The Un-meeting

I’m not on the research staff, so most of the days I have a fair share of free time when I’m done producing potions and overseeing the gnolls and the broken draenei in my production room. Then I go out and try to chat up a few people in our “village” and realize how busy or tired most of them are. Yesterday evening when I was done with work, I went to look for Orkan and found him in Verroak’s room, working on some solution they were preparing together. He had no time for me, so I thought I’d check some other important people around here. I checked Theramas first, and he was still in his lab. He never seems to tire. I know what he is in reality, but it still seems strange. For two days straight he’s been in his lab, working on spells to treat his mental patients. And he wasn’t the only researcher busy with work either. Zovaar was working on those enchanted information disks, and he even got Podric to help him. I kept wandering around until I found the boss in the security quarters – or mission control, as he started calling it recently.

Verroak was sitting in the mission control room with an impatient Hwarnë pacing around the room, with an open rift to Darfell sitting idly. Turns out, Zovaar and Podric were supposed to go with Hwarnë to Darfell to meet some pirate guy. Apparently this “Windreaver Mafrak” is some corporeal K’areshi who previously gave us information that led us to those two dead androids, and he had new information for us. Those two did not show up in mission control, so they started asking me if I saw them. Naturally, I told them what I saw and Verroak just waved his talons away, saying they’re more valuable in research. But either way, he said he needed someone to check this out with Hwarnë in case it’s a trap or something of the sort. I offered to go, to get some more interplanetary mileage, and soon they called up Vikoka to join us.

It’s always strange when you go to another world and it’s suddenly a different time of the day there. Apparently, Darfell has a 15-hour long day, so the amount of daylight rarely aligns with what we have on Azeroth at the same time. For example, yesterday I left the Island engulfed in a dark evening. When I crossed over, it was the middle of the day on Darfell. By the way, shouldn’t there be different time on Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms? If they’re on opposite sides of the world as the globes show them, there should be half a day difference between them… but it seems it’s always evening on both continents? Does this mean we only scratched the surface of our world and there’s so much more on the other side?

So we went to check this pirate. He lives in a pretty neat tent on the outskirts of the Market. It’s a tent, but the material and all the cool, otherworldly treasures inside were rather interesting. I know, he probably stole it all from some hapless traders but I couldn’t help but admire some of the artwork. As soon as we came in, he notifies us he wanted to introduce us to someone. Then, a new alien comes into the tent by the back door, apparently called “Ajazy” (don’t ask me to pronounce that). I haven’t seen this kind of alien in our files yet. It looked mostly human in stature, but he was bald, brightly orange and had these big, black rabbit-like eyes. He wasn’t wearing much beyond a harness and some leather pants. I’m not even sure if it was a guy or a chick… he had no breasts but who knows how it works with these aliens?

The first question he asked was strange. He asked, “are you the ones who set the mountains on fire?” It took a moment to click he was probably talking about that yellow, highly flammable desert our team visited some time before – the same one where they found the androids. When I explained it to the others, Hwarnë quickly told him that none of the people who had done it were present (really, none of us had been there when that happened), but then she admitted we’re from the same organization. That’s when the alien flipped out and started yelling what a sacrilege we had done. However, his rant explained to us some things about the androids.

He said, his people consider that facility their temple. Only their elder shamans know the riddle necessary to open the door to the “inner sanctum”. They knew about the two androids lying within, but they considered them “sleeping gods”. According to their myths, one day, long ago, their ancestors possessed great, magical devices (so probably technology), but they became so powerful that the metal sky gods (the Titans?) envied them. In a fit of envious rage, the metal sky gods invaded their world and almost wiped out every living thing on it. However, a group of “magicians” created two perfect bodies to house the spirits of the divine ancestors, Eu and Yib. As they did thousands of years ago, when they gave birth to the first Ajazy, these two sleeping gods would one day give rise to a new era. Life survived the alien assault, but Ajazy lost all technology and now live in superstitious fear of the unknown.

The story time was over and the alien began demanding we gave up the two androids. We of course refused, and the angry alien decided to take them by force, regardless of us not having them with us. Vikoka did most of the fighting there, and I stayed back and healed him, while Hwarnë hid behind an ornate drawer. I can’t really tell much about the fight, but the alien was fighting with some hooked, black spear and some trinkets made from abandoned technology. Finally, Vikoka pierced his heart with his trident and the alien collapsed, in his last words imploring us we returned “the Sleepers”.

I will leave speculation on this to the boss, but I don’t think it was a Re-origination. I think this story sounded like the Titans were genuinely afraid of the rivalry of these people. But the Titans so violently dealing with another civilization just because of that… were those people really so dangerous, or are the Titans just not as benevolent as we thought? Or maybe they weren’t Titans at all, and there’s more myth to this story than truth. Who knows, I’m not an archaeologist.