This a parody (satire, whatever, I'm too uncultured to know the difference between the two), so...
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Shh, I'm Trying to Think Here [Warcraft][Others][SI]
- Thread starter d.fish
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Prologue: The King in the North
d.fish
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This a parody (satire, whatever, I'm too uncultured to know the difference between the two), so anything you recognize is probably intentional (maybe?). This a comedy (I think), so don't take it all that seriously, because it won't take itself very seriously unless it's trying to make you loose your balance (or pretending to be smarter than it really is). I think this keeps developing in a worse and worse direction (crack crack crack), but I can't seem to stop... help me out (send help. pls.)?
It's warcraft x crossovers, btw with SI sprinkled on top, but not in the prologue... because the prologue is just for setting the tone, sort of? Maybe just to get you in the mood. I need help on this, or maybe I just need help. Hm. Never thought of it that way.
(SEND HALP. Can't finish all this crack on my own.)
Note 2: It is suggested that you skip the Prologue if you want to get to the actual story.
~~~
King and Queen Menethil the Second of First Lordaeron Castle, were proud to say that they were perfectly happy, thank you very much. They were the first people you'd expect to be hosting anything group related or celebratory, because they enjoyed and were obligated to leadership, which in many cases turned out to be pandering.
King Menethil was the King of a kingdom in the north called Lordaeron, which was the breadbasket of the continent. He was an infirm, aging man with hardly any blonde hair remaining due to his age, although he did have a magnificent mustache belying his wisdom. Queen Menethil was thin and blonde and had nearly twice as less muscles as the next woman, which came easily since she was stranded and sick in bed since a complication midst her second pregnancy. The Menethils had a small daughter called Calia and in their opinion there was no finer girl anywhere.
The Menethils had everything they wanted, but they also had a new bundle of joy arriving, and their greatest excitement was to announce it to their kingdom. They didn't think they could bear it any longer to keep their little Arthas a secret, but the last few tumultuous years have left the political situation unstable. Why, anything could happen, from the unkindly Alterac rebels in the mountains rising up in arms to strange, old men arriving at their doorsteps to tell them that their children were to be wizards, to go with the far older man to this castle, where they will have sweets and learn magic. The Menethils shuddered to think what the war exhausted populace of the rival powers in the dissident nations of Gilneas, Stromgarde, and Quel'Thalas would say if he began to train a new heir for the throne while holding the reins to the Continental Alliance. It seemed like any day now that the nations would be set off and do something that everyone would regret shortly afterwards.
When King and Queen Menethil woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. King Menethil hummed as he picked out his most boring crown for work, and Queen Menethil gossiped away happily with the courtiers as she snuggled a giggling Calia into her high chair.
None of them noticed a large, ragged and disease-infested raven flutter past the window.
At half past eight, King Menethil picked up his scepter, pecked Queen Menethil on the cheek, and tried to kiss Calia good-bye but missed, because Calia was too shy for such nonsense and quickly hid away behind the legs of a young courtier by the name of Daval Prestor.
"Little lass," chortled King Menethil as he stepped out of the dining room—they hardly ever used the actual dining hall for family breakfasts with only the occasional guest after all. He got into his wagon and rode off towards the church for the ceremonies he usually presided over.
It was on the corner of the first street into the noble's quarter that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar — a raven reading a map. For a second, King Menethil didn't realize what he had seen—then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a raven standing on the corner of his castle wall, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. King Menethil blinked and stared at the raven. It stared back. As King Menethil around the corner and up the road, he watched the raven in the reflection of a noble's window. It was now mouthing the word, "Nevermore"— no, was just cawing; ravens couldn't talk or make signs. King Menethil gave himself a little shake and put the raven out of his mind. As he rode toward divine quarters he thought of nothing except an upcoming celebration of the Alliance he was hoping to plan for hosting today.
But on the edge of the Nob's quarters, parties were driven out of his mind by something else. As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam caused by this broken axle or that fallen cargo, he couldn't help noticing that there was a very strangely dressed person about. A person in a cloak of raven feathers. King Menethil couldn't bear people who dressed in unsanitary clothes—the getups you saw on refugees from Azeroth! He supposed this was just one weirdo. He drummed his fingers on the side of his car and his eyes fell on the weirdo standing quite close by, yelling to the populace of the end times and waving around a rather nicely crafted raven-headed staff in a threatening manner. This was causing quite the scene. King Menethil was enraged to see that a couple of his citizens were being harassed by the man; why, that man had to be older than he was, besides! The nerve of him! But then it struck King Menethil that this was probably some silly stunt —this was probably the work of one of the dissident states…yes, that would be it. Paying them mind in a reactionary way would only be falling into their trap. The traffic moved on and a few minutes later, King Menethil arrived in the Church of the Holy Light, his mind back on party games and sultry entertainers.
King Menethil always sat with his back against his iron throne of melted orcish weapons. If he hadn't, he might have found it harder to concentrate on reading holy scriptures that morning. He didn't see the ravens swooping past in broad daylight, though people down in the streets did; they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as raven after raven sped overhead. Most of them had never seen an raven that size even on the battlefield. King Menethil, however, had a perfectly happy, raven-free morning.
By noon, he was in a good mood and he'd forgotten all about the ravens until he passed a group of them next to the baker's. He eyed them angrily as he passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch were whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single person noticing. It was on his way back past them, clutching his royal scepter, that he caught a few words of what they were saying.
"The Menethils, that's right, that's what I heard—"
"—yes, their son, Arthas—"
King Menethil stopped dead. Fear flooded him. He looked back at the whispering ravens as if he wanted to say something to them, but thought better of it.
He rushed his driver back across the city, hurried up to his castle, snapped at his chamberlain not to disturb him, seized his scrying device, and had almost finished activating it to call Dalaran when he changed his mind. He put the crystal ball back down and stroked his mustache, thinking… no, he was being stupid. Menethil wasn't such an unusual name. He was sure there were lots of people called Menethil who had a son called Arthas. Come to think of it, he wasn't even sure his son was called Arthas. Lianne was the one who named him, after all—King Menethil certainly wasn't going senile in his old age. Artie'd just been born. It might have been Arthur. Or Mordred. Or Horus? Brutus? Judas? Whatever the case, there was no point in worrying Antonidas; he always got so upset when he was distracted from his work...
… As the monarch of Lordaeron fell into an uneasy sleep that night, the ravens flocked to his window. They cawed and watched in silence, casting a long shadow over the castle, as if some ill thought metaphor for the raven-themed wizard who caused the last few wars that shook the entire continent. King Terenas Menethil the Second fell asleep with a final, comforting thought that perhaps he was just being overly paranoid, and that the disagreeing powers would not need a flimsy excuse such as his newly born son to split up the once united and cooperating kingdoms. Nothing bad could possibly come from a single child after all, especially one as adorable and kindly as his Arthas. His son, who would be the king of the northern regions... his son, who held the new promise and hope for the kingdom to recover from the devastating wars; yes, Arthas would lead humanity into a new age after he passed on...
… Well, he wasn't exactly wrong, per say.
In truth, nothing like the raven had ever been seen in the northern kingdom. As no more eyes winked and all but the most dutiful guards passed onto the sandman's realm, a swirl of myth and magic swam about the ravens, and they coalesced into the form of a man. This was the raving lunatic who disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived to the capital. Nothing like this man had ever been seen in the capital before this day either.
Oh, certainly, there were the odds and ends of crazies who raved about the end times approaching. They weren't too off, be they insane or simply charlatans, since after all, there were giant dragons swooping about, multiple warbands of orcs and demons and ogres and trolls and all manner of stranger beings roaming the battlefields, and the most powerful nation in the south had not yet started to recover from being shattered by conquest. Yes, these signs pointed to doom and gloom; if not the actual end times, people were depressed enough from all the death and fighting.
But where were we? Ah, yes, as the stark-razing lunatic began to rise to his full height, he stared into his clear reflection in the moon-lit glass windows below. Though his stony expression told no tales with not so much as a quiver at each and every sound in the night, the reflection's eyes twitched and bemoaned a hurting mind.
He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the way his back cracked and his motions stopped abruptly as he got up half-way. It was the sort of unholy pain one got in the spine from having laid down too much for one's life, only to attempt to stand straight and stretch for the first time in years. He was wearing long robes, a brown cloak that swept the ground, adorned with silver armored shoulders lined with raven feathers, and a giant ruby clasp holding it all together on his chest, in the shape of a knife-long beak, and high-healed, leather boots—very stylish and trendy, some ten years ago. His eyes were light, bright and sparkling with power under his dark cowl, and his lips twisted into a disgruntled frown that so many elderly put up when approached with an actual task to complete, as if too used to things going his way. This man's name was Magus Notchrismetzens Garystuspawning Walkingplotdevice or, as he liked to be called, Medivh.
But that was only what he was known as for most of his life, his secrets were never publicized in the open. The man who stood there was but two personas of the person known as Medivh. Unlike most who suffer from multiple personality disorders, Medivh knew exactly what he was doing and what was happening to him... after all, not everyone could reach the peaks of power as he had and still be only as insane as he.
As he stared into his reflection, Medivh's anguished and aggressive whisper echoed through the higher towers of the castle, "We wants it, we needs it. Must destroy the precious. Corrupt it. Compel it. Control it. They protect it from us. Sneaky little humieses. Kindly, gentle, good!"
"No. Not my humieses!" The Medivh in the reflection—the true Medivh who had been so suppressed by the wicked Sargeras within his own body—whimpered.
"Yesss... humieses, good!" Hissed Medivh back at Medivh, "You cheated them, hurt them, lied to them! They know you evil!"
Medivh shook his head, "Humies our friend!"
"You don't have any friends, Medivh," said Medivh harshly, "nobody likes you!"
"I'm not listening... I'm not listening... I'm here to help... I want to help..." Medivh cradled his head and tried to turn away, knowing it would do nothing against the voice in his head, in his heart, and scarred and carved into his lingering soul. "I'm going to help..."
"No one will listening..."
"They wills!"
"They do not know..." Medivh cackled at the torment he inflicted upon Medivh, at Medivh's pain and confusion and at the indecision that weighed down on Medivh's heart. "They will not know of the prophecy..."
"They can. They will... They have to..." Medivh protested, "It is foretold! And it is tradition, like killing giant rats, holding dying loved ones, and the big, bad villain!"
"... but, we is the big, bad villain."
"No! We... we's dead," Medivh whimpered.
Medivh cocked his head to a side curiously and not revealing his intentions completely, "Oh? Are we really? Yet here we are. We trying to change fate. We trying to do."
"We trying to do good!"
A shoe flew up from one of the opened windows in the nobles' quarters, which did not exactly hit Medivh or even the stained-glass window he was dialoguing into, but it did smash a window, caused a cat to howl, and probably landed on a homeless fellow. "Shut it up there, some of us are trying to sleep!"
Medivh turned towards the source of the sound and poked his finger towards the disgruntled noble. The noble was a newt.
"No!" Medivh protested, but it was too late. Another boot was conjured above the newt, squashing it.
"Murderer," Medivh teased.
"Go away!"
"Go away?" Medivh asked mockingly. He strutted about with a wicked grin on his visage, and from a chortle grew his laughter, all the while Medivh began to cry.
"I will... I will change the fate..." Medivh promised. "I will tell them the prophecy. I am the prophet!"
Medivh snorted nonchalantly, "And tell them what prophecy? That the world will end? That the devourer of worlds is coming, that his herald is already here, locked in an icy cage? That the world is older than any of them know? That contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise? That for untold eons, demons walk the world, made it their home, their hell? But in time, they lost their purchase on this reality? That only then was the way made for mortal animals, for humieses? That all that remains of the Old Ones are vestiges, certain magic, certain creatures...? Ha! Tell them! See if they will believe!"
"They will believe! I believes in the them who believes in the prophecy!" Medivh howled back as Medivh ended his spectacle of a rant on a crescendo. His body shivered in the cold as he looked down on the babe who would one day be prophesied to bring unspeakable change to the world. He knew Arthas Menethil would one day flip the human kingdoms upside down, and with it, somehow, bring about the survival of the world. But how? "He is the chosen one! He will believe!"
"You are foolish to believe in good and righteousness, Medivh," Taunted Medivh. "Remember where it got you last time? Wasn't it better to just end this precious world, like the other one you condemned to annihilation...?"
Tears nearly welled in Medivh's cracked, old eyes. "I did not know about Draenor! It was a retcon!"
Medivh hissed, "Silence! You know not of such things! But if you want to influence fate, why not just a nudge here, kill a babe there...? Perhaps things would actually turn out for the better, Medivh?"
"... You are a monster," Concluded Medivh, for there was definitely no way that killing Arthas Menethil while he was just an infant could change the course of history for the better in any way! "Leave now, and never come back!"
"No!"
"Leave now, and never come back!" Medivh repeated to his reflection, as if the mantra were a spell.
Medivh screamed in frustration at Medivh's incessant will to remove Medivh from Medivh's mind and his influence from his actions.
"LEAVE NOW! AND NEVER COME BACK!" Medivh shouted, just before dodging another boot that flew up from a different noble house (the Prestors, a minor house of no note, that would probably disappear into the annals of history without causing any change).
Medivh was silent. There was no Medivh, only Medivh.
"We told him to go away... and away he goes, Arthas!" Medivh whispered down at the now-clear glass window. "Medivh is free! Medivh will watch over Arthas, over the humies, over the kingdoms. Medivh will tell when time comes, and you will believe... Medivh will save precious, precious world from evil..."
A breeze ruffled the neat hedges within the gardens of the Castle Lordaeron, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect a titanic battle of wills between good and evil to happen. Arthas Menethil rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on a disease-covered raven's feather beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was the prince, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by the start of celebrations of his birth that King Menethil had ordered so hastily just hours previous, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being hugged and cuddled by his sister Calia.. He couldn't know that at this very moment, a creepy, old man older than his father and planning to take him from his home in a dozen years in the future was watching him at this very moment in secret behind many layers of magic and secrecy, whispering in hush, "To Arthas Menethil — the King in the North!"
…
… Did you think that was the protagonist of this story? Did you think this was about crazed, old, and wrinkly Medivh? Or perhaps you thought this was all about the future of Arthas. Perhaps you even thought this was about one of the other people mentioned in this prologue already.
But no, this is not.
For you see, they aren't all that important at all. After all, I'm the important one, and you're here to read about me, even if you didn't know it yet. You see, this is the story of a self insert. Yes, it's that type of story, but you've gone too far to escape now, so read on...
It's warcraft x crossovers, btw with SI sprinkled on top, but not in the prologue... because the prologue is just for setting the tone, sort of? Maybe just to get you in the mood. I need help on this, or maybe I just need help. Hm. Never thought of it that way.
(SEND HALP. Can't finish all this crack on my own.)
Note 2: It is suggested that you skip the Prologue if you want to get to the actual story.
~~~
Prologue
King and Queen Menethil the Second of First Lordaeron Castle, were proud to say that they were perfectly happy, thank you very much. They were the first people you'd expect to be hosting anything group related or celebratory, because they enjoyed and were obligated to leadership, which in many cases turned out to be pandering.
King Menethil was the King of a kingdom in the north called Lordaeron, which was the breadbasket of the continent. He was an infirm, aging man with hardly any blonde hair remaining due to his age, although he did have a magnificent mustache belying his wisdom. Queen Menethil was thin and blonde and had nearly twice as less muscles as the next woman, which came easily since she was stranded and sick in bed since a complication midst her second pregnancy. The Menethils had a small daughter called Calia and in their opinion there was no finer girl anywhere.
The Menethils had everything they wanted, but they also had a new bundle of joy arriving, and their greatest excitement was to announce it to their kingdom. They didn't think they could bear it any longer to keep their little Arthas a secret, but the last few tumultuous years have left the political situation unstable. Why, anything could happen, from the unkindly Alterac rebels in the mountains rising up in arms to strange, old men arriving at their doorsteps to tell them that their children were to be wizards, to go with the far older man to this castle, where they will have sweets and learn magic. The Menethils shuddered to think what the war exhausted populace of the rival powers in the dissident nations of Gilneas, Stromgarde, and Quel'Thalas would say if he began to train a new heir for the throne while holding the reins to the Continental Alliance. It seemed like any day now that the nations would be set off and do something that everyone would regret shortly afterwards.
When King and Queen Menethil woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. King Menethil hummed as he picked out his most boring crown for work, and Queen Menethil gossiped away happily with the courtiers as she snuggled a giggling Calia into her high chair.
None of them noticed a large, ragged and disease-infested raven flutter past the window.
At half past eight, King Menethil picked up his scepter, pecked Queen Menethil on the cheek, and tried to kiss Calia good-bye but missed, because Calia was too shy for such nonsense and quickly hid away behind the legs of a young courtier by the name of Daval Prestor.
"Little lass," chortled King Menethil as he stepped out of the dining room—they hardly ever used the actual dining hall for family breakfasts with only the occasional guest after all. He got into his wagon and rode off towards the church for the ceremonies he usually presided over.
It was on the corner of the first street into the noble's quarter that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar — a raven reading a map. For a second, King Menethil didn't realize what he had seen—then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a raven standing on the corner of his castle wall, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. King Menethil blinked and stared at the raven. It stared back. As King Menethil around the corner and up the road, he watched the raven in the reflection of a noble's window. It was now mouthing the word, "Nevermore"— no, was just cawing; ravens couldn't talk or make signs. King Menethil gave himself a little shake and put the raven out of his mind. As he rode toward divine quarters he thought of nothing except an upcoming celebration of the Alliance he was hoping to plan for hosting today.
But on the edge of the Nob's quarters, parties were driven out of his mind by something else. As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam caused by this broken axle or that fallen cargo, he couldn't help noticing that there was a very strangely dressed person about. A person in a cloak of raven feathers. King Menethil couldn't bear people who dressed in unsanitary clothes—the getups you saw on refugees from Azeroth! He supposed this was just one weirdo. He drummed his fingers on the side of his car and his eyes fell on the weirdo standing quite close by, yelling to the populace of the end times and waving around a rather nicely crafted raven-headed staff in a threatening manner. This was causing quite the scene. King Menethil was enraged to see that a couple of his citizens were being harassed by the man; why, that man had to be older than he was, besides! The nerve of him! But then it struck King Menethil that this was probably some silly stunt —this was probably the work of one of the dissident states…yes, that would be it. Paying them mind in a reactionary way would only be falling into their trap. The traffic moved on and a few minutes later, King Menethil arrived in the Church of the Holy Light, his mind back on party games and sultry entertainers.
King Menethil always sat with his back against his iron throne of melted orcish weapons. If he hadn't, he might have found it harder to concentrate on reading holy scriptures that morning. He didn't see the ravens swooping past in broad daylight, though people down in the streets did; they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as raven after raven sped overhead. Most of them had never seen an raven that size even on the battlefield. King Menethil, however, had a perfectly happy, raven-free morning.
By noon, he was in a good mood and he'd forgotten all about the ravens until he passed a group of them next to the baker's. He eyed them angrily as he passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch were whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single person noticing. It was on his way back past them, clutching his royal scepter, that he caught a few words of what they were saying.
"The Menethils, that's right, that's what I heard—"
"—yes, their son, Arthas—"
King Menethil stopped dead. Fear flooded him. He looked back at the whispering ravens as if he wanted to say something to them, but thought better of it.
He rushed his driver back across the city, hurried up to his castle, snapped at his chamberlain not to disturb him, seized his scrying device, and had almost finished activating it to call Dalaran when he changed his mind. He put the crystal ball back down and stroked his mustache, thinking… no, he was being stupid. Menethil wasn't such an unusual name. He was sure there were lots of people called Menethil who had a son called Arthas. Come to think of it, he wasn't even sure his son was called Arthas. Lianne was the one who named him, after all—King Menethil certainly wasn't going senile in his old age. Artie'd just been born. It might have been Arthur. Or Mordred. Or Horus? Brutus? Judas? Whatever the case, there was no point in worrying Antonidas; he always got so upset when he was distracted from his work...
… As the monarch of Lordaeron fell into an uneasy sleep that night, the ravens flocked to his window. They cawed and watched in silence, casting a long shadow over the castle, as if some ill thought metaphor for the raven-themed wizard who caused the last few wars that shook the entire continent. King Terenas Menethil the Second fell asleep with a final, comforting thought that perhaps he was just being overly paranoid, and that the disagreeing powers would not need a flimsy excuse such as his newly born son to split up the once united and cooperating kingdoms. Nothing bad could possibly come from a single child after all, especially one as adorable and kindly as his Arthas. His son, who would be the king of the northern regions... his son, who held the new promise and hope for the kingdom to recover from the devastating wars; yes, Arthas would lead humanity into a new age after he passed on...
… Well, he wasn't exactly wrong, per say.
In truth, nothing like the raven had ever been seen in the northern kingdom. As no more eyes winked and all but the most dutiful guards passed onto the sandman's realm, a swirl of myth and magic swam about the ravens, and they coalesced into the form of a man. This was the raving lunatic who disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived to the capital. Nothing like this man had ever been seen in the capital before this day either.
Oh, certainly, there were the odds and ends of crazies who raved about the end times approaching. They weren't too off, be they insane or simply charlatans, since after all, there were giant dragons swooping about, multiple warbands of orcs and demons and ogres and trolls and all manner of stranger beings roaming the battlefields, and the most powerful nation in the south had not yet started to recover from being shattered by conquest. Yes, these signs pointed to doom and gloom; if not the actual end times, people were depressed enough from all the death and fighting.
But where were we? Ah, yes, as the stark-razing lunatic began to rise to his full height, he stared into his clear reflection in the moon-lit glass windows below. Though his stony expression told no tales with not so much as a quiver at each and every sound in the night, the reflection's eyes twitched and bemoaned a hurting mind.
He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the way his back cracked and his motions stopped abruptly as he got up half-way. It was the sort of unholy pain one got in the spine from having laid down too much for one's life, only to attempt to stand straight and stretch for the first time in years. He was wearing long robes, a brown cloak that swept the ground, adorned with silver armored shoulders lined with raven feathers, and a giant ruby clasp holding it all together on his chest, in the shape of a knife-long beak, and high-healed, leather boots—very stylish and trendy, some ten years ago. His eyes were light, bright and sparkling with power under his dark cowl, and his lips twisted into a disgruntled frown that so many elderly put up when approached with an actual task to complete, as if too used to things going his way. This man's name was Magus Notchrismetzens Garystuspawning Walkingplotdevice or, as he liked to be called, Medivh.
But that was only what he was known as for most of his life, his secrets were never publicized in the open. The man who stood there was but two personas of the person known as Medivh. Unlike most who suffer from multiple personality disorders, Medivh knew exactly what he was doing and what was happening to him... after all, not everyone could reach the peaks of power as he had and still be only as insane as he.
As he stared into his reflection, Medivh's anguished and aggressive whisper echoed through the higher towers of the castle, "We wants it, we needs it. Must destroy the precious. Corrupt it. Compel it. Control it. They protect it from us. Sneaky little humieses. Kindly, gentle, good!"
"No. Not my humieses!" The Medivh in the reflection—the true Medivh who had been so suppressed by the wicked Sargeras within his own body—whimpered.
"Yesss... humieses, good!" Hissed Medivh back at Medivh, "You cheated them, hurt them, lied to them! They know you evil!"
Medivh shook his head, "Humies our friend!"
"You don't have any friends, Medivh," said Medivh harshly, "nobody likes you!"
"I'm not listening... I'm not listening... I'm here to help... I want to help..." Medivh cradled his head and tried to turn away, knowing it would do nothing against the voice in his head, in his heart, and scarred and carved into his lingering soul. "I'm going to help..."
"No one will listening..."
"They wills!"
"They do not know..." Medivh cackled at the torment he inflicted upon Medivh, at Medivh's pain and confusion and at the indecision that weighed down on Medivh's heart. "They will not know of the prophecy..."
"They can. They will... They have to..." Medivh protested, "It is foretold! And it is tradition, like killing giant rats, holding dying loved ones, and the big, bad villain!"
"... but, we is the big, bad villain."
"No! We... we's dead," Medivh whimpered.
Medivh cocked his head to a side curiously and not revealing his intentions completely, "Oh? Are we really? Yet here we are. We trying to change fate. We trying to do."
"We trying to do good!"
A shoe flew up from one of the opened windows in the nobles' quarters, which did not exactly hit Medivh or even the stained-glass window he was dialoguing into, but it did smash a window, caused a cat to howl, and probably landed on a homeless fellow. "Shut it up there, some of us are trying to sleep!"
Medivh turned towards the source of the sound and poked his finger towards the disgruntled noble. The noble was a newt.
"No!" Medivh protested, but it was too late. Another boot was conjured above the newt, squashing it.
"Murderer," Medivh teased.
"Go away!"
"Go away?" Medivh asked mockingly. He strutted about with a wicked grin on his visage, and from a chortle grew his laughter, all the while Medivh began to cry.
"I will... I will change the fate..." Medivh promised. "I will tell them the prophecy. I am the prophet!"
Medivh snorted nonchalantly, "And tell them what prophecy? That the world will end? That the devourer of worlds is coming, that his herald is already here, locked in an icy cage? That the world is older than any of them know? That contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise? That for untold eons, demons walk the world, made it their home, their hell? But in time, they lost their purchase on this reality? That only then was the way made for mortal animals, for humieses? That all that remains of the Old Ones are vestiges, certain magic, certain creatures...? Ha! Tell them! See if they will believe!"
"They will believe! I believes in the them who believes in the prophecy!" Medivh howled back as Medivh ended his spectacle of a rant on a crescendo. His body shivered in the cold as he looked down on the babe who would one day be prophesied to bring unspeakable change to the world. He knew Arthas Menethil would one day flip the human kingdoms upside down, and with it, somehow, bring about the survival of the world. But how? "He is the chosen one! He will believe!"
"You are foolish to believe in good and righteousness, Medivh," Taunted Medivh. "Remember where it got you last time? Wasn't it better to just end this precious world, like the other one you condemned to annihilation...?"
Tears nearly welled in Medivh's cracked, old eyes. "I did not know about Draenor! It was a retcon!"
Medivh hissed, "Silence! You know not of such things! But if you want to influence fate, why not just a nudge here, kill a babe there...? Perhaps things would actually turn out for the better, Medivh?"
"... You are a monster," Concluded Medivh, for there was definitely no way that killing Arthas Menethil while he was just an infant could change the course of history for the better in any way! "Leave now, and never come back!"
"No!"
"Leave now, and never come back!" Medivh repeated to his reflection, as if the mantra were a spell.
Medivh screamed in frustration at Medivh's incessant will to remove Medivh from Medivh's mind and his influence from his actions.
"LEAVE NOW! AND NEVER COME BACK!" Medivh shouted, just before dodging another boot that flew up from a different noble house (the Prestors, a minor house of no note, that would probably disappear into the annals of history without causing any change).
Medivh was silent. There was no Medivh, only Medivh.
"We told him to go away... and away he goes, Arthas!" Medivh whispered down at the now-clear glass window. "Medivh is free! Medivh will watch over Arthas, over the humies, over the kingdoms. Medivh will tell when time comes, and you will believe... Medivh will save precious, precious world from evil..."
A breeze ruffled the neat hedges within the gardens of the Castle Lordaeron, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect a titanic battle of wills between good and evil to happen. Arthas Menethil rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on a disease-covered raven's feather beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was the prince, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by the start of celebrations of his birth that King Menethil had ordered so hastily just hours previous, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being hugged and cuddled by his sister Calia.. He couldn't know that at this very moment, a creepy, old man older than his father and planning to take him from his home in a dozen years in the future was watching him at this very moment in secret behind many layers of magic and secrecy, whispering in hush, "To Arthas Menethil — the King in the North!"
…
… Did you think that was the protagonist of this story? Did you think this was about crazed, old, and wrinkly Medivh? Or perhaps you thought this was all about the future of Arthas. Perhaps you even thought this was about one of the other people mentioned in this prologue already.
But no, this is not.
For you see, they aren't all that important at all. After all, I'm the important one, and you're here to read about me, even if you didn't know it yet. You see, this is the story of a self insert. Yes, it's that type of story, but you've gone too far to escape now, so read on...
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Self Insert 1
d.fish
Lés Bien
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- Feb 19, 2013
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Chapter 1
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary (as most of us in the modern era do, because of how the internet has induced such insomnia upon us, to stay awake for hours into the dawn), over a many a quaint and curious volume of cat pictures and boobs—I turned to a new series that someone in the comments of one particular picture of a particular set of luscious breasts accompanied by a cute kitten, a series called Wilfred.
You might think it a non sequitur—irrelevant information that I am just throwing at you to confuse you my dear reader—but it is actually relevant (or at least at the time I thought it was relevant). For you see, it is a retelling of traditional and culturally relevant Australian tale, of how Frodo Baggins hallucinates a dog being in a man suit in a dog suit talking to him about all sorts of things, and getting into rather hallucinogenic adventures with Kuzco, Giuseppe Salvatore, Iknik Blackstone Varrick, and a whole cast of colorful characters. It is perhaps one of those great shows that can be enjoyed while on all sorts of substances, such as what I was (probably) sniffing at the time (Magic the Gathering cards tend to bring both that high and the feeling of nostalgia to me, which is far better crack than crack, in my honest opinion).
But you see, there was a whole hypnotic feel to the show. I had only watched one episode, and I felt like I was doing every drug imaginable. Well, maybe I had watched all four seasons—I couldn't rightly remember. And there I sat in my office, with my elbows plopped on my mahogany desk and my eyes staring into the overly bright screen that was the only source of light in the room that doubled as a private office and a study. The show slowly put me into a trance, and while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as if someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. It came in ones and then twos and then three, fours and fives.
They increased, like the beating of my heart. The sound of it like a drum, like in that story, of the murderer who hid the body in his house, yet his conscious and his guilt had led him to hear the beating of the slain heart. It came loud and it came soft, from not just the door but at my sides.
I looked right and I looked left, yet not a single being was in sight. Only darkness, flickering shadows, and nothing more.
Next you might guess that I claimed to remember distinctly the date and time, but all I could tell you was I was high. High like a kite or perhaps, I was merely seeing unseen sights. First came the rapping, then came the pounding, and finally came the clicking. Why were my fingers moving with no comprehension, when I had not commanded them anything? But the clicking did not come from my clicky keys, but from all around me, in the shadows from beyond sight.
I saw then, a spider on my keyboard, bathing in the light like a cat would nap on my laptop. Its red, hourglass shaped marking on its back was so enticing to the eye. Then came another, then came another, until the darkness was but spider. They once said bees and wasps and flies were fierce, but perhaps they have never seen spiders.
Ah, and as the darkness took me, caused by hallucination, the piles of white snow around me, or the shadows that were spiders, or something else within my clear and clearly sane mind, I heard but one voice, "Wow, you died a messed up death."
I peered up in the direction of the light, but it was blinding and I saw nothing. "Who are you," I had to ask.
"Your auditor, I suppose," came the bland reply, as if repeated already a million, million times. It was bored, that much was clear, and clearly as unhelpful as hell could be. "Sort of like your tax agency, or a bunch of lawyers out to get you, you know what I mean?"
I did.
"Just how did you get so high on life? Are you... hey, pay attention," I heard a snap. It snapped at me, and then it slapped.
I shook my head, only to see I had none. In fact, I had no eyes or nose or lips to speak of... to scream with, or the cry from. "What?" I asked, as meek as could be.
"You're one messed up case," It stated. "Now stop wandering off."
"I'll take that as a challenge," I replied. And so I sped, quickly through what I knew was a crossroads, a limbo, a restaurant at the intersections of the highways of the multiverse, and perhaps just a step into the afterlife.
"Hey!"
I did not turn, nor could I look over my shoulders. I had none. But the sights I took in were too amazing to comprehend, but it was sort of like that one comic that I had read, some dozen years prior... it had a special saying for the experience of death. Something, something, death, something, something, changed your life, growing up, or something like that... did I get that right? But if you were curious, I could try to explain what I saw.
First there was a galaxy, or at least I thought it was one. There was a tacky guy there, dressed in bronze, wielding a rainbow studded glove, and then he became a pleb. Wait, no, it was a crossroads for sure this time. They were just the two-laned roads that local roads had in rural America, with stop signs and everything. At the center of it all, I saw a milk shake.
It was delicious, though I think it belonged to someone else.
"You're not supposed to eat that!"
It was peach-flavored.
"Get back here! Someone, help! It's an escaped soul!"
And it was delicious.
"Ow! It bit me! How the bleeping bleeps did it bite me?!"
Come to think of it, auditors taste like lawyers.
And as I flew down the celestial river and into the cosmic highways, dodging the speeding space dust and drunk drivers (they are everywhere, everywhen), I couldn't but help notice a giant, sexy woman picking me up from the upside down ground. Wait, was I in Australia? See, this was exactly what I meant when I said that Wilfred was relevant somehow!
She was pretty in the sense that she had the sort of wild, styled hair iconic to the 80's and 90's, dressed in black silks and leathers, with pearly teeth and porcelain skin, and a most luxurious ankh hanging at her throat. Somehow, I knew her name was Death, and she was boundless, forever, and... what's that word that I'm looking for? Ah, well, it couldn't be some kind of title for her kind, so who cares, right?
Her lips perked in a smirk, but something told me that her expression—while belying amusement of someone up high—was also of one that told me she had just picked up something like a cum-rag and clearly detested with thinly veiled disgust what she was looking at. Hey! That's me, you're looking at!
"You know, I'm usually pretty lenient about this sort of thing," She said after a moment.
And Death had all the rights to be, as she was just as inevitable as human greed. And I said so to her, if only to make her frown, as if this kind of minuet, insignificant, and most importantly human concept were so beneath her... him... it... whatever, Death. "Also, you're hot."
"... thanks."
Then I broke from her grip, and left. After all, she was only Death. I was no wimp, if I died, then I ought to just walk it off. You know, this was the sort of thing people got better from all the time, after all.
"Hey!"
"Smell ya' later!"
So there were a lot of different universes and planes and realities and dimensions and timelines to choose from, yet I could only choose one. After all, I was too drunk and too high to remember where home was, so it was best to find some place where I could sleep death off first before I sought home, right? This was common sense, after all. There were all sorts of colors and patterns swirling around in some cosmic centrifuge as I jumped down the proverbial drain of the Limboic bathtub, and I saw all sorts of maids. There were head maids and big sister maids, little maids and maids in masks, and there was even a combat butler-maid, if that made any sense. Well, a long story short—skipping over all the unnecessary details—I arrived at a nice plane and world, where at least it wasn't a ball of fire or just about to explode with only one child somehow miraculously being shot out into space and the rest of its inhabitant locked in some kind of phantom... area. Definitely not a zone, but I could see how someone might call it that.
As I fell through the skies, a sticky note slapped against my face. It ripped itself from me after a moment, and a paper clip materialized itself on top of it, with freakish googly-eyes and thick, thick eyebrows. Did I mention how thick those eyebrows were? Thick. "I see you are attempting to reincarnate into a body. Tell me, are you a boy... or a girl?"
Are you bleeping serious?
"I'm a girl, obviously. But a penis would definitely change my perspective on the world, you know what I'm saying?" I added truthfully.
"I see that you are a boy, is that correct?"
"No! No! NO!"
"Confirm that you are a boy?"
"NO!"
"I didn't quite get that," The paper clip spoke after a moment of nothingness. The blank stare of its enormous eyes bore into my soul and I shivered in fear at how soulless this artifact creature was. How horrific must its creators be to make such an abomination? "Are you a boy or a girl?"
"... A girl."
Before I could hear its response, I crashed into the earth. Well, what did you expect when you jump from what might well be the top of the Empire State Building into a Petri dish? I couldn't exactly aim where I was going to land, or which body I was going to possess, or "naturally reincarnate into a body that already had a soul" as they say, or some other nonsense. Quite frankly, I was just surprised I wasn't picking up pieces of my soul that were splattered all over this universe.
"I see you chose to splatter your soul all over this universe. Commencing in five... four... three..." The paper clip was obviously evil. But how could I stop it? It was so obstinate and so difficult to use, like the old software that were dressed in dull grays that people hated so much and... Oh. Oooh. Oh...
Well.
Fuck.
My consciousness rushed forwards and...
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary (as most of us in the modern era do, because of how the internet has induced such insomnia upon us, to stay awake for hours into the dawn), over a many a quaint and curious volume of cat pictures and boobs—I turned to a new series that someone in the comments of one particular picture of a particular set of luscious breasts accompanied by a cute kitten, a series called Wilfred.
You might think it a non sequitur—irrelevant information that I am just throwing at you to confuse you my dear reader—but it is actually relevant (or at least at the time I thought it was relevant). For you see, it is a retelling of traditional and culturally relevant Australian tale, of how Frodo Baggins hallucinates a dog being in a man suit in a dog suit talking to him about all sorts of things, and getting into rather hallucinogenic adventures with Kuzco, Giuseppe Salvatore, Iknik Blackstone Varrick, and a whole cast of colorful characters. It is perhaps one of those great shows that can be enjoyed while on all sorts of substances, such as what I was (probably) sniffing at the time (Magic the Gathering cards tend to bring both that high and the feeling of nostalgia to me, which is far better crack than crack, in my honest opinion).
But you see, there was a whole hypnotic feel to the show. I had only watched one episode, and I felt like I was doing every drug imaginable. Well, maybe I had watched all four seasons—I couldn't rightly remember. And there I sat in my office, with my elbows plopped on my mahogany desk and my eyes staring into the overly bright screen that was the only source of light in the room that doubled as a private office and a study. The show slowly put me into a trance, and while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as if someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. It came in ones and then twos and then three, fours and fives.
They increased, like the beating of my heart. The sound of it like a drum, like in that story, of the murderer who hid the body in his house, yet his conscious and his guilt had led him to hear the beating of the slain heart. It came loud and it came soft, from not just the door but at my sides.
I looked right and I looked left, yet not a single being was in sight. Only darkness, flickering shadows, and nothing more.
Next you might guess that I claimed to remember distinctly the date and time, but all I could tell you was I was high. High like a kite or perhaps, I was merely seeing unseen sights. First came the rapping, then came the pounding, and finally came the clicking. Why were my fingers moving with no comprehension, when I had not commanded them anything? But the clicking did not come from my clicky keys, but from all around me, in the shadows from beyond sight.
I saw then, a spider on my keyboard, bathing in the light like a cat would nap on my laptop. Its red, hourglass shaped marking on its back was so enticing to the eye. Then came another, then came another, until the darkness was but spider. They once said bees and wasps and flies were fierce, but perhaps they have never seen spiders.
Ah, and as the darkness took me, caused by hallucination, the piles of white snow around me, or the shadows that were spiders, or something else within my clear and clearly sane mind, I heard but one voice, "Wow, you died a messed up death."
I peered up in the direction of the light, but it was blinding and I saw nothing. "Who are you," I had to ask.
"Your auditor, I suppose," came the bland reply, as if repeated already a million, million times. It was bored, that much was clear, and clearly as unhelpful as hell could be. "Sort of like your tax agency, or a bunch of lawyers out to get you, you know what I mean?"
I did.
"Just how did you get so high on life? Are you... hey, pay attention," I heard a snap. It snapped at me, and then it slapped.
I shook my head, only to see I had none. In fact, I had no eyes or nose or lips to speak of... to scream with, or the cry from. "What?" I asked, as meek as could be.
"You're one messed up case," It stated. "Now stop wandering off."
"I'll take that as a challenge," I replied. And so I sped, quickly through what I knew was a crossroads, a limbo, a restaurant at the intersections of the highways of the multiverse, and perhaps just a step into the afterlife.
"Hey!"
I did not turn, nor could I look over my shoulders. I had none. But the sights I took in were too amazing to comprehend, but it was sort of like that one comic that I had read, some dozen years prior... it had a special saying for the experience of death. Something, something, death, something, something, changed your life, growing up, or something like that... did I get that right? But if you were curious, I could try to explain what I saw.
First there was a galaxy, or at least I thought it was one. There was a tacky guy there, dressed in bronze, wielding a rainbow studded glove, and then he became a pleb. Wait, no, it was a crossroads for sure this time. They were just the two-laned roads that local roads had in rural America, with stop signs and everything. At the center of it all, I saw a milk shake.
It was delicious, though I think it belonged to someone else.
"You're not supposed to eat that!"
It was peach-flavored.
"Get back here! Someone, help! It's an escaped soul!"
And it was delicious.
"Ow! It bit me! How the bleeping bleeps did it bite me?!"
Come to think of it, auditors taste like lawyers.
And as I flew down the celestial river and into the cosmic highways, dodging the speeding space dust and drunk drivers (they are everywhere, everywhen), I couldn't but help notice a giant, sexy woman picking me up from the upside down ground. Wait, was I in Australia? See, this was exactly what I meant when I said that Wilfred was relevant somehow!
She was pretty in the sense that she had the sort of wild, styled hair iconic to the 80's and 90's, dressed in black silks and leathers, with pearly teeth and porcelain skin, and a most luxurious ankh hanging at her throat. Somehow, I knew her name was Death, and she was boundless, forever, and... what's that word that I'm looking for? Ah, well, it couldn't be some kind of title for her kind, so who cares, right?
Her lips perked in a smirk, but something told me that her expression—while belying amusement of someone up high—was also of one that told me she had just picked up something like a cum-rag and clearly detested with thinly veiled disgust what she was looking at. Hey! That's me, you're looking at!
"You know, I'm usually pretty lenient about this sort of thing," She said after a moment.
And Death had all the rights to be, as she was just as inevitable as human greed. And I said so to her, if only to make her frown, as if this kind of minuet, insignificant, and most importantly human concept were so beneath her... him... it... whatever, Death. "Also, you're hot."
"... thanks."
Then I broke from her grip, and left. After all, she was only Death. I was no wimp, if I died, then I ought to just walk it off. You know, this was the sort of thing people got better from all the time, after all.
"Hey!"
"Smell ya' later!"
So there were a lot of different universes and planes and realities and dimensions and timelines to choose from, yet I could only choose one. After all, I was too drunk and too high to remember where home was, so it was best to find some place where I could sleep death off first before I sought home, right? This was common sense, after all. There were all sorts of colors and patterns swirling around in some cosmic centrifuge as I jumped down the proverbial drain of the Limboic bathtub, and I saw all sorts of maids. There were head maids and big sister maids, little maids and maids in masks, and there was even a combat butler-maid, if that made any sense. Well, a long story short—skipping over all the unnecessary details—I arrived at a nice plane and world, where at least it wasn't a ball of fire or just about to explode with only one child somehow miraculously being shot out into space and the rest of its inhabitant locked in some kind of phantom... area. Definitely not a zone, but I could see how someone might call it that.
As I fell through the skies, a sticky note slapped against my face. It ripped itself from me after a moment, and a paper clip materialized itself on top of it, with freakish googly-eyes and thick, thick eyebrows. Did I mention how thick those eyebrows were? Thick. "I see you are attempting to reincarnate into a body. Tell me, are you a boy... or a girl?"
Are you bleeping serious?
"I'm a girl, obviously. But a penis would definitely change my perspective on the world, you know what I'm saying?" I added truthfully.
"I see that you are a boy, is that correct?"
"No! No! NO!"
"Confirm that you are a boy?"
"NO!"
"I didn't quite get that," The paper clip spoke after a moment of nothingness. The blank stare of its enormous eyes bore into my soul and I shivered in fear at how soulless this artifact creature was. How horrific must its creators be to make such an abomination? "Are you a boy or a girl?"
"... A girl."
Before I could hear its response, I crashed into the earth. Well, what did you expect when you jump from what might well be the top of the Empire State Building into a Petri dish? I couldn't exactly aim where I was going to land, or which body I was going to possess, or "naturally reincarnate into a body that already had a soul" as they say, or some other nonsense. Quite frankly, I was just surprised I wasn't picking up pieces of my soul that were splattered all over this universe.
"I see you chose to splatter your soul all over this universe. Commencing in five... four... three..." The paper clip was obviously evil. But how could I stop it? It was so obstinate and so difficult to use, like the old software that were dressed in dull grays that people hated so much and... Oh. Oooh. Oh...
Well.
Fuck.
My consciousness rushed forwards and...
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Chapter 2
d.fish
Lés Bien
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2013
- Messages
- 2,913
- Likes received
- 245,961
Chapter 2
I have always felt a kinship to water. Perhaps it is because, for the last few years (or days, weeks, months—I can't be quite sure of the passage of time just yet), I have had most of my soul submerged in water. It is a funny thing to splatter one's soul all over a world, since so much of the Earth-like world is water. Most of this eventually coalesces in the center of the world, in a whirlpool of sorts, so massive it could devour a whole Europe if given the opportunity. But all of this water—be it in vapors or in ice floating up north, or in the water within this magical maelstrom of a whirlpool to nowhere—have no consciousness. I cannot move that which is simply a part of nature, without an interface for my will to be exerted.
That beings me to the one splatter that did get on a person's head—a twelve year old girl's head. It did occur to me that in any other circumstance, what happened to me was like a space whale ejaculating its space whale space semen all over a human populace to further its goals while using the locals by giving them space powers... did I mention space? But alas, I am not a space whale and my soul—while similar consistency and viscosity to some—is not space whale semen. In fact, I do not truly give any powers other than perhaps my own considerable analytic prowess. And truly my mental might is wasted on the youth, as are most things, because currently a creep older man is talking to her about leaving her home with him to go to his castle and 'learn magic', whatever that meant.
"Clearly, he is a pervert," I commented to myself—the other me. After having come so far for so long, I have come to think of this local body as myself. Is it messed up? Probably, but what could one do? At least I walked Death off.
"You did not just call Archmage Antonidas, Leader of the Kirin Tor and Master of Dalaran, the Nation of Magic, a freak!" She hissed back mentally as we smiled vapidly at the most powerful magic using mortal in the world as he continued to talk about the benefits of studying at Dalaran, under him or some such nonsense.
"No, I didn't. I called him a pervert. I didn't call him a freak, I called him a freak," I retorted using different tones for each pronoun of ourselves. There were so many ways I could mess with this common human language of the Alliance in the current situation I was in, and I took every opportunity I saw. One might even call me an opportunist! But I would just call me silly. And by 'I', I mean her, not me. I mean... you get what I mean, right?
"You... I... argh!" She lamented intelligibly.
Sadly, both of us felt the frustration that both of us felt, as did we all emotions. I would have liked to say that I enjoyed her suffering, but I was not that much of a masochist and I certainly did not indulge in self-cutting. But enough of this indulgence in internal monologues, let me start from the beginning so that we can get this show on the road.
I found myself inside Jaina, the third daughter of a seafaring nation's admiralty, but it turned out our body was of the 'easily seasick' type. We are a thin, underdeveloped girl, with a slight red puffiness around our eyes, like a poor girl's makeup, from all the sleepless nights we've endured awake indoors or rocking sickly on ships. It is the sort of feeling of a perpetual urge to vomit with nothing in your stomach multiplied by the sensation of a hangover that has gone on too long with only more alcohol to drink rather than water. This left us too weak to go out and play like normal children, so our only joy in life was staying in and reading. Our dear mother is overworked, having to play administrator and organizer for father as he was off fighting someone else's wars—the incursions of the orcs from the Dark Portal some years ago, from the southern tip of the continent. For reference, we were on the other side. But the sparse memories of them both, haggard and overworked for our sake had left deep impressions on our budding psyche that...
Well...
It is rather difficult to truly introduce ourselves, if we didn't include that we—or rather I—knew exactly where we were. In doing so, we—or rather I—knew that this was or could be all part of a game. That lent some kind of a personal reality distortion field on our perception of the world, or perhaps the rest of my soul was just getting really high from all the spinning and fun in the center of the world.
No, that came out wrong. How do I explain this? I can't, honestly, which is my I don't. I didn't even tell my mom or dad. But if I had to, I guess I could describe this as my special ability (my insanity to see the world through a different lens). We haven't had it for very long—just a week, really, since I'd only just remembered that World of Warcraft was a thing—but… well, you see, this ability definitely isn't going to be a one-off thing. I'll reiterate it in future chapters, I promise. It's like this, you see...
I muttered, "Status."
Name: Jaina Proudmoore
Level: 1
HEALTH: 52/52
MANA: 165/165
STRENGHT: 20
AGILITY: 20
STAMINA: 20
INTELLECT: 23
SPIRIT: 22
KARMA: Error, please contact your administrator.
This window appeared in front of me at the sound of my voice. It wasn't one of those tacky, blue screens from Final Fantasy that we were all too familiar with; it was the sort of character sheet that came with a game, with even slots for me to dress with—so that I could get up in ten minutes, rather than the mandatory two hours as were the norm for girls no longer purely adolescent.
In addition to this, there was a spherical, visor-like feel to the status window, like the type you'd see in Borderlands 2, but with actually not bugged interface that would actually work on a virtual reality helmet. I should know, since I worked on all of the more prominent augmented reality and virtual reality helmets already. I hesitated to theorize that maybe it was because my knowledge on the matter that the windows looked like how they did...
For those of you who didn't know—like me—those status attributes were exactly the numbers for a human mage, of the first level, at the beginning of the game known as World of Warcraft. Now, is anything else in this world like the game? No. Not at all. So how did this happen? The best I could explain of this was that I was still hallucinating... do hallucinogens that affect the soul carry over from body to body?
There were actually many more numbers below these, such as my armor attributes, my over all defensive score—which was then made up of not just my ability to mitigate damage directly, but also from my ability to dodge, to roll, to maintain resilience, and so on—and my differing offensive capabilities. It was multiple pages long, extending to five pages of excel sheets and with a whole book on the background history of the girl known as Jaina Proudmoore. It was the 'hardcore' gamer's happy place and my personal hell, since I found these points of data to be vital to my future yet they were so utterly boring.
"You're not introducing us correctly," Jaina interrupted fourth-wall-breakingly with a small pout that would have looked cute to me, if it wasn't my face pouting at ourselves in the reflection of ourselves on a boat. Yes, we were on a boat—we're going to be on a boat a lot for the foreseeable future, so you can expect this story to be something like magical Asha Greyjoy's chapters. "Who's Asha Greyjoy?"
"Never mind that. If you want to introduce yourself, why don't you do that yourself?" I poked her in the tummy and tickled her... in our mind, of course.
"Hey! S-Stop!" She whimpered like the adorable little bookworm that she was. "I thought you wanted to do it..."
I shrugged our shoulders. "Eh."
She blinked away the painful tears induced by too much tickling and tried to straighten herself. I helped, of course, because how would our plebs think, if they saw their Princess Jaina, third in line for the Admiralty of Kul Tiras, giggling like a loony? It would be pretty awkward to explain to father, too, and he was on the next ship over. So we cleared our throats and turned to the reader and curtsied—I was awkward with it since I never did grow up with this sort of thing, but Jaina was trained for it at a young age, considering the position our nation was in comparison to its peers. She was the graceful one, I was the... uh... other one.
"I am Jaina Proudmoore, daughter of Daelin Proudmoore, Lord Admiral and King of Kul Tiras, Grand Admiral of the Alliance Fleet. I love my father and my brothers, Derek and Tandred, though I wish Derek would return home and Tanny really ought to stop hiding behind me." She introduced herself with a flourish and a bow, in the sort of sickeningly sweet tone that only a cute, little girl could make when she wholeheartedly wanted to befriend someone. Sort of like what you'd expect from Bubbles in the Powerpuff Girls or one o' 'em darned ponies. "I, bwah? Ponies?"
"You were doing a great job, don't stop now." I encouraged, ignoring all signs of ponies. I knew she liked ponies, but I was ambivalent towards them, since I've stayed some time in Mongolia with horses before this.
We were guided into our room by one of the older sailors, something something, I didn't really pay attention. Nevertheless, I nudged Jaina to continue.
"Mongolia? Where is... Oh, where was I? I really like Mother's bed time stories of the Guardian Aegwynn, so I want to be a great wizard like her when I grow up, so I can help as many people as I can too! Um, but... I haven't seen Mother in ages... Father wouldn't say much about her, while we are still at sea, only that there's no point in going home. Why is that?" She asked, without a clue of what was all happening in the shadows. She's a pure and innocent maiden, and since she was me, I could obviously and truthfully claim that I was a pure and innocent maiden. Ah-ha! She frowned and turned back to the sea, ignoring my interruption and plowing forth with her introduction. It was so cute how hard she was working her little mind to articulate as best to her ability. "We have been sailing for four months now since Father picked me up from the Capital, and we have had several skirmishes against the orcs, but the crew all say that the war was already over, and that we were just cleaning up the messes of the others. Father hates the orcs and reacts especially bad when I ask of him of them, in relation to Mother. I wonder if Mother had encountered orcs before? I do hope she could tell me of them, but whenever there is fighting, they lock me in my room, and all I can tell is the sound... the sound..."
We sniffled.
"Hey, hey, we're a big girl now, we don't cry. Jaina, come on, you know if you start crying, I can't help but cry too, right?" I reached up and tried to wipe away the tears on my sleeve—a move that Jaina was clearly against, as she was brought up to never damage her clothing... rationing during war left a mark on her mentality in that way. Instead, our arm locked—very painful, I assure you—before I relented and she reached up more delicately with a handkerchief.
"Umu..."
"Right so... let's keep introducing ourselves, okay?" I added again. Look, it was either do this or we'd just huddle up in our room now, shivering. Because from the moment we started to now, a skirmish on the high seas had occurred, and we were locked in, and anything to distract us from the sounds of violence, okay? I... after taking this form, I didn't really like it either.
"Um... so... I like reading, and writing, and I like making cantrips for Father and studying. And... well, I'm not really interesting. Why do people want to know about me? I'm nobody special... I'm a burden to Father, to everyone around me... it'd be better if they didn't bring me..." Our knees tucked into our crossed arms and we hugged ourselves in the darkness. The ship rocked again, shaking and quivering as if mimicking our little body's reactions to the sounds outside. The sounds of pain, fear, and rage, they were not hindered by these thin, wooden walls of our cabin.
I sighed internally, I needed something to distract myself, because it affect me so much too. "Look, how about we make a plan?There are a lot of ideas out there, many that are intermediary steps that are necessary to accomplish greater things. It's sort of like how Antonidas might know how to manipulate time itself with magic, but he doesn't have the tools to make the tools to observe the spell, or the many underlying mechanics, such as Dark Matter, the God Particle, and the like. We could... combine magic and my vague memories of technology. Something fun, what do you say?"
"Will we... will we change the world?" We lifted our head, staring into the darkness with but a single candle to light our path.
"Oh... more than this world," I replied. A plan began to form in our head. We tossed it back and forth at the speed of thought, with drawing boards and charts and even the dreaded excel sheets plastered all over our little brain meats. And in the darkness, we plotted and planned, make the world a better place, to help all peoples, to make everyone's lives better, with might and magic—a step that would eventually lead up to the moment we would have with Antonidas later on—and world peace...
… Whether they want it or not. Or else.
I have always felt a kinship to water. Perhaps it is because, for the last few years (or days, weeks, months—I can't be quite sure of the passage of time just yet), I have had most of my soul submerged in water. It is a funny thing to splatter one's soul all over a world, since so much of the Earth-like world is water. Most of this eventually coalesces in the center of the world, in a whirlpool of sorts, so massive it could devour a whole Europe if given the opportunity. But all of this water—be it in vapors or in ice floating up north, or in the water within this magical maelstrom of a whirlpool to nowhere—have no consciousness. I cannot move that which is simply a part of nature, without an interface for my will to be exerted.
That beings me to the one splatter that did get on a person's head—a twelve year old girl's head. It did occur to me that in any other circumstance, what happened to me was like a space whale ejaculating its space whale space semen all over a human populace to further its goals while using the locals by giving them space powers... did I mention space? But alas, I am not a space whale and my soul—while similar consistency and viscosity to some—is not space whale semen. In fact, I do not truly give any powers other than perhaps my own considerable analytic prowess. And truly my mental might is wasted on the youth, as are most things, because currently a creep older man is talking to her about leaving her home with him to go to his castle and 'learn magic', whatever that meant.
"Clearly, he is a pervert," I commented to myself—the other me. After having come so far for so long, I have come to think of this local body as myself. Is it messed up? Probably, but what could one do? At least I walked Death off.
"You did not just call Archmage Antonidas, Leader of the Kirin Tor and Master of Dalaran, the Nation of Magic, a freak!" She hissed back mentally as we smiled vapidly at the most powerful magic using mortal in the world as he continued to talk about the benefits of studying at Dalaran, under him or some such nonsense.
"No, I didn't. I called him a pervert. I didn't call him a freak, I called him a freak," I retorted using different tones for each pronoun of ourselves. There were so many ways I could mess with this common human language of the Alliance in the current situation I was in, and I took every opportunity I saw. One might even call me an opportunist! But I would just call me silly. And by 'I', I mean her, not me. I mean... you get what I mean, right?
"You... I... argh!" She lamented intelligibly.
Sadly, both of us felt the frustration that both of us felt, as did we all emotions. I would have liked to say that I enjoyed her suffering, but I was not that much of a masochist and I certainly did not indulge in self-cutting. But enough of this indulgence in internal monologues, let me start from the beginning so that we can get this show on the road.
I found myself inside Jaina, the third daughter of a seafaring nation's admiralty, but it turned out our body was of the 'easily seasick' type. We are a thin, underdeveloped girl, with a slight red puffiness around our eyes, like a poor girl's makeup, from all the sleepless nights we've endured awake indoors or rocking sickly on ships. It is the sort of feeling of a perpetual urge to vomit with nothing in your stomach multiplied by the sensation of a hangover that has gone on too long with only more alcohol to drink rather than water. This left us too weak to go out and play like normal children, so our only joy in life was staying in and reading. Our dear mother is overworked, having to play administrator and organizer for father as he was off fighting someone else's wars—the incursions of the orcs from the Dark Portal some years ago, from the southern tip of the continent. For reference, we were on the other side. But the sparse memories of them both, haggard and overworked for our sake had left deep impressions on our budding psyche that...
Well...
It is rather difficult to truly introduce ourselves, if we didn't include that we—or rather I—knew exactly where we were. In doing so, we—or rather I—knew that this was or could be all part of a game. That lent some kind of a personal reality distortion field on our perception of the world, or perhaps the rest of my soul was just getting really high from all the spinning and fun in the center of the world.
No, that came out wrong. How do I explain this? I can't, honestly, which is my I don't. I didn't even tell my mom or dad. But if I had to, I guess I could describe this as my special ability (my insanity to see the world through a different lens). We haven't had it for very long—just a week, really, since I'd only just remembered that World of Warcraft was a thing—but… well, you see, this ability definitely isn't going to be a one-off thing. I'll reiterate it in future chapters, I promise. It's like this, you see...
I muttered, "Status."
Name: Jaina Proudmoore
Level: 1
HEALTH: 52/52
MANA: 165/165
STRENGHT: 20
AGILITY: 20
STAMINA: 20
INTELLECT: 23
SPIRIT: 22
KARMA: Error, please contact your administrator.
This window appeared in front of me at the sound of my voice. It wasn't one of those tacky, blue screens from Final Fantasy that we were all too familiar with; it was the sort of character sheet that came with a game, with even slots for me to dress with—so that I could get up in ten minutes, rather than the mandatory two hours as were the norm for girls no longer purely adolescent.
In addition to this, there was a spherical, visor-like feel to the status window, like the type you'd see in Borderlands 2, but with actually not bugged interface that would actually work on a virtual reality helmet. I should know, since I worked on all of the more prominent augmented reality and virtual reality helmets already. I hesitated to theorize that maybe it was because my knowledge on the matter that the windows looked like how they did...
For those of you who didn't know—like me—those status attributes were exactly the numbers for a human mage, of the first level, at the beginning of the game known as World of Warcraft. Now, is anything else in this world like the game? No. Not at all. So how did this happen? The best I could explain of this was that I was still hallucinating... do hallucinogens that affect the soul carry over from body to body?
There were actually many more numbers below these, such as my armor attributes, my over all defensive score—which was then made up of not just my ability to mitigate damage directly, but also from my ability to dodge, to roll, to maintain resilience, and so on—and my differing offensive capabilities. It was multiple pages long, extending to five pages of excel sheets and with a whole book on the background history of the girl known as Jaina Proudmoore. It was the 'hardcore' gamer's happy place and my personal hell, since I found these points of data to be vital to my future yet they were so utterly boring.
"You're not introducing us correctly," Jaina interrupted fourth-wall-breakingly with a small pout that would have looked cute to me, if it wasn't my face pouting at ourselves in the reflection of ourselves on a boat. Yes, we were on a boat—we're going to be on a boat a lot for the foreseeable future, so you can expect this story to be something like magical Asha Greyjoy's chapters. "Who's Asha Greyjoy?"
"Never mind that. If you want to introduce yourself, why don't you do that yourself?" I poked her in the tummy and tickled her... in our mind, of course.
"Hey! S-Stop!" She whimpered like the adorable little bookworm that she was. "I thought you wanted to do it..."
I shrugged our shoulders. "Eh."
She blinked away the painful tears induced by too much tickling and tried to straighten herself. I helped, of course, because how would our plebs think, if they saw their Princess Jaina, third in line for the Admiralty of Kul Tiras, giggling like a loony? It would be pretty awkward to explain to father, too, and he was on the next ship over. So we cleared our throats and turned to the reader and curtsied—I was awkward with it since I never did grow up with this sort of thing, but Jaina was trained for it at a young age, considering the position our nation was in comparison to its peers. She was the graceful one, I was the... uh... other one.
"I am Jaina Proudmoore, daughter of Daelin Proudmoore, Lord Admiral and King of Kul Tiras, Grand Admiral of the Alliance Fleet. I love my father and my brothers, Derek and Tandred, though I wish Derek would return home and Tanny really ought to stop hiding behind me." She introduced herself with a flourish and a bow, in the sort of sickeningly sweet tone that only a cute, little girl could make when she wholeheartedly wanted to befriend someone. Sort of like what you'd expect from Bubbles in the Powerpuff Girls or one o' 'em darned ponies. "I, bwah? Ponies?"
"You were doing a great job, don't stop now." I encouraged, ignoring all signs of ponies. I knew she liked ponies, but I was ambivalent towards them, since I've stayed some time in Mongolia with horses before this.
We were guided into our room by one of the older sailors, something something, I didn't really pay attention. Nevertheless, I nudged Jaina to continue.
"Mongolia? Where is... Oh, where was I? I really like Mother's bed time stories of the Guardian Aegwynn, so I want to be a great wizard like her when I grow up, so I can help as many people as I can too! Um, but... I haven't seen Mother in ages... Father wouldn't say much about her, while we are still at sea, only that there's no point in going home. Why is that?" She asked, without a clue of what was all happening in the shadows. She's a pure and innocent maiden, and since she was me, I could obviously and truthfully claim that I was a pure and innocent maiden. Ah-ha! She frowned and turned back to the sea, ignoring my interruption and plowing forth with her introduction. It was so cute how hard she was working her little mind to articulate as best to her ability. "We have been sailing for four months now since Father picked me up from the Capital, and we have had several skirmishes against the orcs, but the crew all say that the war was already over, and that we were just cleaning up the messes of the others. Father hates the orcs and reacts especially bad when I ask of him of them, in relation to Mother. I wonder if Mother had encountered orcs before? I do hope she could tell me of them, but whenever there is fighting, they lock me in my room, and all I can tell is the sound... the sound..."
We sniffled.
"Hey, hey, we're a big girl now, we don't cry. Jaina, come on, you know if you start crying, I can't help but cry too, right?" I reached up and tried to wipe away the tears on my sleeve—a move that Jaina was clearly against, as she was brought up to never damage her clothing... rationing during war left a mark on her mentality in that way. Instead, our arm locked—very painful, I assure you—before I relented and she reached up more delicately with a handkerchief.
"Umu..."
"Right so... let's keep introducing ourselves, okay?" I added again. Look, it was either do this or we'd just huddle up in our room now, shivering. Because from the moment we started to now, a skirmish on the high seas had occurred, and we were locked in, and anything to distract us from the sounds of violence, okay? I... after taking this form, I didn't really like it either.
"Um... so... I like reading, and writing, and I like making cantrips for Father and studying. And... well, I'm not really interesting. Why do people want to know about me? I'm nobody special... I'm a burden to Father, to everyone around me... it'd be better if they didn't bring me..." Our knees tucked into our crossed arms and we hugged ourselves in the darkness. The ship rocked again, shaking and quivering as if mimicking our little body's reactions to the sounds outside. The sounds of pain, fear, and rage, they were not hindered by these thin, wooden walls of our cabin.
I sighed internally, I needed something to distract myself, because it affect me so much too. "Look, how about we make a plan?There are a lot of ideas out there, many that are intermediary steps that are necessary to accomplish greater things. It's sort of like how Antonidas might know how to manipulate time itself with magic, but he doesn't have the tools to make the tools to observe the spell, or the many underlying mechanics, such as Dark Matter, the God Particle, and the like. We could... combine magic and my vague memories of technology. Something fun, what do you say?"
"Will we... will we change the world?" We lifted our head, staring into the darkness with but a single candle to light our path.
"Oh... more than this world," I replied. A plan began to form in our head. We tossed it back and forth at the speed of thought, with drawing boards and charts and even the dreaded excel sheets plastered all over our little brain meats. And in the darkness, we plotted and planned, make the world a better place, to help all peoples, to make everyone's lives better, with might and magic—a step that would eventually lead up to the moment we would have with Antonidas later on—and world peace...
… Whether they want it or not. Or else.
Last edited:
Chapter 5: Dual Boxing
d.fish
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Chapter 5
Life took a turn for the surreal. An action bar appeared at the bottom edge of my vision, curved fit the range and depth of my eyes. There were the usual buttons such as the status toggle and a menu toggle for saving and exiting, as well as some other tooltips and options. Perhaps most interesting was that a button that appeared grey filled with color, and a sound effect played akin to the special effects used in Hearthstone, the card game with rather nicely made special effects for a digital card game. This button was the picture of a half-opened book. It was the skills and abilities toggle...
… this was not the time to play around with skills however. Father gaped, "Jaina Proudmoore, watch your mouth!" A stormy expression donned, he completely ignored how everyone around him cursed like the sailors that they were for the past few months right in front of me.
"B-But..." We protested.
"No buts, go to your room without rations, young lady! I will not tolerate your rash behavior like this! You are a pure and innocent maiden and you will stay like so until I am in my grave, you hear me? And all you assholes listening in better back me up on this one, or else!" Daelin Proudmoore added, waving a rapier at the rest of the occupants of the dining hall threateningly.
And he was rather threatening...
Lord Admiral, King Daelin Proudmoore of Kul Tiras
Grand Admiral of the Alliance of Lordaeron
Level <<Skull>> Warrior, Fighter, Paladin, Sorcerer, Hydromancer, Royalty
Those words appeared quite readily as I focused our vision on the green letters that spelled out 'Daelin Proudmoore' above his head, like a set of advanced tooltips that came with most games. It proved for one that apparently we could multi-class, though it was strange because no one around us actually called Father by the title of 'King'... and we didn't have a level in 'Royalty' class. I wonder why...?
"But it wasn't..." Jaina gripped the hem of our skirt in frustration.
But Father had no time for our nonsense. "Go to your room!"
"Hmph!" Jaina pushed our body to hurry out of the hall, stomping all the way. She was rather upset by the way she pouted and how she didn't even bother looking at her new friend, who sat in her seat still with a dropped jaw.
You've been grounded!
You can no longer leave your cabin and social interaction suffers a 100% reduced efficiency. This effect lasts for the next 7 hours and 57 minutes. This effect cannot be dispelled. This effect pierces magic immunity. This effect was cast by Daelin Proudmoore .
… Oh phooey. This is overpowered. Nerf!
"What are you doing?" Jaina grumbled. I could feel the blame and unhappiness at having been grounded shift in a vague sensation from other targets towards me, and not undeservingly so.
"I'm trying to learn magic," I answered honestly.
"Learning magic isn't getting us grounded!" She harrumphed before rolling over onto the other side of our bunk and hugging ourselves more tightly. "Learning magic isn't going around, saying n-naughty words like... like that! And, who even calls it learning magic?"
I frowned. "Then what do people call it?"
She floundered a bit, having never really thought about it. In truth, I never heard people call our studying the 'learning of magic' or something like that. The word 'magic' seemed almost demeaning in that it was the term for explainable, supernatural phenomenons, or it should be, in my opinion. "People call it, um... Father says it is the pursuit of the art when he plays with magic, but he doesn't study it because he's just using inherited power."
"Oh, well, that tells us nothing—wait, what inherited power?" I paused.
Jaina blinked, and thought to me having gotten too tired and thirsty from speaking constantly, "You know, all of the lords of the sea are masters of water sorceries. They can make a fountain of water shoot up anywhere and they even turn the swings of their swords into tides."
"Why don't we have a power like that?"
Jaina looked inwardly at me in suspicion. "What do you mean?"
"If we have a power like that, why don't we learn to practice it? Certainly being a hydromancer would be interesting," I reasoned. "And what do you mean 'what do you mean'?"
"If you're me, shouldn't you know this?" Jaina flipped us up from bed angrily and stalked around the room. All of our voices were turned inwardly, so our sense of sound only heard the loud stomping of our tiny feet against the wooden timbers of our floors and the soft creaking of the ship, protesting against the waves.
There was a moment's pause.
It was then that I searched our memories for knowledge of this, having so foolishly blurted it out earlier without considering the consequences. It was merely a curiosity, but it tripped a reaction within Jaina. The games and the books never spoke of this side of her, nor did they speak in detail of her past and of her then deceased father. This moment's pause was like having been asked "Do you love me?" and then having to pause visibly for a moment to think on the question.
Awkwardness was an understatement when I finally did answer, "... Yes, I know it."
But the thing was, the connection went both ways. As I searched in the brain meats of our vessel for the memories so necessary to answer the question of what was the inherited powers that Daelin Proudmoore might possess, Jaina too felt, saw, and all the other senses sensed the process. Even if she were the forgiving child she was and even if she were to even forget this...
… I had broken some kind of trust. I knew this. Our relationship, from then on, wouldn't ever be the same. Jaina's heart pained to think on this matter. She sighed, concluding, "... You're weird."
That was all she said.
We stood in silence, for nearly five minutes. Neither of us really wanted to say anything, much less move or read or anything else. Both of our focuses, despite splitting the attention of our totality, were turned inwards. Jaina was remembering all the people she knew of in the past, and of how they told false or omitted information like I had done. In part, I was confused what I had unwittingly omitted, but I knew I had lied about things.
I wasn't merely her soul. I wasn't born with her. I wasn't just her. I was the out of context problem and solution that had changed so much of her life already, and yet neither of us knew how.
I couldn't speak up though, because I wouldn't—couldn't bear it—to tell her my story.
… It wasn't like I remembered it all anyway, considering the hell of a trip that I was on before I came to inside Jaina Proudmoore.
It seemed almost stupid now to go back over my skills and study the new skills I had gained with having become a Wizard. Neither of us were in the mood for anything anymore. Perhaps it was right what they said, about negative emotions begetting negative emotions, but it was almost stupid how each of these things were individually so unimportant and small, yet once compounded we couldn't even function without being sad.
Perhaps some fresh air would help.
I pulled us up and towards the door. We were feeling a mite thirsty as well, having spoken so much. It would be an opportune time to pick up a jar of lemon drink. As my hand reached for the door, my body locked. "Uh... Jaina? Let's go get something to drink."
"Alright, sure, why are you not opening the door then?" She replied.
I couldn't open the door.
Our eyes widened at the realization. It was the horrible realization that having the world become a game had downsides to their downsides. Life sucked, and now even our game life sucked.
"I can't. We're grounded, remember?" I bit back testily.
"Well, here," She pushed the door open with the least amount of effort. I couldn't do that with our body. She could. This goddamned body was playing by game rules.
Horror filled my mind.
All the bugs, all the problems, all the restrictions of the world being a game. So I could destroy the most powerful being in the world, but what good would it be if by these rules, I couldn't even open a 'locked' tent flap?
I...
I want off this wild ride.
I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want...
"Can you please stop tapping our feet? It's really annoying," Jaina grumbled before taking a large gulp. "If you keep doing that, I'm going back to bed."
"Okay, let's go—" She could open any doors I couldn't, anyway.
"No, wait, I want to go play with Finn."
"Make up your mind, would you?"
"... Okay, I remember last year when I was in Boralus, Tandred wanted us to go play tea party with him and his friends. It sounded really dumb, because there was no tea! But Tanny got to take all my toys for the party anyway. I've always wanted to try it, Tanny keeps saying he's had a lot of fun with the other girls he met at the parties." Jaina rambled on, "Let's go ask Finn!"
"Oh, come on!" I sighed. Having scanned Jaina's memory for more than once, I knew that neither of us knew how to play tea party. How did it even work? And why couldn't Jaina want to play a more normal game that young girls like to play, like 'plan for conquering the world' or something actually fun?
"What?" She pouted.
"... Nothing, just... nothing. Let's go then," I sighed. I could see how this was going to turn out already.
And apparently, Finn never played the game either, but she agreed readily, having been bored out of her mind to have sat through a long-winded dinner.
We sat down in an imaginary circle, using the night stand as our table and our mugs for tea cups. There were no dolls on the ship, so we used a sword on a pillow with a charcoal drawn picture stuck on its hilt for our tea party attendee Cutty Sharpiebites and Finn's mother polymorphed one of the orc prisoners into a kitten inside a glass ball with three holes for our game, so we named her Felicia Sexopants because we were so good at naming things and sexopants were those doubly reflecting navigation instruments used to measure the angle between two visible objects that sailors used, after all, so this party was relevant.
It was while we were cordially discussing Cutty Sharpiebites' rather enormous badonkadonks (the sword was enchanted with both Ice and Fire, making a nice, brilliant golden glow when poked) over deliciously flat lemon drink that I noticed something rather disturbing floating above our head in the reflection cast into our cup.
Jaina Proudmoore (True)
Crown Princess of Kul Tiras
Level 12 Princess
But then there was another character under that...
Jaina Proudmoore (False)
The Self Insert
Level 1 Wizard
… Huh.
Huh.
Huh...
Life took a turn for the surreal. An action bar appeared at the bottom edge of my vision, curved fit the range and depth of my eyes. There were the usual buttons such as the status toggle and a menu toggle for saving and exiting, as well as some other tooltips and options. Perhaps most interesting was that a button that appeared grey filled with color, and a sound effect played akin to the special effects used in Hearthstone, the card game with rather nicely made special effects for a digital card game. This button was the picture of a half-opened book. It was the skills and abilities toggle...
… this was not the time to play around with skills however. Father gaped, "Jaina Proudmoore, watch your mouth!" A stormy expression donned, he completely ignored how everyone around him cursed like the sailors that they were for the past few months right in front of me.
"B-But..." We protested.
"No buts, go to your room without rations, young lady! I will not tolerate your rash behavior like this! You are a pure and innocent maiden and you will stay like so until I am in my grave, you hear me? And all you assholes listening in better back me up on this one, or else!" Daelin Proudmoore added, waving a rapier at the rest of the occupants of the dining hall threateningly.
And he was rather threatening...
Lord Admiral, King Daelin Proudmoore of Kul Tiras
Grand Admiral of the Alliance of Lordaeron
Level <<Skull>> Warrior, Fighter, Paladin, Sorcerer, Hydromancer, Royalty
Those words appeared quite readily as I focused our vision on the green letters that spelled out 'Daelin Proudmoore' above his head, like a set of advanced tooltips that came with most games. It proved for one that apparently we could multi-class, though it was strange because no one around us actually called Father by the title of 'King'... and we didn't have a level in 'Royalty' class. I wonder why...?
"But it wasn't..." Jaina gripped the hem of our skirt in frustration.
But Father had no time for our nonsense. "Go to your room!"
"Hmph!" Jaina pushed our body to hurry out of the hall, stomping all the way. She was rather upset by the way she pouted and how she didn't even bother looking at her new friend, who sat in her seat still with a dropped jaw.
You've been grounded!
You can no longer leave your cabin and social interaction suffers a 100% reduced efficiency. This effect lasts for the next 7 hours and 57 minutes. This effect cannot be dispelled. This effect pierces magic immunity. This effect was cast by Daelin Proudmoore .
… Oh phooey. This is overpowered. Nerf!
"What are you doing?" Jaina grumbled. I could feel the blame and unhappiness at having been grounded shift in a vague sensation from other targets towards me, and not undeservingly so.
"I'm trying to learn magic," I answered honestly.
"Learning magic isn't getting us grounded!" She harrumphed before rolling over onto the other side of our bunk and hugging ourselves more tightly. "Learning magic isn't going around, saying n-naughty words like... like that! And, who even calls it learning magic?"
I frowned. "Then what do people call it?"
She floundered a bit, having never really thought about it. In truth, I never heard people call our studying the 'learning of magic' or something like that. The word 'magic' seemed almost demeaning in that it was the term for explainable, supernatural phenomenons, or it should be, in my opinion. "People call it, um... Father says it is the pursuit of the art when he plays with magic, but he doesn't study it because he's just using inherited power."
"Oh, well, that tells us nothing—wait, what inherited power?" I paused.
Jaina blinked, and thought to me having gotten too tired and thirsty from speaking constantly, "You know, all of the lords of the sea are masters of water sorceries. They can make a fountain of water shoot up anywhere and they even turn the swings of their swords into tides."
"Why don't we have a power like that?"
Jaina looked inwardly at me in suspicion. "What do you mean?"
"If we have a power like that, why don't we learn to practice it? Certainly being a hydromancer would be interesting," I reasoned. "And what do you mean 'what do you mean'?"
"If you're me, shouldn't you know this?" Jaina flipped us up from bed angrily and stalked around the room. All of our voices were turned inwardly, so our sense of sound only heard the loud stomping of our tiny feet against the wooden timbers of our floors and the soft creaking of the ship, protesting against the waves.
There was a moment's pause.
It was then that I searched our memories for knowledge of this, having so foolishly blurted it out earlier without considering the consequences. It was merely a curiosity, but it tripped a reaction within Jaina. The games and the books never spoke of this side of her, nor did they speak in detail of her past and of her then deceased father. This moment's pause was like having been asked "Do you love me?" and then having to pause visibly for a moment to think on the question.
Awkwardness was an understatement when I finally did answer, "... Yes, I know it."
But the thing was, the connection went both ways. As I searched in the brain meats of our vessel for the memories so necessary to answer the question of what was the inherited powers that Daelin Proudmoore might possess, Jaina too felt, saw, and all the other senses sensed the process. Even if she were the forgiving child she was and even if she were to even forget this...
… I had broken some kind of trust. I knew this. Our relationship, from then on, wouldn't ever be the same. Jaina's heart pained to think on this matter. She sighed, concluding, "... You're weird."
That was all she said.
We stood in silence, for nearly five minutes. Neither of us really wanted to say anything, much less move or read or anything else. Both of our focuses, despite splitting the attention of our totality, were turned inwards. Jaina was remembering all the people she knew of in the past, and of how they told false or omitted information like I had done. In part, I was confused what I had unwittingly omitted, but I knew I had lied about things.
I wasn't merely her soul. I wasn't born with her. I wasn't just her. I was the out of context problem and solution that had changed so much of her life already, and yet neither of us knew how.
I couldn't speak up though, because I wouldn't—couldn't bear it—to tell her my story.
… It wasn't like I remembered it all anyway, considering the hell of a trip that I was on before I came to inside Jaina Proudmoore.
It seemed almost stupid now to go back over my skills and study the new skills I had gained with having become a Wizard. Neither of us were in the mood for anything anymore. Perhaps it was right what they said, about negative emotions begetting negative emotions, but it was almost stupid how each of these things were individually so unimportant and small, yet once compounded we couldn't even function without being sad.
Perhaps some fresh air would help.
I pulled us up and towards the door. We were feeling a mite thirsty as well, having spoken so much. It would be an opportune time to pick up a jar of lemon drink. As my hand reached for the door, my body locked. "Uh... Jaina? Let's go get something to drink."
"Alright, sure, why are you not opening the door then?" She replied.
I couldn't open the door.
Our eyes widened at the realization. It was the horrible realization that having the world become a game had downsides to their downsides. Life sucked, and now even our game life sucked.
"I can't. We're grounded, remember?" I bit back testily.
"Well, here," She pushed the door open with the least amount of effort. I couldn't do that with our body. She could. This goddamned body was playing by game rules.
Horror filled my mind.
All the bugs, all the problems, all the restrictions of the world being a game. So I could destroy the most powerful being in the world, but what good would it be if by these rules, I couldn't even open a 'locked' tent flap?
I...
I want off this wild ride.
I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want off this wild ride. I want...
"Can you please stop tapping our feet? It's really annoying," Jaina grumbled before taking a large gulp. "If you keep doing that, I'm going back to bed."
"Okay, let's go—" She could open any doors I couldn't, anyway.
"No, wait, I want to go play with Finn."
"Make up your mind, would you?"
"... Okay, I remember last year when I was in Boralus, Tandred wanted us to go play tea party with him and his friends. It sounded really dumb, because there was no tea! But Tanny got to take all my toys for the party anyway. I've always wanted to try it, Tanny keeps saying he's had a lot of fun with the other girls he met at the parties." Jaina rambled on, "Let's go ask Finn!"
"Oh, come on!" I sighed. Having scanned Jaina's memory for more than once, I knew that neither of us knew how to play tea party. How did it even work? And why couldn't Jaina want to play a more normal game that young girls like to play, like 'plan for conquering the world' or something actually fun?
"What?" She pouted.
"... Nothing, just... nothing. Let's go then," I sighed. I could see how this was going to turn out already.
And apparently, Finn never played the game either, but she agreed readily, having been bored out of her mind to have sat through a long-winded dinner.
We sat down in an imaginary circle, using the night stand as our table and our mugs for tea cups. There were no dolls on the ship, so we used a sword on a pillow with a charcoal drawn picture stuck on its hilt for our tea party attendee Cutty Sharpiebites and Finn's mother polymorphed one of the orc prisoners into a kitten inside a glass ball with three holes for our game, so we named her Felicia Sexopants because we were so good at naming things and sexopants were those doubly reflecting navigation instruments used to measure the angle between two visible objects that sailors used, after all, so this party was relevant.
It was while we were cordially discussing Cutty Sharpiebites' rather enormous badonkadonks (the sword was enchanted with both Ice and Fire, making a nice, brilliant golden glow when poked) over deliciously flat lemon drink that I noticed something rather disturbing floating above our head in the reflection cast into our cup.
Jaina Proudmoore (True)
Crown Princess of Kul Tiras
Level 12 Princess
But then there was another character under that...
Jaina Proudmoore (False)
The Self Insert
Level 1 Wizard
… Huh.
Huh.
Huh...
Chapter 6: Tea Party
d.fish
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Chapter 6
"Cutty Sharpiebites, would you like more tea?" Finn lifted the jar of lemon drink and poured the tea before waiting for confirmation, causing Jaina to frown. She was having fun, but one of the fun things about having a tea party turned out to be making up the rules as we went along.
Cutty Sharpiebites
Inherited Goldensword
Level 18 Short Sword
I chimed in for her, "Oh, you would? Very good, splendid!" We spoke in exaggerated, English accents. Obviously we wanted to sound as hideous as possible, so we wanted to sound as English as possible. It was fun.
Finn smiled at the soft reminder and turned to our other companion, the orc prisoner polymorphed into a kitten—by the strange name of Zuluhed the Whacked—who was trapped inside a glass bowling ball. She lifted the jaw towards us and asked, "Lady Proudmoore, would you like to do the honor?"
"Why, I would be absolutely delighted, Lady Goldensword," We replied.
Zuluhed the Whacked, "Felicia Sexopants"
Rage of the Dragonmaw
Level <Skull> Warlock Chieftain
Felicia Sexopants meowed.
"Very good, Lady Sexopants, but you simply do not have the badonkadonks that Lady Sharpiebites has! No matter how you reason with us, you cannot fool us of such a thing!" We reprimanded Lady Sexopants harshly. This was not the first time that "Felicia" tried to claim that she had just as good badonkadonks as Cutty Sharpiebites.
"How rude!" Finn exclaimed in exaggerated indignation.
"Indeed!" Jaina replied and stifled a giggle.
Finnal Goldensword
The Immovable Mountain
Level 33 Mystic Swordsman
It was to this sight that a rather anticipated fellow by the name of Antonidas walked in. He was in a flowing, white cloak that belied an image of goodness, though he wore purple and blue robes underneath. There was a steel-like skull cap on his head that made him look like the Merlin in that one old King Arthur movie I watched a long time ago and only remembered because the actress who played Arthur's mother Ygraine was nude for that one rather explicit scene where Uther took the guise of her husband and conceived Arthur. At least, that was how I remembered it—I had been tripping balls for that decade after I accidentally time warped backwards into that era, so a lot of things were rather confusing. Anyway, he had his beard tucked into his belt and half-lidded spectacles like Dumbledore, and looked rather grandfatherly, mentorly, and all around friendly.
These qualities did not help him from sputtering when we tried to get our Felicia Sexopants, whose polymorfication had reversed and was now in the mindset of a kitten but with the body of a rather studly fifty-something year old orc warlock, into women's undergarments. Perhaps our... ahem... attempts at drawing makeup on the grizzled, weathered orcish face did not help either.
He looked like a clown.
By 'he', I mean both of them, after that.
But taking a critical eye to Antonidas, we knew that the man was powerful without knowing of his gear or his skills; his simple reputation as the singular force behind the unification of the various squabbling powers of Dalaran was enough. It was said that Dalaran was a meritocracy and a democracy, but it just meant that most of the time, these powerful wizards were too busy bickering amongst themselves to interfere in international politics. Democracy, as it is called here as well, is the governing method that is almost universally laughed at for its inefficiency. After all, it was the monarch's duty and privilege to serve the people, and they were blessed and checked by their blessings from the Light for it... what did elected leaders have as checks or obligations, other than the backing of the constituencies that pushed them into office?
Antonidas was the sort of leader who changed that mindset in the last decades, for he was able to turn all the power brokering powers against each other, unite every wizard in Dalaran to back him nominally, and dominate domestic politics enough to dictate the overarching goals of the entire faction. It helped that he had a powerful nemesis to rally the people behind too, of course.
Antonidas
The Kirin Tor
Level <Skull> Archmage
His title was simple, but it told a whole story. After all, the Kirin Tor was not a title, but the name of an entire senate of wizards. It was the council that ruled Dalaran. This was similar to ancient Rome in that almost all of the senators were from landed aristocracies of Dalaran or its surrounding nations. It was ruled by six powerful wizards, who followed their supreme leader, this was true.
Yet here was Antonidas, who was the senate. The same way that perhaps a successful Julius Caesar might have been the Roman senate. He was power and he was the emperor in Dalaran.
So why was he here, at the doorstep of a grounded girl and her crossdressing, swashbuckling roommate?
"Hello, Lady Proudmoore..." His twinkling eyes watched my every move, following me as if too intrigued to be amused. Power emanated from his being in visible hues of purple and white. His attention was suffocating and his gaze like the gravity of the world compressed into the spot I was standing.
I smiled up at him, every bit amused as he ought to be, "... I've been expecting you."
"Cutty Sharpiebites, would you like more tea?" Finn lifted the jar of lemon drink and poured the tea before waiting for confirmation, causing Jaina to frown. She was having fun, but one of the fun things about having a tea party turned out to be making up the rules as we went along.
Cutty Sharpiebites
Inherited Goldensword
Level 18 Short Sword
I chimed in for her, "Oh, you would? Very good, splendid!" We spoke in exaggerated, English accents. Obviously we wanted to sound as hideous as possible, so we wanted to sound as English as possible. It was fun.
Finn smiled at the soft reminder and turned to our other companion, the orc prisoner polymorphed into a kitten—by the strange name of Zuluhed the Whacked—who was trapped inside a glass bowling ball. She lifted the jaw towards us and asked, "Lady Proudmoore, would you like to do the honor?"
"Why, I would be absolutely delighted, Lady Goldensword," We replied.
Zuluhed the Whacked, "Felicia Sexopants"
Rage of the Dragonmaw
Level <Skull> Warlock Chieftain
Felicia Sexopants meowed.
"Very good, Lady Sexopants, but you simply do not have the badonkadonks that Lady Sharpiebites has! No matter how you reason with us, you cannot fool us of such a thing!" We reprimanded Lady Sexopants harshly. This was not the first time that "Felicia" tried to claim that she had just as good badonkadonks as Cutty Sharpiebites.
"How rude!" Finn exclaimed in exaggerated indignation.
"Indeed!" Jaina replied and stifled a giggle.
Finnal Goldensword
The Immovable Mountain
Level 33 Mystic Swordsman
It was to this sight that a rather anticipated fellow by the name of Antonidas walked in. He was in a flowing, white cloak that belied an image of goodness, though he wore purple and blue robes underneath. There was a steel-like skull cap on his head that made him look like the Merlin in that one old King Arthur movie I watched a long time ago and only remembered because the actress who played Arthur's mother Ygraine was nude for that one rather explicit scene where Uther took the guise of her husband and conceived Arthur. At least, that was how I remembered it—I had been tripping balls for that decade after I accidentally time warped backwards into that era, so a lot of things were rather confusing. Anyway, he had his beard tucked into his belt and half-lidded spectacles like Dumbledore, and looked rather grandfatherly, mentorly, and all around friendly.
These qualities did not help him from sputtering when we tried to get our Felicia Sexopants, whose polymorfication had reversed and was now in the mindset of a kitten but with the body of a rather studly fifty-something year old orc warlock, into women's undergarments. Perhaps our... ahem... attempts at drawing makeup on the grizzled, weathered orcish face did not help either.
He looked like a clown.
By 'he', I mean both of them, after that.
But taking a critical eye to Antonidas, we knew that the man was powerful without knowing of his gear or his skills; his simple reputation as the singular force behind the unification of the various squabbling powers of Dalaran was enough. It was said that Dalaran was a meritocracy and a democracy, but it just meant that most of the time, these powerful wizards were too busy bickering amongst themselves to interfere in international politics. Democracy, as it is called here as well, is the governing method that is almost universally laughed at for its inefficiency. After all, it was the monarch's duty and privilege to serve the people, and they were blessed and checked by their blessings from the Light for it... what did elected leaders have as checks or obligations, other than the backing of the constituencies that pushed them into office?
Antonidas was the sort of leader who changed that mindset in the last decades, for he was able to turn all the power brokering powers against each other, unite every wizard in Dalaran to back him nominally, and dominate domestic politics enough to dictate the overarching goals of the entire faction. It helped that he had a powerful nemesis to rally the people behind too, of course.
Antonidas
The Kirin Tor
Level <Skull> Archmage
His title was simple, but it told a whole story. After all, the Kirin Tor was not a title, but the name of an entire senate of wizards. It was the council that ruled Dalaran. This was similar to ancient Rome in that almost all of the senators were from landed aristocracies of Dalaran or its surrounding nations. It was ruled by six powerful wizards, who followed their supreme leader, this was true.
Yet here was Antonidas, who was the senate. The same way that perhaps a successful Julius Caesar might have been the Roman senate. He was power and he was the emperor in Dalaran.
So why was he here, at the doorstep of a grounded girl and her crossdressing, swashbuckling roommate?
"Hello, Lady Proudmoore..." His twinkling eyes watched my every move, following me as if too intrigued to be amused. Power emanated from his being in visible hues of purple and white. His attention was suffocating and his gaze like the gravity of the world compressed into the spot I was standing.
I smiled up at him, every bit amused as he ought to be, "... I've been expecting you."
Chapter 7
d.fish
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Chapter 7
"The Magus Antonidas was but a mere boy when he became an apprentice to one of the Kirin Tor. He was a tenacious learner, pouring over books in the magical libraries of Dalaran. After only a few short years of studying under the sect, Antonidas had outclassed his peers and earned their admiration, as well as the respect of his elders. At the age of 12, Antonidas' thesis, "The Ramifications of Refined Reverse Time Travel Phenomena into Quantifiable Magical Practice", earned him the Kirin Tor Sash of Supreme Acumen, the youngest to ever receive the award..."
… it went on further to explain that before him there have been fads where students abandoned their family names, but never to the sort of trend that went on after Antonidas took the reins. He had been taken so young he did not remember his family and never sought them due to his interests in magic taking priority. However, many tried to mimic Antonidas afterwards, even those who were from prestigious households. In the past decades, Antonidas has shaped Dalaran's culture into one to his liking.
He was not actually very tall or very muscular. He stood less than six feet tall and if I took even a cursory glance over him, it was easy to notice his thin, bony limbs and fingers. If he had been anyone else, then he would have looked like a simple breeze would have knocked him over. Despite being well groomed and impressively presented, Antonidas' robes were baggy and just a tinge too large for him that this was noticeable. It was like there was an absence of flesh, or simply that he was over a hundred years old or something. Considering he had experimented with time travel, who knew what his true age was?
Antonidas
The Kirin Tor
Level <Skull> Archmage
HEALTH: 52,945,000
MANA: 16,585,000,000
STRENGHT: 120
AGILITY: 290
STAMINA: 5520
INTELLECT: 23754
SPIRIT: 12019
KARMA: Neutral
Equipment: Sash of Supreme Acumen, Khadgar's Pipe of Insight, Archus...
Once our powers of observation grew powerful enough, I saw the world through a lens. It was like walking the world while having one eye peek over the game master's shoulder. I sighed and stopped trying to pry deeper into Antonidas' status. For one, I didn't even know if those numbers were good. Not for the first time, I wished that I had fallen into a Dungeons and Dragons world. At least prestidigitation was considered a low level spell there; I wouldn't have to study a whole bunch just to learn the most simplistic things. And for another, I doubted that Antonidas would just sit here for us to study.
They were nice numbers though, big and large. If I had any inkling of their meaning, I might have went far as question how Arthas had been able to defeat him. But the power of destiny is and always will be a powerful thing...
"You've been expecting me?" His eyebrows rose to his forehead. He stroked his beard distractedly, but his acute eyes followed my movements as I welcomed him into our room. He knew something about me, perhaps?
This was not how I had planned our first meeting however. I nodded, "Are you not Antonidas, ruler of Dalaran?"
"You have me at a loss, young lady," He clarified immediately. His eyes swerved over the room and took in everything about our habitat. It looked like he was already forming his own conclusions about us and me in particular. "A student of magic too... you seem to think you know more about me than I do of you."
"Well, that is to be expected, since you're a public figure written about in books and I'm... a twelve year old girl," I replied not without a hint of sarcasm.
He huffed like he had choked down a chuckle and peered down at our gloriously set tea table. "Tell me, do you know what was my first accomplishment, Miss Proudmoore? The one that really, truly set me apart from my peers?"
"Oh, I don't know, is it your thesis about the—"
"No." He cut us off immediately, his eyes piercing and sharp. There was an edge to his voice, as if speaking to one of the thousands of imbeciles he dealt with on a daily basis, like he want to choke the ignorance out of us with a flux of knowledge. The radiance of power was back and brighter than before, visible and tangible in the room. Beside us, Finn seemed to have a hard time breathing.
"... er, what?" I was actually about to ramp up for a rant of my own.
"No, Miss Proudmoore. That is not my first accomplishment. That is but a study and the first scrap of knowledge I shared with my peers. People are inherently superstitious. They believe in the folk lore of hedge wizards and follow the archaic rituals of high elves, but both have become obsolete in the last one hundred years. Do you know why that is, Miss Proudmoore?" He asked, invitingly. I felt not intimidated to want to converse with him under this atmosphere, for it seemed like even if he was so vastly more knowledgeable than I was, he would not laugh at me for my guesses. It was a rather silly feeling, since it was the feeling a chimp would have when a human would teach it to use sign language rather than to use it to test the toxicity of cosmetics.
"For thousands of years, we have learned magic through the same methods of 'try, observe, and try again' school of thought. It was passed down to us from the high elves, and from various myths to them. But that is limiting, not in what mysteries we study but how we study," He lectured, while pouring himself a cup of lemon drink. "Perhaps others will disagree, but my contribution to the arts was the formalization and standardization of the process. There is never a need for guesswork, superstitions, or folk lore, when there is science to be done."
He was cold and bold about it, as if there was no arguing with him. There was a sort of charm, but if you knew what to look for you could see it very well. It was very similar to how Steve Jobs was after his return to Apple. He, oh. Oh! Oh... I get it. "Oh, you're a psychopath."
Antonidas blinked not unkindly and smiled further, "I like you. You have the boldness of a much older woman, Miss Proudmoore."
"... Thank you?" I blinked, confused.
"That wasn't a compliment." He replied jokingly? Probably? I couldn't get a read on him anymore and all we used Observe on were still objects or people while they weren't paying attention. I never bothered trying to us it as a mind reading skill yet, so it was so hard to see why he was smiling further. "You think I'm here to recruit you."
"Well, yes, of course." That was obvious, wasn't it? Why else would he be here? I ought to pencil in trying to learn to read minds sometime in the future however. "Why, you don't think I deserve to go to your whatever bullshit magic school?"
"I can tell you all you need to know about yourself, young lady. I can tell you more about yourself than you know about yourself." He went along with the conversation, as if we were truly just having tea.
"Oh, I highly doubt that, even if you are... very smart." He didn't have the ability to just Observe something and just read off all that data just neatly complied and scripted into a pop-up window, after all. I leaned forward, staring him down and calling his bluff. Jaina panicked inside us, firing a hundred questions at me. She thought I was trying to get us out of going if I just insulted Antonidas enough. She didn't see that the man was not insulted. How could a leader of men be insulted by a twelve year old girl who could do nothing to him, in a room of almost absolute privacy?
His face never so much as twitched, and he only leaned back against his chair. He took a sip, "I do, and do you know how I do, young lady? Statistics, data analysis, and things that you can learn of in Dalaran."
"Oh yeah? Well, why don't you prove... wait, what was that? Did you just say learn in Dalaran? But I thought you..." Jaina blurted out for us. I thought for a moment there Jaina was going to make us go cross-eyed, because of how panicked she was.
"You have what it takes to join my, ah, how did you so eloquently put it? My 'whatever bullshit magic school', was it?"He smirked over his tea cup before setting it down. There was an audible clatter. "Theorize, observe, hypothesize, predict, gather data, and so on and so forth. When I first though of standardization, it was just the next logical step for me. For everyone else, it was the next logical step only after I had explained the idea. It was simple enough to begin with, and I had done so with so many other processes of magic. Now, Dalaran is on the forefront of learning that the high elf prince is arriving to learn from us. It was with that same process that I deducted you would excel in the academy or as an apprentice."
Hold on a minute, there was... "You spied on me!"
He actually rolled his eyes at this.
I sighed, realizing I was right, but that there was nothing I could do about it.
"Miss Proudmoore, I do not spy on little girls. That is unbecoming of me." He paused, before adding, "I have people to do that for me. If you do not understand, that was a joke. Miss Goldensword—no, not you Finnal, your mother—has informed me of your curiosity and the amount of powerful flowing into and out of you. It is indeed as if you were a grown and trained wizard, but you are not."
"What? How would you even know that without Father knowing?" We felt the heart pounding return.
"A large amount of energy—pure, arcane energy in such concentrations not even witnessed at the Sun Well—keep flowing to you from the rather stormy oceans to the west." He stated. His face was grim. He was not joking now. "What do you know of that, Miss Proudmoore?"
"Um." Oh, that was probably my soul doing the whatever thingamajiggy soul bullshit that allowed me to have rather unique and hilarious powers. That thing. Oh, it's noticeable. And... people can track it. And... they can study it. Oh. Oh... "... I don't know what you are talking about?"
He stared.
"I plead the fifth?"
Antonidas sighed. "I cannot persuade you to give up your course on dangerous magics, Miss Proudmoore, but I can use my position to insure your safety and the safety of those around us, such as the world. Do you understand me, Miss Proudmoore?"
"You're saying you're offering me a position as your apprentice, but not because I am that talented. It is because you think I'm dabbling in fel magics that might somehow destroy the world?" I blinked. I was quite flattered, to be honest. But Jaina was having another anxiety attack for some unknown reason. Really, Jaina, get it together, girl. "I'm flattered, sir, but I don't know... even if I did I doubt I can do anything that catastrophic."
He chortled and shook his head. "No, Miss Proudmoore. I do not expect you to be able to do such a thing either. There is no need to be dramatic. But you are not the first student to delve into the unknown, to cause unknown effects upon the world."
He said it with such conviction and forlorn knowledge that I almost thought he was the one who accidentally accidented the world before. That couldn't be right. "Um, thank you?"
Antonidas sighed again. "That wasn't a compliment, Miss Proudmoore."
I blinked.
"That said, you have open to you two options, Miss Proudmoore," He reached into his flowing robes and from somewhere that was obviously not on this dimension, pulled out a scroll that was just a tidbit too large to fit into his robes. It was thick, and there were golden letters on it that sparkled and change. They scrambled and rearranged themselves with each passing second. I thought I was going to get a seizure from staring at it for too long.
"And what might they be?" We asked in unison. I tore our eyes away from the script and back to Antonidas, noticing how amused he was by our reaction.
"First, you can be a regular student within Dalaran. What you cannot provide will be provided to you once you choose one of three sponsors, the Kirin Tor, the Mages' Guild, or the Sorcerers' League. Each will have their rules to abide by, but they can be summed up as limiting and boring and general education for the underachieving wizard. You do not want to choose this route, Miss Proudmoore, unless you wish to squander your opportunities and be a lackey, a minion, and a nobody," Antonidas intoned. He certainly cut to the chase immediately, and he expected me to abide by his predictions instead.
Well, fine. If that was how he wanted to play it, I'd at least give him the respect and listen to his proposal. It would be a hard life if I somehow did spurn him and cause enmity between us. "Alright, then what is my other option?"
He nodded along. "The other option is to be my apprentice, Miss Proudmoore. It is a more prestigious position, but you and I do not care for prestige. We are people who care for results. You will certainly have more resources at your disposal, but you are a princess of a major power, and so I do not doubt you can acquire anything if you set your mind to it. But you will have access to my mind, Miss Proudmoore, and all the other wizards who are like me, and pursue a greater goal for a greater good. Of course, this means you will need to change somethings about..." He waving lazily at our... everything.
"What?" We blinked and frowned indignantly, "What? What's wrong with the way I am? I'm getting along with my studies perfectly."
Antonidas nodded again, but now it just felt condescending. "Sure, sure, Miss Proudmoore. But sometimes, you have to change what is already, ahem, "perfect" to something of your own. Do not worry your pretty little head over it, for any changes you make are simply my instructions for you to be a better you."
I tilted our head and narrowed our eyes at him funnily, with a half-smirk as I thought I had finally figured out a side of him that was not in the games. "... You're the kind of guy who fixes something that's already working."
"And you'll be the one to clean up my mess, Miss Proudmoore," He chortled. I wasn't sure if I should be amused. He turned back to the scroll, which was now switching back and forth between 'Terms of Academic Residence in Dalaran' and 'Terms of Apprenticeship'. "Now that we are done describing the age old institution of apprentices and mentors, what is your choice?"
It was boiled down pretty easily for us. Freedom or knowledge?
---
Note: I think I need help from people who know Warcraft 2. And maybe some refreshers from Warcraft 3. I'll be honest, I never played 1 or 2. Can anyone help me with that?
"The Magus Antonidas was but a mere boy when he became an apprentice to one of the Kirin Tor. He was a tenacious learner, pouring over books in the magical libraries of Dalaran. After only a few short years of studying under the sect, Antonidas had outclassed his peers and earned their admiration, as well as the respect of his elders. At the age of 12, Antonidas' thesis, "The Ramifications of Refined Reverse Time Travel Phenomena into Quantifiable Magical Practice", earned him the Kirin Tor Sash of Supreme Acumen, the youngest to ever receive the award..."
… it went on further to explain that before him there have been fads where students abandoned their family names, but never to the sort of trend that went on after Antonidas took the reins. He had been taken so young he did not remember his family and never sought them due to his interests in magic taking priority. However, many tried to mimic Antonidas afterwards, even those who were from prestigious households. In the past decades, Antonidas has shaped Dalaran's culture into one to his liking.
He was not actually very tall or very muscular. He stood less than six feet tall and if I took even a cursory glance over him, it was easy to notice his thin, bony limbs and fingers. If he had been anyone else, then he would have looked like a simple breeze would have knocked him over. Despite being well groomed and impressively presented, Antonidas' robes were baggy and just a tinge too large for him that this was noticeable. It was like there was an absence of flesh, or simply that he was over a hundred years old or something. Considering he had experimented with time travel, who knew what his true age was?
Antonidas
The Kirin Tor
Level <Skull> Archmage
HEALTH: 52,945,000
MANA: 16,585,000,000
STRENGHT: 120
AGILITY: 290
STAMINA: 5520
INTELLECT: 23754
SPIRIT: 12019
KARMA: Neutral
Equipment: Sash of Supreme Acumen, Khadgar's Pipe of Insight, Archus...
Once our powers of observation grew powerful enough, I saw the world through a lens. It was like walking the world while having one eye peek over the game master's shoulder. I sighed and stopped trying to pry deeper into Antonidas' status. For one, I didn't even know if those numbers were good. Not for the first time, I wished that I had fallen into a Dungeons and Dragons world. At least prestidigitation was considered a low level spell there; I wouldn't have to study a whole bunch just to learn the most simplistic things. And for another, I doubted that Antonidas would just sit here for us to study.
They were nice numbers though, big and large. If I had any inkling of their meaning, I might have went far as question how Arthas had been able to defeat him. But the power of destiny is and always will be a powerful thing...
"You've been expecting me?" His eyebrows rose to his forehead. He stroked his beard distractedly, but his acute eyes followed my movements as I welcomed him into our room. He knew something about me, perhaps?
This was not how I had planned our first meeting however. I nodded, "Are you not Antonidas, ruler of Dalaran?"
"You have me at a loss, young lady," He clarified immediately. His eyes swerved over the room and took in everything about our habitat. It looked like he was already forming his own conclusions about us and me in particular. "A student of magic too... you seem to think you know more about me than I do of you."
"Well, that is to be expected, since you're a public figure written about in books and I'm... a twelve year old girl," I replied not without a hint of sarcasm.
He huffed like he had choked down a chuckle and peered down at our gloriously set tea table. "Tell me, do you know what was my first accomplishment, Miss Proudmoore? The one that really, truly set me apart from my peers?"
"Oh, I don't know, is it your thesis about the—"
"No." He cut us off immediately, his eyes piercing and sharp. There was an edge to his voice, as if speaking to one of the thousands of imbeciles he dealt with on a daily basis, like he want to choke the ignorance out of us with a flux of knowledge. The radiance of power was back and brighter than before, visible and tangible in the room. Beside us, Finn seemed to have a hard time breathing.
"... er, what?" I was actually about to ramp up for a rant of my own.
"No, Miss Proudmoore. That is not my first accomplishment. That is but a study and the first scrap of knowledge I shared with my peers. People are inherently superstitious. They believe in the folk lore of hedge wizards and follow the archaic rituals of high elves, but both have become obsolete in the last one hundred years. Do you know why that is, Miss Proudmoore?" He asked, invitingly. I felt not intimidated to want to converse with him under this atmosphere, for it seemed like even if he was so vastly more knowledgeable than I was, he would not laugh at me for my guesses. It was a rather silly feeling, since it was the feeling a chimp would have when a human would teach it to use sign language rather than to use it to test the toxicity of cosmetics.
"For thousands of years, we have learned magic through the same methods of 'try, observe, and try again' school of thought. It was passed down to us from the high elves, and from various myths to them. But that is limiting, not in what mysteries we study but how we study," He lectured, while pouring himself a cup of lemon drink. "Perhaps others will disagree, but my contribution to the arts was the formalization and standardization of the process. There is never a need for guesswork, superstitions, or folk lore, when there is science to be done."
He was cold and bold about it, as if there was no arguing with him. There was a sort of charm, but if you knew what to look for you could see it very well. It was very similar to how Steve Jobs was after his return to Apple. He, oh. Oh! Oh... I get it. "Oh, you're a psychopath."
Antonidas blinked not unkindly and smiled further, "I like you. You have the boldness of a much older woman, Miss Proudmoore."
"... Thank you?" I blinked, confused.
"That wasn't a compliment." He replied jokingly? Probably? I couldn't get a read on him anymore and all we used Observe on were still objects or people while they weren't paying attention. I never bothered trying to us it as a mind reading skill yet, so it was so hard to see why he was smiling further. "You think I'm here to recruit you."
"Well, yes, of course." That was obvious, wasn't it? Why else would he be here? I ought to pencil in trying to learn to read minds sometime in the future however. "Why, you don't think I deserve to go to your whatever bullshit magic school?"
"I can tell you all you need to know about yourself, young lady. I can tell you more about yourself than you know about yourself." He went along with the conversation, as if we were truly just having tea.
"Oh, I highly doubt that, even if you are... very smart." He didn't have the ability to just Observe something and just read off all that data just neatly complied and scripted into a pop-up window, after all. I leaned forward, staring him down and calling his bluff. Jaina panicked inside us, firing a hundred questions at me. She thought I was trying to get us out of going if I just insulted Antonidas enough. She didn't see that the man was not insulted. How could a leader of men be insulted by a twelve year old girl who could do nothing to him, in a room of almost absolute privacy?
His face never so much as twitched, and he only leaned back against his chair. He took a sip, "I do, and do you know how I do, young lady? Statistics, data analysis, and things that you can learn of in Dalaran."
"Oh yeah? Well, why don't you prove... wait, what was that? Did you just say learn in Dalaran? But I thought you..." Jaina blurted out for us. I thought for a moment there Jaina was going to make us go cross-eyed, because of how panicked she was.
"You have what it takes to join my, ah, how did you so eloquently put it? My 'whatever bullshit magic school', was it?"He smirked over his tea cup before setting it down. There was an audible clatter. "Theorize, observe, hypothesize, predict, gather data, and so on and so forth. When I first though of standardization, it was just the next logical step for me. For everyone else, it was the next logical step only after I had explained the idea. It was simple enough to begin with, and I had done so with so many other processes of magic. Now, Dalaran is on the forefront of learning that the high elf prince is arriving to learn from us. It was with that same process that I deducted you would excel in the academy or as an apprentice."
Hold on a minute, there was... "You spied on me!"
He actually rolled his eyes at this.
I sighed, realizing I was right, but that there was nothing I could do about it.
"Miss Proudmoore, I do not spy on little girls. That is unbecoming of me." He paused, before adding, "I have people to do that for me. If you do not understand, that was a joke. Miss Goldensword—no, not you Finnal, your mother—has informed me of your curiosity and the amount of powerful flowing into and out of you. It is indeed as if you were a grown and trained wizard, but you are not."
"What? How would you even know that without Father knowing?" We felt the heart pounding return.
"A large amount of energy—pure, arcane energy in such concentrations not even witnessed at the Sun Well—keep flowing to you from the rather stormy oceans to the west." He stated. His face was grim. He was not joking now. "What do you know of that, Miss Proudmoore?"
"Um." Oh, that was probably my soul doing the whatever thingamajiggy soul bullshit that allowed me to have rather unique and hilarious powers. That thing. Oh, it's noticeable. And... people can track it. And... they can study it. Oh. Oh... "... I don't know what you are talking about?"
He stared.
"I plead the fifth?"
Antonidas sighed. "I cannot persuade you to give up your course on dangerous magics, Miss Proudmoore, but I can use my position to insure your safety and the safety of those around us, such as the world. Do you understand me, Miss Proudmoore?"
"You're saying you're offering me a position as your apprentice, but not because I am that talented. It is because you think I'm dabbling in fel magics that might somehow destroy the world?" I blinked. I was quite flattered, to be honest. But Jaina was having another anxiety attack for some unknown reason. Really, Jaina, get it together, girl. "I'm flattered, sir, but I don't know... even if I did I doubt I can do anything that catastrophic."
He chortled and shook his head. "No, Miss Proudmoore. I do not expect you to be able to do such a thing either. There is no need to be dramatic. But you are not the first student to delve into the unknown, to cause unknown effects upon the world."
He said it with such conviction and forlorn knowledge that I almost thought he was the one who accidentally accidented the world before. That couldn't be right. "Um, thank you?"
Antonidas sighed again. "That wasn't a compliment, Miss Proudmoore."
I blinked.
"That said, you have open to you two options, Miss Proudmoore," He reached into his flowing robes and from somewhere that was obviously not on this dimension, pulled out a scroll that was just a tidbit too large to fit into his robes. It was thick, and there were golden letters on it that sparkled and change. They scrambled and rearranged themselves with each passing second. I thought I was going to get a seizure from staring at it for too long.
"And what might they be?" We asked in unison. I tore our eyes away from the script and back to Antonidas, noticing how amused he was by our reaction.
"First, you can be a regular student within Dalaran. What you cannot provide will be provided to you once you choose one of three sponsors, the Kirin Tor, the Mages' Guild, or the Sorcerers' League. Each will have their rules to abide by, but they can be summed up as limiting and boring and general education for the underachieving wizard. You do not want to choose this route, Miss Proudmoore, unless you wish to squander your opportunities and be a lackey, a minion, and a nobody," Antonidas intoned. He certainly cut to the chase immediately, and he expected me to abide by his predictions instead.
Well, fine. If that was how he wanted to play it, I'd at least give him the respect and listen to his proposal. It would be a hard life if I somehow did spurn him and cause enmity between us. "Alright, then what is my other option?"
He nodded along. "The other option is to be my apprentice, Miss Proudmoore. It is a more prestigious position, but you and I do not care for prestige. We are people who care for results. You will certainly have more resources at your disposal, but you are a princess of a major power, and so I do not doubt you can acquire anything if you set your mind to it. But you will have access to my mind, Miss Proudmoore, and all the other wizards who are like me, and pursue a greater goal for a greater good. Of course, this means you will need to change somethings about..." He waving lazily at our... everything.
"What?" We blinked and frowned indignantly, "What? What's wrong with the way I am? I'm getting along with my studies perfectly."
Antonidas nodded again, but now it just felt condescending. "Sure, sure, Miss Proudmoore. But sometimes, you have to change what is already, ahem, "perfect" to something of your own. Do not worry your pretty little head over it, for any changes you make are simply my instructions for you to be a better you."
I tilted our head and narrowed our eyes at him funnily, with a half-smirk as I thought I had finally figured out a side of him that was not in the games. "... You're the kind of guy who fixes something that's already working."
"And you'll be the one to clean up my mess, Miss Proudmoore," He chortled. I wasn't sure if I should be amused. He turned back to the scroll, which was now switching back and forth between 'Terms of Academic Residence in Dalaran' and 'Terms of Apprenticeship'. "Now that we are done describing the age old institution of apprentices and mentors, what is your choice?"
It was boiled down pretty easily for us. Freedom or knowledge?
---
Note: I think I need help from people who know Warcraft 2. And maybe some refreshers from Warcraft 3. I'll be honest, I never played 1 or 2. Can anyone help me with that?
Chapter 8: Contract?
d.fish
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Chapter 8
"Before I can make a decision, I would like to ask one thing," I said. I sighed internally, because this was more for Jaina than it was for me. I would have accepted immediately, being the shameless slut for power that I was. No, wait, I'm a pure and innocent maiden, and no one can say otherwise.
"Of course," He nodded congenially. "There are many considerations you should think about before making such a decision. Shall I return on a different date?"
We shook our head. Jaina was too filled with the impatience of youth. She wanted to learn, and learning at the feet of the greatest scholar in all of the world was no simple thing. This was the chance of a lifetime. She didn't even question me about if I knew anything about the strange reason that drew Antonidas to us. A child improvised; an adult planned. Well, I was a child too then, in this case, but I had different thoughts in mind. I did not want to seem too eager or wanton. No one liked clinginess, after all. "No, that would not be necessary. I simply wish to know if my friend Finn can join me in being your apprentice."
Finn rolled her eyes beside me. "Oh, finally remembered me, did you? You didn't even ask if I wanted to go with this strange old man to Light-knows-where in his magical castle and take his colorful candies to, ah, "learn magic"!"
I blinked. "Wow, you make it sound so bad."
She raised an eyebrow at us silently.
"Fine, I'm sorry I didn't look at it from your perspective," We rolled our eyes in response. "But tell me the truth. Do you really want to stay in this cramped, little cabin in the middle of the ocean in who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long until the end of the war or go on a magical adventure?"
Finn stared back at us. For a moment, only sound of the creaking wood and splashing waves filled the room. If this were a movie, this would have been the moment when the camera panned out to show the entirety of our two meter by two meter room in all of its tininess.
We raised an eyebrow at her, no less sarcastically in our silence.
She slumped after that and pouted. "Oh, fine. S'not like I'm tired of pretending to have tea parties or anything."
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and waved at the ceiling, whispering in a hushed voice, "But think about it, Finn! We could go beat up bandits and steal their tea and drink it on the backs of half-dead ogres. It'd be beautiful."
A single tear leaked out of her eyes and she turned away with a sniffle. "... Yeah."
"Ahem." Antonidas cleared his throat. "If that is quite enough of that drama, ladies? I would not be against taking on your friend, Miss Proudmoore, but she is your responsibility. You shall vouch for her, make sure she stays out of trouble, and you will make sure she does not stain the name of the Kirin Tor. Do you understand me, young lady?"
"You make this sound like I'm—" I began to say.
"Do you understand, Miss Proudmoore? Responsibility, young lady." Antonidas interrupted, clearly making sure that everything wrong would be pinned on us. It was what made a great leader, after all, so I understood. You needed to be able to deny and pin everything on everyone else, else you'd never be a leader of people. At least he didn't seem to be much of a hypocrite, and he wasn't lying to my face. That already made him better than pretty much every other politician I knew!
I felt like I was in a pet shop and Finn was my new puppy. "... Yes."
"Very well then, I see no troubles with that. If you will make your decision then, Miss Proudmoore?" He placed the scroll on our tiny table. It still flickered back and forth, since we had not given word on our choice. "I am a busy man, and I have much to attend to. Like a war of defense against orcish aggression, if you remember."
"I thought you were monitoring Khadgar," I blurted. It was the one key note of import that even referred to Antonidas in the Second War, or as normal people called it, Warcraft 2: Tits of Dorkness. At least, if I remembered correctly that was the title. During that time, one of the key characters of the lore, Khadgar, who was the apprentice and student of Medivh—a man I had referred to several times prior as a rather central plot point—went around doing important missions for the Alliance of Lordaeron, such as the closing of the Dark Portal (the portal that the orcs came through) and the investigation of Draenor (the orcs' homeland).
He frowned, "And how... exactly... do you know this, Miss Proudmoore?"
Oh. Wait. Those might be secret missions. Huh. "Uh..."
"Yes?" He seemed to put on a veneer of joking calm, but we felt the pulse of power return.
"Actually, what's this even about? What are you guys talking about now?" Finn butted in too, upset at being out of the loop on our conversation. She leaned closer too.
"Uh..." I looked between them. "It was an educated guess? How about we go back to that apprentice bullshit thingy, eh? I'll totally be your student, no problem!"
He expressed some sense of surprise, but only enough to seem like an act. "And you are not saying this because you do not want to answer the previous question, Miss Proudmoore?"
"... nope!"
"Very well," He nodded again. The scroll's letters no longer changed. They stayed as 'Terms of Apprenticeship' and rather simple words too. I didn't notice any fine print. That was probably a good thing. "I shall speak with your father about this later. I am sure he is worried about your confinement on his flagship."
Scroll of Certificate of Apprenticeship
This is the contract between Antonidas and Jaina Proudmoore to protect, provide, and learn from each other. It is binding in that both can be identified using it and it is proof of the relationship. This can also be used to requisition items from various quartermasters and storages on the authority of either signatories. It also notes adds that Finnal Goldensword is Jaina Proudmoore's page for the duration of the apprenticeship.
Cost: 0 Gold
"Oh..." We had a flashback to when Father jumped from the crow's nest atop the ship onto a black dragon, kicked its rider off, before wrassling the dragon into submission and smiling down at us from across the deck as if he had just won the Father of the Year award. "I'm sure he'll cope."
Antonidas blinked at the strange reply. "Very good. Miss Goldensword, Miss Proudmoore. I shall see you within the week. Let me be the first to welcome you to Dalaran School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
I momentarily went cross-eyed, even far he had already exited the room. Then we turned to Finn, "Where have I heard that title before?"
"Beats me," Finn shrugged. "You're a strange girl, you know that, Jaina?"
"Before I can make a decision, I would like to ask one thing," I said. I sighed internally, because this was more for Jaina than it was for me. I would have accepted immediately, being the shameless slut for power that I was. No, wait, I'm a pure and innocent maiden, and no one can say otherwise.
"Of course," He nodded congenially. "There are many considerations you should think about before making such a decision. Shall I return on a different date?"
We shook our head. Jaina was too filled with the impatience of youth. She wanted to learn, and learning at the feet of the greatest scholar in all of the world was no simple thing. This was the chance of a lifetime. She didn't even question me about if I knew anything about the strange reason that drew Antonidas to us. A child improvised; an adult planned. Well, I was a child too then, in this case, but I had different thoughts in mind. I did not want to seem too eager or wanton. No one liked clinginess, after all. "No, that would not be necessary. I simply wish to know if my friend Finn can join me in being your apprentice."
Finn rolled her eyes beside me. "Oh, finally remembered me, did you? You didn't even ask if I wanted to go with this strange old man to Light-knows-where in his magical castle and take his colorful candies to, ah, "learn magic"!"
I blinked. "Wow, you make it sound so bad."
She raised an eyebrow at us silently.
"Fine, I'm sorry I didn't look at it from your perspective," We rolled our eyes in response. "But tell me the truth. Do you really want to stay in this cramped, little cabin in the middle of the ocean in who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long until the end of the war or go on a magical adventure?"
Finn stared back at us. For a moment, only sound of the creaking wood and splashing waves filled the room. If this were a movie, this would have been the moment when the camera panned out to show the entirety of our two meter by two meter room in all of its tininess.
We raised an eyebrow at her, no less sarcastically in our silence.
She slumped after that and pouted. "Oh, fine. S'not like I'm tired of pretending to have tea parties or anything."
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and waved at the ceiling, whispering in a hushed voice, "But think about it, Finn! We could go beat up bandits and steal their tea and drink it on the backs of half-dead ogres. It'd be beautiful."
A single tear leaked out of her eyes and she turned away with a sniffle. "... Yeah."
"Ahem." Antonidas cleared his throat. "If that is quite enough of that drama, ladies? I would not be against taking on your friend, Miss Proudmoore, but she is your responsibility. You shall vouch for her, make sure she stays out of trouble, and you will make sure she does not stain the name of the Kirin Tor. Do you understand me, young lady?"
"You make this sound like I'm—" I began to say.
"Do you understand, Miss Proudmoore? Responsibility, young lady." Antonidas interrupted, clearly making sure that everything wrong would be pinned on us. It was what made a great leader, after all, so I understood. You needed to be able to deny and pin everything on everyone else, else you'd never be a leader of people. At least he didn't seem to be much of a hypocrite, and he wasn't lying to my face. That already made him better than pretty much every other politician I knew!
I felt like I was in a pet shop and Finn was my new puppy. "... Yes."
"Very well then, I see no troubles with that. If you will make your decision then, Miss Proudmoore?" He placed the scroll on our tiny table. It still flickered back and forth, since we had not given word on our choice. "I am a busy man, and I have much to attend to. Like a war of defense against orcish aggression, if you remember."
"I thought you were monitoring Khadgar," I blurted. It was the one key note of import that even referred to Antonidas in the Second War, or as normal people called it, Warcraft 2: Tits of Dorkness. At least, if I remembered correctly that was the title. During that time, one of the key characters of the lore, Khadgar, who was the apprentice and student of Medivh—a man I had referred to several times prior as a rather central plot point—went around doing important missions for the Alliance of Lordaeron, such as the closing of the Dark Portal (the portal that the orcs came through) and the investigation of Draenor (the orcs' homeland).
He frowned, "And how... exactly... do you know this, Miss Proudmoore?"
Oh. Wait. Those might be secret missions. Huh. "Uh..."
"Yes?" He seemed to put on a veneer of joking calm, but we felt the pulse of power return.
"Actually, what's this even about? What are you guys talking about now?" Finn butted in too, upset at being out of the loop on our conversation. She leaned closer too.
"Uh..." I looked between them. "It was an educated guess? How about we go back to that apprentice bullshit thingy, eh? I'll totally be your student, no problem!"
He expressed some sense of surprise, but only enough to seem like an act. "And you are not saying this because you do not want to answer the previous question, Miss Proudmoore?"
"... nope!"
"Very well," He nodded again. The scroll's letters no longer changed. They stayed as 'Terms of Apprenticeship' and rather simple words too. I didn't notice any fine print. That was probably a good thing. "I shall speak with your father about this later. I am sure he is worried about your confinement on his flagship."
Scroll of Certificate of Apprenticeship
This is the contract between Antonidas and Jaina Proudmoore to protect, provide, and learn from each other. It is binding in that both can be identified using it and it is proof of the relationship. This can also be used to requisition items from various quartermasters and storages on the authority of either signatories. It also notes adds that Finnal Goldensword is Jaina Proudmoore's page for the duration of the apprenticeship.
Cost: 0 Gold
"Oh..." We had a flashback to when Father jumped from the crow's nest atop the ship onto a black dragon, kicked its rider off, before wrassling the dragon into submission and smiling down at us from across the deck as if he had just won the Father of the Year award. "I'm sure he'll cope."
Antonidas blinked at the strange reply. "Very good. Miss Goldensword, Miss Proudmoore. I shall see you within the week. Let me be the first to welcome you to Dalaran School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
I momentarily went cross-eyed, even far he had already exited the room. Then we turned to Finn, "Where have I heard that title before?"
"Beats me," Finn shrugged. "You're a strange girl, you know that, Jaina?"
Chapter 9: Shipwrecked
d.fish
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Chapter 9
There was a tearful farewell between the parent and their child. It was destined to happen, when the child goes to boarding school. I've experienced it once before, back when I was in first grade. Back then, when I was seven, anything that even sounded like 'mother' or 'father' caused me to tear up and unable to function for minutes. Of course, this similar process was the tearful farewell... between Finn and her mom.
Not us, of course. Daelin Proudmoore was too busy being a man's man and wrassling with his men and growing out his beard and rubbing oil on his chest hair and all that stuff. He had no time for tears. Instead, he just handed us a bag of gold and told us to have fun. We weren't even sure if he knew it was us until he added, "Oh, and your mother is dead." We knew he was a busy man and he was probably drunk having to cope with his baby girl going away, but he seemed to have triggered a lot of different triggers with that one.
And after that, it was just me driving our body. Jaina seemed to have just stopped answering or bothering doing anything at all. So it ended up with me staring blankly into his eyes, channeling mana to look like a Midwich kid, and deadpanning, "Father, I am not a person. My body is just a flesh vessel for an immortal being whose name, if you heard it, would make your soul melt out of your butt."
Right, anyway, I got a new quest.
You have a new quest!
Title: Survive the trip to Dalaran.
Description: It is the first adventure of your life, you are to venture forth with the marine guards assigned to you by Daelin Proudmoore and Finnal Goldensword to the the violet city of Dalaran, to see the wonderful wizard of Dalaran. There is no yellow brick road, and tutorial mode has already ended. Don't die.
Victory Conditions: Arrive at Dalaran.
Failure Conditions: Jaina Proudmoore (True) dies. Finnal Goldensword dies.
Failure Results: Prestige loss, favorite toys lost to Tandred Proudmoore, and death.
Bonus: Arrive before the Black Dragonflight sieges Dalaran and get a surprise!
I wonder what the surprise is…
Well, everything was in order, so I clicked accept and we were off. That was yesterday.
Father and Finn's mother had sent twenty guards with us. We were supposed to travel incognito using this riverboat to go from the marshland northward to a wealthy port called Southshore. This was the southern most trading port of Lordaeron. It was from these muddy roads that we were supposed to find a wagon caravan that would take us to the border between Lordaeron and the city-state of Dalaran. It was to be a two week's journey, easily making it into any time restraints that I had artificially instilled on our adventure. For the first day, it was peaceful, even as we reached the southern shores of Lordaeron...
… and then the murlocs attacked.
For the uninitiated, what were murlocs? I didn't know even know what they were until the whole event was done and over with. In the video games and the other medias, you see a green, little midget frog-man with orange feet and great, watery eyes like something out of the most exaggerated point of Japanese animation made into real life. It looked as it sounded—both in the description and the way these critters were made to sound in the games—cute.
Cute.
Cute, cute, cute...
Whoever told me murlocs were cute (actually that's me) should go slap themselves up the back of their heads and do penance for their sins. Cute. Ha!
Cute is not a maw the size of a human torso.
Cute is not a jaw that was half of the body's entire mass.
Cute is not teeth the length of my middle finger, with a layer of decay and yellowing and caked blood between the gaps.
They came at us in the night, as the clouds shrouded over the moonlight. We saw nothing, until dozens of gleaming, red eyes shone in the dark waters. I had, for the briefest of moments, thought we had been hallucinating, because there were no sounds of violence. I heard no growls, no howls, and no announcements of combat, just the calm waters sloshing about...
I was on the side of the dingy, thinking nothing could go wrong. I had twenty of the elite marines of the Alliance of Lordaeron with me, and that was enough to take out a small platoon of orcs or even commandeer one of their juggernaut ships if it only had a skeleton crew. It was enough to man the defense of a fort, to... do a lot of things. The point was, I thought I was safe.
We had been chatting since we set off that morning, actually. It was all nonsense we were talking about ("So did you know if we mixed cough syrup with sugar and soda, it would taste good?"), but we were having fun. Finn was sitting opposite of me, sipping a gin and tonic like I was, and the marines all had whiskey with their captain dipping his hands in pudding, as was tradition. I had broached the topic I had wanted to discuss ("So who here has daddy issues? All of you? Wait what—") and leaned over to relax, when a bit of something slimy dripped onto my forearm.
I frowned, not remembering picking my nose in recent memory, and turned to the source of my annoyance. It was a small droplet of greenish yellow. I thought it was strange, and studied it, thinking of where this could have came from. It looked and felt like mucus, though there was a tinge of something akin to the same sort of hallucinogens that the back of some colorful frogs might have had. Being the curious student of SCIENCE that I was, I turned around and leaned over to see if it was from something in the water.
A hand reached out and grabbed me. I was startled and nearly jumped into the water. As I turned, I noticed it was the hand of one of the junior officers on my shoulder. "Oh, it's just you," I had told her. I had forgotten her name already, because I wasn't paying attention when we were introduced.
She couldn't have been older than me, and yet she was already serving as an apprentice navigator and map maker. She smirked knowingly, "Private Lorena, Navigation Junior Officer Third Class. Lady Proudmoore, I'm just makin' sure you're comfortable, 'cuz the moon's gone 'n we might be runnin' intah trouble."
"Oh, I'm fine," I feigned a smile. What I really wanted to ask was why no one bothered checking up on me while I was on the ship. Of course, there was no point in throwing a tantrum like a spoiled princess who has the exact background as I did. Wait...
"If you are sure," Lorena's smile seemed rather strained too. She was holding onto Finn with her other hand and Finn seemed a tidbit distraught. "It's lookin' like we're under attack."
I peered over as Lorena pushed Finn and I into the water. "Oh."
Perhaps half of one hundred creatures were piling onto the dingy, straining as they ripped marines apart and the wood from the very boat. Blood, wood, bone, metal, and leather were all flying as a frenzy of a melee was occurring on the deck. One grabbed onto my arm, its cold, slimy hands were webbed I noticed. It was also ugly, like a cross breed between several animals after being forced to inbreed for several centuries. Its tongue licked my fingers and a hungered fire sparked in its desperate eyes.
The one good thing about this entire ordeal was that it woke Jaina up. "Wha... what is going on? Why are we in the water? Why is it so cold? What is that thing?"
"It's a midget-water-shark-frog-wolf-thing, and if you haven't been paying attention, I do believe they are trying to eat us." I replied cordially.
"What's wrong with you? Panic! Why are you so calm?" Jaina asked as she pulled our hand back just fast enough to evade the teeth of the monster. Then she slapped it in the face with a dozen arcane missiles, causing its mouth to bulge and its eyes to explode all over our favorite dress... which was already wet and covered in mucus and blood and probably torn in at least three places.
I pondered on Jaina's deep and thoughtful question as she kicked our legs as fast as humanly possible and then some, before coming to a simple conclusion. "I think I'm high. Well, that makes two perks for this whole ordeal."
"What?" Jaina would have turned around to look me in the eyes if we were separate people. Instead, she could only follow Private Lorena, Finn and a tiny, little floating-thing-that-was-probably-one-of-the-gnomish-crew-members-but-could-be-one-of-our-water-monsters swim towards the shore in the distance. "What do you mean 'high'? We're in water!"
And it was then that the moon shone itself through the darkness again, and we saw only a wreckage, with hundreds of bodies. Most of them were of the monsters, but other than the four of us shivering in the darkness and cluttering around one piece of drift wood, there was no survivors...
… Only the sounds of the beasts in the water, in the distance, and in the darkness, wherever they were...
Aughibbrgyubugbugrguburgle...
Aughibbrguburgle...
Aughibbrgyubugbugrguburgle...
Rwl rwl rwl rwl...
… I had assumed they were singing us the song of their people. It was probably something akin to a primitive war ritual for these water primates after a successful ambush. It was also magical in nature, because we could feel it in the air. It made me come down from my high.
After that, we were all panicking and we paddled our way to shore as fast as we could.
That... was yesterday.
Today, we woke, with several crates of goods from our wreckage and a small fire that was hidden from sight. None of us had the strength to stand up just yet and we all just wanted to hide. Not a single person spoke, though the fear drained from us as the tide receded, leaving only something that didn't quite feel right.
My glorious plan of seeing Dalaran was ruined. All I saw was red... and if I had the ability, I would have went on a rampage.
But as we watched the ocean tides wax and wane, I saw in the distance in every direction, thousands names floating in the air. Their words were red as my vision, to belie hostility on sight. They were each nearly impossible to pronounce, and each the name of an individual in a murloc warband. "Lorena, if I told you that we were trapped with warbands of murlocs in every direction as far as the eye could see, what would be your response?"
She turned to us, with bags under her eyes from having kept watch through the early dawn. The raggedness of her hair finally unkempt and nearly causing it to fall from its bun. There was a sort of tired resignation in her eyes and her voice as she spoke with the accent of her Cockney-like people, "Well, Lady Proudmoore, I'd probably say something along the lines of 'Sounds interesting, Lady Proudmoore. Very good. Pip, pip, cheerio, Bob's your uncle, Light save the King and all that... bugger all.' Does that sound about right?"
We shrugged, "Well, almost. They seem to have gotten our scent and are headed our way."
"Jaina," Finn sighed. "Sometimes, I wish you never opened your mouth."
"'Sometimes', huh?" I smirked.
She punched me.
There was a tearful farewell between the parent and their child. It was destined to happen, when the child goes to boarding school. I've experienced it once before, back when I was in first grade. Back then, when I was seven, anything that even sounded like 'mother' or 'father' caused me to tear up and unable to function for minutes. Of course, this similar process was the tearful farewell... between Finn and her mom.
Not us, of course. Daelin Proudmoore was too busy being a man's man and wrassling with his men and growing out his beard and rubbing oil on his chest hair and all that stuff. He had no time for tears. Instead, he just handed us a bag of gold and told us to have fun. We weren't even sure if he knew it was us until he added, "Oh, and your mother is dead." We knew he was a busy man and he was probably drunk having to cope with his baby girl going away, but he seemed to have triggered a lot of different triggers with that one.
And after that, it was just me driving our body. Jaina seemed to have just stopped answering or bothering doing anything at all. So it ended up with me staring blankly into his eyes, channeling mana to look like a Midwich kid, and deadpanning, "Father, I am not a person. My body is just a flesh vessel for an immortal being whose name, if you heard it, would make your soul melt out of your butt."
Right, anyway, I got a new quest.
You have a new quest!
Title: Survive the trip to Dalaran.
Description: It is the first adventure of your life, you are to venture forth with the marine guards assigned to you by Daelin Proudmoore and Finnal Goldensword to the the violet city of Dalaran, to see the wonderful wizard of Dalaran. There is no yellow brick road, and tutorial mode has already ended. Don't die.
Victory Conditions: Arrive at Dalaran.
Failure Conditions: Jaina Proudmoore (True) dies. Finnal Goldensword dies.
Failure Results: Prestige loss, favorite toys lost to Tandred Proudmoore, and death.
Bonus: Arrive before the Black Dragonflight sieges Dalaran and get a surprise!
I wonder what the surprise is…
Well, everything was in order, so I clicked accept and we were off. That was yesterday.
Father and Finn's mother had sent twenty guards with us. We were supposed to travel incognito using this riverboat to go from the marshland northward to a wealthy port called Southshore. This was the southern most trading port of Lordaeron. It was from these muddy roads that we were supposed to find a wagon caravan that would take us to the border between Lordaeron and the city-state of Dalaran. It was to be a two week's journey, easily making it into any time restraints that I had artificially instilled on our adventure. For the first day, it was peaceful, even as we reached the southern shores of Lordaeron...
… and then the murlocs attacked.
For the uninitiated, what were murlocs? I didn't know even know what they were until the whole event was done and over with. In the video games and the other medias, you see a green, little midget frog-man with orange feet and great, watery eyes like something out of the most exaggerated point of Japanese animation made into real life. It looked as it sounded—both in the description and the way these critters were made to sound in the games—cute.
Cute.
Cute, cute, cute...
Whoever told me murlocs were cute (actually that's me) should go slap themselves up the back of their heads and do penance for their sins. Cute. Ha!
Cute is not a maw the size of a human torso.
Cute is not a jaw that was half of the body's entire mass.
Cute is not teeth the length of my middle finger, with a layer of decay and yellowing and caked blood between the gaps.
They came at us in the night, as the clouds shrouded over the moonlight. We saw nothing, until dozens of gleaming, red eyes shone in the dark waters. I had, for the briefest of moments, thought we had been hallucinating, because there were no sounds of violence. I heard no growls, no howls, and no announcements of combat, just the calm waters sloshing about...
I was on the side of the dingy, thinking nothing could go wrong. I had twenty of the elite marines of the Alliance of Lordaeron with me, and that was enough to take out a small platoon of orcs or even commandeer one of their juggernaut ships if it only had a skeleton crew. It was enough to man the defense of a fort, to... do a lot of things. The point was, I thought I was safe.
We had been chatting since we set off that morning, actually. It was all nonsense we were talking about ("So did you know if we mixed cough syrup with sugar and soda, it would taste good?"), but we were having fun. Finn was sitting opposite of me, sipping a gin and tonic like I was, and the marines all had whiskey with their captain dipping his hands in pudding, as was tradition. I had broached the topic I had wanted to discuss ("So who here has daddy issues? All of you? Wait what—") and leaned over to relax, when a bit of something slimy dripped onto my forearm.
I frowned, not remembering picking my nose in recent memory, and turned to the source of my annoyance. It was a small droplet of greenish yellow. I thought it was strange, and studied it, thinking of where this could have came from. It looked and felt like mucus, though there was a tinge of something akin to the same sort of hallucinogens that the back of some colorful frogs might have had. Being the curious student of SCIENCE that I was, I turned around and leaned over to see if it was from something in the water.
A hand reached out and grabbed me. I was startled and nearly jumped into the water. As I turned, I noticed it was the hand of one of the junior officers on my shoulder. "Oh, it's just you," I had told her. I had forgotten her name already, because I wasn't paying attention when we were introduced.
She couldn't have been older than me, and yet she was already serving as an apprentice navigator and map maker. She smirked knowingly, "Private Lorena, Navigation Junior Officer Third Class. Lady Proudmoore, I'm just makin' sure you're comfortable, 'cuz the moon's gone 'n we might be runnin' intah trouble."
"Oh, I'm fine," I feigned a smile. What I really wanted to ask was why no one bothered checking up on me while I was on the ship. Of course, there was no point in throwing a tantrum like a spoiled princess who has the exact background as I did. Wait...
"If you are sure," Lorena's smile seemed rather strained too. She was holding onto Finn with her other hand and Finn seemed a tidbit distraught. "It's lookin' like we're under attack."
I peered over as Lorena pushed Finn and I into the water. "Oh."
Perhaps half of one hundred creatures were piling onto the dingy, straining as they ripped marines apart and the wood from the very boat. Blood, wood, bone, metal, and leather were all flying as a frenzy of a melee was occurring on the deck. One grabbed onto my arm, its cold, slimy hands were webbed I noticed. It was also ugly, like a cross breed between several animals after being forced to inbreed for several centuries. Its tongue licked my fingers and a hungered fire sparked in its desperate eyes.
The one good thing about this entire ordeal was that it woke Jaina up. "Wha... what is going on? Why are we in the water? Why is it so cold? What is that thing?"
"It's a midget-water-shark-frog-wolf-thing, and if you haven't been paying attention, I do believe they are trying to eat us." I replied cordially.
"What's wrong with you? Panic! Why are you so calm?" Jaina asked as she pulled our hand back just fast enough to evade the teeth of the monster. Then she slapped it in the face with a dozen arcane missiles, causing its mouth to bulge and its eyes to explode all over our favorite dress... which was already wet and covered in mucus and blood and probably torn in at least three places.
I pondered on Jaina's deep and thoughtful question as she kicked our legs as fast as humanly possible and then some, before coming to a simple conclusion. "I think I'm high. Well, that makes two perks for this whole ordeal."
"What?" Jaina would have turned around to look me in the eyes if we were separate people. Instead, she could only follow Private Lorena, Finn and a tiny, little floating-thing-that-was-probably-one-of-the-gnomish-crew-members-but-could-be-one-of-our-water-monsters swim towards the shore in the distance. "What do you mean 'high'? We're in water!"
And it was then that the moon shone itself through the darkness again, and we saw only a wreckage, with hundreds of bodies. Most of them were of the monsters, but other than the four of us shivering in the darkness and cluttering around one piece of drift wood, there was no survivors...
… Only the sounds of the beasts in the water, in the distance, and in the darkness, wherever they were...
Aughibbrgyubugbugrguburgle...
Aughibbrguburgle...
Aughibbrgyubugbugrguburgle...
Rwl rwl rwl rwl...
… I had assumed they were singing us the song of their people. It was probably something akin to a primitive war ritual for these water primates after a successful ambush. It was also magical in nature, because we could feel it in the air. It made me come down from my high.
After that, we were all panicking and we paddled our way to shore as fast as we could.
That... was yesterday.
Today, we woke, with several crates of goods from our wreckage and a small fire that was hidden from sight. None of us had the strength to stand up just yet and we all just wanted to hide. Not a single person spoke, though the fear drained from us as the tide receded, leaving only something that didn't quite feel right.
My glorious plan of seeing Dalaran was ruined. All I saw was red... and if I had the ability, I would have went on a rampage.
But as we watched the ocean tides wax and wane, I saw in the distance in every direction, thousands names floating in the air. Their words were red as my vision, to belie hostility on sight. They were each nearly impossible to pronounce, and each the name of an individual in a murloc warband. "Lorena, if I told you that we were trapped with warbands of murlocs in every direction as far as the eye could see, what would be your response?"
She turned to us, with bags under her eyes from having kept watch through the early dawn. The raggedness of her hair finally unkempt and nearly causing it to fall from its bun. There was a sort of tired resignation in her eyes and her voice as she spoke with the accent of her Cockney-like people, "Well, Lady Proudmoore, I'd probably say something along the lines of 'Sounds interesting, Lady Proudmoore. Very good. Pip, pip, cheerio, Bob's your uncle, Light save the King and all that... bugger all.' Does that sound about right?"
We shrugged, "Well, almost. They seem to have gotten our scent and are headed our way."
"Jaina," Finn sighed. "Sometimes, I wish you never opened your mouth."
"'Sometimes', huh?" I smirked.
She punched me.
Chapter 10: Murloc Fashion Season
d.fish
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Chapter 10
Perhaps it was because I had such a game player's mind that I was able to analyze the situation calmly as Jaina screamed in my ear. We have few choices; it was either confront the murderous beasts with a last stand or trek further inland. There was a reason why such islands were mostly abandoned colonies—they were usually filled with even more dangerous, more horrifying creatures from watery or fiery depths. As far as Jaina knew, common sense told of monsters with the bodies of fish and heads of men that roamed smaller islands and preyed on the weakness within the hearts of sailors. Jaina also knew these beasts from books, and knew enough to reinforce her fear of confronting them if we ventured further inland.
It was a big enough island that from first glance, we thought we had hit the beaches of Lordaeron. But as far as I knew, murlocs did not live inland, and we saw groups of them behind some trees and hills near the shores from our perspective. It did not look good for us and I took the moment to review what we had.
We had us, of course. We had Finnal, and Felicia Sexopants. I kept forgetting that Finnal was dragging around a glass ball filled with a polymorphed kitten that was once one of the most powerful and loyal warlocks that the orcs ever had. I bet he was tripping out of his mind at this point. But other than them, what did we have?
Private Lorena
Junior Navigator 3rd Class
Level 31
Private Tinky Wickwhistle
Former Blind Bandit
Level 33
Crate of Supplies
Jar of Coal Tar – 5
Marine Uniform – 10
Harpoon – 2
Crate of Supplies
Plank of Wood – 10
Wooden Pole – 4
Compass – 2
Crate of Supplies
Shipwright's Tools – 2
Stack of Green Lizard Hide – 4
Murloc Corpses – 10 (ish?)
Shipwrecked Dingy
2 Percent HP
Needs repair before use. Looks like a few, broken pieces of wood stuck together.
… There wasn't much here except for supplies, actually. Level-wise, these murlocs were mostly in their teens, but as we saw the previous night, a dozen of them could overwhelm a single experienced sailor. This wasn't a game, after all.
We had a lot of supplies, which we had probably clung to in order to even float to shore. The waters were too cold at night for much movement. To be frank, I thought we were lucky to even get to shore in one night. But now was not the time to think of how lucky we were. No matter how the next couple minutes turned out, it wasn't going to be very comfortable. "Come on, I think we got this," I said to Jaina.
"How do we 'got this'? There's... hundreds of them! I can see them!" She paused. "How can I see them? What did you do?"
My lips thinned to a line. "Why is it always my fault?"
Jaina raised our eyebrow at that. "Are you saying it's not?"
"Well, I mean, it's just really unfair!" I protested.
"And so what?" Jaina rubbed our temples. "Is it really unfair if it's the truth?"
I pouted, "What's wrong with being able to see them? Isn't that a good thing?"
Jaina rolled our eyes, "It makes us weird."
"What's wrong with weird?" I blinked.
"I don't want to... stand out. I just want to fit in and study!" Jaina replied, reminding me of how almost all children, back when they were in their adolescents, were awkward around everyone else their age and wished to just fit it. It wasn't until they were adults, all wearing the same suits and ties, that they wished to stand out somehow. Of course, I had gone through those phases a few times, and observed them enough to know I couldn't fight against such preservation instincts anyway.
So I shrugged, "Hey, you'll live with this one, if no one knows about it."
"You just told them!" She pointed at our companions.
"... Oh. Right. Um." That was not on purpose.
Jaina only gathered momentum from that point on. "Don't you do that again! What happened?"
I really felt this was unfair though, and I voiced those opinions. "It's really not my fault we have a special power! It's just a racial trait called Perception! I thought all humans had it. Maybe Lorena needs glasses or something?"
"You know glasses are only fashion pieces the very rich can afford," Jaina replied, slightly affronted by the offhand comment. "But a racial trait? As in something common in all humans? How come I couldn't see so far before?"
I shrugged. "Maybe you're just coming into your power now."
"Fine." She sighed.
"Fine?" I asked. "Really?"
"Yes. What else could I say? It's not like I want to force you to tell me something you don't know." Jaina responded reasonably before peering over the horizon. "So what are we going to do about this mess?"
I dropped it too, since there was nothing to add. "We could try to fight our way—"
"You know that won't work," Jaina cut me off then.
"Well, not with that attitude," I huffed.
Jaina uncrossed our arms and counted to ten in our head before saying calmly, "Even with a different attitude. Now what's the crazy scheme that you had in our mind that we ought to try? Since nothing else is going to work in this situation, we could do whatever you're thinking. I really wish this whole adventure was just done and over with, so let's hurry it up."
"You're such a party pooper," I slumped. "Why can't we just have fun for once?"
"Not with that attitude," she threw my phrase back at me.
"Fine," I conceded. See, life was all about compromises. I knew she want to sit next to a cozy fire with a good book and a creamy hot chocolate and she knew I wanted to watch the world burn. So the compromise would probably to sit next to a burning world with a good book and a creamy hot chocolate. Well, compromises actually never worked for companies, or countries, or anything that required decisive actions in that a mixed action never worked well. However, the compromise here was not that sort of decisive action, but an action where right now we did things my way, but once we were at Dalaran, we'd do things her way. And I was fine with that. "But for now, let's do it my way."
"Fine." And thus, we finished our conversation in the span of one second in real time. It was funny how mind-conversations worked when you didn't have to sub-vocalize everything, wasn't it?
Everyone else looked at us funnily.
"What?" I asked with a huff. "No time to make funny facial expressions, ladies, because we have work to do. Why are you all looking at me funny? Sheesh!"
"Uh..." Finn tried to speak up.
"Right, Finn, I need you to grab those green leathers and cut them up and piece them together into a cloak or a suit, you know, like the skin-tight one your mom wears or the cloak with the sleeves she has," We took the reins immediately. It was time for decisive action and SCIENCE.
"Wha...?" Lorena blinked in confusion.
"Lorena, you see that one large murloc that's bigger and brighter than the other corpses? Skin it... wait, we probably don't have time for the whole thing, just get the head first, I want a scalping done proper," I pointed at the big one with the yellow and red spikes growing out of the crown of its skull and the blue spots. Its skin was pretty and we had vague memories of it being the first to jump on the dingy, which was probably why it was stuck to a piece of the remains of the dingy. "And Tinky?"
She looked like she was about to puke. Maybe she already puked in her mouth, for efficiency? "... Yes, milady?"
"Help us piece this thing together and make it a proper murloc suit with some mojo." We were the child in the candy store and all those pieces of red candies were so many pieces of delicious experience! What pure and innocent maiden would not feel joy in the coming feast? I added with a bright, innocent, and happy smile, "I'm gonna wear its face."
Perhaps it was because I had such a game player's mind that I was able to analyze the situation calmly as Jaina screamed in my ear. We have few choices; it was either confront the murderous beasts with a last stand or trek further inland. There was a reason why such islands were mostly abandoned colonies—they were usually filled with even more dangerous, more horrifying creatures from watery or fiery depths. As far as Jaina knew, common sense told of monsters with the bodies of fish and heads of men that roamed smaller islands and preyed on the weakness within the hearts of sailors. Jaina also knew these beasts from books, and knew enough to reinforce her fear of confronting them if we ventured further inland.
It was a big enough island that from first glance, we thought we had hit the beaches of Lordaeron. But as far as I knew, murlocs did not live inland, and we saw groups of them behind some trees and hills near the shores from our perspective. It did not look good for us and I took the moment to review what we had.
We had us, of course. We had Finnal, and Felicia Sexopants. I kept forgetting that Finnal was dragging around a glass ball filled with a polymorphed kitten that was once one of the most powerful and loyal warlocks that the orcs ever had. I bet he was tripping out of his mind at this point. But other than them, what did we have?
Private Lorena
Junior Navigator 3rd Class
Level 31
Private Tinky Wickwhistle
Former Blind Bandit
Level 33
Crate of Supplies
Jar of Coal Tar – 5
Marine Uniform – 10
Harpoon – 2
Crate of Supplies
Plank of Wood – 10
Wooden Pole – 4
Compass – 2
Crate of Supplies
Shipwright's Tools – 2
Stack of Green Lizard Hide – 4
Murloc Corpses – 10 (ish?)
Shipwrecked Dingy
2 Percent HP
Needs repair before use. Looks like a few, broken pieces of wood stuck together.
… There wasn't much here except for supplies, actually. Level-wise, these murlocs were mostly in their teens, but as we saw the previous night, a dozen of them could overwhelm a single experienced sailor. This wasn't a game, after all.
We had a lot of supplies, which we had probably clung to in order to even float to shore. The waters were too cold at night for much movement. To be frank, I thought we were lucky to even get to shore in one night. But now was not the time to think of how lucky we were. No matter how the next couple minutes turned out, it wasn't going to be very comfortable. "Come on, I think we got this," I said to Jaina.
"How do we 'got this'? There's... hundreds of them! I can see them!" She paused. "How can I see them? What did you do?"
My lips thinned to a line. "Why is it always my fault?"
Jaina raised our eyebrow at that. "Are you saying it's not?"
"Well, I mean, it's just really unfair!" I protested.
"And so what?" Jaina rubbed our temples. "Is it really unfair if it's the truth?"
I pouted, "What's wrong with being able to see them? Isn't that a good thing?"
Jaina rolled our eyes, "It makes us weird."
"What's wrong with weird?" I blinked.
"I don't want to... stand out. I just want to fit in and study!" Jaina replied, reminding me of how almost all children, back when they were in their adolescents, were awkward around everyone else their age and wished to just fit it. It wasn't until they were adults, all wearing the same suits and ties, that they wished to stand out somehow. Of course, I had gone through those phases a few times, and observed them enough to know I couldn't fight against such preservation instincts anyway.
So I shrugged, "Hey, you'll live with this one, if no one knows about it."
"You just told them!" She pointed at our companions.
"... Oh. Right. Um." That was not on purpose.
Jaina only gathered momentum from that point on. "Don't you do that again! What happened?"
I really felt this was unfair though, and I voiced those opinions. "It's really not my fault we have a special power! It's just a racial trait called Perception! I thought all humans had it. Maybe Lorena needs glasses or something?"
"You know glasses are only fashion pieces the very rich can afford," Jaina replied, slightly affronted by the offhand comment. "But a racial trait? As in something common in all humans? How come I couldn't see so far before?"
I shrugged. "Maybe you're just coming into your power now."
"Fine." She sighed.
"Fine?" I asked. "Really?"
"Yes. What else could I say? It's not like I want to force you to tell me something you don't know." Jaina responded reasonably before peering over the horizon. "So what are we going to do about this mess?"
I dropped it too, since there was nothing to add. "We could try to fight our way—"
"You know that won't work," Jaina cut me off then.
"Well, not with that attitude," I huffed.
Jaina uncrossed our arms and counted to ten in our head before saying calmly, "Even with a different attitude. Now what's the crazy scheme that you had in our mind that we ought to try? Since nothing else is going to work in this situation, we could do whatever you're thinking. I really wish this whole adventure was just done and over with, so let's hurry it up."
"You're such a party pooper," I slumped. "Why can't we just have fun for once?"
"Not with that attitude," she threw my phrase back at me.
"Fine," I conceded. See, life was all about compromises. I knew she want to sit next to a cozy fire with a good book and a creamy hot chocolate and she knew I wanted to watch the world burn. So the compromise would probably to sit next to a burning world with a good book and a creamy hot chocolate. Well, compromises actually never worked for companies, or countries, or anything that required decisive actions in that a mixed action never worked well. However, the compromise here was not that sort of decisive action, but an action where right now we did things my way, but once we were at Dalaran, we'd do things her way. And I was fine with that. "But for now, let's do it my way."
"Fine." And thus, we finished our conversation in the span of one second in real time. It was funny how mind-conversations worked when you didn't have to sub-vocalize everything, wasn't it?
Everyone else looked at us funnily.
"What?" I asked with a huff. "No time to make funny facial expressions, ladies, because we have work to do. Why are you all looking at me funny? Sheesh!"
"Uh..." Finn tried to speak up.
"Right, Finn, I need you to grab those green leathers and cut them up and piece them together into a cloak or a suit, you know, like the skin-tight one your mom wears or the cloak with the sleeves she has," We took the reins immediately. It was time for decisive action and SCIENCE.
"Wha...?" Lorena blinked in confusion.
"Lorena, you see that one large murloc that's bigger and brighter than the other corpses? Skin it... wait, we probably don't have time for the whole thing, just get the head first, I want a scalping done proper," I pointed at the big one with the yellow and red spikes growing out of the crown of its skull and the blue spots. Its skin was pretty and we had vague memories of it being the first to jump on the dingy, which was probably why it was stuck to a piece of the remains of the dingy. "And Tinky?"
She looked like she was about to puke. Maybe she already puked in her mouth, for efficiency? "... Yes, milady?"
"Help us piece this thing together and make it a proper murloc suit with some mojo." We were the child in the candy store and all those pieces of red candies were so many pieces of delicious experience! What pure and innocent maiden would not feel joy in the coming feast? I added with a bright, innocent, and happy smile, "I'm gonna wear its face."
Chapter 11: Autosave
d.fish
Lés Bien
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2013
- Messages
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- Likes received
- 245,961
Chapter 11
… But it wasn't to be. Even though a human was almost fifty percent larger than a murloc, this one was perhaps a mutant murloc and it was twice the size of Daelin Proudmoore. That was to say, only half of its body was still stuck to the ship—the rest of it, including its limbs, were somewhere in the watery depths (or inside a different murloc's stomach, Jaina thought they ate each other, which might not be too off mark). The upper section of its skull was large enough to cover my head and then some, making it a rather leathery hood instead.
To be honest, I thought we looked rather cool, like a Sith in those flashy, shooty, swordy dramatic reenactments of wars in space that us Americans love so much. But Jaina just never stopped whining, "Ew. Ew, ew, ew. It smells like fish guts in here!"
"It is fish guts in here," I rolled our eyes and pushed away a bit of murloc lips out of our eyes.
"These sleeves are too big."
"They are not sleeves, they're supposed to be the mantelet," I grumbled.
"We already have a cape," Jaina pointed out.
I sighed again, "Damn it, it's fashion, it doesn't have to make sense!"
"Oh."
And 'Oh' was right, because I thought it looked awesome, so that was the way we were going. It was sort of like the cape-cloak that Medivh had in all those cut-scene cinematics, except with dragonhide and a murloc skin hood. Sure, the colors didn't quite match; the cloak itself was more of a pea green because of the prolonged soak the leathers had. The hood itself was was puke orange, with mustard yellow tentacle-spikes sticking out of it.
Jaina poked one of those tentacle-spikes and wondered, "What purpose do these fulfill, I wonder? Do you suppose it's for sensory purposes?"
"Eh." I shrugged. "Don't touch that. I've seen enough Japanese animation to know where that's going."
"Wha...?"
"I understand this is a new experience for you, but we're less than five minutes away from a possible life or death struggle. Do you really want to ponder on the mysteries of life now?" Because the moment she started focusing on it, I had the most uncontrollable urge to tug on one of those hardened tendrils.
They were thin as fingers and spiked on the end, no doubt with mild poisons like a jelly fish's tentacles. I knew the look of them; their brightly colored, almost translucent, pigmentation were definitely a way to ward off larger predators. After all, why have murlocs, who had bred so much that they were considered the possums and rats of Kul Tiras, not been farmed for food, if they were not poisonous?
Perhaps the answer lied in that they were mostly bone and sinew, hard to chew and harder to cut cleanly. It was only with Finn's rather sharp and heavily enchanted long blade that we were able to make short work of things and stitch it all together, with judicious application of tar and arcane magic and...
"Hey," Jaina poked me in the belly like one might do to the Pillsbury Doughboy mentally. "Are you pondering the mysteries of life... without me?"
She sounded vaguely upset.
"... No."
"There was a pause there. Why did you pause?" She pouted.
I really didn't want to get into this right now. After all, answering that I was just that socially awkward would only bring out more questions and cause her to question herself and thus cause us further delays in our development and... "Now is not the time, Jaina. Stop thinking so much!"
"Hmph."
There really wasn't any time to deal with her childish tantrum right now. I turned to our friends and commanded, "Look, murlocs are idiots when things don't go by script. So... Finn, get in that crate. Tinky, use that one. And Lorena, get the third one, I want you guys to form a semi-circle around me and turn any hostiles who charge at me into idiots who charged into a kill zone. Also, give me two harpoons."
"What's a kill zone?" Finn asked as she climbed into a box and handed me the sharp weapons that children definitely should run around with if they were being chased by murlocs.
Lorena added, "And, uh, you got some murloc eyes on your cheek over... ah, you got it. Okay, let me just grab a sword, two ticks... right, go ahead?" She didn't have a sword.
I handed her a wooden pole. A staff weapon was useful on any battlefield anyway. Tinky had smeared murloc guts all over her body and then added a layer of murloc guts. We decided to ignore her entirely for the moment. "... Right, just... just hide, alright?"
"... And wot're you gonna do?" Finn asked.
It seemed like a decent time to smirk. After all, there were many ways to game the system, only an idiot gamed the system through Final Fantasy styled grinding of attribute points... but seeing the fish raised in a threatening manner, I just backed off on the smirking 'heroically'.
Sometimes, it was better not to get punched in the arm too many times. My murlocloak wasn't very sturdy after all. Yeah. That's exactly why I didn't gloat. Because I was concerned about my new accessory.
Yup.
"You know something?" I muttered under my breath loudly. "I bet not a single person knows how to use their goddamn racial skills. It's almost like... you know what? Never mind. I'll just tell you. It's called diplomacy. Humans have this skill called diplomacy."
Finn frowned at me, before tilting her head and raising one eyebrow. She parted her lips for a moment, paused, and then closed her mouth. She watched me incredulously, as if thinking I was some kind of mythical animal, like a unicorn or a tooth fairy or a Stephen Hawking. Then she grumbled, "There's so many things wrong with... wait, did you drink some of the sailor's whiskey last night?"
"What."
"Are you drunk?"
"... No?"
"Are you sure?" She deadpanned. "Because you aren't."
"No! Yes! Wait. Argh! You know what? Laugh at all you want," I harrumphed and then turned around towards the murlocs that were almost within hearing distance of us. I could hear the ancient song of their people being chanted in the background. Obviously, this was a good time to turn around badassly and state my purpose.
Except Finn couldn't keep it in anymore and snorted. Then she started laughing so hard her crate tilted over and she nearly fell out. Her head peeked out as I turned around towards her again, and she said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry. Go on, do your thing. I could use a laugh before we're royally fucked. 'Ey, and you know what? I can say that we're actually royally fucked since we got into this mess 'cuza you."
"Argh!" I growled at her again.
She squeaked and hid, but her crate vibrated still.
"Hey!" Even Jaina was giggling, albeit shakily and making us tremble at the same time. I grabbed a harpoon in each hand and roared into the sky in frustration and pulled the hood down on our face in retaliation, "Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!"
Autosave – 1
… Wait, why was there an autosave?
There were a lot of gear in those crates just now... an awfully convenient collection of ammunition and battle items.
Now that I thought about it, there was a lot of room on this beach...
As I peered through the gouged out, leaking eye sockets of my fallen foe. For a moment, the world was silent, like in a game when the background music just stopped. Then, it was back, louder and pounding in our ears. The rhythm quickened like the pounding of our heart, like the roar of a thousand bands. You'd have thought a video game player would have known by now the signs, but I only just realized what was about to go down.
"That's a lot of bass."
"What?"
"Don't worry your silly, little head, Finn. I'm just... getting in the mood." Idly, I noted how the murloc blood that dripped down onto my lips tasted awfully like gravy. Well. "Nothing like a boss battle to start the morning. I'm going to diplomacy this bitch so hard."
… But it wasn't to be. Even though a human was almost fifty percent larger than a murloc, this one was perhaps a mutant murloc and it was twice the size of Daelin Proudmoore. That was to say, only half of its body was still stuck to the ship—the rest of it, including its limbs, were somewhere in the watery depths (or inside a different murloc's stomach, Jaina thought they ate each other, which might not be too off mark). The upper section of its skull was large enough to cover my head and then some, making it a rather leathery hood instead.
To be honest, I thought we looked rather cool, like a Sith in those flashy, shooty, swordy dramatic reenactments of wars in space that us Americans love so much. But Jaina just never stopped whining, "Ew. Ew, ew, ew. It smells like fish guts in here!"
"It is fish guts in here," I rolled our eyes and pushed away a bit of murloc lips out of our eyes.
"These sleeves are too big."
"They are not sleeves, they're supposed to be the mantelet," I grumbled.
"We already have a cape," Jaina pointed out.
I sighed again, "Damn it, it's fashion, it doesn't have to make sense!"
"Oh."
And 'Oh' was right, because I thought it looked awesome, so that was the way we were going. It was sort of like the cape-cloak that Medivh had in all those cut-scene cinematics, except with dragonhide and a murloc skin hood. Sure, the colors didn't quite match; the cloak itself was more of a pea green because of the prolonged soak the leathers had. The hood itself was was puke orange, with mustard yellow tentacle-spikes sticking out of it.
Jaina poked one of those tentacle-spikes and wondered, "What purpose do these fulfill, I wonder? Do you suppose it's for sensory purposes?"
"Eh." I shrugged. "Don't touch that. I've seen enough Japanese animation to know where that's going."
"Wha...?"
"I understand this is a new experience for you, but we're less than five minutes away from a possible life or death struggle. Do you really want to ponder on the mysteries of life now?" Because the moment she started focusing on it, I had the most uncontrollable urge to tug on one of those hardened tendrils.
They were thin as fingers and spiked on the end, no doubt with mild poisons like a jelly fish's tentacles. I knew the look of them; their brightly colored, almost translucent, pigmentation were definitely a way to ward off larger predators. After all, why have murlocs, who had bred so much that they were considered the possums and rats of Kul Tiras, not been farmed for food, if they were not poisonous?
Perhaps the answer lied in that they were mostly bone and sinew, hard to chew and harder to cut cleanly. It was only with Finn's rather sharp and heavily enchanted long blade that we were able to make short work of things and stitch it all together, with judicious application of tar and arcane magic and...
"Hey," Jaina poked me in the belly like one might do to the Pillsbury Doughboy mentally. "Are you pondering the mysteries of life... without me?"
She sounded vaguely upset.
"... No."
"There was a pause there. Why did you pause?" She pouted.
I really didn't want to get into this right now. After all, answering that I was just that socially awkward would only bring out more questions and cause her to question herself and thus cause us further delays in our development and... "Now is not the time, Jaina. Stop thinking so much!"
"Hmph."
There really wasn't any time to deal with her childish tantrum right now. I turned to our friends and commanded, "Look, murlocs are idiots when things don't go by script. So... Finn, get in that crate. Tinky, use that one. And Lorena, get the third one, I want you guys to form a semi-circle around me and turn any hostiles who charge at me into idiots who charged into a kill zone. Also, give me two harpoons."
"What's a kill zone?" Finn asked as she climbed into a box and handed me the sharp weapons that children definitely should run around with if they were being chased by murlocs.
Lorena added, "And, uh, you got some murloc eyes on your cheek over... ah, you got it. Okay, let me just grab a sword, two ticks... right, go ahead?" She didn't have a sword.
I handed her a wooden pole. A staff weapon was useful on any battlefield anyway. Tinky had smeared murloc guts all over her body and then added a layer of murloc guts. We decided to ignore her entirely for the moment. "... Right, just... just hide, alright?"
"... And wot're you gonna do?" Finn asked.
It seemed like a decent time to smirk. After all, there were many ways to game the system, only an idiot gamed the system through Final Fantasy styled grinding of attribute points... but seeing the fish raised in a threatening manner, I just backed off on the smirking 'heroically'.
Sometimes, it was better not to get punched in the arm too many times. My murlocloak wasn't very sturdy after all. Yeah. That's exactly why I didn't gloat. Because I was concerned about my new accessory.
Yup.
"You know something?" I muttered under my breath loudly. "I bet not a single person knows how to use their goddamn racial skills. It's almost like... you know what? Never mind. I'll just tell you. It's called diplomacy. Humans have this skill called diplomacy."
Finn frowned at me, before tilting her head and raising one eyebrow. She parted her lips for a moment, paused, and then closed her mouth. She watched me incredulously, as if thinking I was some kind of mythical animal, like a unicorn or a tooth fairy or a Stephen Hawking. Then she grumbled, "There's so many things wrong with... wait, did you drink some of the sailor's whiskey last night?"
"What."
"Are you drunk?"
"... No?"
"Are you sure?" She deadpanned. "Because you aren't."
"No! Yes! Wait. Argh! You know what? Laugh at all you want," I harrumphed and then turned around towards the murlocs that were almost within hearing distance of us. I could hear the ancient song of their people being chanted in the background. Obviously, this was a good time to turn around badassly and state my purpose.
Except Finn couldn't keep it in anymore and snorted. Then she started laughing so hard her crate tilted over and she nearly fell out. Her head peeked out as I turned around towards her again, and she said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry. Go on, do your thing. I could use a laugh before we're royally fucked. 'Ey, and you know what? I can say that we're actually royally fucked since we got into this mess 'cuza you."
"Argh!" I growled at her again.
She squeaked and hid, but her crate vibrated still.
"Hey!" Even Jaina was giggling, albeit shakily and making us tremble at the same time. I grabbed a harpoon in each hand and roared into the sky in frustration and pulled the hood down on our face in retaliation, "Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!"
Autosave – 1
… Wait, why was there an autosave?
There were a lot of gear in those crates just now... an awfully convenient collection of ammunition and battle items.
Now that I thought about it, there was a lot of room on this beach...
As I peered through the gouged out, leaking eye sockets of my fallen foe. For a moment, the world was silent, like in a game when the background music just stopped. Then, it was back, louder and pounding in our ears. The rhythm quickened like the pounding of our heart, like the roar of a thousand bands. You'd have thought a video game player would have known by now the signs, but I only just realized what was about to go down.
"That's a lot of bass."
"What?"
"Don't worry your silly, little head, Finn. I'm just... getting in the mood." Idly, I noted how the murloc blood that dripped down onto my lips tasted awfully like gravy. Well. "Nothing like a boss battle to start the morning. I'm going to diplomacy this bitch so hard."
Chapter 12: Primitive Diplomacy
d.fish
Lés Bien
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2013
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- 245,961
Chapter 12
Dread rose up from within my heart, Jaina's fear bearing down on us from all sides like a tidal wave. Though it seemed I was immune to what childish fear she had—perhaps due to my past experience as a mass murloc murderer in a video game—it was still present. I had to acknowledge the discomfort rumbling on the precipice of my bodily vessel.
If using inherent traits were natural, then feeling the urges and feelings were too. As the red names of the many fish-like creatures bobbled in the horizon, I could not help but shiver in anticipation. Their voices spread across the distance like a thousand bubbling kettles, the sort of sound made by people trying to speak underwater in concert. I knew the task ahead of me was daunting. I wished I could just fake a win; skimming over it like many did via watching others play their games for them.
The robe stuck to our skin, leaving excited goosebumps trailing all over our body. A layer of half-dried sweat and ocean water mingled there, not quite crusting. That same mixture dripped over our brow, just far enough to roll into the edge of our eye. The sting from the salt was a welcome distraction, but we wiped it away... unnecessary.
The cloak weighed down on our tired arms, from all the clinging and swimming and fighting for our lives that felt like a nightmare of yesternight. It was unbalanced and improperly cut, leaving small gaps between edges and the wind to howl just beneath our notice.
Our hair stuck to the gooey mass that was the emptied skull of a murloc king. Every so often, an irritation arose that we could not amend, leaving us more agitated and fixing our grip on our weapons. No matter how I moved my hands, it felt like the harpoons were too large and too cumbersome for our thin, girly fingers. The blunt end of the spear-like weapons felt glued to the wet sand beneath. We had let slid our hands up and down the shaft in our discomfort more than once, tightening and loosening our grip. A small hole formed where the harpoons stood on the sands.
For a moment, we closed our eyes in preparation, just to take in our surroundings. Too often did players forget the vast, vibrant world we built for them, focused on shiny trinkets barely worth our time. Too often did we spend long, toiling hours making the textures and physics and each and every grain of the world, only to be ignored for blue, purple, and golden words of simple nothings.
The salty air assailed our nostrils not for the first time, but for the first time we noticed. The smell of the sea was augmented by the addition of corpses and of opened jars of coal tar and of the naked fear that we few girls had for the coming moments. It smelled of stale fish yet it also was air so fresh, I had not realized how unindustrialized this world was until this very moment. There was an ephemeral quality to the texture of the feeling of the cold morning air as it filled our lungs. We shivered from the cold, but I welcomed it in reverence to how rare such a breath was on my native plane.
As our eyes opened again and welcomed in the dawn's early light, I felt myself smiling just as the heat of the waking sun washed over our face. The sky was bright orange with tinges of blue and purple the further up my eyes saw. There were few clouds in the sky, a complete change from the previous night where the weather blocked all visibility. It felt like too good a day to die...
… But was death permanent or just something to walk off?
I didn't want to find out, too fearful of death was I even without Jaina's influence. There was too much to see, too much I wanted to experience, and too much left for me. Life was never fair about such things and I knew such complaints were worthless before the end. But even the end must end, no? There was no ending without a beginning, no death without more life. Were we to be trapped in the cycle if I could not break out?
The wheels of fate turned with the slow creaking of time and I sighed. We had no time left for reminiscing the past or pondering the future. There was only the here and now and we could only do as best we could for all that we had and leave everything that we could not control and could not comprehend to other powers of the world.
Many were the murlocs that gathered towards us, though we had not warrant such a welcome. Such a warband was perhaps all the warriors of a single tribe, and that was no trifling thing.
At their front was their chief and master, the angry, purple-scaled beast head and shoulders above the rest. He gurgled his challenge and brought his best fin forth.
Gobbler Sr.
Bluegill Chieftain
Level 22 Shaman
There were others, of course, who stood out with names and titles. Many of those that were not so were only less than half their power in levels, but a spear in the eye was still a spear in the eye, no matter what your level. This was not a video game, after all.
Nibbler Sr.
Brother and Champion
Level 25 Warrior
Whitefin
Bluegill Matron
Level 14
As much as I wished I could communicate my intentions to them, I knew I could not. I was not some omni-lingual monster and... to be quite frank, the moment they were but twenty meters from us, all thoughts of plans left my mind. I could not think.
I could not just challenge Gobbler, and I could not just intimidate my way through. I had intended to speak, to talk, but how? Even if I could speak to them with all the murloc guts on my hands, what could I say?
Murlocs, as it was universally known, were idiots. They could only comprehend as many a word as kittens.
But if logic was not an option, there were not many options left. I blinked away the sweat, tears and blood, and felt my throat dry. Swallowing did not help. No words came to mind, but I nevertheless urged myself to come up with something, anything, since it seemed this eldritch calm of mind could not be broken. Not so many a syllables came to me, but I raised my hand to the coming onslaught and felt the vast sea of mana within the ocean that is my soul churn. Through these cracked, dry lips, I uttered," … Wololo..."
Dread rose up from within my heart, Jaina's fear bearing down on us from all sides like a tidal wave. Though it seemed I was immune to what childish fear she had—perhaps due to my past experience as a mass murloc murderer in a video game—it was still present. I had to acknowledge the discomfort rumbling on the precipice of my bodily vessel.
If using inherent traits were natural, then feeling the urges and feelings were too. As the red names of the many fish-like creatures bobbled in the horizon, I could not help but shiver in anticipation. Their voices spread across the distance like a thousand bubbling kettles, the sort of sound made by people trying to speak underwater in concert. I knew the task ahead of me was daunting. I wished I could just fake a win; skimming over it like many did via watching others play their games for them.
The robe stuck to our skin, leaving excited goosebumps trailing all over our body. A layer of half-dried sweat and ocean water mingled there, not quite crusting. That same mixture dripped over our brow, just far enough to roll into the edge of our eye. The sting from the salt was a welcome distraction, but we wiped it away... unnecessary.
The cloak weighed down on our tired arms, from all the clinging and swimming and fighting for our lives that felt like a nightmare of yesternight. It was unbalanced and improperly cut, leaving small gaps between edges and the wind to howl just beneath our notice.
Our hair stuck to the gooey mass that was the emptied skull of a murloc king. Every so often, an irritation arose that we could not amend, leaving us more agitated and fixing our grip on our weapons. No matter how I moved my hands, it felt like the harpoons were too large and too cumbersome for our thin, girly fingers. The blunt end of the spear-like weapons felt glued to the wet sand beneath. We had let slid our hands up and down the shaft in our discomfort more than once, tightening and loosening our grip. A small hole formed where the harpoons stood on the sands.
For a moment, we closed our eyes in preparation, just to take in our surroundings. Too often did players forget the vast, vibrant world we built for them, focused on shiny trinkets barely worth our time. Too often did we spend long, toiling hours making the textures and physics and each and every grain of the world, only to be ignored for blue, purple, and golden words of simple nothings.
The salty air assailed our nostrils not for the first time, but for the first time we noticed. The smell of the sea was augmented by the addition of corpses and of opened jars of coal tar and of the naked fear that we few girls had for the coming moments. It smelled of stale fish yet it also was air so fresh, I had not realized how unindustrialized this world was until this very moment. There was an ephemeral quality to the texture of the feeling of the cold morning air as it filled our lungs. We shivered from the cold, but I welcomed it in reverence to how rare such a breath was on my native plane.
As our eyes opened again and welcomed in the dawn's early light, I felt myself smiling just as the heat of the waking sun washed over our face. The sky was bright orange with tinges of blue and purple the further up my eyes saw. There were few clouds in the sky, a complete change from the previous night where the weather blocked all visibility. It felt like too good a day to die...
… But was death permanent or just something to walk off?
I didn't want to find out, too fearful of death was I even without Jaina's influence. There was too much to see, too much I wanted to experience, and too much left for me. Life was never fair about such things and I knew such complaints were worthless before the end. But even the end must end, no? There was no ending without a beginning, no death without more life. Were we to be trapped in the cycle if I could not break out?
The wheels of fate turned with the slow creaking of time and I sighed. We had no time left for reminiscing the past or pondering the future. There was only the here and now and we could only do as best we could for all that we had and leave everything that we could not control and could not comprehend to other powers of the world.
Many were the murlocs that gathered towards us, though we had not warrant such a welcome. Such a warband was perhaps all the warriors of a single tribe, and that was no trifling thing.
At their front was their chief and master, the angry, purple-scaled beast head and shoulders above the rest. He gurgled his challenge and brought his best fin forth.
Gobbler Sr.
Bluegill Chieftain
Level 22 Shaman
There were others, of course, who stood out with names and titles. Many of those that were not so were only less than half their power in levels, but a spear in the eye was still a spear in the eye, no matter what your level. This was not a video game, after all.
Nibbler Sr.
Brother and Champion
Level 25 Warrior
Whitefin
Bluegill Matron
Level 14
As much as I wished I could communicate my intentions to them, I knew I could not. I was not some omni-lingual monster and... to be quite frank, the moment they were but twenty meters from us, all thoughts of plans left my mind. I could not think.
I could not just challenge Gobbler, and I could not just intimidate my way through. I had intended to speak, to talk, but how? Even if I could speak to them with all the murloc guts on my hands, what could I say?
Murlocs, as it was universally known, were idiots. They could only comprehend as many a word as kittens.
But if logic was not an option, there were not many options left. I blinked away the sweat, tears and blood, and felt my throat dry. Swallowing did not help. No words came to mind, but I nevertheless urged myself to come up with something, anything, since it seemed this eldritch calm of mind could not be broken. Not so many a syllables came to me, but I raised my hand to the coming onslaught and felt the vast sea of mana within the ocean that is my soul churn. Through these cracked, dry lips, I uttered," … Wololo..."
Chapter 13: Intermediate Diplomacy
d.fish
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- Feb 19, 2013
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Chapter 13
It didn't work.
It did not work.
Did you really believe something I have never done before would work the first time I tried it without ever verifying it could do what I thought it did?
The first murloc to get in my face about things was the first one to go. His scales changed colors until they were similar to that of the colors of my robes, a deep, navy blue over white. But he had already leaped out of water and his bony face smashed against my forehead. Of course, I clenched my jaw and I did not falter, but it was a blow powerful enough to knock Jaina unconscious.
And then it was all down hill from there. With us stunned, the first wave of the onslaught broke against our defenses. Lorena and Tinky were both able enough and experienced in war to stay their ground. They yelled for Finn to drag us back, but Finn just stared at us, eyes wide and lower lip quivering.
I did not remember much of what happened afterwards, but I did not think they killed a hundred before they were overwhelmed.
Reload?
There was no option for 'no'. I could not refuse. The timer counted down, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...
And we were back. The song of their nerglish people were over a hundred meters away and far enough. The skies were still the same, beautiful hue. The air still smelled as fresh. The rhythm of the pounding of my blood was still as catchy and addictive. But I stood there, feeling a sort of betrayed sarcasm dripping like toxins in my heart.
You could take the best of a feature from an individual unit and utilize it to its full potential to play the game against simple artificial intelligence. Playing the campaign on easy mode taught you enough that you could beat the basic AI at the game in the real time strategies. But the difference between the amateur and the professional is the thin line of utilizing the worst features as well.
I brought forth a power unknown, but it was easy to forget that a priest's armor was paper thin and health as fragile as tissue.
And I was not playing against computers; these were living, breathing creatures.
And I had not taken everything into account, such as the side-effects of invoking such powers.
And...
… and I forgot one rather important aspect of these powers. The conduit of my might was not as sturdy as I wished, and without the skills and redundancies to enforce it, there were a lot of bugs popping up. Bugs were such pesky problems, starting as annoyances and developing into crippling deficiencies. This particular bug was not something I could just squash or fix or wave my hand and wish away, however. It came as part of the package, after all. "What just happened?"
"Wait... you came back with me?" I blinked.
"Did we just die?" Jaina asked, ignoring my previous question.
There was no way to bullshit my way out of this, even though I could bullshit the universe into thinking I was a priest from Age of Empires. Just as I was Jaina, Jaina was me. "... You came back with me," I realized.
"That really happened, didn't it? We... did something to that first murloc, and then... and then it hit us. We were overwhelmed," She observed.
"Well, you're awfully calm about this," I said.
"... I'm going to count to ten." She counted. "I'm going to stay calm... I'm calm and I'm not going to scream at you."
"Oh, well, that's good," I smiled.
"Mrgl."
I blinked again—for some reason, I felt like I was having an aneurysm, "Are you alright? Are you trying to do the same thing and learn nerglish? That's actually a pretty good idea..."
And then, somehow, Jaina learned psionic combat and choked ourself in our mind. I guess she didn't know what she was doing; it was a good first try.
I congratulated her so, "That's pretty good, but you shouldn't be so stressed. It can cause distractions."
For some reason, a tick developed above our left eye. It was the sort of tick that only developed on the sort of individual that the universe might designate as "the only sane individual", but I knew that was me already, so I didn't question it. Still, Jaina sounded only more stressed and our vision reddened to a point where I could barely see anything. Maybe this was a special event?
Jaina did not care. "Distractions? Distractions! I'll show you distractions! I only... only wanted to study! I didn't ask for this!"
Then our own hands came up and began choking our throat...
… I wonder why? Perhaps this was some kind of murloc magic?
Reload?
The timer counted down and I could not refuse, but the maddening loss of having somehow been defeated by random critters taunted me from the edge of my mind. My vision was tainted and at the corners of my eyes, I only saw red.
Just outside of our vision, from the three hundred sixty-first degree of nonexistence, I saw nothing but a sort of blinding anger that threatened to consume me.
The eldritch calling from beyond the realms urged me forth. My lips parted in cruel savagery that was a twisted perversion of Jaina's visage. For the moment, she too was screaming in our mind, without our lips, with no mouth and no sound. For that single moment, everything was blank. Our mind, cleared and calm, filled with nothing but fiery blood, burning to the ash and rising up to be boiled once more. Like the sound of uncounted children screaming in the far off realm unknown to man, blocked by the shadowy veil of nothing—as though a sound both far off in the distance and right within the skull, that song of incineration filled our ears like a warped set of drums of war.
I could have simply said we began screaming internally.
Ha.
Ha. Ha... ha.
But I did not.
Do you know what death does to the human mind? Do you know what it means to be reset? What does it even mean to the mind, if the mind were but cells and a cocktail of chemicals, to be tugged between the line of life and death, to be set in a state that should be death, to experience death, when it is supposed to be alive?
Unfortunate as our minds were, it was Jaina who might have worried me more, had I not been so enraged with the fact that I had to go through the whole cut-scene before the boss fight multiple times. She was the one who had her soul so delicately attached and aligned with this flesh puppet... a soul, it seemed, that was now being repeatedly knocked back and forth like Red Asphalt being put on fast forward and stuck on a loop.
Reload?
Sometimes... even induced calm could not finish the job.
Like... pouring a glass of water on the surface of the sun, this temper merely sizzled.
Perhaps... Jaina's everything pouring into and tainting my conscious fragment of soul was more worrisome.
Reload?
Reload?
Reload?
...
Somewhere between the sarcastic death menu asking me to reload and Jaina's... whatever her thing was... the thermometer burst and its shards flicked into my eye.
I had gone so far off the scale, I had gone into a loop.
That red mist propelled us from calm into the blind rage and somehow, we had circled around back into calm. But this sort of strange calm was weird. For one, Jaina wasn't complaining like she usually was, the little brat.
Ding!
Through great rage, you (Jaina Proudmoore (True)) have learned a new skill!
Berserker Rage
Level 1 (0%)
You go into a berserker's rage, removing and temporarily granting immunity to all mind-altering and physically incapacitating effects for a short duration and putting all damage taken until after the duration ends.
Duration: 6 Seconds.
"What." Jaina finally said something.
"Don't just stare, Jaina," I sighed at her inexperience. It was a new skill, and as a respected individual of the community of upstanding moral fiber, it was up to us to exploit every opportunity for every speck of gain, no matter the consequences. Perhaps we could finally get passed the tutorial boss and get out of these impossibly mocking and boring cut-scenes?
"Oh, you're still here." She frowned in disappointment. "That wasn't a dream."
"No." And what could possibly go wrong? We had finally opened a new door of opportunity to us now and this told me that our little princess was growing up into a fine render of limbs. It was the best outcome, since she had forced me in the other direction. "Just cast Fist."
It didn't work.
It did not work.
Did you really believe something I have never done before would work the first time I tried it without ever verifying it could do what I thought it did?
The first murloc to get in my face about things was the first one to go. His scales changed colors until they were similar to that of the colors of my robes, a deep, navy blue over white. But he had already leaped out of water and his bony face smashed against my forehead. Of course, I clenched my jaw and I did not falter, but it was a blow powerful enough to knock Jaina unconscious.
And then it was all down hill from there. With us stunned, the first wave of the onslaught broke against our defenses. Lorena and Tinky were both able enough and experienced in war to stay their ground. They yelled for Finn to drag us back, but Finn just stared at us, eyes wide and lower lip quivering.
I did not remember much of what happened afterwards, but I did not think they killed a hundred before they were overwhelmed.
Reload?
There was no option for 'no'. I could not refuse. The timer counted down, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...
And we were back. The song of their nerglish people were over a hundred meters away and far enough. The skies were still the same, beautiful hue. The air still smelled as fresh. The rhythm of the pounding of my blood was still as catchy and addictive. But I stood there, feeling a sort of betrayed sarcasm dripping like toxins in my heart.
You could take the best of a feature from an individual unit and utilize it to its full potential to play the game against simple artificial intelligence. Playing the campaign on easy mode taught you enough that you could beat the basic AI at the game in the real time strategies. But the difference between the amateur and the professional is the thin line of utilizing the worst features as well.
I brought forth a power unknown, but it was easy to forget that a priest's armor was paper thin and health as fragile as tissue.
And I was not playing against computers; these were living, breathing creatures.
And I had not taken everything into account, such as the side-effects of invoking such powers.
And...
… and I forgot one rather important aspect of these powers. The conduit of my might was not as sturdy as I wished, and without the skills and redundancies to enforce it, there were a lot of bugs popping up. Bugs were such pesky problems, starting as annoyances and developing into crippling deficiencies. This particular bug was not something I could just squash or fix or wave my hand and wish away, however. It came as part of the package, after all. "What just happened?"
"Wait... you came back with me?" I blinked.
"Did we just die?" Jaina asked, ignoring my previous question.
There was no way to bullshit my way out of this, even though I could bullshit the universe into thinking I was a priest from Age of Empires. Just as I was Jaina, Jaina was me. "... You came back with me," I realized.
"That really happened, didn't it? We... did something to that first murloc, and then... and then it hit us. We were overwhelmed," She observed.
"Well, you're awfully calm about this," I said.
"... I'm going to count to ten." She counted. "I'm going to stay calm... I'm calm and I'm not going to scream at you."
"Oh, well, that's good," I smiled.
"Mrgl."
I blinked again—for some reason, I felt like I was having an aneurysm, "Are you alright? Are you trying to do the same thing and learn nerglish? That's actually a pretty good idea..."
And then, somehow, Jaina learned psionic combat and choked ourself in our mind. I guess she didn't know what she was doing; it was a good first try.
I congratulated her so, "That's pretty good, but you shouldn't be so stressed. It can cause distractions."
For some reason, a tick developed above our left eye. It was the sort of tick that only developed on the sort of individual that the universe might designate as "the only sane individual", but I knew that was me already, so I didn't question it. Still, Jaina sounded only more stressed and our vision reddened to a point where I could barely see anything. Maybe this was a special event?
Jaina did not care. "Distractions? Distractions! I'll show you distractions! I only... only wanted to study! I didn't ask for this!"
Then our own hands came up and began choking our throat...
… I wonder why? Perhaps this was some kind of murloc magic?
Reload?
The timer counted down and I could not refuse, but the maddening loss of having somehow been defeated by random critters taunted me from the edge of my mind. My vision was tainted and at the corners of my eyes, I only saw red.
Just outside of our vision, from the three hundred sixty-first degree of nonexistence, I saw nothing but a sort of blinding anger that threatened to consume me.
The eldritch calling from beyond the realms urged me forth. My lips parted in cruel savagery that was a twisted perversion of Jaina's visage. For the moment, she too was screaming in our mind, without our lips, with no mouth and no sound. For that single moment, everything was blank. Our mind, cleared and calm, filled with nothing but fiery blood, burning to the ash and rising up to be boiled once more. Like the sound of uncounted children screaming in the far off realm unknown to man, blocked by the shadowy veil of nothing—as though a sound both far off in the distance and right within the skull, that song of incineration filled our ears like a warped set of drums of war.
I could have simply said we began screaming internally.
Ha.
Ha. Ha... ha.
But I did not.
Do you know what death does to the human mind? Do you know what it means to be reset? What does it even mean to the mind, if the mind were but cells and a cocktail of chemicals, to be tugged between the line of life and death, to be set in a state that should be death, to experience death, when it is supposed to be alive?
Unfortunate as our minds were, it was Jaina who might have worried me more, had I not been so enraged with the fact that I had to go through the whole cut-scene before the boss fight multiple times. She was the one who had her soul so delicately attached and aligned with this flesh puppet... a soul, it seemed, that was now being repeatedly knocked back and forth like Red Asphalt being put on fast forward and stuck on a loop.
Reload?
Sometimes... even induced calm could not finish the job.
Like... pouring a glass of water on the surface of the sun, this temper merely sizzled.
Perhaps... Jaina's everything pouring into and tainting my conscious fragment of soul was more worrisome.
Reload?
Reload?
Reload?
...
Somewhere between the sarcastic death menu asking me to reload and Jaina's... whatever her thing was... the thermometer burst and its shards flicked into my eye.
I had gone so far off the scale, I had gone into a loop.
That red mist propelled us from calm into the blind rage and somehow, we had circled around back into calm. But this sort of strange calm was weird. For one, Jaina wasn't complaining like she usually was, the little brat.
Ding!
Through great rage, you (Jaina Proudmoore (True)) have learned a new skill!
Berserker Rage
Level 1 (0%)
You go into a berserker's rage, removing and temporarily granting immunity to all mind-altering and physically incapacitating effects for a short duration and putting all damage taken until after the duration ends.
Duration: 6 Seconds.
"What." Jaina finally said something.
"Don't just stare, Jaina," I sighed at her inexperience. It was a new skill, and as a respected individual of the community of upstanding moral fiber, it was up to us to exploit every opportunity for every speck of gain, no matter the consequences. Perhaps we could finally get passed the tutorial boss and get out of these impossibly mocking and boring cut-scenes?
"Oh, you're still here." She frowned in disappointment. "That wasn't a dream."
"No." And what could possibly go wrong? We had finally opened a new door of opportunity to us now and this told me that our little princess was growing up into a fine render of limbs. It was the best outcome, since she had forced me in the other direction. "Just cast Fist."
Chapter 14: Advanced Diplomacy
d.fish
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Chapter 14
It was testament to Jaina's maturation that rather than stop and ask for an explanation, she replied immediately, "How?" She was not quite at the point of simply doing, but thinking and then complying was far better than questioning my authority. Perhaps it was the haze of festering anger that beset us both that allowed us to synchronize better than we could have when we were both clear minded.
Well, we still were.
We were just singularly clear minded in rage. This was the calculated madness that had reached around insanity and back into functional insanity. This was madness, yes, but...
This was madness with purpose.
Our purpose was one.
Just as I had tapped into her abilities, so too I freely gave access to mine. There was a time when petty disagreements between the two of us had to come to an end, though I had not thought it would be so soon. Tapping into my powers, her own abilities mutated and grew. It was the natural process of things, that when two minds and two souls were so fused and focused as one, their combined prowess would be greater than the sum of two exponentially.
But she was not a warrior. She never was, no matter what abilities she gained. Her class was determined already, even if this were no game like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy to restricted her so completely to one path of growth. Jaina... Jaina was not a Wizard, not a Sorceress as she might be in the future, and she was not a Warrior.
Jaina was a Princess.
Remember?
We tell our daughters they are princesses. We tell them they could be anything they set their minds to. They are the princesses of our hearts, the recipient of the sum of our adoration. "You could be anything, Princess."
So she became a Princess, because she was a Princess. As a Princess gaming the universe, she could be any class. And so, there were no class restrictions on us, through the Princess that was her.
Ding!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Jab!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Fighting Style of the Fierce Tiger!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Parry!
"... What just happened?" Jaina blinked, momentarily dazed, and fell back on previous, bad habits of questioning me.
I deduced she knew and saw, since I was not holding anything back anymore and we were more at one with ourself than we ever were. So I answered her nonchalantly since we were cool with each other (probably), "That's just my ability and your ability fusing into some kind of mutated monstrosity of a hybrid ability never before seen on the face of this world. It's no biggie."
"Cool."
We looked down at our hands. "Hrm."
"I don't feel any different. Why do I feel so much stronger when I can't see any change in my muscle mass? I need to... STUDY... this." Jaina smiled happily.
"And I need to study the faces of these murlocs with my fist," I noted they were almost within range.
"Oh! There is science to be done!" Jaina giggled in our head, sounding somewhat like an insane, adolescent, and female Mark Hamill. It was nice to see that she was channeling her insanity and my rage into somewhere productive, but...
… I stared at her funnily.
…
Nevermind. I peered from the corner of our eyes to make sure that our friends were safe. Our friend—possibly bestie—Finn was staring at the residual energy from our constant resets with a look of aghast horror. Tinky did not seem to be faring any better, but she had steadied herself for the coming fight, being the tiny gnome that she was.
Strangely, Lorena just had a sort of strained smile that was so unlike the looks of shock and mortification, like she was thinking, "But the party has only just started motherfuckers!"
I thought to myself that I liked Lorena.
She's nice.
Then we cleared our throat to give our opening statement—after all, without the flourish and dazzle, we were only murderhobos, but with it we were a fabulous, pretty Princess with the iron fist—and gurgled out in nerglish, "Alright, you little critters! I'm going to beat each and every one of you black and... bluer. And after that, I'm going to be your princess!"
"Mrrgkra mrrlglgrl m'kurngluglee!" The Bluegill Chieftain, Gobbler Senor, called out in response, obviously meaning something like, 'These are my waters, humans die'.
What a majestic language, I thought, before replying in the same South Shore dialect of nerglish he had just spoken in, "You will find that not all prey are small fish, Gobbler! Come at me, at your own peril!"
"M'grel'lolerg grlrlli!" He replied, meaning, 'You speak too much big words, stupid'.
It seemed like even the most beautiful languages would be twisted terribly by the right being. In this case, it seemed like we had no choice but to fight without banter. This was such a terrible existence to be had, after all, what was fighting without bantering if not more pointless violence. It was banter that gave violence purpose! "It seems like you need a swift kick in the balls, Gobbler."
"Pftmgrl b'lglrlmmka balls m'krua!" He retorted, meaning, 'ha, you said balls'. And with that, there was no need for more words, for the murloc were indeed a simple creature with simple minds of cats and dogs. They charged not as one, but as individuals, like reenactments of ancient tribal battles, where individual honor trumped unit cohesion.
This was good for us, of course, because it meant we did not need to deal with the murlocs as a wave, but as individuals like a Kung Fu movie—you know the kind, with a single person being surrounded by, like, a hundred ninjas, but instead of all of them throwing shuriken, they would charge the person in the middle one or three at a time, like those old Bruce Lee movies. Of course, I was more of a Jackie Chan girl, but Bruce Lee was cool too, I suppose.
The first murloc that reached within our range was a nameless goon on our user interface. Of course, just by being first, it was special. It was special also in being the first for us to plant our fist in its face. Jab.
Jab.
Jab.
There were no cooldowns to this skill; it was only limited by how quickly we could swing our fists. Three, tiny indents in the murloc's skull appeared before it hit the sandy beach. Because of how low our combined strength attribute was, even with these hits, it health points did not go down to zero...
Still, unlike a game with mindless artificial intelligence charging at you without end, the puffy eyes and obvious cracks in its bone structure were enough to keep it down.
"Don't get back up," We whispered as if we were doing something awesome, only to be interrupted by another murloc tackling us.
"Oh Light, it's so slimy." Jaina whimpered.
"Jaina—" I urged.
"So sticky!"
"Get your shit together and grapple like your life depends on it!" I roared at her. Funny how quickly six seconds ended. A berserker's rage ought to last a fight, shouldn't it? Adrenaline should not stop pumping, not when we needed it so much.
But Jaina heard me and we resynchronized and planted our elbow in the murloc's face. We kicked it off of our body, though it was too heavy for us, until I repeated jabbed its stomach three times in a row with little, two-inch jabs.
It flew off us faster than we could blink.
But we had no respite, because they kept coming at us. Bruce Lee—hell, even Jackie Chan—made it look so easy on the big screen, but it wasn't that goddamn easy! There was no flow to the fighting, the murlocs did not bother wait and see who was ahead of them. Instead, they tried to pile on us like they did... with the ship. Oh...
Realization hit us as I knocked a pair of murlocs back; this was a strategy that worked for them, because they had the numbers for it. "Why is it that 'balls' is still 'balls' no matter what language we are speaking anyway? Even demonic and elvish..."
"Now's not the time for that, Jaina," I groaned mentally.
"Hey, I just had a great idea!" She perked up suddenly.
"Now's not the time for that!" I repeated. We had only gone through a dozen murlocs, and we were already tired and panting. Our lungs burned as we gasped for air. Even with Chi and Rage and Mana as separate pools of resources to pull on, our body was not keeping up with the erratic flow of the battle.
Then Jaina threw a punch on her own, combining the three resources at our disposal. It was arcane missiles without really being arcane missiles. It was jabs without really jabbing. It was a heroic strike without really being a heroic strike. An explosion of arcane energy propelled and wrapped around the Chi-powered projections of our fists into shells of flaming rage.
"I HAVE AN IDEA!" She yelled at me as nine fists few and popped nine murlocs like blood balloons.
Ding!
By combining knowledge of different abilities, you have created a new skill! Would you like to name this skill?
"Oh."
It was testament to Jaina's maturation that rather than stop and ask for an explanation, she replied immediately, "How?" She was not quite at the point of simply doing, but thinking and then complying was far better than questioning my authority. Perhaps it was the haze of festering anger that beset us both that allowed us to synchronize better than we could have when we were both clear minded.
Well, we still were.
We were just singularly clear minded in rage. This was the calculated madness that had reached around insanity and back into functional insanity. This was madness, yes, but...
This was madness with purpose.
Our purpose was one.
Just as I had tapped into her abilities, so too I freely gave access to mine. There was a time when petty disagreements between the two of us had to come to an end, though I had not thought it would be so soon. Tapping into my powers, her own abilities mutated and grew. It was the natural process of things, that when two minds and two souls were so fused and focused as one, their combined prowess would be greater than the sum of two exponentially.
But she was not a warrior. She never was, no matter what abilities she gained. Her class was determined already, even if this were no game like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy to restricted her so completely to one path of growth. Jaina... Jaina was not a Wizard, not a Sorceress as she might be in the future, and she was not a Warrior.
Jaina was a Princess.
Remember?
We tell our daughters they are princesses. We tell them they could be anything they set their minds to. They are the princesses of our hearts, the recipient of the sum of our adoration. "You could be anything, Princess."
So she became a Princess, because she was a Princess. As a Princess gaming the universe, she could be any class. And so, there were no class restrictions on us, through the Princess that was her.
Ding!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Jab!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Fighting Style of the Fierce Tiger!
Through stupidly insane bullshittery and repeatedly smashing your mind against the universe, you have learned a new skill – Parry!
"... What just happened?" Jaina blinked, momentarily dazed, and fell back on previous, bad habits of questioning me.
I deduced she knew and saw, since I was not holding anything back anymore and we were more at one with ourself than we ever were. So I answered her nonchalantly since we were cool with each other (probably), "That's just my ability and your ability fusing into some kind of mutated monstrosity of a hybrid ability never before seen on the face of this world. It's no biggie."
"Cool."
We looked down at our hands. "Hrm."
"I don't feel any different. Why do I feel so much stronger when I can't see any change in my muscle mass? I need to... STUDY... this." Jaina smiled happily.
"And I need to study the faces of these murlocs with my fist," I noted they were almost within range.
"Oh! There is science to be done!" Jaina giggled in our head, sounding somewhat like an insane, adolescent, and female Mark Hamill. It was nice to see that she was channeling her insanity and my rage into somewhere productive, but...
… I stared at her funnily.
…
Nevermind. I peered from the corner of our eyes to make sure that our friends were safe. Our friend—possibly bestie—Finn was staring at the residual energy from our constant resets with a look of aghast horror. Tinky did not seem to be faring any better, but she had steadied herself for the coming fight, being the tiny gnome that she was.
Strangely, Lorena just had a sort of strained smile that was so unlike the looks of shock and mortification, like she was thinking, "But the party has only just started motherfuckers!"
I thought to myself that I liked Lorena.
She's nice.
Then we cleared our throat to give our opening statement—after all, without the flourish and dazzle, we were only murderhobos, but with it we were a fabulous, pretty Princess with the iron fist—and gurgled out in nerglish, "Alright, you little critters! I'm going to beat each and every one of you black and... bluer. And after that, I'm going to be your princess!"
"Mrrgkra mrrlglgrl m'kurngluglee!" The Bluegill Chieftain, Gobbler Senor, called out in response, obviously meaning something like, 'These are my waters, humans die'.
What a majestic language, I thought, before replying in the same South Shore dialect of nerglish he had just spoken in, "You will find that not all prey are small fish, Gobbler! Come at me, at your own peril!"
"M'grel'lolerg grlrlli!" He replied, meaning, 'You speak too much big words, stupid'.
It seemed like even the most beautiful languages would be twisted terribly by the right being. In this case, it seemed like we had no choice but to fight without banter. This was such a terrible existence to be had, after all, what was fighting without bantering if not more pointless violence. It was banter that gave violence purpose! "It seems like you need a swift kick in the balls, Gobbler."
"Pftmgrl b'lglrlmmka balls m'krua!" He retorted, meaning, 'ha, you said balls'. And with that, there was no need for more words, for the murloc were indeed a simple creature with simple minds of cats and dogs. They charged not as one, but as individuals, like reenactments of ancient tribal battles, where individual honor trumped unit cohesion.
This was good for us, of course, because it meant we did not need to deal with the murlocs as a wave, but as individuals like a Kung Fu movie—you know the kind, with a single person being surrounded by, like, a hundred ninjas, but instead of all of them throwing shuriken, they would charge the person in the middle one or three at a time, like those old Bruce Lee movies. Of course, I was more of a Jackie Chan girl, but Bruce Lee was cool too, I suppose.
The first murloc that reached within our range was a nameless goon on our user interface. Of course, just by being first, it was special. It was special also in being the first for us to plant our fist in its face. Jab.
Jab.
Jab.
There were no cooldowns to this skill; it was only limited by how quickly we could swing our fists. Three, tiny indents in the murloc's skull appeared before it hit the sandy beach. Because of how low our combined strength attribute was, even with these hits, it health points did not go down to zero...
Still, unlike a game with mindless artificial intelligence charging at you without end, the puffy eyes and obvious cracks in its bone structure were enough to keep it down.
"Don't get back up," We whispered as if we were doing something awesome, only to be interrupted by another murloc tackling us.
"Oh Light, it's so slimy." Jaina whimpered.
"Jaina—" I urged.
"So sticky!"
"Get your shit together and grapple like your life depends on it!" I roared at her. Funny how quickly six seconds ended. A berserker's rage ought to last a fight, shouldn't it? Adrenaline should not stop pumping, not when we needed it so much.
But Jaina heard me and we resynchronized and planted our elbow in the murloc's face. We kicked it off of our body, though it was too heavy for us, until I repeated jabbed its stomach three times in a row with little, two-inch jabs.
It flew off us faster than we could blink.
But we had no respite, because they kept coming at us. Bruce Lee—hell, even Jackie Chan—made it look so easy on the big screen, but it wasn't that goddamn easy! There was no flow to the fighting, the murlocs did not bother wait and see who was ahead of them. Instead, they tried to pile on us like they did... with the ship. Oh...
Realization hit us as I knocked a pair of murlocs back; this was a strategy that worked for them, because they had the numbers for it. "Why is it that 'balls' is still 'balls' no matter what language we are speaking anyway? Even demonic and elvish..."
"Now's not the time for that, Jaina," I groaned mentally.
"Hey, I just had a great idea!" She perked up suddenly.
"Now's not the time for that!" I repeated. We had only gone through a dozen murlocs, and we were already tired and panting. Our lungs burned as we gasped for air. Even with Chi and Rage and Mana as separate pools of resources to pull on, our body was not keeping up with the erratic flow of the battle.
Then Jaina threw a punch on her own, combining the three resources at our disposal. It was arcane missiles without really being arcane missiles. It was jabs without really jabbing. It was a heroic strike without really being a heroic strike. An explosion of arcane energy propelled and wrapped around the Chi-powered projections of our fists into shells of flaming rage.
"I HAVE AN IDEA!" She yelled at me as nine fists few and popped nine murlocs like blood balloons.
Ding!
By combining knowledge of different abilities, you have created a new skill! Would you like to name this skill?
"Oh."