was wanting to get it, and would be back afterward. We knew then that we had a limited time to find the bodybag and get it out of town!
After that we went back to where Misery had been interrogating a couple of goblins in the orc’s employ that she’d found, a rogue and a sapper. They were really creeped out by her sinister grin and her hints at “playing” with them, and they gave up the bag’s location next – an underground building across town, the one that was right next to the bank I had just been in with Mairy! We got over there, and there were three goblins guarding it. Nah identified the three as “goon leader, electro-goon, and goonette.” The electro-goon had some sort of shock baton in his hand, the goonette looked like a hair stylist or something and was armed with a barber’s razor and a pair of scissors, and the goon leader didn’t seem to be armed as far as I could see. I was working on a negotiation with the leader to let us pass, speaking the goblins’ primary language: Gold. But, Mairy butted in, having been spoiling for a fight all night long, and demanded passage before I could finish securing our entry with a bribe. When the goblin wasn’t having it, Mairy, when I was about to get us in quietly with a bribe, with us trying to avoid a scene and sneak in and out with the bodybag without another Whitewind Company incursion being known, walked right up to the goon leader and HEADBUTTED him!
That set off a fight, of course, and she may as well have put up a big, bright neon sign that said THE WHITEWIND COMPANY IS HERE! to anyone within earshot of all the racket they were making. Disgusted, yet confident in my friends’ ability to handle a (completely avoidable) fight, especially as they outnumbered the goons even without me, I simply snuck past the din and made my way downstairs. I could hear what was going on upstairs. The electro-goon had gotten a few shocks in with his shock stick, and someone got jabbed with a pair of scissors, and once, Nah’s flintlock pistol even went off!
Shaking my head, I searched the underground storage facility, not really liking how a fight had been started right when I was already about to get the goblin to let us in of his own accord already. Questionable wisdom, that. I looked around, double- and triple-checking different places around the storage facility as the fight went on outside, eventually finding what I was looking for: a bodybag, covered in LOTS of chains, padlocks, and magical runes! It was elf woman-sized, too! The only problem was, it was buried below a hodgepodge of crates and barrels and stuff! I was hoping quite a lot that the stasis spell was still active, and that the person inside (hopefully Aedie!) wasn’t hurt badly by having all this stuff stacked on top of them. I knew I couldn’t move it with my own strength, so I summoned Mek-barash in to help me. The wrathguard soon had everything off of the bodybag and threw it over his shoulder. I came out right on time to witness the usual sort of silly aftermath of a Whitewind Company battle: a hole the size and shape of a goblin was gouged quite deeply into the sandstone wall of the bank next door, one goblin was howling in pain in the distance on the outside of the Gadgetzan town walls, evidently having been punted out by Mairy, one was unconscious on the ground, and one was sprinting off across town, fleeing the fight in terror. It may not have been smartly done, but it was done nonetheless! The Whitewind Company had prevailed again!
I went back to the Whitewind’s Grace with my bestie and Mairy to get the bodybag into Captain Tiala’s safekeeping. We hung out and did the debriefing with the mission for a short while, and then everyone went home to bed. It had been a tiring night!
It’s been a week of fun and success! I just hope that, whenever all the locks and the magical runes get worked out, the person inside the bodybag turns out to be Aedie after all! We’ll see, in time! In the meantime, I’m getting back to my family and our guest. Celeste is currently detailing the finer points of her blueprints she drew up for a “skeleton pinky” for Penny, a skeleton key embedded in her right pinky that will unlock any lock. Cool stuff! I’m gonna go see what I can do to help next, even if it’s just to make us all lunch! It’s turning out to be such a great day already, just like this week has! YAY!
Nat smiled at her happy thought, tapping off the excess ink from her ravenfeather quill and replacing it in her cherrywood quill case. She capped off her inkwell of purple ink next, then sat and watched Celeste and Penny work out the details of her skeleton pinky for a while as she finished off her coffee. She closed her diary after her coffee was gone, the ink on the pages now dry, and she took her diary, quill case, and inkwell upstairs along with empty coffee mugs to refill. The diary resumed its usual place on Nat’s office bookshelf, and the quill case and inkwell went back into her large desk drawer on the right side of the desk. She refilled the coffee mugs, heading back downstairs with three full mugs of steaming coffee to rejoin the fun, where Celeste and Penny had decided on the last digit of Penny’s right pinky finger being on a hinge, so that it could fold back and uncap the skeleton pinky, rather than the skeleton key itself having extra mechanisms to extend and retract the key. That decided, they moved on to other aspects of the tool-hands, and the day went by quickly, the little family and the new family friend having a great time with their engineering fun!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Mar 10, 2022 15:55:26 GMT
March the Tenth For the second week in a row, the workbench in the basement workshop-aircraft hangar features also a diary, an inkwell of purple ink, and a cherrywood quill case containing a ravenfeather quill. This week, however, also featured twice the usual number of people. Penelope Boltbucket, the mechagnome who had been here last week as well, and a dwarf, who hadn’t been here in a few months, were also downstairs with Celeste and Nat. Rugnar was the dwarf’s name, and he was practically family to Celeste, who called him “Uncle Rugnar.” Underfoot as always was Dordy the molten corgi.
Nat sat at the workbench next to Rugnar, who was in between her and Celeste, with Penny seated on a stool elevated on a small crate to Celeste’s left. Dordy was under the workbench, curled up into a ball and dozing lightly while he waited for something fun to happen. Celeste was huddled around schematics for an internal combustion engine for a flying machine engine, with Rugnar and Penny offering insights. It was confusing work, as human, dwarven, and mechagnomish engineering had such varying styles. While they worked to combine the best aspects of their differences in construction styles, Nat took a break to make a diary entry, as the technical talk was getting beyond her novice skills.
The engine in question had already been built and brought over by Rugnar, hauled into the hangar in his cargo hold. Enhancements were being talked about, and that’s where the schematics came in, as the three engineers pointed at different parts and made their suggestions. The engine was currently suspended from the ceiling on chains from a winch operated by the Mobile Utility Transport Tool, the M.U.T.T.’s arms locked into position raised and outstretched as it held the engine in place. The engine was also suspended low enough for Penny to work on, which was just fine for Rugnar the dwarf, as well as the considerably taller human Celeste, who was young enough that such stooping wouldn’t bother her a bit.
The current debate was the positioning of the clutch in the gearbox, in relationship to its distance from the flywheel. Nat saw merit in all three of the other engineers of various races, so she went ahead with her writing break, withdrawing her ravenfeather quill from the cherrywood quill case, uncapping her inkwell of purple ink, and dipping the quill tip for some ink, tapping off the excess before applying the tip to the next blank page in her diary.
Dear diary,
What a safe week it’s been! I totally forgot about Cari’s every-other-Monday archaeology adventure, which made me really sad when I realized it, because I’d been fascinated the whole way! What a BUMMER! And also there wasn’t a Whitewind Company adventure last night either, because Nah was called away on business from the nobles at the last moment, so I had to settle for retelling the tale of the rescue of Rio’s uncle from the Syndicate instead! Mairy, that horrifying “Misery” woman, Bob, and Zarshal were there for that story. From what I hear, I missed a GOOD one with Cari’s excursion! They went to an undersea city that sank a long time ago in Vashj’ir, taking a gnomish submarine into the ruins of a temple or something. Apparently they made their entry by accidentally smashing the sub through the glass dome roof! Then they exited, protected magically by water pressure and water breathing spells, and found some really cool stuff! Lots of very old spell tomes, and some sort of mysterious orb that pulls lots and lots of mana to itself when activated. It really made things wonky when it was teleported aboard the sub! I can’t wait to hear what it actually is, and what it’s for!
This week, though, Penny and Celeste’s uncle Rugnar have been here! Rugnar has stayed in the guest room, while Penny has been sleeping nearby at Halfhill at the shack there, which she seems to have made quite homey! Penny’s tool-hands are also done! But the current project, before we actually trade out her basic prosthetic skeleton hands for the tool-hands, is getting her a mode of transportation! Rugnar had a gift for her he surprised us all with: an internal combustion engine for a flying machine! He’s made us his usual biscuits with sausage gravy, something that the nutrition-paste-in-a-tube-eating mechagnome Penny has never had. She nearly exploded with how good it was! Hehe. And now they’re all working on schematics for the engine he brought over, suggesting new ideas to make additions to it and whatnot. This thing is going to ZOOM! …Or blow up… Hopefully just the former!
Monday I got to hang out with Nah in Stormwind for a while, and we ran into Mags and Zarshal! Z didn’t stay long; he was just passing through, but Mags told me of an adventure she went on to Kalimdor she’d just gotten back from! Apparently her group was adventuring in the Barrens, and she wanted to see giraffes (which she calls “Thyzzes” because of her plushie giraffe she named Thyzz), though she didn’t get to see any. She also said it was super hot and dry there and the beds were hard and made of dry grass, and she said that you “poke through the beds when you try to jump on them.” HA! She’s so adorable! But she also had a bad time with some thieves that had stolen stuff from their group and had gotten away, so that was no good! But, she’s happy about an upcoming market setting up over there, where she’ll get to sell her Lakeshire Soap Company products, so that’ll be good! I gotta make sure I make it there myself!
After she had to go, Nah had Whitewind Company business in Booty Bay. I got to go with her! She was going to meet that goblin in the dress from last week in Gadgetzan, which was sure to be embarrassing, but when we got there, we couldn’t find her anyway! Instead, as it turns out, she’d sent a Vulpera contact to meet us, a really foul-mouthed little guy who wasn’t very nice to us. But, he told us of the next contract the goblin lady wanted to hire us for, some kind of protection escort for stuff she wants to ship from Ratchet to Booty Bay. She says after the ruckus from last week’s adventure in Gadgetzan, the orc and his warlock master are not very happy with Gadgetzan goblins, and she’s worried her shipments might get pirated or something, so she’s discreetly sending it up the coast to Ratchet to ship from there. Hopefully we don’t meet a huge amount of resistance between Ratchet and Booty Bay! But I’m sure our Company and our outside contractors are more than up to the task, too!
Nat paused in her writing for a moment, thinking of all the vast space between Ratchet and Booty Bay. The Great Sea, spanning the breadth of Azeroth between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and was fraught with perils ranging from pirates to kraken to the Maelstrom itself, though the Maelstrom was easily enough avoidable. The good news was that the boat from Ratchet went directly to Booty Bay, so the sea was the only danger to brave. Nat wrinkled her nose, a face unnoticed by the three excited engineers still talking shop just to her left as pointing at various bits of the schematics for the flying machine's engine. She wished the Whitewind Company had some way of getting more intel on who might know about this trip, who they might tell, and what sort of ambush, if any, they might face. She sighed softly, knowing there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it overmuch right now, and went back to her writing, bringing her mind back to happy thoughts again. Smiling, she remembered Tuesday. She dipped her ravenfeather quill for more purple ink, tapped off the excess, and went back to scratching the tip along the pages.
Tuesday was fun too! DEATHROLLS! It was me, Maya, Cari, Bob, and Elinore! We played at the Brawlpub under the Deeprun Tram for the first time in a long time! Nah, Mags, and Zarshal weren’t available this time, but we still had a lot of fun and laughs! Cari suggested very early on that we all take shots on rolls of two, and the way we tend to roll a full round around the table of twos somehow, that’s never a good idea! Heh. Elinore just wanted to watch us play and hang out with us, instead of play, and the Tol Barad coconut rum Maya bought a full tray of shots of for us, she just sipped lightly at. As a result, she got to see all her friends plastered from a slightly buzzed perspective. How embarrassing for us! HA! Anyway, the game was loads of fun! There were some REALLY embarrassing Truths about Maya and Cari’s relationship at home, with Maya gleefully, shamelessly revealing quite a bit involving ropes and things, and Cari looking like she wanted to sink through the floor. Oh gosh! HA! There were like four of five of those! There were more Truths in abundance, covering topics ranging from wearing socks in the shower to farts to more Then there was one where Cari wanted me, after I’d already had a good few shots, to put a shot glass on Maya’s head and try to knock it off with a water balloon! Turns out a goblin working at the Brawlpub had water balloons on hand as a quick means of cleaning messes in the brawl pit, so I was able to get one, fill it up, and toss it. Mine arced nicely through the air, and I thought it was aimed well for the shot glass… but then it arced a bit too much, and came directly down instead of straight, and exploded all down Maya’s front! Missed the shot glass entirely! Oops! Maya didn’t seem to care too much; she just reached up to her head for the free shot! HA! Then there was a Dare in which I had to put a shot glass on MY head, and let Maya take the shot with no hands from off of my head. Maya decided to ham it up, and really exaggerate her drunken swaying to scare me, but I knew she would be able to do it. She’s a strong drinker! Cari got Dared to do a handstand and take a shot, which she did using the wall for support. I decided to make it hard again by going over to tickle her. That made it messy! Hehe. Elinore had to come late, so I had a Dare for Maya, when Eli got there, to jump up and sprint over and hug Eli, then turn around and DEMAND the rest of us go hug her too, or face their doom in the brawl pit with her! Elinore was SO surprised! There was another Dare from Bob in which I had to take off running all around the Brawlpub yelling out that the horde were coming! Drunken me is an even worse runner than sober me, and I fell down a lot, and also I forgot what I was supposed to yell by the time I got to the far side of the brawl pit, so by the time I got back, I had on my silly horse costume, and I was yelling that the horse was coming! Everyone was laughing so hard at me! How embarrassing! Bob had another one where he was supposed to take the now-empty rum bottle and get his tongue stuck on it, then wiggle it around like he had a huge tongue. It was weird! He even got stuck for real! He couldn’t get the bottle off of his tongue until he got the idea to use his tongue to whack the bottle on the table for a while. It was so funny! There were lots more funny Truths or Dares, too! I love Deathrolls!
Before Deathrolls, though, I was sitting in the Recluse with a book I checked out of the Stormwind Library up near the keep. It’s on elven armor! I was trying to find a recorded instance of a blue suit of plate armor being made with intricate truesilver trimmings and designs on it, but I couldn’t find it in the book I had. I was trying to find information on that gauntlet I found when Celeste took me pearl diving off the west coast of Stranglethorn Vale. But no joy! I asked Cari about it, since she knows elven history and stuff from her interest in it and her archaeology thing she currently has going on, but she didn’t know this specific set either. I think I might start a whole campaign to go and find the rest of the set through research and adventures, starting with maybe another dive near that ship where I found it at. Maybe there’ll be another clue there! I gotta wait until things die down with the current Whitewind Company issues, though. Rick Riggermotor and his orcish thug and all their cult and whatnot need to be dealt with before we’re freed up for this campaign. Current campaign first!
In the meantime, I’ve got a few ideas of my own to present for this internal combustion engine Celeste, Rugnar, and Penny are working on, so I’m gonna get back to it! It may have been a week bereft of adventure, but it’s been a safe and relaxing one, including this new flying machine for Penny, so she doesn’t have to take Celeste’s Flying Nosebleed around everywhere! Monday, maybe the tool-hand attachment? We’ll see! For now, transportation takes priority! This is going to be so much fun, helping build a flying machine for the first time ever! I can’t wait until we really dive in! I love engineering work with family and friends! YAY!
Nat finished with an excited smile, tapping the excess ink off into her inkwell of purple ink and replacing her ravenfeather quill into her cherrywood quill case. She capped off her inkwell next, placing it and the quill case off to the far right corner of the workbench, getting it out of the way. The diary followed, sitting open for now until the ink on the pages dried. She moved to stand behind Celeste, wrapping her arms around Celeste’s midsection and resting her head on Celeste’s shoulder. Celeste didn’t react much, but everyone present knew her well enough to know that this wasn’t from coldness. Celeste just gets that focused when she works, and it was one of the myriad traits of Celeste’s that Nat adored, so Nat didn’t mind a bit. Between the four of them (five, if one counts Dordy waking up and bringing random tools to play with the group and giving them new ideas in the process!), they had the schematics for the flying machine’s engine overhauled with a rather eccentric approach to how it was assembled, and a few boosts to this and that. Penny’s new flying machine was going to be so great! Nat was thrilled to get to be a part of its design, too; it was just one more thing that made life with her family and friends so sweet!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Mar 17, 2022 13:47:50 GMT
Sunshine poured through the open window of the office on the northeast corner of the two-story house on the spire. The warmth helped chase away the relative chill of the early spring morning as it crested the horizon and sent its rays to dazzle the jungles of the Krasarang Wilds (what bit of the rain forest canopy it could penetrate) and light up the beaches. Turtle Bay caught the sunlight as the sun began to peek into it, and all below was bathed in yellow-orange light as all above lightened to blue. Pre-dawn mists began to burn away, revealing more and more of Turtle Bay, Turtle Beach, Angler’s Wharf, and the Krasarang jungles. Soon enough, the water reflected blue skies instead of cresting sunlight, the beach, bay, and village below were revealed in through the mists, the jungles ceased to appear on fire from the brilliant display of light to turn green once again, and the sun rose.
The effect it had on that corner office with the curtain opened on its sliding glass patio door was to dazzle the occupant inside. The young woman watched the entire display, mesmerized, never quite tiring of it even after having lived in her new house for several months now. Her wick of her desk lamp had been snuffed out in anticipation of the show, and now her face was as lit up as the land and sea around her had been moments before. With a happy sigh, Natasha Ebonlocke turned to her diary, opening it up to the next blank page. With her ravenfeather quill already freed from its cherrywood quill case and her inkwell of purple ink already opened and waiting, Nat dipped the tip of the quill into the inkwell, tapped off the excess, and began to write.
Dear diary,
It’s been quite a week this week! Monday morning, I woke up to the sound of the Flying Nosebleed’s engine starting up, then a loud ZAP, then a loud BANG, and then Dordy barking like crazy! The flying machine’s engine was just idling after that. I was so startled I jumped out of bed in my sleepwear and went downstairs as fast as I could to see what happened! It looked like a metal drum with lots of copper wiring spooled around it. There was a box with more wires on top that were connected to the inside of the MUTT’s torso. More wires lead from the Flying Nosebleed to the drum. Everything was covered in a thin layer of soot centered around the drum. There was a scorch mark around the connection point in the MUTT and smoke streaming out of its chest! That wasn’t good! Worse, Celeste, dressed in her work overalls, looked dazed, and her short hair was standing up on end! Dordy, clearly unharmed, kept barking up at her. She started speaking nonsense about snowing butterflies or something, and then she fell over! It was so scary! I helped her get to her feet and got her upstairs and into bed. She said she wouldn’t need a healer and that she just needed to lie down for a moment. Then she got all worried about the MUTT, wanting me to go pop open the front panel and see what it looks like and then come back and tell her, so I went downstairs to take a look, wanting to hurry back up to keep an eye on Celeste. I was totally NOT expecting what happened next!
The panel on the MUTT opened easily, more so than one would have thought after the kind of electrical short that must've zapped Celeste. Inside the panel is a simple metal plate with a large purple button on it. The words PRESS ME were written in bright red on top of it, and there were doodles of a moon and stars all around it. Celeste also wrote "You electrify my life!" underneath the button! Pressing the button made the large drum rattle for a moment, which worried me, as I thought another shock was coming, but then, the top popped off, and the ROPHE, now with a thruster instead of legs - it FLIES now!- came out of the drum! It was like, "ROPHE online." It droned out in a robotic voice, pronouncing its name as “ROPE.” And then it was like, "Greetings. Mistress. Ebonlocke. This. Unit. Is. Ready. To. Serve." It seemed quite helpful!
So the entire thing was a SHAM! Celeste and her clever surprises! HA! The purple button, my favorite color, Celeste’s doodles that I love so much, the fact that the moon and stars she doodled on are actually her affectionate nickname (my Moon and Stars) for me, the surprise addition to my Winter Veil gift, the Remote Operated Personal HElper that I use so much to help me cleaning and stuff around the house, and the surprise centered around engineering, with a clever way to get me to come down and then go and accidentally trigger my surprise, it was all so CELESTE! I love her SO MUCH! She sure tricked me good though! HA!
I went back upstairs to thank her for my surprise, and she was already changed out of her work overalls and her hair already brushed again. The trickster! Hehe. After that, we had a pleasant rest of the day without getting any work done at all, save for a happy moment after lunch with Penny in which we finally got her tool-hands, now complete with all the finishing touches and all the paint done just right, attached! YAY! Then we went out to lunch in Halfhill to celebrate! But yeah, after that, no more work! We all just relaxed!
The next morning, we got up early to make up for lost time. I helped Celeste in the workshop to put the finishing touches on the idea I had like last week or the week before, where we make the electromagnet in the Perimeter Intrusion Electromagnet, or P.I.E., reverse its poles to attract metal instead of repulse it, the way it did in Mechagon when we had it set up to keep all the crazy wild robots and stuff out of our campsite while we stayed there for a while. The hope is, attach the P.I.E. to the Flying Nosebleed’s winch, dip it into the center of that huge school of mechafish, and flip the switch! Then fly through a portal to Boralus, fly northwest to Mechagon Island, and release them back into their home! So that’s what we did, with Celeste spending the early part of the morning assembling a much bigger, much stronger electromagnet from spare Mechagon parts we brought back from our camping trip.
We headed down to Angler’s Wharf after that, and some of our friends there wanted to join us! They came out to help on their own boats as we got in the Wave Dancer, and between the lot of us, with me piloting the Flying Nosebleed overhead, they got a cube made of fishnets assembled around the school of fish, with divers taking the bottom. The sonic shark repellant Celeste made for our pearl diving adventure really helped there! I’d also flown to Halfhill to pick up Penny, who was my spotter while I piloted the Flying Nosebleed. She’s so small, she can fit into the Dordy Bucket at the front of the flying machine, and was able to look down below us from her vantage point where she harnessed in. With Penny aboard, she was able to look down and catch Celeste’s signals and relay them to me while I kept an eye on the instrument panels. When Penny gave me the signal, I lowered the winch with the big new P.I.E. attached until Penny signaled to stop. Following signals she relayed from Celeste, I adjusted the depth of the winch in the water until it was just right, then flipped the switch. The Flying Nosebleed bobbed a bit with the extra weight of so many robot fish, which was spooky, so I compensated with a bit of an increase to engine power. I heard later that some of the fish had also been cordoned off to stay next to the Angler’s Wharf docks in a much smaller fishnet pen, to be studied by the Pandaren. In the meantime, though, I was getting more signals from Penny. Celeste had a portal to Boralus opened, and we were ready to go through!
I flew up over the portal after that, then descended straight into it, so that the P.I.E. with all the fish stuck to it would dip into the portal, with Penny and I going in after it. Onyx, as always, followed me through, coming along on the adventure to keep an eye on me as he always has. What I didn’t expect was to see Cloud Dancer come through the portal in Boralus! He usually never leaves Pandaria! He sure looked curious about this new land! Anyway, we got through the portal, which, thankfully, didn’t open up in the Sanctum of the Sages, not with a flying machine with a ton of stuff on a winch dangling below it! Celeste had anchored the other end of her portal at an elevated position above the ley line convergences in the Sanctum there, so that we came out in the sky overhead of the tidesages’ room there. The local sure were surprised to see a flying machine with a winch holding a big metal thing with lots of robot fish stuck to it, a Netherdrake, and a Cloud Serpent come out, let alone a molten corgi in aviator goggles held by a woman on the Cloud Serpent and a Mechagnome harnessed into a flying machine being piloted by a human!
We flew northwest after we were all assembled in the air over Tradewinds Market. It was rough going with so much weight under the flying machine. I was getting less and less response from the engines the further we flew, and, trying to gain altitude to get over the mountains and into Stormsong Valley, the engine started whining really loudly and belching out black smoke! More so than usual, even! I thought we were going to have to land on the near side of the mountains and make repairs, but she was able to fix it on the fly… literally, on the fly! She was able to reach the engine panel from where she was in the Dordy Bucket up front, then, with tools already handy right there in her hands, always along for the ride, she went to work!
Penny opened up the hood, which rolls sideways to open like a barrel roll instead of straight up where it can catch the wind and get broken off. I saw her light up like a Winter Veil tree almost immediately, apparently having spotted ways to help increase engine efficiency, from what she was yelling over the wind. She yelled something about the air filter and EGR valve, then yelled something about piston rings. Next, she screamed something out about fuel injector timing, and various tools extended and retracted from her hand as she set to work. When done, she did a final check for anything loose, cracked, or leaking, then, satisfied, she closed the hood and turns back toward me. Her face was TOTALLY black with soot, but she was all smiles! She raised her right fist, and one prosthetic thumb extended upward. The smoke was cleared up, the engine was no longer whining, and the Flying Nosebleed was able to make it up and over the mountains only JUST in time! Thank goodness we got her those tool-hands on the day before! I’m beginning to see the merit in prosthetic “upgrades,” though I’m still totally wanting to keep my own limbs and stuff! But still, she had really saved the day!
After that, it was smooth sailing! We got to Mechagon Island, where Celeste led us around to the north side where she knew the mechafish tended to stay. From Cloud Dancer’s back, she guided me to a specific spot about fifty yards or so from the beach and had me lower the P.I.E. back into the water. Then she gave me the signal to turn the P.I.E. off, and all the mechafish dropped off and splashed into the water, gathering immediately into a school again. What weird robots those are! I’m just glad the powerful magnetic field that held them didn’t hurt them!
Celeste got a portal back to the Shrine of the Seven Stars in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms going while I retracted the winch back into its hold in the Flying Nosebleed. We flew through, turning from there to go southward toward home, rising over the mountain range the Shrine is built into to see the Valley of the Four Winds sprawling out ahead of us, and the Krasarang Wilds beyond that. Soaring over that, we made it back home quickly, with Celeste heading to Angler’s Wharf to speak with Other Nat. I landed the Flying Nosebleed on its ingenious pontoons Celeste had added during the shark-fishing adventure we had that made it a seaplane and guided it to the dock to tie off. I helped Penny out and went to go see what Celeste was up to.
Celeste and Other Nat were talking about something being in a cave when I caught up. It seemed they were talking about the underwater cave in Turtle Bay! Other Nat was saying that he’d caught far more fish than usual down deeper in the bay, closer to the entrance to the cave. If they congregate there, then it stood to reason that it’s where the fish emerge, kinda like how farm animals always congregate at a certain place and time when they know they’re going to be fed. If whatever is causing the mechafish is in that cave, we gotta get it dealt with! I asked Celeste when she wanted to tackle that, and she laughed a bit and was like, “Just like that, eh? What if there were an angry giant crab or a six cutlass wielding octopus pirate guarding the entrance?” She’s so funny! But she also made a good point! So the plan is for now, take that huge fishnet we contained the mechafish with and spread it out to block the cave entrance.
To fix whatever the issue is, Celeste said that our pearl diving expedition gave her an idea that she wants to try. She wants to try making the ROPHE submersible. SROPHE, I guess, Submersible Remote Operated Helper! We can peek at what's going on inside the cave safely with that. She wants to work on that today when she wakes up, except, make a new one from scratch. But for the time being, she suggested we all celebrate the liberation of Turtle Bay from the invasion of the mechafish! WOO! Celeste turned and shouted out to everyone at the Wharf, "Hey guys, how about a good ol' fashioned Angler cookout! Let's get our rods and find us some dinner for everyone!" Everyone cheered at the notion. It was so exciting! Cookouts are just about an every day thing at the Angler's Wharf, but this time, there was a reason for it as well! Soon enough, everyone was out over the bay in their boats. The fish that were in a frenzy over the mechanical ones were hungry now, and, with their newfound freedom, were biting easily! The Wave Dancer was packed with Anglers along with us (and everyone left my purple chair free for me! How nice!), and Penny got to drive the boat! She had a blast doing that! Dordy barked at the fish he saw through the glass bottom, which made everyone laugh. The party lasted late into the night with everyone sharing great grilled fish and drinks, some tall fishing tales, and even Penny got to wow everyone with stories from far and foreign Mechagon. Good ol’ Penny was near tears with happiness in her good fortune, having gone from impoverished Mechagon cast-off to suddenly driving a fancy boat (with gleeful Mechagnome-style approval of the boat's many upgrades!) around with friends who cared about and liked her, fishing up a storm in between driving and getting ready for a cookout with real, non-paste food!
All my (non-Darkshire) family and friends enjoyed the cookout party after the fishing party quite a bit, with everyone getting slightly tipsy (and Penny in particular discovering that less is more) and their bellies getting quite full! I really enjoyed the stories everyone told, and I told a few of my own, stories that ranged from the shark-fishing story to fishing off of giant mushrooms in the sea with Celeste on another world to stories about meeting and first getting serious with Celeste to begin with. It seemed that everyone present had a few stories, and the sky went from blue to orange to purple to night sky as the relaxing, happy party went on. I enjoyed the night immensely; this was definitely good for the soul!
Nat looked up from her diary as she finished writing about the exciting adventures of the early week. She could hear the sounds of Celeste stirring upstairs, and the activation of the ROPHE, which now flew through the living room and into the kitchen to open the door, thanks to Celeste’s new thrusters. The sounds of rapidly scampering little paws could be heard stampeding down the stairs, followed shortly there after by rapid, but much less so, human feet. A robotic version of Celeste’s voice said, “Greetings, pretty lady,” and then Nat could hear Celeste laughing and responding, “I’m not Nat! I’m going to need to fix your facial recognition programming, I see.” Shortly thereafter, Celeste entered the room, hugging Nat from behind and wishing her a good morning before announcing that breakfast was going to be her Uncle Rugnar’s favorite biscuits with sausage gravy recipe. Nat lit up excitedly in response, and Celeste left the room in a hurry to go prepare breakfast. Nat returned to her writing, happy that her family was awake and happy. She could see Dordy darting around outside as he made his morning rounds to mark his territory around the house, darting past the office’s patio door as the morning sun continued to make its way skyward. Smiling happily, she went back to her writing.
And that wasn’t even all the fun that was had Monday and Tuesday!
Monday night, there was this BIIIIIIG marketplace going on in Uldum! The fancy buildings around the widest part of the river, the cluster on the west bank, had like maybe a hundred or more people in it! It was the most people I’d seen in a long time, and there were booths for EVERYthing! I went with my bestie Nah and our friend Star the Lightforged Draenei, and we shopped all over! Food, trinkets, home supplies, outdoorsman supplies, magical artifacts, even a traveling artist was there! Nah and Star and I stopped everywhere, but our first stop was MAGS’ STALL! Redridge Soap Company! YAY! I bought two of all five products, the liquid soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and Mags’ patented hair serum, all in the usual lavender and goldthorn scents, which she and her lady Elsa and her adoptive father Nate (Not our First Mate Nate, a much older Nate!) still mix up for you right on the spot! She also had seasonal scents out, so I got bath bombs of those! One three-pack of Desert Sandstorm, a very fizzy bomb that starts off beige and brown with earthy notes before calming down with a bright, warm finish akin to bright desert sunshine, and one three-pack of April Showers, May Flowers, a gentler sort of bath bomb that smells first of fresh rain with citrus and salt notes. The central core is bright and fizzy with a heavy floral smell, and contains small, flower-shaped dissolving soap beads. “April showers bring May flowers!” Mags is a genius, I tell you!
Nah, Star, and I stayed at the market for a good long time, even though there were lots and lots of stinky horde there too. The armistice sure is filling a lot of pockets with gold with the whole cross-faction interaction stuff! Eventually, though, with our packs a bit fuller and our coin purses a bit lighter, we all went to bed. Mags wanted to stay way later, all the way to the end of the market that night, as she was getting LOTS of customers, and she also wanted to catch this one plushie vendor before they packed up shop for the night. That figures! Hehe. It was such a fun night, and a great way to end the lazy day after Celeste’s flying ROPHE surprise and the other really sweet surprise she left me!
Then Tuesday night, after the fishing/cookout party to celebrate the liberation of Turtle Bay from all the mechafish, I was going to go to Deathrolls, but no one came! I was SOOOO BUMMED! It seemed everyone was busy! But then I got a call from Elinore, right before I was about to give up and go home. She wanted to hang out! So, with the later part of the night salvaged and the good mood continued after the party after all, I met up with her and the bodyguards her (very rich) parents always have at least one of around her, Bobby and Stan, in Boralus, as we had decided to go hiking there! We were going to hike from Boralus to the Norwington Estate, where she held the Midsummer Gala last year with Lex! So we got to Boralus, and started hiking through the old Ashvane Company Yards, making a wide berth around the spooky gallows part and then dodging the slums as well. The city has made great strides in that area with the fall of the Brinebreaker Gang, but it still has a ways to go! We stopped at the Hops, Line, and Sinker pub for a moment when Elinore heard a bard in there playing, and we stayed to listen for a moment. It was then that Mags called as well, asking belatedly about Deathrolls! We talked about playing a three-person game there in the bar, but Elinore, like last week, said she’d likely just hang out with us and watch, and a two-person Deathrolls game didn’t sound as appealing, so Mags just decided to go with us on our hike. We waited for her in the pub, then set off to Hatherford, this little town that’s only just to the northwest of Boralus, sitting on the opposite shore of the waterway there and reachable over this really long bridge. From Hatherford, we hiked westward, enjoying the quite night air and each other’s company. One problem I should have foreseen, though, was horses. Mags, for some reason, is terrified of them, and there were guards and travelers on horses all over! Boralus guards, Norwington Estate guards, and just random people were trotting along the path from one end to the other, and I found myself distracting the horses so they wouldn’t look at Mags while she made a wide circle around them. Then we remembered that the estate itself is packed with horses, as Lord Norwington himself is a renowned equestrian. With that in mind, we made a wide berth around the estate as well, making for the beautiful half-circle of waterfalls coming down off the cliffs beyond that!
Once I got there, I spread out my picnic blanket (the one crafted like a saddle blanket, but double-thick and durable, midnight-purple, with patches of fish and sea turtles and fishing rods all over it, and one big spot where I can still tell where a skull patch used to be that I ripped off almost a year ago) on a grassy knoll next to the river, and we just hung out and talked a whole bunch and had a nice time next to the river and the beautiful waterfall as the stars twinkled brightly in the night sky. We stayed so long, we were all getting sleepy enough to fall asleep on the spot! Mags was worried about highwaymen, and Bobby and Stan didn’t seem too keen on the idea either, and besides, all five of us wanted to sleep in our own beds anyway, so we dragged ourselves to our feet to head home. I rolled up my picnic blanket and packed it away, and we all said our goodnights and went home. The Deathrolls bust was salvaged, and the night was pleasant and stayed as happy as I’d been after the Angler’s Wharf fishing and cookout party after all! It was so nice!
As Nat wrote, the smells of biscuits with sausage gravy, bacon, and coffee wafted into the room, and as she finished her latest paragraph, Celeste strode in, presenting Nat her breakfast and coffee with a flourish worthy of a queen, making Nat blush and giggle. Nat thanked Celeste earnestly, and Celeste headed off with her own breakfast to her workshop to eat and work on the new submersible ROPHE after a hug and kiss. Nat enjoyed a few bites of biscuits and sausage gravy and a piece of bacon, washing it down with fresh, hot coffee with just a bit of liquid hazelnut creamer and no sugar. Celeste really has Nat’s coffee down pat! Smiling happily, Nat returned to her writing once more.
Last night’s adventure, however, was much more dangerous and scary! It was a Whitewind Company worknight, and that means an adventure contract! This one was a call from the Thundermar clan, a Wildhammer clan, for a ground crew to come in and clear out the Verrall River in the Twilight Highlands, getting rid of orcs that were now trying to dam the last bit of what river flows through the riverbed and build structures in there to take the entire length of it from the Wildhammer Dwarves that live along it! Mairy had nothing nice to say about the Thundermar clan needing help with Dragonmaw orcs, and she was all too happy to come along and help us out! Also present were Sparkles and… He says I can feel free to speak his name openly, as he doesn’t care if the bullying poser lady learns he still hangs out with me or not… Grim’Un Oakenbloom, the one I’ve been calling Bob all this time! I’m not sure where Zarshal was, but Nah was away on Whitewind Company business of her own in Northrend somewhere and couldn’t come this time around. But, the four of us figured to be plenty!
We flew to the portal to the Twilight Highlands in the island in the lake north of the Stormwind Keep that has all those portals, emerging in Highbank in Twilight Highlands and flying to the Verrall River delta, where it empties into the ocean. My plan was to have Mairy in the air on her gryphon Twitchtail to use smoke bombs from Sparkles to mark large clusters of orcs or a building in progress or something for an airstrike from Thundermar dwarves, but everyone wanted to do the fighting themselves, so we scrapped that plan and just ran in all willy-nilly.
Sure enough, the first orcs we came across outnumbered us two-to-one, but still no airstrike! Luckily, these were obviously just peons, a much smaller and seemingly less intelligent caste of orc, so they weren’t so much of a problem. They looked to be building a guard tower, right in the middle of the delta, which would block off access to this end of the river with heavy archer fire! Not good! We couldn’t let them build it! Grim jumped in first, doing his heroic leap thing, bright swords and bright, shiny, silvery armor (he looks so different without all the black!) sparkling brilliantly as he arced through the air, crashing to one side of the orc group and surprising the heck outta them before taking one of them out right off the bat! Mairy dive-bombed them with her gryphon, Sparkles was fighting with her spear, and I had Mek-barash, my wrathguard, and Piznik, one of my imps, out, and I was commanding them through the fight. Grim was the only one in any real danger, but, fully plated, he dodged, blocked, and parried the shots coming his way from the peons’ work hammers with the skill of a seasoned veteran. Mairy chased one down that threw away his hammer and fled and finished him off. Sparkles got one right through the back of the neck with her spear, which was SO gross, and soon enough, the orcs were done for! Mairy said Wildhammers would come and clean up the mess and remove the orcs and what bit of construction they’d done on the guard tower, so we proceeded upriver.
We passed the ruins of an old, broken-down Dragonmaw Orc fortress on the west bank, and Mairy said that one had been sitting there crumbling since the Cataclysm. Further upriver, we found ANOTHER Dragonmaw fortress on the west bank, and this one had Thundermar gryphonriders buzzing all around it likes flies, throwing stormhammers that struck and returned to their hands at orcs in the two towers on the river side of the walls, striking them down, though more orcs kept coming up the towers to replace them. The orcs in the towers were looking up at them to shoot their bows, not down at us, so we got another surprise attack on the two towers from the riverbed! Only problem was, the three orcs we encountered on the ground were not peons, but real orc berserkers! I stayed at a distance in the riverbed, controlling Mek-barash and Piznik again, Sparkles charged in with her spear alongside Grim, and Mairy was dive-bombing with her gryphon again. But, instead of charging the orcs, she tried to take out one post of the guard tower to try and knock it down with her stormhammer! It didn’t work; the tower held strong, though the post shook just hard enough to make the orc standing overtop it look down. Spotting us, he fired at Mairy, and Twitchtail took an arrow through the wing with such force that the wing was pinned to the ground! Poor Twitchtail! He looked so hurt! Mairy had to dive off and throw her stormhammer again to take the orc out that had noticed them, and then we took the fight to the berserkers. Grim and Sparkles did just fine with their orcs, but one on the ground caught Mairy in a flying tackle after she dismounted and pinned her there! Grim and Sparkles finished off their orcs, then charged the other orc to free Mairy, but he wouldn’t budge, and just ducked even lower when Mek-barash swung his axe at him. Piznik finally got him with a felfire bolt that set him on fire, and now Mairy was buried underneath a burning, screaming orc! Sparkles tried to get the orc off of Mairy by burying the tip of her spear in him and flipping him off, but he just sort of slumped a bit when she tried to move him, having already died from the felfire. Grim went in and helped, and Mairy was able to push the orc off of her, unscathed by the felfire, as the orc had inadvertently shielded her from it the whole time. With the orcs down, we moved to the tower.
With a tower needing to be destroyed, we knew who to turn to… Sparkles, the insane pyromaniacal gnome! Sparkles didn’t settle for just placing bombs around the bottom of the support posts, though… She just ran right up the spiraling ramp to the top, dodging through the legs of orcs and planting bombs all over, then taking a flying leap off the highest ledge, cackling madly and grinning just as insanely as she flew through the air and hit the detonator. She was still flying through the air as the tower EXPLODED behind her, bits of tower and orc flying in every direction… and she was STILL CACKLING! She ended up faceplanting in the mud on landing, so we had to help her up, but by golly, that tower was GONE! She did the same thing at the other tower, dodging through orc legs to plant bombs all up and down the thing, though this time, she stuck the landing perfectly, and THEN hit the detonator. Again, bits of tower and orc flew in all directions. It was so gross! But the towers were down, and the Thundermar now had free reign over the orcs inside the fortress who, without their towers and their bows, were easy pickings. We left them to it and continued clearing upriver.
We found the other end of the river swamped in a huge ground battle between orcs and Wildhammer dwarves, and weaved our way through it quickly to the end, where the dam was being built. The orcs were screaming in their dumb grunting language, and the Wildhammers were screaming all sorts of horrible, though perfectly true and applicable, insults at them as they fought. When we got there, we could see that the dam was also going to double as a huge stone fortress, complete with huge spikes sticking out, the way orcs build! They couldn’t see us, and we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them behind it. Sparkles changed some kinda setting on her goggles, using a sonar thing she’s used a few times in the past to listen in. She could hear the waterfall hitting the water at an elevation that was right around our own, so the dam hadn’t been holding up what trickle of water was coming down off the cliffs above long enough to have gained much depth in the water yet. With the knowledge that blowing the dam up wouldn’t cause a flood to come wash all those Wildhammer dwarves fighting in the riverbed away, Sparkles went to work once again. Cackling quietly to herself as she muttered about different types of explosives to use, including what sounded like “just a pinch of Azerite” that was really a huge fistful, she set up her explosives from one end to the other, then climbed to the west bank where we were. Shrieking with glee, she hit her detonator, and, ka-BOOOOOOMMM! The dam was blown SKY-HIGH!! Sparkles was bouncing up and down as high as she could jump, all four limbs flailing madly as the explosion went off, absolutely out of her mind with the sort of completely insane glee we’ve come to associate with her. With the dam blown, we figured our work here was done!
Yyyyeah… we thought wrong.
I don’t know how they got it, or where they got it from, but this enormous orcish warlord came swooping in after the dam blew… on an enormous Twilight Dragon drake! He started yelling at us in broken Common about how the Dragonmaw would take the Highlands, rightfully their after their fathers had conquered the lands with red dragons a generation before. Mairy was having none of it! She was looking in sheer, abject terror at the dragon, but seemed ready to do battle nonetheless! Wordlessly, she lashed out with her stormhammer, throwing it hard. Grim threw one of his own weapons, bashing the dragon in the head and stunning it Mek-barash climbed the house it was hovering over to leap off the chimney, sinking his axe into the back of the orc, and Sparkles threw some kinda tool that propelled itself forward HARD, hitting the orc in the head just as Piznik’s felfire bolt struck him in the head and burned his face horribly. The orc fell from the dragon to the grass, where Mairy finished him off.
It was to be the only easy part of this fight.
The dragon soon returned to its senses from being stunned by Grim, tailwhipping Mek-barash right off the chimney and sending him flying after sinking its teeth into Mek-barash’s torso first. Next, some kinda dragonfire-like thing happened, with twilight breath belching forward from its massive maw right at Mairy, Piznik and I. It destroyed Piznik as it had destroyed Mek-barash! They’ll be back, however, as fel minions that die in the natural universe simply return to the Twisting Nether and regenerate. I, on the other hand… don’t remember anything after that twilight breath! Apparently, I was knocked out cold by it, without the minions there shielding me as they usually do with the soul link spell. Mairy very nearly bought it herself, and Sparkles was knocked out by a tree that fell on her. In the end, it was just Mairy and Grim left, and it was all they could do with the twilight drake bashing them with its tail and doing its twilight breath thing and biting at them for them to finally finish the thing off. Grim and Mairy were able to sink their swords deep into it, and Mairy got the killing blow in with shamanic magic, asking the earth spirits for help. Apparently the last blow to the head of the dragon had been assisted by the spirits of the earth, using Azeroth’s own gravity, intensified tenfold, to bring the hammer down that much harder, crushing the dragon’s head and killing it. When Mairy woke me up with healing water magic shamans use, there was such a gross mess in the grass from all that and the orc! And then there was Sparkles, still out cold under the tree!
Grim went and lifted the trunk of the tree up, and I got Sparkles by the ankle and dragged her out from under there. Mairy lifted Sparkles up as Grim dropped the tree, throwing her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes the way she usually does when Sparkles is knocked out. We were all pretty wiped out by then. With the mission over, we got all got a bit more shamanic healing around, supplemented by the healthstones Grim and I used (Mairy always declines healing aid from this branch of magic). After that, we were ready to head home. Mairy wanted to visit a family member’s grave to place a wreath or something while we were here, so Grim used his hearthstone and I flew Onyx back to Stormwind to take the Pandaren portal back home, not quite feeling up to conjuring a trans-continental portal at this point. I was SO tired when I got home! At least Celeste is there to always help me unwind from adventure nights! She’s so great!
And now this morning, she’s working on building the submersible version of the ROPHE after having made us biscuits with sausage gravy and bacon with coffee for breakfast. She always makes life so great! Mine is finished now, so I’m gonna go down and help her! This will be fun! I love working with Celeste in the workshop! I’m learning so much! I can’t wait to see how the new mech, and this underwater cave adventure, all works out!
Smiling excitedly, Nat tapped off the excess ink from her quill, replacing it in its case. She capped her inkwell, replacing it and the quill case into her large side drawer along the right side of her writing desk. She headed downstairs briefly to get Celeste’s mug, darting upstairs to refill it. Celeste was totally in the zone when Nat went down for the mug, completely focused on a bit of welding she was doing, her welding mask pulled down over her face, and didn’t spot Nat while she was down there. Nat refilled the mugs – black for Celeste, a bit of hazelnut creamer with no sugar once again for her own – and took the mugs back downstairs to Celeste. Dordy was underfoot the whole time, happy to travel around the house with Nat while Celeste was just sitting in one spot. As Nat headed back downstairs, Dordy returned to a Dordy bed under the workbench (it had started out in an out-of-the-way corner, but Dordy had usually ignored it in favor of remaining around the feet of his beloved packmates), curling up and going back into a snooze while Nat placed Celeste’s refilled mug down and took a seat beside her, immediately getting into engineering talk with Celeste after she raised her welding mask with a grin to thank Nat for her coffee and take a sip. Celeste continued her welding while having Nat retrieve various tools or work on assembling other bits of the robot. The day passed by pleasantly as the two worked, and Nat found herself enjoying the final day of this week’s minication quite a bit! What a wonderful life!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Mar 24, 2022 13:36:30 GMT
March the Twenty-Fourth The lingering smell of biscuits and sausage gravy lingered in the air with the scent of bacon, a hint of coffee intermingling pleasantly with it. Complementing that was the smell of early-morning salt sea air, tempted inside through windows thrown open wide in enjoyment of perfect night temperatures that promised to remain pleasant throughout the day.
Sitting in front of one such window, belly full of excellent breakfast food, was Nat. With her writing desk located right below her office window, she was perfectly positioned to enjoy the breeze that was occasionally blowing right in. The breeze called for a paperweight on the pages of the diary she had open before her, but it was well worth it! With the morning breeze in front of her and the rising sun streaming through the sliding glass patio door to her right, she was sitting pretty comfortably this fine morning!
In addition to her diary, her cherrywood quill case and inkwell of purple ink were both open on the desk, off to the right of her diary, and a steaming mug of coffee, refilled after breakfast to bring to her desk, sat just beyond the next blank pages of the thick book. Nat took a sip, relaxing with the warm mug in her hands and gazing out the window at the beauty of Turtle Bay stretching out far low the window of the house atop the rock spire, then placed the mug back on the desk and reached for her ravenfeather quill. Dipping it into her inkwell of purple ink, she tapped off the excess and began to write.
Dear diary,
It’s been a pretty cool week! Celeste, Penny, and I got to take the Submersible Remote Operated Personal HElper out to the middle of Turtle Bay for a dive to check on the origin of the mystery of the mechafish, we got to play Deathrolls again after a week’s break, and the Whitewind Company has a new mystery to solve that took us north to Tirisfal Glades this week, and will take us much further north, to Northrend, next week!
Monday and Tuesday, Celeste and I spent much of both days in the workshop putting the finishing touches on the SROPHE, which including water-proofing it, installing electrical, thermal, motion, and SONAR sensors, as well as Celeste’s S.E.L.F.I.E. camera to get an idea of what’s in the cave and come up with various sorts of images for us. It looks like a metal ball with a propeller on one end, and a complex array of sensors on the other. Celeste wanted to build another ROPHE, just like the one she built me for Winter Veil to help me do chores around the house, only she wanted this one to be submersible, to help with this diving investigation! She didn’t want to risk mine, as we wanted to check the underwater cave, like I wrote about last week, to see if there was something dangerous in there making the fish. Well, Tuesday afternoon, we finished it up, so Wednesday morning, yesterday, we took it out for its mission!
Celeste got into a brand-new bikini, a really deep-sea blue one with jellyfish, and a new pareo in light shades of sky blue. She looks sooooooo good in it! I figured I’d use my newest one as well, the one made of purple Shal’dorei silk that my bestie Nah got me for Winter Veil! We went to our Halfhill farm and picked up Penny, both to hang out with a new friend and to get her additional engineering expertise, then went to the Wave Dancer, which Celeste had already loaded up with supplies for the mission. Penny got to pilot the boat again, which really made her happy! Celeste sat near me up by the purple chair with the purple parasol that she made me, and Dordy kept barking through the bulletproof glass bottom of the boat at all the wild marine life we passed by. Celeste helped direct Penny to the buoy she’d placed in the water to mark the cave entrance, and we stopped and dropped anchor there.
The plan here was for Celeste to put on her deep-dive helmet and make the dive with the SROPHE to open the fishnet she and our Angler’s Wharf friends had covered the cave entrance with during the weekend while I was at work, so that the SROPHE could get in there and use the imaging system we designed to get a good look at the cave and everything in it. I was to remote-control the SROPHE from in the boat, with Penny there as a back-up engineer in case something went wrong with the tech on our end. Dordy was going to make the dive with Celeste in his Dordy Bubble Celeste built for him for our pearl diving adventure, just for fun and company!
So, with the plan reviewed one last time, Celeste put on her deep-dive helmet and made ready to go overboard. I gave her a water-breathing spell as a back-up for her helmet. Celeste got Dordy into his Dordy Bubble and placed him in the water, then splashed overboard herself. She and Dordy went south, and I sat in the floor of the boat, remote-operating the SROPHE probe to dive with Celeste, guiding it by watching it through the see-through bottom of the Wave Dancer. Celeste was going pretty far down the Narsong Trench, the deepest part of Turtle Bay, and she was soon quite tiny down there. Dordy was easily recognizable, his fiery, molten body standing out in the water like a beacon.
It was fun to do this with Celeste, as we were in radio contact the entire time. Her deep-dive helmet has a radio built into it, and the Wave Dancer has another. We had a nice, silly time talking like sailors talk, with a lot of “aye-aye, Captain!” from me and a lot of crisp commands in a deep, manly voice from Celeste. Eventually we got so silly with it that we couldn’t keep straight faces anymore, and Penny was laughing at us anyway. But, it worked! And we had fun! Celeste helped me from her vantage point with her commands to guide the SROPHE probe to the left side of the fishnet-covered cave entrance, and, after she took down the top left corner, she got me to send in the probe and then hit the autonomous mode button after I lost sight of it. The probe then surfaced in the underwater cave, using its sensors as designed. It took about ten minutes. When it came back out of the cave, I resumed control at Celeste’s word and guided it back to the boat. Penny got it clipped back onto the side mount Celeste had rigged up for it, and I helped get Dordy’s Dordy Bubble out of the water and let him out of it. Dordy came out, shaking himself out and bouncing around, yip-yipping, excited at his adventure, having chased a few fish and even an octopus as he played down in the water!
After we got everyone settled back in, Celeste suggested sensor and image analysis over lunch at Angler’s Wharf, so Celeste got Penny to drive the boat back to the dock. We unclipped the SROPHE again, bringing it to our favorite platform of the little stilt village, the one on the bay side of the Wharf that sits flat on top of the water, and ordered lunch while we worked on getting information from the probe.
The pictures revealed an empty cave except for a single humanoid robot. Celeste gasped when she saw it and exclaimed: “So THAT’S where it went!”. She laughed and turned to face Penny and I, and laughed even more at our bewildered looks.
“I found that robot in the scrap heaps of Mechagon while you were off at work during our camping trip there, Nat,” she explained. “I thought it was some sort of gnome patrol robot at first but then I realized it was a fishing robot. Look at it: it even has a metal wide-brim hat welded to its head! The bit boots, the coveralls! I didn’t find anything that looks like a fishing rod near it, though. I realized it had circuits, however, so I figured that if it was programmed to fish mechanical fish, I could try reprogramming it to care for live ones. Remember that fish farm project I had? Anyway, there was a tear in one of Nosebleed’s cargo nets. I suspected some stuff had fallen out, but I wondered if this guy didn’t activate and escape. It could’ve fallen into the sea from the Spire, then walked along the bottom until it reached that cave. That must be what’s creating the mechanical fish. I suppose it makes some odd sort of sense. If Mechagon has robotic dogs, I just thought it quirky that someone wanted to make mechanical fish. I guess this is how they were made. A fisherman making fish! Others catch them and this guy makes more…”
I couldn’t help but giggle at the Mechagnomes’ design for this little guy. A fisherman with bit boots, coveralls, and a wide-brimmed fishing hat, just like Celeste’s! And, like Celeste said, it DID make sense, in an odd sort of way! I was like, "So he's some sort of crafting robot that creates mechafish for the Mechagnomes to fish for sport? I suppose the purpose of THAT is to craft fish that are difficult to catch and, once they ARE hooked, put up the best fights? And yeah, this little guy really would be a great help for a fish farm! We'd just have to completely remove his crafting programming, yeah!" And Celeste was like, “You know… it might be playing with fire, but what if we allowed it to create one super fish for a fishing contest each year? Released in a controlled area. It would add something new to the fishing we all know well by now here. Winner gets to be addressed as fishing king or queen for a week or two. With the honors and the bowing!” Celeste and I laughed at her zany idea. Celeste shrugged. “First we need to contain the disaster it’s causing. Then reprogram it for a different use.” And then I was like, "Ooooooohhh... As long as it isn't programmed to be a predator of a real fish, yet will still go for baited hooks -- given that the angler is lucky enough to drop a line where it happens to be and figures out what it goes for and how to maneuver the bite to lure the fish in -- it should be an awesome fishing contest! But yeah, reprogramming it would be essential to stopping it from causing an ecological disaster down there in Turtle Bay!" So we began brainstorming ideas for all that with Penny, who had confirmed Celeste’s suspicions on what the robot was created for, and brainstormed ideas with us. Lunch at the Wharf was really nice, with all that going on!
Then Tuesday night was DEATHROLLS! It was me, Grim, one of the Voyagers named Darlah, and Sparkles, and we got to play in one of our old favorite venues, the Salty Sailor in Booty Bay! Darlah is a Kul Tiran woman, and she’s kinda built like me, except way taller, which means her build is a bit bigger than me. Consequently, Sparkles, ever nicknaming people with not-always-flattering nicknames, calls her “Broadsides,” playing on words with Darlah being not only a bigger sort of woman, but also a Kul Tiran shipwright. Rude! Grim is “Mountain,” because he’s so tall and powerfully built himself, and I’m “Red,” because of how I blush so easily. She’s so silly! Anyway, Deathrolls was fun! Right off the bat, I rolled a one and Grim got to Dare me, so he had me go under the green rug on the floor and crawl under it from one end of the other. That was so gross! It was FILTHY under there! I crawled under it from one end to the other, just like Grim said, and I was COVERED in dust and dirt when I came out the other end! Darlah even called me a “dust bunny!” Then right after that, Sparkles got to Dare me… That wasn’t good at all! She went and got a spoon and piled it high with salt from a shaker on the table, then Dared me to eat it all at once! It was SO bad! I was coughing and hacking and wheezing, and it was SO gross, and it took a full tankard of cherry grog Grim went to get me for me to make it back to normal! ACK! Then Sparkles had a Truth in which she had to tell, in a scenario in which Grim spends a drunken night with Darlah, what the baby would look like, and she said it would look like a cross between a mountain and a boat! RUDE! Darlah kept choosing Truth, and she answered everything from Grim’s “body count” question, which meant how many people had she gone to bed with… GOSH! She had others, resulting in stories ranging from her dream of building the ship of her dreams to sail the world to find the man of her dreams, to picking out a wedgie from her backside and getting spotted doing it, and retorting that the “cheeky” peeper sure got a kick out of staring at a lady’s backside, to her most embarrassing moment, which was fishing on one of the Voyager’s ships and accidentally hooking her own trousers and having them ripped off right in front of everyone! HA! Gosh! I got Grim with a good Whisper Dare, too!. I haven’t done one of those in a while! So later, after a few rounds, when people had forgotten I’d given Grim a Whisper Dare and weren’t expecting it, Grim, without context, without warning, stood up and walked over to Darlah, asking to borrow her glasses, citing the need for them for his old eyes. Then he climbed up onto the table, crossed over it to Sparkles, kneeling in front of the maniac gnome and began professing her love for her, and how he really wanted Darlah’s glasses so that he could take in her beauty more clearly. Darlah was SO confused, and I was fighting hard to keep a straight face, but Sparkles took it better than anyone – she just kept making wisecracks back at Grim about how, when she needed a Mountain to help her hide the “bodies,” she’d give him a call, as she knows she’d get free labor! Grim started going back and forth with her then, like, “Oh, you need a booty, do you? …Oh wait, you said body,” and stuff like that and making me blush. It got worse and worse until I couldn’t keep a straight face anymore, so, I said the Whisper Dare was complete! Sparkles and Darlah had both guessed by this time that I had put Grim up to it anyway. It was a fun one! What a fun and hilarious game! I love Deathrolls!
Nat placed her quill in her inkwell, reaching for her coffee. She smiled as she sat back in her chair, reviewing the memories of the fun in Turtle Bay and in Booty Bay. It’d been a fun week of Bay events! The pleasant morning wind in this bay was like to that of early spring morning breezes of Booty Bay, and the similarity brought back memories of the recent pearl diving adventure there. Nat’s mind meandered from that adventure to the desire she had to research the suit of armor that pretty gauntlet had come from, the truesilver gauntlet with the beautiful blue metal trim that looked like it had been finely crafted for a Quel’dorei princess. Where would she research such suits? Dalaran’s immense library? There were a lot of restricted sections there. Stormwind’s library? It was a bit more open, though it had its own restricted section. As a human library, it might, perhaps, have a book on well-known suits of armor from Alliance races. Nat made a mental note to head to both libraries with the Whitewind Company and friends to see if they could discover the rest of the suit. It was sure to be worth quite a bit of gold, though Lady Whitewind might enjoy the prestige of owning such a suit of armor herself, even if it was built for someone rather more slender than most human females. Would this be the beginning of a Whitewind Company Museum of History? How fun would that be!
Nat took another sip of coffee, mulling over the possibilities, her mind eventually wandering from that potential adventure to the one from the previous night. Remembering she was recording her thoughts just now, she took one last dainty sip of her coffee and placed it back on her writing desk, reaching once more for her quill and returning it to the pages of her diary.
Last night was the weekly Wednesday night adventure for the Whitewind Company! It was me, the Quel’dorei ranger Lady Rivenori “Riven” of the fallen house Summersong, one of the Whitewind Company officers I see sometimes. She was coming to fill in for Nah to lead this mission, as Nah is still up in Northrend investigating the roots of the attacks against the Whitewind Company. Also present were Mairead Brewbeak the Wildhammer Dwarf, of the Voyagers, and another Voyager, filling in for Sparkles, who is out from last week’s concussion from having a tree fall on her. Her name is Valaestra something or other the Void Elf, who prefers to be called by her self-bestowed nickname of “Misery.” She really creeps me out, but there’s no doubting her effectiveness… I just try to steer as clear of her as I can! She also hints sometimes at the same thing Sparkles does: that she is some sort of mother figure to the crazed gnome. There are also hints of something to do with Maya, which would explain how the usually perfectly normal Maya, once in a blue moon, speaks of voices in her head… spooky! Zarshal was there as well, though he randomly left early. We all met up outside the Scarlet Monastery in northeastern Tirisfal Glades, the location noted by Lady Riven in her letters to each of us asking us to meet her there.
When we got there, Riven briefed us on the mission. It was about the job posting listed by Lady Whitewind on the Whitewind Company bulletin board, the one about one Matilda Blackthorn raising a new faction of the Scarlet Crusade. The job listing reads thus:
• WANTED: Matilda Blackthorn. A veteran of the Second War and former Paladin for the Silver Hand, Matilda now commands a small regiment of Scarlet Crusaders in their zealotry to restore Lordaeron. Unlike most Scarlets, however, Matilda has - ironically - allowed undead Scarlets to serve in her ranks, as well as those turned by the Worgen Curse. Her regiment is small enough to not be a considerable threat, but after the events of the Fourth War, neither the Forsaken nor the Alliance have the resources necessary to properly quell this potential threat.
Riven explained that Matilda Blackthorn had finally been spotted, last seen going in and out of the Scarlet Monastery several times, and that her new faction was called the Scarlet Sisterhood, an all-female (for reasons best known to Matilda, I guess) sect of the Crusade. We were there to apprehend her and bring her to justice, with a hefty contract payout to the Whitewind Company and its outside contractors from the bounty the Crown had placed on her. The plan was a straightforward one: gain entry to the Scarlet Monastery, fighting through it if we have to, and search it high and low for Matilda Blackthorn, capturing her alive if possible. With that, we headed up the hill to the entrance arc.
There, at the entrance, was a huge, hulking worgen… with a Light-blessed greatsword! I was thinking of a stealth plan to try to sneak past the worgen, but Mairy, in true Mairy fashion, simply walked right up to the worgen and immediately began an insult war with the worgen lady. The worgen looked like she could fight far better than she could get into a battle of wits, and that turned out to be quite true. All she could do was spew profanity at the Wildhammer dwarf, and Mairy was roasting her good and proper! She even pretending to know her, saying she knew her name: Yerdum Andaninny! HA! The worgen didn’t even know she’d been called a dumb ninny! But insults weren’t going to get us past her, so I sent my wrathguard Mek-barash in along with a vilefiend I summoned to do battle. Problem was, that worgen was GOOD! Everyone attacked all at once when the wrathguard did, and the worgen dodged, blocked, or parried everything – axes, swords, hammers, spells, vilefiend fangs and claws, even arrows from Riven’s bow! Then, in one swing from her Light-blessed greatsword in a counterattack, it destroyed the vilefiend, cut Mek-barash pretty deep, and knocked Grim and Mairy back a few feet. Mairy even fell over on her rear! The fight got intense from there, with steel and spells flying and me sending Mek-barash help in the form of dreadstalkers and other fel minions in. The worgen was eventually overwhelmed, and we knocked her out. Misery came in and did something awful to it, which the rest of us turned away from, not wanting to watch. I sure hope she doesn’t come along to many of these missions, though again, there’s no doubting her effectiveness… Still, she’s so CREEPY!
From there, we gained entry, and moved up the front stairs through the tunnel leading to the monastery proper. There were more inside, of course, humans and undead and worgen alike, all wearing that white tabard with the red flame on it the Scarlets use, and all trying to block our way in. Their crimes against those not wearing their tabard are too many to ignore, however, and so we took the fight to them when they wouldn’t surrender peacefully and attacked us first. Priests, paladins, warriors, all came at us, and all were felled. The way Riven had our group arrayed had great effect, and the Scarlets coming at us in twos and threes were instantly overwhelmed. It was easy to see why that worgen out front was posted there; the rest of these wouldn’t have made effective guards at all! I also discovered a new effective pairing for Mek-barash: a Shivarra. The six-armed, towering melee fighters are able to keep up with a wrathguard in battle, and their onslaught really helped us out. Grim and Mairy were also laying about left, right, and center with their own weapons, and Misery and Riven were attacking from the back lines, behind cover, as I was. Before long, we had worked our way through halls, an armory, an open-air space outside ringed by the buildings of the monastery, and back to this really stout-looking set of double-doors that were locked with a heavy locking mechanism in the middle where the doors meet.
Certain that Matilda Blackthorn was within, Riven tried to open the door. It was locked! Mairy went up and kicked the poo out of the door a couple of times, but all she managed was to hurt her foot. Then I gave it a shot myself. Engineering fun time! I set up a breaching charge on the door that Sparkles would have been proud of. I was like, “There is no problem that cannot be solved with the practical application of seaforium.” I set up the seaforium charge right over the narrow gap where the doors meet in the middle, right on the locking mechanism. We all took cover around corners and behind pillars and stuff, and I got to yell something I’d always wanted to yell on a mission, ever since picking up engineering over a year ago: “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” Then I trigger the detonator, and ka-BOOM! The door got blown to BITS! I could just hear Sparkles’ maniacal shouted cackling after the explosion went off, as though she were standing right there with us!
We went into the room, which the seaforium charge had sort of wrecked. It was an office/library combination, and a bookshelf had fallen over, stuff was blown off the desk in the center, and lots of other books had fallen off of other bookshelves. It was such a mess! Everyone started searching around. Still tempted to find a book on that elven armor suit, I started looking through some of the books blown off the shelves. Non-Humans and Their Threat to Society, A Treatise on the Light and Its Blessings, Bailey Brock’s Best Bestiary, and one titled Jaina Proudmoore Art. Remembering how Cari has kind of a crush on Jaina, I was like, “Hey, I should take this one to Cari!” Then I opened it up… and OHMIGOSH! I closed it QUICK, blushing furiously, and threw it across the room, and I was like, “I should definitely NOT take that one to Cari!” GOSH! Then Misery found this letter, hand-written by Matilda Blackthorn, stating she’d be meeting with another Scarlet Commander, whose name was redacted, in Northrend. I bet they’re in that Scarlet Onslaught building up there in Dragonblight! Riven found a Scarlet Sisterhood manifest and started reading through that. Grim found a key, which seemed to be the size of the lock on this huge chest at the other side of the room. He tossed it to Riven. Riven caught it instinctively, then crossed the room to insert it into the chest. It opened! And oh gosh, inside was a large stash of gold coins, jewels, and holy relics and artifacts. Riven figured the Scarlet Sisterhood wouldn’t be needing all that anymore, and told the group to help themselves before she hauled out whatever remained for Whitewind Company coffers. I still have that massive load of gold banked from the Freehold adventure, where we found that mountain of treasure in that shattered ship at the end of the night during the Brinebreaker/Tidesage campaign, so I just took one thing… a little surprise I plan to give Celeste when the moment is right! I’m excited about it! The rest of the group helped themselves, with the added promise that they’ll also still get their share of pay from the Whitewind Company as outside contractors as well. Riven closed the chest when everyone’s pockets were full and hefted it up. She’s really strong for a Quel’dorei woman!
After that, the mission was over, and we all made plans to meet up next week to head to Northrend to apprehend Matilda Blackthorn and whomever this secret Scarlet Crusade commander is. I hope that one goes as well as this one did, and that we’re able to catch Matilda Blackthorn this time!
Anyway, Celeste is downstairs tinkering in her workshop. I think she’s coming up with a plan to catch that fish-crafting bot safely and reprogram it! I wanna go help! This fish farm is gonna be the BEST! YAY!
Nat tapped off the excess ink from her ravenfeather quill into her inkwell of purple ink, capping the latter and placing the former into her cherrywood quill case. These items went back into the large desk drawer by her right leg. Nat stood, heading downstairs with her empty coffee mug in hand, collecting Celeste’s from her workbench, where she sat doodling intently on some plans she’d drawn up. The doodles included fish and hearts and a robot with what looked to be a robot fish in one hand being chased around a cave by a short-legged dog made of lava. Nat giggled at the doodles as she collected Celeste’s mug, which didn’t interrupt the dialed-in Celeste from her musings at all. Nat took the mugs upstairs, refilling them. Black coffee for Celeste, a bit of liquid hazelnut creamer and no sugar for her own. She took the mugs back to her office, where the ink on her pages was now dry. She closed her diary, replacing it on the bookshelf on the wall to the left of her desk in its usual home, then took the steaming mugs back downstairs to Celeste. The smell of coffee finally brought Celeste back to the present, and she had a smile for Nat as the two sipped at coffee and began to go over Celeste’s latest plans for recovering the fish-crafting robot in the cave. The day passed by pleasantly and fruitfully, and Nat looked forward not only to her next underwater adventure with Celeste, but also to her next adventures with her friends in Northrend, not to mention her next Deathrolls game with them! What a great life!
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Post by Natasha Ebonlocke on Mar 31, 2022 12:19:15 GMT
March the Thirty-First It was an odd-looking workshop, odder than most Azeroth had to offer, yet it was as beloved as any gnome’s workshop. The walls were painted in a scene that depicted a beach on one side of the room, descending deeper and deeper along a coral reef along the sides, with the wide blue ocean opening up at the other end. This end had a camouflaged door that opened up… into nothing. The hangar bay doors on the side of the rock spire opened hundreds of feet over the South Seas of Pandaria, and inside were a heavily modified goblin shredder and a fixed-wing aircraft painted to look like a direhorn. Odder still was the contrast between beautiful coral reef scene and workbenches that were usually strewn with various half-finished engineering projects and a vast array of scattered tools. The oddest bit yet was curled up into a ball at the feet of two human women – a corgi made of molten magma!
Both Celeste McCullough and Natasha Ebonlocke were focused on paper in front of them. Celeste was drawing up plans to remove a robot from a cave. Nat had her diary, inkwell of purple ink, and cherrywood quill case in front of her. As Celeste’s infamous “focus face” had her riveted to her plans, barely registering anything else around her, Nat sank into her writing. She withdrew her ravenfeather quill from its case, unstoppered her inkwell of purple ink, dipped her quill in, and began to write.
Dear diary,
Gosh, this week has been all over the place! From the south seas to northwest Kalimdor to the island nation of Kul Tiras to Stormwind City, this week has seen a lot of action! Granted, Stormwind is usually just visiting with friends, but the rest of it has been action-packed!
There’s been a lot going on at home, too! Celeste built me a whole FISH TANK! It’s ENORMOUS! She loaded it up with sand and rocks that she embedded tiny lights in, and spent the weekend while I was at work hand-crafting a metal, realistic-looking CORAL REEF! She basically just built the frame for the tank, which holds like five thousand gallons of water or something, with no glass yet, so I can decorate it! It was SUCH a great surprise! There was sand in the bottom, and that was it so far! The aquarium was large enough for several people to stand in. Celeste said she wanted a real piece of the sea replicated inside, though only the mechanical fish we pulled out of Turtle Bay would be placed in it. She also chose to add fresh water, as salt water would rust the decorations she was making for me to use. Though the idea was to replicate a sea floor, Celeste liked the theme of mechanical fish, so she was welding scrap metal into the shapes of corals colored by whichever colors the metal she used had been painted in. Yellows, greens, reds, blues, the decorations were a veritable kaleidoscope of colors! Inert anemones, corals, tube worms with feathery pseudopods extended to catch imaginary plankton, it’s all so wonderful! I had plenty to choose from! Over the next few days, she said, she would add large rocks and sand for the bottom. Lights embedded in the rocks to make the decorations stand out. When it was all done, it would be so awesome, Celeste said, that it would distract her from her tinkering! She already has plans to work with Penny on creation a mechanical octopus for Dordy, and a hermit crab too! Any critter we want to add to the aquarium! When I get done decorating, she will add the glass panels and then use the MUTT to pump the water in. The aquarium starts at floor level and reached the painted ceiling. Celeste so grinning SO hard when she surprised me with it! And for good reason, too! This is an amazing bit of work! I LOVE it!
We were also discussing a shipwreck somewhere in the tank, though Celeste said she’d have a hard time with making the scale of the wreck match the tank. She does like the idea of a deep-dive helmet sitting in the bottom, though, maybe with an octopus inside in the dark, peering out from within? And maybe some variety to the mechanical fish, too, including some designed to look like mechanical sharks, like maybe even a hammerhead, though that would mean locating and reworking the fish-making robot’s programming. And then also, a treasure chest sitting open at the bottom, under the reefs, in the sand, with lots of gold and gems showing!
Celeste also left all the pieces of the reef and various static sea creatures like anemones on the workbench, which was another surprise – I got to arrange them how I liked! I took a careful, thorough inventory of all the beautiful decorations Celeste had crafted, arranging them on the table in several different ways before finding an arrangement I liked. Exclaiming over how realistic the metal coral and other sea life looks, I began to set up an arrangement. Off to the left, near the end, a mound of coral arose, different colored bits and oddments sticking out in a natural-looking arrangement. The side near the end has a not-quite-vertical slope, and the side of the mound sloping to the center is much less steep, complete with a couple of uneven terraces along the way. SI made a smaller mound to the right, with the sand in between the two only barely visible from the amount of coral and light-up rocks and sea anemones among them. The octopus peers out from within the darkness of the deep-dive helmet, with five of its eight arms visible as they curl out from under the bottom, and the hermit crab skitters across the front. I left a bit of sand visible along the tank, but not much, and what is visible mostly has different forms of plant or animal sea life growing out to hover over it, crawling through it, or growing up out of it. This is just my initial attempt at setting up the decorations and the fake reefs and stuff. I’m sure we might come up with more ideas as we go along! Either way, this tank is going to be AMAZING when it’s ready!
Monday, though, was an altogether different scene. I went with a whole huge crowd of the Voyagers to Cari’s archaeology expedition, this time to investigate a lead she had on Kalanaar, the Kaldorei city we’re all increasingly convinced exists on another world! This time we ended up on one of the South Seas islands that’s a complete desert, with one massive mountain rising right in the center. It’s called Zul Athriss, and boy, was it HOT there! With no shade and a day devoid of wind, it was sweltering! Even though we held off until the evening, when the sun was heading down and it began to get cooler, it was still an oven on that giant sand dune!
Not that it was devoid of life… far from it! Animated cacti walked the sandy desert, their needles sticking out in every direction, though thankfully, they were not aggressive! What WAS aggressive was that species of lasher! Those walking plants look a lot like the lashers from like Gorgrond or something, except they hunt in packs. We had a mule-drawn wagon with a steam shovel Cari said we’d need for the sand, and this young elf girl named Fairiel, nicknamed Fairy, was driving. The mule was super stubborn, though. It sure took a lot sometimes to make him go! So that made it slow moving through the dunes. We did, blessedly, have a stone road to travel on, so the wagon never got stuck. But it also got us stuck on the side of the mountain as we spiraled up it when the lasher pack struck!
Most charged the wagon, trying to climb it and get to Cari and Fairy, who were riding, but one of them went for ME! I never use my fel magics in groups like these where I will alarm people, so I reverted to frost, peppering the lasher up nicely with a flurry of ice shards. No good! It threw a vine around my ankles and yanked me down flat on my face, and wouldn’t let go! Then, when the others swarmed the wagons, they trampled me! That hurt! I eventually got myself free of the vine around my ankles, though it left cuts. I also took another vine whip across the face! That stung so much! But, in the end, we outnumbered the lashers, and smashed them all. The mule helped – it seemed he was hungry! He ATE a couple of them!
Once the fight was over, this priest in the Voyagers, a sweet young human woman named Mae, healed us up, and we drove onward, still spiraling up the mountain. Then bad luck struck again! SNAP! The right rear wheel broke in a pothole in the road! There was this huge human warrior guy named Mahky, and another Dark Iron Dwarf named Benny, and they went to go hold up the wagon. I offered my engineering services, and Cari accepted, so I went to go and take the broken wheel off and put the spare on. It only took a few minutes! Celeste would have been so proud of me! Hehe. Once we got the wheel on, we continued onward.
The next obstacle was a huge pile of rubble in the middle of the road. That one had to be cleared, so we got the steam shovel working. There were other mechanical experts in the group, and they got the steam shovel working. I went to the boiler on the steam shovel to heat the water up with fire magics, as did Cari, and another mage guy named Jayce. Together, we managed to get that water boiling good and proper, and the steam shovel activated! They got the rubble cleared in no time!
But, while we were all working on that, a GHOST game! It was a Kaldorei male, giving us this urgent look and pointing at an inscription on what seemed to be a stone wall. Some went to go look, and the inscription was basically something cursing a Kaldorei woman named Torisandre for some reason. GOSH! It looked like we’d found an ancient Kaldorei city, and the rubble was blocking the entry! It got really cold all of a sudden as he was looking at us! But he disappeared quickly! Passing under an archway afterward, we entered into what must have been a magnificent square in its time. A sand-filled fountain stood at the center. Thick pillars still stand supporting mighty edifices: grand structures that seem to have done a good job of sheltering this square from the desert winds. Three well-preserved statues of Kaldorei still stand proud: two males and one female. And just one final flight of stairs separated those of us in the expedition from the tower at the top of the mountain. It suddenly got cold again! The ghost Kaldorei guy was again hovering, watching, this time by one of the male statues. Though, as before, we faded as we approached.
I went over to the statue he was standing by; it looked JUST like him! This statue was still in SUCH good shape! The plate said, "Caynrus, the Architect of Athriss; Proof that even a lowborne can rise above their station within our glorious Empire! We honor a true Kaldorei; He who found a few scorched, forgotten Zandali stones and forged a city that will be as eternal as the beauty of our gracious and humble Queen Azshara.”
Others were reading other brass plates as well. The other male was a renowned cartographer, apparently, and was credited with being the “first to open the gateway to the heavens.” That must mean, if Kalanaar really exists, he was the one to first discover the way to travel the world they founded it on! That’s so exciting! The Kaldorei female’s statue had been vandalized, and it seemed to be Torisandre as well, though I don’t know what she had to do with this group, or why she was so hated.
By this point, the sun had gone down, and the ruins were now all lit up with ancient Kaldorei wisps! That and the clear skies of the desert clearly showing thousands of brilliant stars against a velvet background made it all so beautiful! The temperature dropped quickly, as it usually does in deserts, and we started a few perimeter fires around what was to be established as a base camp for excavation. Cari opened portals to and from the Discovery, the Voyager ship devoted to archaeology, and we settled in before I had to get back to Celeste.
So many new questions now! Like, why are there all these wisps about, yet the ghost of the city’s builder, Caynrus, still keeps his Kaldorei form? Why was this Torisandre so hated? Did this other Kaldorei guy REALLY find a way to make a portal to another planet? I can’t wait to see what the Voyagers find out!
Then Tuesday was DEATHROLLS! It was a small group this time, just Grim and Sparkles and I, as most others were pretty busy already. Mags was going to come, but she got held up. Doh! She always makes the games even more hilarious! Also, we were going to play at that bar on the beach on that island just off the west coast of Stormsong Valley, but when we got there, there were NAGA all over the place! Others seemed to have the situation well in hand, however, so we just went back across the valley to Boralus and played at an old favorite venue, Pinky’s Groggery, the open-air tavern in Upton Borough there.
It was a SUPER hilarious game! It started off with Sparkles drawing a number of Truths, and Grim and I asking her questions about what the heck she’s talking about as far as suddenly being… a MOTHER?! First thing she said was, “NO, I didn’t STEAL him!” HA! Apparently lots of Voyagers have asked her that! So it seems that the kid’s name is… Brenadict? Odd name, but that’s fine! It seems he was an orphan or something, growing up in Waylight Harbor not too far east of Gilneas, where the Voyagers call dock and home. Sparkles said lots and lots of really spooky things suddenly started happening in Waylight one day recently, and the bartender that Bren had been growing up with was suddenly killed, before the dust from all that settled! Sparkles, of all people, took him in, saying she’s really good with kids (?!?!) and he can live in her workshop until she and Darlah – the one she calls “Broadsides” – get done building a room for him in her house. She also says he’s picking up engineering quickly, so that’s cool! Then Grim – nicknamed “Mountain” by Sparkles – ended up rolling a one and choosing Dare, so Sparkles fed him a spoonful of some kinda crystalline white substance on a spoon. I thought he was getting the salt Dare like I got last week at Booty Bay, but it turns out it was some sort of taste bud-altering powder that Sparkles invented. Sugar at first, but then it turns sour, and then sour-tasting stuff would taste sweet to Grim for a while until the effects faded off! Grim was making the FUNNIEST faces! Then, while we were at the table, we saw TONS of people go into Dock One Exports, the store across the way, so Sparkles Dared me to go over and ask them how they liked my dress… In Dwarven! One of them spoke Dwarven, translating for the others. They thought it was the most random thing ever, having someone come up to them and knocking on the door to the party they were having, just to ask, in a foreign language no less, what they thought of her dress! HA! It was so embarrassing! Then I got Sparkles back, having her scream odd words at the top of her lungs where they could hear her, out of nowhere. She had to yell, “FIZZ! CHEEK! OAK! SPROCKET! BOAR! UPSIDE! NICKEL!” at the top of her lungs, which caused a couple of them to poke their heads out of their doors and look across the way at us. Hehe! Then there was a Truth about how many people in there Sparkles thought were hot, and she said that all three people at the door were hot, both genders, even. Grim spoke up as well, saying he didn’t see any he liked, but he did hear people talking about a girl getting her… well, upper unmentionables… pierced… GOSH! I had heard it to, but I wasn’t going to SAY anything about it! Then Grim got another Dare, and, before I could even tell him what his Dare was, Sparkles started yelling at the top of her lungs like, “I AM NOT GETTING MINE PIERCED!” GOSH! They came out to look across the way at us for a moment again, and I was blushing so hard! The Dare there was a Dare where I Dared Grim to throw Sparkles as far out into the water of the channel that passes by Pinky’s as he could. Grim being so incredibly strong, and Sparkles weighing next to nothing, she sure got some great altitude and distance! She was so far out in the water, we had to yell again for her to be able to hear us! She was okay though, and she enjoyed it! Then there was a bit where Grim and Sparkles, between the Deathrolls and the Truth or Dare rolls out of twenty afterward, both rolled a one! So, I Dared them to do the bit where you shoot an apple off the top of someone’s head, except with a twist! Sparkles had activated the Jovial Explosive Freedom Fighter, the six-foot-tall fighting robot she’d used on previous Whitewind Company and Voyager missions, so I Dared her to get up on Grim’s shoulders and sit there while the J.E.F.F. hurls one of my Zarshal turnips at her head to try and knock her off Grim! It worked, too! The targeting sensors on the J.E.F.F. are so finely tuned that Sparkles took the turnip squarely in the center of her forehead, knocking her right off of Grim and onto her back behind him from a distance of maybe twenty yards! HA! Then there was a Truth in which Grim asked Sparkles if the pink was her natural hair color, and she said no, it was black, and Grim was like, yeah, mine too, so I was like, we should totally die Grimmie’s hair pink to match! Hehe. Another Dare I really wanted to do was to have Sparkles and Grim go and put on a show for the partying folks across the way, with Grim chasing Sparkles around the square, like, “COME BACK HERE YOU LITTLE—“ and Sparkles just fleeing and doing that mad, maniacal cackle she does, but I figured we’d been disruptive of their party enough and didn’t do it. Then there was a Truth where Grim, having previously had the option of joining the huge Voyagers guild or Nah and I in the little Whitewind Company – basically frequency of active missions versus being with two people he’s known for forever but only do a couple of things per week, and he revealed his decision! He wants to be a WHITEWIND COMPANY MEMBER! So he’s going to be joining us as soon as Nah returns from Northrend! Might get that done next week! YAY! All in all, it was a super fun and hilarious game of Deathrolls, especially with all those partygoers noisily getting drunk across the street! It was an awesome night! WOO!
Nat smiled broadly, placing her ravenfeather quill into her inkwell of purple ink for more ink, but then leaving it there as she stretched and flexed her hands a little. She looked over at Celeste, who was still completely in the zone and not looking up. Detailed plans involving scrawled words, some of which were scratched out and replaced with different ideas, were placed next to diagrams of different actions being performed. Doodles were there too, doodles of a cartoony robot tending to fish in an enclosure, accompanied by what looked like a fiery dog wearing a wide-brimmed fishing hat and coveralls holding a fishing rod with a line in the water. Nat giggled at the doodle, causing Dordy to perk his head up and cant it to one side from where he lay on the floor at their feet under the workbench. Nat grinned, reaching under the table to give him a few pats on the head before sitting up straight and returning to her diary. Dordy wagged his tail at the patting, then lay his head back down on his paws for a bit more of a snooze. Celeste caught none of this, seemingly, as she was completely dialed in on the work she was so very focused on. Nat smiled lovingly at her and Dordy, then reached for her quill and went back to her own work.
The night after that, last night, was the Wednesday evening Whitewind Company mission! And who else should hire us but… Maya Maxwell, our dear old Voyager friend! What a twist! She was still dealing with the aftermath of the Waylight stuff, so she hired us to go after a necromancer that was under suspicion of having caused the spooky things there. He’d fled to Kalimdor, and was last sighted in the Felwood, so Maya dispatched Sparkles and Mairy there, plus hired out the Whitewind Company and other allies. So it was Sparkles, Mairy, myself, and Zarshal, who came in a little late. Grim wanted to come, but he had things at home to take care of, and Nah was still in Northrend, so yeah, it was just the four of us. We met in Felwood, just inside the tunnel between there and the Moonglade, and began trekking down the road as it wound south, looking for signs of the necromancer or his work.
The first thing we encountered had nothing to do with him at all – there were ORCS there! Orc peons, two of them, with a goblin in a shredder, tearing up trees. That made us angry! The Felwood may be pretty messed up, but, just as the druids proved with the Plaguelands, it might still be healed someday, so the orcs totally shouldn’t be cutting it all down! We engaged the orcs without a word of warning, with Mairy sneaking around to the far side and the four of us hitting them from both directions. They were taken completely by surprised! Mairy and Sparkles climbed up the goblin shredder, smashed the green glass dome encasing the goblin, and grabbed him and threw him out! Sparkles took over operation of the goblin shredder, and Mairy, Zarshal, my wrathguard Mek-barash, and a summoned Shivarra minion took care of the two peons in short order. It was a mess left on the road, but better than they make a desert out of the Felwood!
We proceeded south some more, with Mairy and I riding on the goblin shredder’s shoulders, and Zarshal striding alongside us, sniffing around with his worgen nose for scents that might help us. All we could smell, though, was the putrid sulfur smells of a forest too heavily tainted with fel corruption, so it wasn’t much good. But then, right there on the side of the road, we found a very clear sign of necromancy: a pile of discarded body parts, all in a heap! I slid off of the shredder (and, wouldn’t you know it, faceplanted in the process… oof!) to go do a scrying spell on the remains. They smelled SO bad, but I was able to detect a bit of death magic lingering on them, as though they had been animated before, but the spell had been removed. Clear signs of the necromancer! Then Mairy and Zarshal were inspecting tracks they’d found leading off the road to the right and up a dirt path up the hill. Zarshal used his experience as a tenured scout to track the signs up the path. We followed, finding ourselves passing through two hills and into an enclosure where several old ruined Kaldorei buildings had been defaced with fel runes and colored a blood red. They had been defaced by the Legion many years before, and were still a mess! Worse, there seemed to be infected beasts there, and three of them surrounded us to attack us! Two wolves, and a big bear! The beasts were outnumbered and we were able to dispatch them easily enough, but the big bear broke the goblin shredder and crushed it since Sparkles was using its sawblade to fight, so that was that for the shredder. But still, we made short work of the zombie critters!
Then it got even worse! There, in the far ruin, we saw a hooded figure, bent low over a huge heap of something on the ground. He seemed to be casting a spell on it!
I used my Eye of Kilrogg spell to go and check things out, careful to stay in the branches overhead to avoid being spotted. What I saw churned my stomach… it was an enormous amalgamation of old body parts, sewn together to make a massive dead behemoth! The abomination was going to be animated by the necromancer if he wasn’t stopped! I dismissed the Eye and told the others what I’d seen. They wasted no time charging into combat!
Capturing the necromancer (Maya wanted him taken alive for questioning about the Waylight incident) was easy enough. Between Mairy and my Shivarra locking up all four of his limbs and Mek-barash stomping on his head while he was down and Sparkles and Zarshal taking their own shots at him, he went down like a sack of potatoes. Plus, he was concentrating on his spell even while being attacked, so he didn’t fight back against us at all.
It wasn’t quite so easy as all that, though…
The necromancer’s gambit paid off! He finished his spell, and the abomination rose to its feet, screaming about fresh meat! The thing stank, and his belly was still opened and exposed, and he had a third arm coming out of his back with a grappling hook on it. It was the grossest thing EVER!
Mairy snatched the necromancer and took off next, just leaving us there! She said the mission was to arrest the necromancer and take him to Maya, and that we didn’t need to fight the big thing, but none of the rest of us wanted to let it loose on other living things, so we stayed to fight it while Mairy got the necromancer outta there.
I had Mek-barash and my Shivarra engage the thing while Sparkles mounted up on its shoulders, like she had the shredder when she wanted to break the glass dome and get the goblin outta there. Zarshal was stabbing and jabbing at it with his spear. The abomination was taking every hit, though, and not seeming to feel pain at all. That wasn’t good! Eventually, all the hits it was taking were starting to stack up, and I was ordering Mek-barash to cut through all the stitches holding different parts together. That helped a lot! The thing literally fell apart at the seems! Sparkles and Zarshal finished the thing off. The day was won! No abominations will be terrorizing what life remains in Felwood, nor going off to Timbermaw Hold in the north to attack fur bolgs, nor south to Ashenvale to attack Kaldorei. We’d done it! WOO!
After that was the search for Mairy. We didn’t have to look long; I started yelling her name out at the top of my lungs, and she heard me! We just had to follow the sound of her voice south! We found her there sitting on a boulder next to the dazed necromancer, who was still looking bruised and battered and beaten and dirty. When we caught up to her, she threw the necromancer, still looking dazed from Mek-barash stomping on his head, over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, showing no more difficulty with the fully-grown human than she does when she has Sparkles unconscious and over her shoulder. She and Sparkles argued quite a bit going back up the road, Sparkles making digs at her talk of honor versus cowardice, and Mairy stubbornly maintaining that she’d done the job she was paid to do, and that the rest should have come with her and left the abomination to deal with any other orcs in the wood. By the time we got back to the entrance of Timbermaw Hold, where Sparkles said the exchange of gold pay for everyone would be made for the necromancer, they were looking daggers at each other! I tried to pretend I didn’t hear any of it, because it was so awkward to be there for all that! And then this Mechagnome that Sparkles called “Modum,” which sounds Dwarvish? came along on a winch from a flying machine with four massive gold pouches, throwing the pouches down on the group and sending us all scattering to avoid being hit! GOSH! But the pay was awesome! Modum loaded up the necromancer on the winch and ascended into the flying machine again, taking off. Mairy made a hasty exit after that, and so did Zarshal and Sparkles. I sure hope those two aren’t going to stay mad at each other. They’re great companions, and hilarious together usually! I’m sure, though, as much respect as they’ve always had for each other, that things will be just fine! And anyway, we’d gotten the necromancer for Maya, so now she could hopefully get the information she needs to stop the madness in Waylight!
And now, this morning, Celeste is making plans to get that robot fish-maker out of the underwater cave in Turtle Bay. It shouldn’t be too hard; the thing isn’t armed and doesn’t appear to be programmed to fight. But still, a plan in case it does prove to be somehow dangerous is wise, so Celeste is working on that right now. Then, maybe this coming week, we’ll go in there and get the little guy out and see if we can’t reprogram him to work a fish farm for us, and maybe craft sport fish that’ll put up epic fights for future fishing tournaments for Pandaren and other visiting anglers! It’s gonna be so cool, and so much fun to do! I can’t wait! YAY!
Nat smiled broadly again, tapping off the excess ink from her quill and dreaming of epic angling experiences and suppressing giggles at the thoughts of the exaggerated stories Celeste would tell all their friends of their encounters as she replaced her quill in its cherrywood quill case. She capped her inkwell as she thought of the emperor salmon they might catch by mistake, and how they’d provide a good meal after a long day of fishing as a result. All in all, it promised to be a lot of fun, and Nat was quite ready for it all, especially with Celeste and Dordy there to make the experience a hundred times more enjoyable!
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