The Penguin, The Mage and The Terrible Weather

I hate snow. I absolutely despise snow. Farahlon was not seeing snow often, and I was lucky with that. I guess the destruction of Draenor had one positive outcome: the heat made it no longer snow anywhere in Outland. But now that I haven’t seen snow for decades and have to survive it again in my old age, I’m curling up in shock. Have I ever said snow reminds me of death? Because it does. Winter is when everything dies. Everything that reminds me of life disappears or flies away, or outright dies. And then everything gets coated with this hideous, white, cold substance. That’s what cold is: death. Snow is dead water. I hate snow. Of course, the darkfire-squawked penguin loves it!

Oh yeah, the penguin. I suppose some of you may be unaware of his presence. So let me start from the beginning. Two days ago, late at night, I gathered with Dumas’s apprentices to perform a spell we found in an old tome, with some adjustments made in comparison with the papers I got from Kalecgos (which turned out to be not completely useless). They started casting the spell (because it’s an arcane spell, I needed mages) and I simply completed the chants with necessary ingredients… and something went wrong. I don’t know if the stupid chimp-pigs messed up their spells, or if I threw in the wrong thing, but the portal that was supposed to open to show me the past on Draenor blew up.

After the dust settled in, we heard weird, squealing noise. As if someone stepped on a rubber toy. As it quickly turned out, we were confronted by a very angry, 4-foot tall penguin in very garish clothing. Before we could wonder what happened, it started talking. No, it started YELLING at us with this horrible, screeching voice that I couldn’t understand because I was concentrating on the annoyance. (Is this why mammals don’t listen to me?) I tried to calm it down, but then it pinched me with its weird beak and started hitting me with its flippers. (How does it even dress itself with those things?) In a blind fury, it was just eating and drinking everything around it, so we threw it a bottle of wine. It drank it in one fell swoop… and continued demolishing the basement.

Alcohol had obviously no effect on it at all. Desperate to options as to how to calm down this dreadful creature, one of the mammals threw it an apple. This is when the weirdest yet happened: it passionately devoured the apple, and immediately asked for more, slurring its speech. The humans were obviously running around like headless chickens, clueless to what’s going on, but in my sheer brilliance I quickly got it more apples from upstairs. Luckily, the penguin-creature got drunk on all the sugar and fell asleep.

He slept for half the next day, but in the morning Maginor Dumas obviously wanted to know what is sleeping in his basement, and why it looks as if a hurricane went through it. I described the entire proceeding to my host, awaiting an educated answer. Unfortunately, I was disappointed again. Apparently the spell malfunctioned because it was cast by an Arakkoa. So, as Dumas says, my avian status somehow fed back into the spell… and summoned another bird. His explanation makes no sense. Other than a bird, I’m also a druid, alchemist, elderly person, former Old God cultist, vertebrate and an animal. Why didn’t it summon any of those? Because my host is a Dumas, that’s why.

So there we had it, a creature apparently called a “dohwar”, displaced from a completely different dimension, waking up in the basement. One thing that I have in common with my Dumas host is that the pursuit of knowledge is most important to us. Except in his case it manifests as interviewing the besquawked crazy space penguin, noting down its skills and employment history and hiring it. Look, I know I’m not special, but am I really worth to you as much as a crazy, sugar-drunk, flightless freak? Apparently I am.

The dohwar says his name is “Hwarnë”, and obviously expects me to write the diacritic down every time. I can’t say, it’s not all bad. He’s still crazy, still waddles around like a toddler, and still loves apples far too much for his own good, but at least he’s good at trading. Of course, he’s rude and obnoxious but once he starts pushing his new victim, he won’t back down until he talks him into submission. He managed to buy quite a lot of rare and expensive stuff for us today, including fresh terocone out of which I can squeeze some exquisite juice. You have earned your place here, penguin. For now.