A new world awaits. Join me!

Denizens of Azeroth and Outland! And Draenor too, if you still care about this universe. I bear news to you, that should be of interest to all of you. I would call you heroes, like your pretentious leaders do, but we all know you’re no heroes. The big “heroes”, the ponces running around with the artifacts, are all leaving for Argus for their big universe saving mission. And I wish them all the best, but some of us have smaller goals in mind for ourselves. Goals that directly benefit us, and not some lofty greater good. This is who I’m addressing this news to: the everyday average folks who are willing to do a job for pay.

I have found a new world. An unspoiled wilderness, filled with untapped resources, uncontacted savages and ancient ruins and primeval jungles waiting to be discovered and claimed. And this world belongs to me now. The only problem is, I do not have the manpower to have all of it charted, claimed and exploited by my own people. So I reach out to you all. Help me in this endeavour, and you shall see riches like few on Azeroth have ever seen. If you gain enough of my approval, I shall sell you small pieces of the land where you can build your palaces, strongholds, garrisons, or whatever it is you call your bases now. But first, you have work to do.

Karnak’s Fate

Karnak angered me one last time, and this time he hit something I personally cared about. His child. No, it’s not a fatherly care, or any creepier sort of old man caring about a small child. Anyone following me should know that child of his, Nef, is special. Because he spent his entire life in the Nexus and couldn’t have children there, his biology was saturated with Nexus energies. So when finally had a child in this dimension, all these energies transferred and she spawned with unusual magical energy tied to her even before birth. We call instances like these “planetouched”. Being touched by the plane of such power as the Nexus… that gave her truly enormous power. She would teleport across space, time and universes at will, with nary a thought. I had to have that power. And that little pissant warrior decided to run away with his family because I was getting snarky with people.

Maiden Voyage of the ASJ Apexis

There it was, at long last, our first ship completed. I know people doubted my reasons for building it. Like, yeah, I know we have rifts that transport us to planets in an instant, but transport is only one thing a ship can be used for. One thing is defense. Pirates did not find us yet, but when they do, having a ship throwing arcane fire at them will be invaluable. Also, transport. Yes, I know what I just said, but our orders can sometimes be pretty big, and other than using half of my porters to push a giant box, we can now use the ship to move the whole thing more easily. Sure, it costs quite a bit, but I figure the opportunities it gives us outweigh the costs. For the past few weeks, we’ve been building the ship and preparing everything it needed.

A Titanic Task

Who says only Titans can move and shape lands? Well, people who don’t know much, or who are dogmatically following some silly beliefs. For your information, ethereals can move lands. As I learned some time ago, they sometimes locate worlds shattered by the Burning Legion (or Old Gods, or other nasties – yes, there are more) and take whole chunks of those worlds, snap some magic technology to them and relocate those chunks elsewhere for easy harvest by their ethereal and grav crews. A lot of the minerals or items you may have purchased or otherwise acquired from ethereals come from these. So when I learned about an ethereal in deep debt who was willing to part with his land-moving devices, I was quick to jump on the occasion.

Broadening the Horizons

We had a bit of a lull in our off-world activity. I mean, at least when it comes to actively going out and looking for stuff. We’re still selling off-world a lot and maintaining all our contacts out there, but ever since my crew got busy with their research they stopped going out. I never thought I’d complain about my employees actually working, but here I am. Well, it’s not bad. It’s good that they’re doing their actual occupation, it’s just that they never seem to do it when I want them to. I’m getting away from the topic I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to say is, after they’ve been here most of the time I realized how much I only heard about from them and never seen in person. So I decided to change it. I went for a trip to see some of those worlds.

One step closer to the full ‘Dex

I have a certain respect for the mo’arg. The engineer dudes, not the beefy mooks. They’re smart, they’re dangerous and their appearance incites terror. When you see a mo’arg going at you, you know you’re in trouble. Sure, they’re going a little extreme with the whole “replacing body parts with machines” thing, but everyone has got their own little obsession. I must admit, mine is probably collecting. Not pixelated monsters in a tiny hand-held device, not cards or teddy bears – collecting people. The more varied and stranger their races, the better. Just seeing all kinds of creatures working together fills a certain, warped sense of collectorship in my mind. And I always wanted to have one of these – the mo’arg. I worked with, and fought, Sal’salabim so I know what they’re capable of. But only recently I got the chance to get one of them in my employ.

Mesonyx Attacks!

In most places, if you talked about inhabitants of Mesonyx, the fourth planet from our sun, people wouldn’t treat you very seriously. This isn’t most places. We’ve been sending people to a parallel past Draenor and taking ingredients from there. We have fought an invasion of Infinite Dragonflight. We finally opened a rift to a completely alien planet, met space gnomes, killed an evil undead alien god, and we regularly trade with two distant worlds. We have employees from other planets – and not just the common Draenor, but we have a darfellan and a shivarra. So naturally, an alien from Mesonyx doesn’t raise too many eyebrows. It does however answer some questions and doubts Azerothians had about the world. For example, the canals must be real and there are actually native races up there. Or rather down there, considering what we’ve learned. Anyway, let’s explain this in a proper order.

Of walking tumors and oddball lizards

People sometimes throw nicknames around all willy-nilly. I’m not one of those people usually. I’ll just call people by their name, if I remember it, or more likely by “hey, you gnome”. Well, either way I don’t do what some people do. I don’t call a shaman “Sparkles” just because he’s shown some shock spells around me, nor do I call them “Waldo” just because they have an extremely unfashionable sweater in red-white stripes. But sometimes, a nickname is so fitting I will repeat it. Take Ughul, a sick-looking saurok also known as “the Cancer”. Not only saying Ughul is extremely weird when you have a beak, calling him the Cancer really fits. I mean, look at the guy. He’s got this… ugly, cancerous looking thing on his chin and neck, and some kind of growths all over his body. And for a while, I thought that was enough to call him that. Until I saw something even more fitting for that name.

Of angry draenei and frozen penguins

It’s rare to see an angry draenei. I don’t mean they’re rare, it’s just rare to see them, because they’re usually angry when no one can see them. They like to pretend they’re above our petty emotions, but they’re just as much subject to them as everyone else. They’re just very… conceited about their emotional state and hide it under layers of seeming self-control. But sometimes, you can actually find one that appears openly angry and even pursues a personal agenda. I talked to one of those some time ago. His name is Zovaar, and he traveled in time attempting to bring back his family. He apparently used to be a paladin but got broken and went with some krokul into this temporal escapade. Imagine my surprise when this (lesser) enemy of the Timewalkers shows up on my doorstep.

Wrong address

As people are anxious to lose their fingers outside, I’m sitting over the reports from yesterday’s mission. A few days ago, Carcon called me up again and said he interrogated a few of the cultists the list ‘Gath got and got a location of their hideout within his duchy. He tells me they were organizing an attack on that hideout and wanted my people to help out. I’m always eager to help (when I’m promised a monetary reward) so I agreed to send my people in. It just so happened that Izzik recently started bugging people about being sent on missions to be more recognizable in my crew again, so I added her to the group leaving out yesterday. Things obviously didn’t go as planned.