Alien Space Bats and Their Magic

It began a few days ago when I picked up a temporal disturbance emanating from the present day. The patterns where typical of mortals manipulating time for their own personal gain, so I thought this would be a small task and went to investigate. I began following the trail but I couldn’t quite pin-point its physical location. No matter where I would go I was still very far away – at least continents away. Finally, I realized what was happening – the disturbance wasn’t even on Azeroth. Someone was messing with time on a distant planet, one I couldn’t find through my simple instruments. I finally asked Chronormu for a permission to use the Keepers’ Lab to trace the disturbance more delicately. Only there I found that the world where it was happening was almost on the edge of our galaxy – and it was an uncharted world Azeroth knows nothing about.

I wasn’t sure if we should meddle with the affairs of another world. The bronze dragonflight, and Timewalkers by extension, were appointed guardians of the timeways of Azeroth – the timeways of another world are outside our jurisdiction. Chronormu, however, wanted to check if there are any guardians of time on the world where this was happening and decided someone must visit that world. As we have few methods of reaching places like that, I volunteered to do it through my brother’s interplanetary rift. He wouldn’t let just anyone through. So I packed up and prepared for another mission. This time I wasn’t watching another era or another timeline, but another world in our time.

After meeting my brother and his newest employee, I crossed through to this new world his crew hasn’t visited either. I found myself in a stone and brick city with a faint hint of smog. As I looked across the landscape, I saw smoking chimneys and railways. This world has clearly gone through an industrial revolution. I have seen it happen on some parallel Azeroths, but what I never saw before was sentient humanoid gargoyles. They were the majority of this city’s population, and among others I saw a few tol’vir and some kind of falcon-people. I was of course the closest biologically to the falcon-people, so I used a magical disguise to turn into one of them.

I began investigating the town, the country and the world. I pretended to be a tourist from far away and asked about some basic information. I was told the city was called Arug in the state of Gaburan, on the world of Djedsut. After further investigation in a local library, Djedsut is a world that was ordered by the Titans an unknown time ago. The major seed races here were gargoyles, tol’vir, mogu and earthen. As in most worlds, the creatures of stone were turned to flesh by an Old God curse, but here the parasites were found before they could take root and were completely destroyed – at least in the physical sense. The mogu are believed to have went extinct since, and the earthen were warped into a form more closely resembling an Azerothian pygmy. Only the gargoyles and the tol’vir remained fleshy versions of their former forms. Besides them, there are also ishurs, the falcon-people I mentioned, and a lesser known race of lizard people on another continent.

Now, from the gargoyle point of view, they were the favored children of the Titans. They were allegedly tasked with maintaining the facilities and watching over them, but the tol’vir, tasked with the great libraries left on the main continent, were supposed to have taken the knowledge they were meant to guard and used it to banish the gargoyles from their ancestral lands. Naturally, the tol’vir claim it was the gargoyles who betrayed the tol’vir out of greed for all that came from the Titans and were only banished as a punishment. Whichever way it was, we may never know, until someone finds the original archives. Now, the tol’vir have a giant empire that takes up over half of the main continent, including all the most fertile lands and some of the oldest Titan facilities. The gargoyles live in a series of states with varying degrees of totalitarianism and poverty. Gaburan, where I was, wasn’t the worst off when it comes to economy, but it was a particularly paranoid dictatorship.

The gargoyles mostly can’t find a common ground with either the tol’vir, or other gargoyle states. As a result, their splintered political status caused an economical and scientific stagnation. Gargoyles are approximately two centuries behind the tol’vir, concentrating everything on heavy, polluting industry and agriculture similar to Azerothian. The tol’vir meanwhile, have long since reached an agricultural surplus that lets them have only 20% of the population work in farming. The other 80% takes part in science, art, services and exploration. Djedsuti tol’vir are in fact space-capable and have a small fleet of interstellar vessels which they use to make contact with some close-by mortal worlds. Gargoyles are purposefully kept from those advances. The tol’vir claim it’s their rule of non-interference, letting the gargoyles develop their technology on their own, but gargoyles claim they jealously guard stolen Titanic secrets.

From the brief time I spent on two sides of the border between Gaburan and the Tol’vir Empire, I can tell standard of living is staggeringly different. The two populations live in different eras – not literally, mind you, but you would think they do if you saw the differences. The tol’vir have advanced magical devices that serve their personal needs, such as shopping or cooking, and established public communication networks that send signals through the air. Tol’vir enjoy a large number of social and political freedoms, including gender, orientation and ethnic equality. The gargoyles, on the other hand, mostly listen to radios and a crude form of visual transmission, as well as using coal and gas to cook their food. Their society is fractured, their women relegated to being housewives, and any deviation from the norm is frowned upon at best. I don’t know when the rule of non-interference becomes a rule of idleness in face of injustice.

This situation forced the gargoyles to enact some difficult decisions. Numerous times, their states managed to put aside their differences and band together in a large league meant to defeat the dominance of the Tol’vir Empire. What they lack in military technology, gargoyles make up for in ferocity and numbers. Although they never won any of those wars, they always managed to inflict enough losses to make the normally pacifistic Empire maintain a standing army of a healthy size. These humiliating defeats of the gargoyle leagues only made their people more bitter. So about half a century ago, a group of gargoyle magnates from across the continent created a secret society meant to covertly acquire tol’vir technology and use it against them. This society called itself the Oule Society.

I had to trasform myself into a gargoyle to infiltrate that secret society and found that it’s little more than a secret terrorist organization with mystical and magical agenda. The Oule Society managed to acquire quite a few technologies only the tol’vir have, but against their own mission statement, most of it is not shared with the general gargoyle population, and when it is, it’s sold for astronomical prices. That’s the first part of their mission statement – furthering the progress of the gargoyle race. The other part is more troubling – they believe they’re the favored children of the Titans and all other races, such as tol’vir, are lesser races that must be subjugated or killed. The Oule in their name comes from an alleged ancient gargoyle civilization that existed before “the tol’vir betrayal”. But the even more troubling part is what they found in a secret archaeological dig – Djedsut’s Chronal Spire.

Chronal Spires are huge devices the Titans occasionally create on a world they order to view its timelines and visit some crucial parts of its development. Azeroth never had one, although it had access to a more natural complex we know as Caverns of Time. Some believe it was the problems Azeroth caused after Titans left that prompted the Titans to create these Chronal Spires. Once they leave, the Titans usually disable these devices and bury them deep underground so that only an approved messenger can find them. However, occasionally, they are dug up although few figured out how to use them. The Oule Society managed to activate the Chronal Spire they found on their territory and is sending agents to the past. Right now they’re only observing, but they’re planning to change the past to benefit their people.

It’s unlikely the Oule Society’s actions would affect Azeroth. Few things they could do would be of any danger to us, but they would still cause temporal damage, and there are no guardians of time on Djedsut. Something must be done, but we still do not know what. One recommendation was sending a tol’vir Timewalker through a portal to Djedsut and having him inform the Empire of Oule Society’s attempts. I’m personally not sure about that, as I do not completely trust the local tol’vir with that kind of power. I do not yet have a personal recommendation, but once I figure out a fair solution, I will promptly inform the Keepers.