This morning I tried a little experiment with Gurtash’s training group – which has been coming along pretty well, by the way, when they’re not driving me up the wall being chattery and unfocused. Anyway, I decided to take them down to the Valley of Trials to see how they would do with some of the odds and ends we give to the new would-be adventurers down there. I figured it would give them a little basic low-risk practice to see how they stack up against some of the other newbies, most of whom are still at least a few years older than them.

I was really kind of hoping there would be more combat involved, gotta say. I’m not sure who designed the training program down there, but come the fuck on. I’m pretty sure our soldiers are never going to find themselves in a situation where life and death hinges on their ability to successfully pick cactus apples. Plus in these kids’ case, that wound up leading to a food fight, so there went a good ten minutes trying to get them under control again. And yeah, there were some boars they had to thin out, but seriously…those boars were so weak and pitiful, the kids hardly got any fighting practice from them. Really, somebody would probably have to kill like 65 million of those things in order to actually get anywhere.

But the real kicker was when Foreman Thazz’ril asked them to go around and smack the laziness out of some peons. Which, granted, those guys ARE pretty damn lazy. I mean as much as I complain about how long the goblins have been taking to finish the post-Cataclysm rebuilding in Orgrimmar (which, yes, they STILL haven’t finished, and which, yes, STILL boggles my mind), I don’t even want to THINK about how much longer things would have taken if I’d left that shit for the peons to do. We’d probably all still be sitting around a pile of fucking rocks and tucking ourselves in at night in a cozy little bed of mud and uprooted weeds.

Don’t get fucking excited, trolls – I said WEEDS, not WEED.

Anyway, Thazz’ril asked the kids to go smack the peons around a little and get them off their lazy asses. Only here’s the thing – the kids didn’t know their own strength…so…we ended up having, uh, a couple dead peons. Which, okay, I know I should maybe give a crap about them being dead, but come on. If a fourteen-year-old can walk up and one-shot you, you probably needed to be dead. Just sayin’.

The trainees were a little unnerved by the, y’know, unexpected fatalities, but I tried to play it up as a confidence-builder and told them there would be plenty of others falling before them once they got the chance to do battle for the glory of the Horde. Only not so much falling from people who might have widows who are covered by contract death benefits, because ugh, more paperwork. (I left out that last part with the kids.) That perked them up a lot, so I figured what the hell, why not use this to build some group pride. So next thing you know, my little pack of trainees are calling themselves the Dead Peons Society.

It’s got kind of a ring to it, as long as you don’t think about it too much and realize where it actually comes from. Plus, it even lends itself to a decent abbreviation. When it comes time for me to start sending them out on actual missions, I can totally see myself saying things like “Time to call in the DPS.”

More soon.