Infinite Azeroths 2: Home

The outskirts of Stormwind were filled with rickety, provisional homes, draped in multi-colored cloths and filled with ringing and clanking bells and windchimes. Despite what someone from Azeroth Prime would say, it was not a goblin camp. It was a shanty-town built by the vishkanyas when they arrived on Azeroth in this timeline. Azeroth-7, or as some know it, the Illidari timeline. Maiev failed to stop Illidan from cracking Northrend apart. The Lich King died, and the Scourge was wiped out. While some would feel that was a positive change, no one expected what followed. Not only the tidal waves from the melting glaciers destroyed numerous cities and broke ancient dams, Illidan went on to become an unchallenged Lord of Outland. And with this power, he took fight to the Legion and fought them across the stars. Numerous innocent worlds found themselves in the crossfire, including the vishkanya world. A small percentage of their people successfully escaped to Azeroth through one of Illidan’s portals.

Now, they live here, in the outskirts of Azerothian civilization. Cast out, abandoned, unwanted. Although King Varian accepted them and let them stay, most of the humans feel they have enough problems with orcs and draenei “squatting” on Azeroth, some feel the vishkanya are the final nail in the coffin of humanity’s power.

Agam was careful to cover her face when she was crossing the streets of Stormwind. For about ten years she lived in this city and knew what the people on both sides were capable of. Does the perception filter even work when she’s in her own timeline? It does, after all, filter out only the extraordinary and on Azeroth-7 her eyes are not something completely out of place. No, they are just something that could get you in trouble. Luckily, Llore was at her side, showing his face without a care in the world, drawing attention away from her hooded face. Together, they walked right out of the Dwarven District and continued down the path to the outskirts.

Once there, she could finally take off the hood and look at all the lights and bells, and take in the smells of the familiar cuisine. She could finally once again hear the familiar noise of her native language, even if it was the crooked merchants hawking their wares and old women yelling at disobedient brats. For all its issues, this was home.

“Agam,” she heard from behind. She quickly turned around and saw what appeared to be a large, muscular human with a bronzed skin… but with eyes just as serpentine as hers. Llore looked up at the man who was showing a rather forbidding visage.

“Is he trouble?” Llore asked her.

“No,” Agam responded, smiling. Suddenly, the mustachioed man smiled back. “He’s my brother.”

Meanwhile, a human guard was leaning on the walls of one of the houses and looking at the two vishkanyas, and then frowning at the sight of Llore – a human, unusual in this district. He snarled and looked back to another guard, sitting nearby and sipping wine someone left over at his porch.

“You seen him?” The first guard asked.

“Whom?” The second answered, for a moment getting the bottle out of his face.

“That one,” The first guard continued, pointing at Llore. “Looks like we got ourselves a snake-fucker.”

Infinite Azeroths 2: Parasite

“Presumably, this timeline’s Lady Vashj’s failure to reach Illidan will lead to heavy repercussions when this timeline reaches our upcoming future. Lady Vashj still being present underneath the ocean will heavily influence the timeline. Although so far, the timeline seems nearly identical to ours, barring that one simple fact, it will have to diverge rather significantly when Nazjatar fails to rise from the sea floor…”

Rise? Or raise? Tarakan’s pen hung above the paper as he started thinking about this. Common wasn’t his first language. No, it had to be “rise” here.

His thought was interrupted when he heard someone entering his office. It was Anachronos, in his humanoid form, looking expectant. Tarakan put the pen away and straightened himself to talk.

“Lord Anachronos,” he opened with a slight bow.

“Greetings, Tarakan,” Anachronos responded, coming closer. “So I heard there was this re-weaving project you were spearheading. To help us deal with the damage caused by temporal refugees in the Prime timeline.”

Tarakan continued to sit there, without the slightest change in his mannerisms. “We already talked about this. You were supposed to begin exper-”

“Stop!” Anachronos said, suddenly raising his hand. “I haven’t talked about this. The version of me you talked to must have been from my future. I’ll wait until then.”

Tarakan just nodded, sighing impatiently. “I’ve been waiting for your future self’s response regarding that for months now.”

“You realize this is just because of a time differential. I don’t doubt my future self went with the results to you fairly quickly.”

“Yes, yes,” Tarakan said, waving his hand dismissively, “I know. Still doesn’t make the wait any less frustrating.”

Anachronos quickly turned around and went towards the doorway. “I better get going, before I cause any more temporal accidents.”

He left, but it felt like he disappeared right behind the door. He could have actually disappeared, so Tarakan didn’t pay much attention to it and continued his work. Squawk, so is it rise or raise? But then, he heard a noise in the corner. He quickly turned his beak to the source, but didn’t see anything there. Then it happened again, from another corner, and this time it sounded like a cackle of a shrunken goblin. What is happening? Tarakan rose from his seat and looked around carefully, but he still wasn’t seeing anything. He decided he’d check his Vision of Time for temporal disturbances and to his surprise, it was turned off. With all due haste, he snapped its parts around to turn it on, only to see it flashing bright red, as if he was in the epicenter of the temporal equivalent of an earthquake. That was troubling.

Tarakan quickly left his room, but stopped right outside. As he passed the threshold, almost the entire scenery changed in the blink of an eye. Anachronos was still there, just outside the door, talking to a blood elf. Tarakan approached him and patted him on the shoulder.

“Lord Anachronos, something strange just happened,” Tarakan said.

The dragon just looked at him surprised. “And who are you?”

Infinite Azeroths 2: Time and Again, part II

PREVIOUSLY: Time and Again, part I

Tarakan was tied up to a chair in a dark room. When he woke up there, his first instinct was to timewalk away but not only were his legs tied to the chair, his gear was gone as well and as a hunter he had no magical powers of his own. Through the few beams of light coming from a hatch in the door he managed to spot a strange, red stone lining the walls. Red stone… he heard about it before. Tarakan’s brother encountered it. A stone that negates all magic where it’s around so no one can enter the room magically, including the arcane serpent being unable to phase through the walls. Most people would have no idea how much time has passed. But he was not most people – he was a Timewalker. Time was his domain.

Suddenly, the door opened and a lot of light burst into the room – something especially painful for a cursed arakkoa. But in that burst of light emanating from the door frame he saw a human-shaped shadow. The shadow stepped in and the door closed behind him, as a faint lamp turned on near the roof. The shadow was no other but Khadgar. But not our Khadgar. It was a parallel Khadgar from this timeline, one that grew up to be a very different man. He was smiling and scratching his goatee, contemplating his captive.

“We meet again, Timewalker,” Khadgar said. “I must admit, I expected you to already turn into a dragon and attempt escape by now.”

Tarakan sighed. “I’m not a dragon. I’m a Timewalker. I am a mortal servant of the bronze dragonflight.”

Khadgar chuckled. “Mortals willingly serving dragons? Do you think we had no dragons over here? The capricious, gluttonous things wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from eating mortals standing around nearby.” Either dragons were very different in this timeline, or Khadgar was lying. “Especially ones that look like they would taste like chicken.”

Tarakan frowned. Cannibalistic jokes never amused him, and especially the numerous ‘do you taste like chicken’ lines from orcs who thought they were oh-so-clever. “You don’t know the first thing about us. And I’m not going to help you find it out.”

“We’ll see,” Khadgar said, “We’ll see how much pain and hunger a… not-dragon can withstand.”

Infinite Azeroths 2: Time and Again

Time travel. It’s complicated. And I don’t mean just the extremely powerful magic necessary to make it reality. Once you’re there, in the past or in another timeline, there is an almost infinite number of factors you have to take into account. Every step you take can end up undoing hundreds of possible lives. And every major change that brings a given timeline out of its alignment… out of its one, true fate can be disastrous. This is what the Infinite Dragonflight has been attempting for… forever, I will have to say because our mundane descriptions of duration or time lose meaning here. They attempted to throw timelines out of alignment, and thus to disintegrate them. Why? To bring chaos, entropy. And when all universes, all realities are destroyed, our entire multiverse ceases to exist and the only thing left are the Old Gods – external parasites from beyond all of creation. Without our universe to contain them, they are free. And perhaps they deserve to be free, but not at the cost of uncountable myriads of innocent lives.

Azeroth-28. An empty, dark corner of Dalaran, one that is ruled by a militaristic, jingoistic and magi-elitist Kirin Tor. One that enviously looks out to other worlds out there in the galaxy and seeks to dominate them all – but lacks the manpower and resources to do so. Not long ago, their Emperor, Khadgar, went into the white tower of Karazhan, using its temporal instability to seek new power that could overthrow the other worlds out there. He went missing for years and his Council tried to keep the Empire intact. Until, one day, he reappeared as mysteriously as he disappeared – having witnessed an alternate Azeroth, one much less developed and already embroiled in a conflict with yet another timeline. He saw this as an opportunity. Now they could command not one Azeroth, but two… or more. An infinite number of Azeroths, all striking out at the potential threats among the stars. But he underestimated the defenders this Azeroth had – the Timewalkers.

In that dark corner of Dalaran, suddenly a magical vortex opened. But this time, it was not another lazy mage quickly transporting himself from the top floor to the street. This time, it was a dwarf clad in bronze robes with the symbol of infinity on his tabard. Or rather someone that looked like a dwarf – it was, in fact, a bronze dragon, Keeper Morozdormu. And behind him, three more characters, subordinates, step out. An arakkoa hunter with a pet arcane serpent coiling behind him – Watcher Tarakan and Pita. Then, a red-haired human male with a hopeful look – Historian Llore. And finally, a dark-skinned, human-looking female mage – Weaver Agam. The four looked around until the dwarf spoke up.

“Alright, folks,” Moros said, “it looks like we landed safely, with no witnesses. Time to work.” He raised his left hand, with a strange hourglass in it. “According to our Vision of Time, we can safely stay here for just over a day. Let’s get digging!”

Character Profiles: Orkan Krasha

Name: Orkan Krasha
Race: Arakkoa
Gender: Male
Age: 20
Class: Warlock (demonology)
Professions: Cooking, leatherworking, minor alchemy
Religion: Atheistic
Alignment (per D&D): True Neutral
Traits (per CK2): Quick, weak, cynical, diligent, patient, honest

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.

Butterfly effect

Have you ever heard of butterfly effect? It comes from that saying that a single flap of wings of a butterfly can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. In other words, one tiny thing can have giant repercussions for the entire world. While every decision everyone makes has the potential to cause such effect, most people do not worry about it, nor should they. If everyone was worried about global repercussions of the breakfast they ate this day, nothing would ever get done. But we time-travelers must think about it all the time. When you do something in the present and it changes the world, it’s the natural course of things. But if you go back in time and sneeze, infecting an ancient person with a disease innocuous to you but lethal to him, you prevent all his future children from existing, and all of their children, and so on, changing the entire course of history. An already established history from which you came.

The Founding of Veil Krasha

Now after all these people went to Draenor and saw that warped little alternate, they think that our Draenor used to be just like this. Well, you’re squawking wrong. For example, you can find hardly any arakkoa outside of the Spires of Arak, and I come from Farahlon, which you lot didn’t even go to. I mean, I’ve even heard some rumors it doesn’t exist over there. And that’s nonsense again, you can’t have geological differences between different timelines, not without Deathwing to mess the land up for laughs. So people say, how did your family come to Farahlon? How did this Veil Krasha even exist? Well, I’m no Reshad, but let me tell you a story.

Character Profiles: Tarakan Krasha

by enipnion

 

Name: Tarakan Krasha
Race: (Outcast) Arakkoa
Gender: Prefers not to specify ((male))
Age: 67 (as of this posting)
Class: Hunter
Professions: skinning, leatherworking, cooking, fishing, first aid
Religion: deistic
Alignment (per D&D): True Neutral
Traits (per CK2): Quick, shy, content, patient, temperate, diligent, brave

Fake dragons and brains on legs

Usually when you call someone a dragon, it means they’re a large, flying, fire-breathing lizard. And when you call someone brain on legs it’s quite the opposite – you do not imagine an actual brain on actual legs. What my people found on Ivarind was of course the opposites of what they expected. I knew things about Ivarind ever since I contacted that Bolivia on Darfell. She sent me some information about her world, but so far it was only words on paper for me. When I had the Aperusei business dealt with, I started scouting Ivarind to see more of it on my own, or rather through the Eye of Terokk. And you know, Ivarind is a world that has never had contact with demons, so they were freaked out when they saw a floating eye on the streets. After some of that scouting I decided it’s time to send my nephew on a mission. Oh yeah, the nephew. I never wrote about him.