Raelia’s Penance

It was an early evening on the Lehba Island. Sun has already set thanks to Anzulekk’s twin world, hanging in the sky right on the horizon. Despite that, it still wasn’t too dark. With his office awash in the twilight, Menrim was preparing to leave for his quarters when the doors opened. It was Raelia Sunspear, his felblood elf assistant. She was still calm and somewhat happy, not knowing what Verroak would soon want of her.

“Raelia,” Menrim said to welcome her, “I see you’re back from the mainland.” She spent most of the day commanding the Ivarindian peasants who were building the village where they would live together with the refugees Anzulekk would invite to flee from Azeroth’s certain and urgent doom.

“Yes. If you do not mind, I will just leave the documents and go back to my quarters.” She calmly walked to her desk, but before she could do what she planned, Menrim interrupted her.

“Actually,” he said, “boss wanted to talk to you.”

She sneered snidely. “What does the old coot want this time? Ran out of bird seed?”

Menrim wasn’t laughing at her jokes. He does not often joke, and he got tired of the bird jokes as well. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

“Fine,” she said putting down her paper stack, “I’ll go to his study right away.”

“Not his study,” Menrim said, pointing through the window. “He’s waiting for you at the world tree. Come.” He came out from behind the desk and grabbed his bag, putting it across his shoulder.

She chuckled. “You’ll be escorting me? My knight in shining armor. Only without the armor…” She looked across Menrim’s leonine centauric lower body. “But you got the horse parts alright.” They exchanged concerned looks after that last remark. “Not what I meant.”

“I know,” the tol’vir responded and came over to the door, waving to the felblood. “Come.”

Green Sun

One would expect that when someone says “impossible”, it would send a pretty clear message – something that’s impossible cannot happen, ever. Unfortunately, people have come to use the word rather frivolously, and therefore there is a plenty of things that are apparently impossible, but still happen quite frequently. For instance, it’s impossible to grab a glass by just wishing it happened… but we have magic for that. On a more further out range of “impossible”, it’s impossible to kill an Old God – but it appears the Titans actually did kill at least one. Frequently, the real meaning of “impossible” is “it cannot happen, unless you throw enough magic at it”. And even that has limits – because some feats require such incredibly large amounts of magic constantly defying a persistent force of nature that it appears truly impossible. No one would have that kind of power, and if he did he would have more important things to do with it. One such truly impossible feat is what one of our Eyes of Terokk discovered – a ruined, uninhabitable world with a green sun.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Character Profiles: Menrim

Name: Menrim
Race: Tol’vir
Gender: Male
Age: 31
Class: Factotum
Professions: herbalism, inscription, cooking, fishing
Religion: Holy Light (layman)
Alignment (per D&D): Neutral Good
Traits (per CK2): Quick, scholar, honest, shy, diligent, kind, charitable, cynical, trusting, patient, craven

Eastern Kingdoms Mogu

The Titans have created a whole family of stone creatures, all of varying morphology as well as faculties. The core Titanic races are commonly mentioned as earthen, gnomes, vrykul, tol’vir and mogu. Most of these creatures have been discovered in multiple sites, including earthen in Uldaman as well as Ulduar, or tol’vir were found in Uldum and Ulduar (even though the Ulduar tol’vir were converted by Nerubians and then the Scourge into Obsidian Destroyers). However, some of those creatures are curiously found, at least presently, in only one of the sites. One such example are vrykul, of which there is little trace outside of Northrend, as well as mogu who appear only in Pandaria. But there is a theory that it’s not true, and finds of these races in other sites are simply missing. One of these could be the kvaldir, found commonly in the South Seas, possibly coming from a facility further south, perhaps even Uldaman, as well as the common among scholars theory of the Eastern Kingdoms Mogu.

Tower of Krasha Management Chat

* BlackViperUldum (blackviper@lostcityreclamators.gov.ul) has joined
<@Arakkoa> “Black Viper of Uldum”?
<BlackViperUldum> What? It’s a nickname.
<@Arakkoa> But “Black Viper of Uldum”?
<BlackViperUldum> Yes.
<@Arakkoa> What does it even mean? Wait, I don’t want to know.
* Arakkoa gives voice to BlackViperUldum
<+BlackViperUldum> It is for the best.
* YuGwai (yugwai@humanoid.net) has joined
<YuGwai> Greetings
<@Arakkoa> Oh, you. I didn’t know you knew how to use these things.
<YuGwai> I know many things you would not expect.
* PacifistOgre (lunk14@ogresite.com) has joined
<PacifistOgre> Hi
<PacifistOgre> Lunk sorry Lunk late Lunk connect wrong channel
<@Arakkoa> I didn’t say I need you here necessarily.
<PacifistOgre> It okay Lunk often un neseccairly
<+BlackViperUldum> Oh, Lunk. That’s a surprise.
<YuGwai> Yeah, the ogre that just ran off despite having a job.
<PacifistOgre> Lunk sorry Lunk hard soul
<@Arakkoa> A what again?
<+BlackViperUldum> I think he means “an uneasy soul”.
<@Arakkoa> Great, now I need to translate him from Common to Common.
<@Arakkoa> Correction: I always needed to translate him from Common to Common.
<+BlackViperUldum> I believe the formal term is Low Common.
<PacifistOgre> Low Common no longer cannon it from book
<@Arakkoa> Okay, let’s get on our topic. Where’s Hwarne? I need her now.
<+BlackViperUldum> I’ll try to get her here.
* Hwarne (hwarne@mail.com) has joined
<Hwarne> What the squawking squawk is up with this network?
<Hwarne> It wouldn’t let me put “ë” in the name.
<PacifistOgre> Hey penguin
<@Arakkoa> Glad to see you to, Hwarne. You seem well.
<Hwarne> I’m not squawking well. This squawking thing won’t let me put my proper name in.
<+BlackViperUldum> It is pointless to dwell on now.
<Hwarne> And don’t call me a penguin.
<@Arakkoa> Yeah, Menrim’s right. Let’s get to the topic.
<PacifistOgre> Lunk sorry
<@Arakkoa> GET TO THE TOPIC
<PacifistOgre> Lunk sorry
<@Arakkoa> Stop saying sorry!
<PacifistOgre> Sorry
<@Arakkoa> …
<+BlackViperUldum> What mr. Krasha is saying is we need to acquire certain technology.
<@Arakkoa> Yeah
<@Arakkoa> We found some blueprints with Menrim.
<@Arakkoa> Blueprints for a golem my people used to build long ago.
<PacifistOgre> Small snail say Lunk big snail is daddy
<@Arakkoa> Lunk, concentrate
<PacifistOgre> Okay
<@Arakkoa> But we need a special power core to power it.
<@Arakkoa> They don’t make these kinds of power cores anymore, and sindorei one didn’t work.
<PacifistOgre> Hnnnnnnng
<+BlackViperUldum> …
<@Arakkoa> What the squawk are you doing?
<PacifistOgre> Lunk is concentrating
<Hwarne> OMG
<@Arakkoa> But why are you typing “hnnng”?
<PacifistOgre> That what you type when concetranting no?
<@Arakkoa> No.
<PacifistOgre> So what you type when cocentrating?
<@Arakkoa> Nothing. You stay quiet.
<PacifistOgre> Okay
<YuGwai> Do I really need to be here?
<@Arakkoa> No.
<Hwarne> CAN WE GET BACK ON TOPIC
<@Arakkoa> Yes, we can. Shut up.
<@Arakkoa> Where was I?
<Hwarne> It’s literally a few lines above your current one.
<@Arakkoa> I said shut up.
<@Arakkoa> So we need an arakkoa golem’s power core.
<@Arakkoa> The sindorei one clearly didn’t work.
<YuGwai> I can still feel the smell of that one from the basement.
<@Arakkoa> I thought you didn’t want to be here.
<YuGwai> Do I have to leave then?
<@Arakkoa> No, it’s the gronn’s shift now.
<Hwarne> GET BACK TO THE TOPIC
<@Arakkoa> I’m the moderator here, Hwarne.
<@Arakkoa> Anyway
<@Arakkoa> I thought we could use the power core from an Eye of Terokk
<+BlackViperUldum> That was actually my idea.
<@Arakkoa> Yes, yes.
<@Arakkoa> But I have only one, and there are very few of those left.
<Hwarne> And you want me to buy one.
<@Arakkoa> I didn’t say anything.
<Hwarne> But you were about to.
<PacifistOgre> Can Lunk speak now?
<@Arakkoa> No.
<@Arakkoa> To both of you.
<@Arakkoa> So I need to acquire another Eye of Terokk.
<Hwarne> And you want me to get it.
<@Arakkoa> I said NO
<@Arakkoa> You can’t buy one of those anywhere. They’re so bloody rare.
<+BlackViperUldum> I bet you could find one on the Black Market.
<@Arakkoa> Those things are pretty much legendary these days.
<@Arakkoa> What makes you think you could find one on the Black Market?
<+BlackViperUldum> I heard someone say he bought a Plagued Proto-Drake mount from the Black Market.
<@Arakkoa> I wasn’t speaking of that kind of Black Market.
<+BlackViperUldum> But I was.
<+BlackViperUldum> Look, I’m saying these pandaren have all kinds of weird things to sell.
<YuGwai> Like grubs they eat. Yuck.
<@Arakkoa> Hey, grubs can be pretty tasty if prepared correctly.
<YuGwai> Nope. Who eats grubs?
<@Arakkoa> I do.
<YuGwai> I mean apart from Pandaren
<YuGwai> Oh
<+BlackViperUldum> I did hear some good recipes for grubs.
<PacifistOgre> Lunk have some grub recipes
<PacifistOgre> Grubs best well roasted
<PacifistOgre> It lot of protein
<PacifistOgre> But you no kill grubs!
<@Arakkoa> No, I’m sure we’d just find them lying around dead.
<PacifistOgre> Yaaay!
<Hwarne> OH MY GODS
<@Arakkoa> How does that even work with you? So are you a vegetarian or not?
<PacifistOgre> veggy tarian? Lunk know what veggy but not remember tarian
<+BlackViperUldum> It means you only eat food of plant origin.
<+BlackViperUldum> Or mushrooms, I guess.
<PacifistOgre> Oh
<@Arakkoa> I’m asking if you eat meat
<PacifistOgre> If it good
<@Arakkoa> But you know you have to kill animals to get meat?
<PacifistOgre> No?
<+BlackViperUldum> You do. How would you extract meat from a living animal?
<YuGwai> I bet I could do that.
<Hwarne> I’m going to get out of my own skin and stand next to myself.
<+BlackViperUldum> That’s gross
<+BlackViperUldum> Both of you
<PacifistOgre> But if you not kill animal
<PacifistOgre> If it just dead not killed
<PacifistOgre> Maybe then you get meat?
<@Arakkoa> Yeah, good luck with that.
<PacifistOgre> Thanks
<Hwarne> SERIOUSLY PEOPLE
<+BlackViperUldum> So you eat carrion?
<PacifistOgre> Carri… it not TV show?
<@Arakkoa> No.
<PacifistOgre> Oh
<+BlackViperUldum> I mean you eat only meat from animals that died naturally.
<PacifistOgre> Yea that sound rite
<Hwarne> FINE
<@Arakkoa> Either way, we don’t need to concern ourselves with that anymore.
<Hwarne> YOU GOT ME
<@Arakkoa> The tuskarr cook is doing everything any of us could desire.
<Hwarne> I’M GOING TO GO AND BUY THE SQUAWKING EYE OF TEROKK AND GET IT HERE
* Hwarne (hwarne@mail.com) has left
<@Arakkoa> What was that about?
<+BlackViperUldum> I think he got angry with our discussion being off-topic.
<YuGwai> She
<@Arakkoa> Whatever
<@Arakkoa> What were we talking about again?
<PacifistOgre> Food
<@Arakkoa> Yeah, but before that.
<PacifistOgre> Snail
<YuGwai> So food.
<@Arakkoa> Oh, yeah, the power core.
<@Arakkoa> I guess he’s buying it now?
<@Arakkoa> She
<+BlackViperUldum> It would seem so.
<@Arakkoa> Fine.
<@Arakkoa> Anyone needs anything else with me?
<+BlackViperUldum> No. I would want to return to my duties now.
<@Arakkoa> Fine, go.
<+BlackViperUldum> Till next we meet.
* BlackViperUldum (blackviper@lostcityreclamators.gov.ul) has left
<@Arakkoa> Which is in five minutes.
<YuGwai> I’ll be going as well.
<@Arakkoa> Yeah, go do your… turtle business.
* YuGwai sighs
* YuGwai (yugwai@humanoid.net) has left
<PacifistOgre> Snail really talk to Lunk
<PacifistOgre> It some time talk in funny language
<@Arakkoa> Do I really have to hear this?
<PacifistOgre> It say to Lunk that nagas want wreck bout
<PacifistOgre> boat
<@Arakkoa> What nagas again?
<PacifistOgre> Under
<PacifistOgre> They under Lunk in boat
<@Arakkoa> Well, get rid of them!
<PacifistOgre> Okay
<PacifistOgre> How?
<@Arakkoa> Well, I would probably kill them.
<PacifistOgre> No, Lunk no kill!
<@Arakkoa> Yeah, I know that.
<@Arakkoa> I’m just saying… get rid of them somehow.
<PacifistOgre> Okay.
<PacifistOgre> Lunk go talk to them.
<PacifistOgre> Bye
<PacifistOgre> See you later.
* PacifistOgre (lunk14@ogresite.com) has left
<@Arakkoa> Uh
<@Arakkoa> That went smoother than expected.
<@Arakkoa> And the penguin won’t even know that was always my plan.
<@Arakkoa> MWAHAHAHA
<@Arakkoa> Ahem
* You have left channel #arakkoa (“Leaving”)

Menrim’s Journal – Duskwood

After yesterday’s troubles in Stranglethorn, I continued up the Nazferiti River for a while until I encountered the bridge that links Duskwood and Westfall. Seeing the bridge I made my decisions and decided to continue further on foot. I tied my boat to a small tree stump under the bridge and protected it from thieves with a spell and then quickly took all my packages with me. Another man would probably be scared to go into this forest, but I’ve seen some things. I saw the Aspect of Death himself appear in the Neferset City to threaten us with his power. I’ve seen cities drowned in sand as an example for those would oppose the villain. Finally, I travelled through the South Seas recently and saw sky covered with evil energy of the Sha, I saw creations of a madman experimenting on living animals – I wasn’t going to be scared by a dark forest.