Tag Archives: kaal soulreaper
The Southshore Campaign
Garrosh just couldn’t seem to have any quiet time in Grommash Hold without some new task cropping up for him. If it wasn’t Eitrigg finding things for him to do, it was someone else from among his cast of minions…
Now, granted, you can hardly blame Garrosh for being a bit startled. This was taking place during Cataclysm, after all, so evidently Sylvanas was way, way ahead of the curve with the whole talking-head thing.
So Garrosh hopped the next zeppelin and headed to Eastern Kingdoms, where Sylvanas and her entourage were there to meet him with bad news for the living and dead alike…
Because seriously, that had been going on long enough.
Next up was a trip to the Apothecarium, where Garrosh first met Sylvanas’ head researcher, Master Apothecary Faranell.
A few awkwardly scripted interactions in the next room later…
And so, as per Faranell’s recommendation, Garrosh’s search for answers continued in Hillsbrad…
After many, many frustrating rounds of exhortations and beatings — which I won’t subject you to here — Garrosh was finally able to extract some information from a panicked Helcular: years ago, while still a living human, Helcular had seen a contingent from the Knights of the Silver Hand lurking around Southshore. Given the paladin order’s eventual interest in the Scourge, Garrosh concluded that there could be a link to the anti-plague. And considering the fact that, where the Silver Hand was concerned, Garrosh had an in right there on staff…
And look. A meeting took place. Words were exchanged. Many, many words. Spirits save us, so many words. And I’m simply not cruel enough to subject you to all of them here. Suffice to say that Garrosh ended up having to deploy Dontrag and Utvoch as part of an exit strategy. The main takeaway from the meeting — other than soul-crushing exhaustion — was that the Knights of the Silver Hand did indeed meet in Southshore some ten years ago to discuss the looming threat of the Scourge. Alexandros Mograine unveiled a magic crystal that would eventually be used to forge the Ashbringer — the ultimate weapon of the Light against undeath. The crystal, however, two of the knights had convinced Mograine to let them study the crystal for their own purposes, which led Garrosh, Mokvar, and Faranell to suspect there might be a connection to the current crisis in Southshore.
The only problem is, all relevant parties were now dead, leaving what seemed to be an equally dead trail for Garrosh and company to follow…
I had really wanted to cover this whole arc in this post, but this week got away from me a bit, so rather than make a late installment that much later, let’s toss up a “TO BE CONTINUED” here and resume our goofy walk down memory lane next time…
Oh, but also, since it’s kind of tradition at this point…
Daria’s Pro Tip for Dealing with Tirion #9: If someone else catches his attention, run — do not walk — out of the room. Do not look back. Do not feel remorse. It’s a hard, cruel world out there; better them than you.
Spare the rod, spoil the Helcular
So Helcular wasn’t exactly the most help in the world. I’m not sure if he’s just been sort of batshit ever since he was raised as undead from the Southshore graveyard a few years back, or if he was always kind of unstable, or what, but dude could not stay on topic for all his flipping out and panicking about what had happened down at the ruins. To be fair, I suppose being at ground zero of some freakish anti-necromantic explosion that took out most of your team, and just barely escaping from having the unlife sucked clean out of you yourself, well, I guess I can see how that might freak you out. And Helcular being a mage, and kind of a bookish one at that, I can see how he might not exactly be the battle-tested kind of guy who deals with adversity well.
But DUDE, I can’t POSSIBLY overstate how much he was spazzing out over everything. Could not keep him on topic for more than thirty seconds at a time, so I spent practically the whole conversation having to slap him around to try to get him back on track. Now granted, I probably didn’t help matters when Kaal arrived with an update from Southshore, and I let him give his report in front of Helcular. Turns out, those shimmery purple lines are still expanding outward – slowly enough that you can’t notice it with the naked eye, but still moving and stretching little by little, apparently gravitating toward other centers of necromantic energy. As in, places where there are lots of undead. So eventually – slowly, but eventually – this thing is going to spread.
Which as you can imagine, is just what panicky jittery Captain Freak-Out Hercular needed to hear, and yeah, a few more beatings ensued to get him to stop fluttering about. Eventually, after enough enforced focus to make my frigging hands sore, I was able to drag this much out of him: Helcular used to live in Southshore, where he knew Kel’Thuzad back in his pre-lich days, and had studied necromancy under him. Because nothing could go wrong there, as we all know. But he couldn’t think of anything they could have done that could have had a hand in what’s happened – the training and practice he did in the vicinity of the town was all small-potatoes stuff, and from what he could remember, Kel’Thuzad kept his distance whenever he was doing anything major. He did remember one point some years back, though, when a bunch of people from the Knights of the Silver Hand were hanging around the town. They were being pretty hush-hush, but were still attracting enough attention that he could remember strangers turning up in the town and lurking around snooping on them…so there’s a fair chance they were up to something. And considering how those paladins wound up taking an interest in the Scourge, it sounds like there’s at least enough of a possible link to be worth following up on.
And again, let me just stress that pretty much every sentence of that was spread out over two of three smackings and a frustrated “Man, will you PLEASE try to pull yourself the fuck TOGETHER?”
Anyway, though, we’ve got another lead to follow, even though I’m not exactly thrilled where it’s leading. But, I’ve already had Eitrigg send a message up to Hearthglen in the Western Plaguelands, and I’m getting ready to head north. Not going to lie to you, I’m not looking forward to this at all, but it’s our best in with the Silver Hand, so I guess I’m going to need to go have a sit-down with Tirion Fordring.
Ruins of Southshore
Okay, so remember what I was saying about the Undercity smelling bad? Well I would happily spruce up the aroma of Grommash Hold with some Undercity potpourri before I took too many deep breaths around Southshore the way it is right now. Holy shit, it’s like somebody went down to the Apothecarium, put together an olfactory mix tape of their greatest hits, distilled in into some kind of glowing green porridge with a side of asparagus, force-fed eighty tons of the shit to a gang of syphilitic ettins, then locked them all in a closet for three days and let them fart it all out. Like THAT bad. That’s what it’s like down here. I seriously think this is what atrocity must smell like. A piquant blend of genocide and child abuse.
I knew Sylvanas’ people had used Southshore as a test site when I gave them the go-ahead to start up their plague research again, but even I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scope of what they had going on here. It isn’t even a town anymore so much a slimy green puddle, with these living goop thingamajigs squirming around the place. It’s actually kind of scary to imagine they were able to crank all this out so quickly in the window I’d left them to resume work. I can only figure some of the apothecaries were so fired up to be able to get back to it that they really threw themselves into it in a huge flurry of activity right off the bat.
Anyway, the bunch of us – myself, Drok, Cromush, Mokvar, and a handful of warlocks and alchemists who came with – spent some hours scouring over the place looking for any clues about where the anti-plague effect had come from. It wasn’t until some of the locks (who, by the way, actually aren’t big fans of socks – apparently we’ve got a bunch of hippie sandal-wearing warlocks these days…terrific) tried some kind of incantation spell that we started getting somewhere. They were able to make these shimmery purple ribbons visible around the town, almost like hazy purple flames. Kaal Soulreaper, one of our locks, explained to me that the haze was made up of the traces of a potent magic effect, which you could see spreading and scattering all around the town – most likely, he said, leaving those purple traces along the paths the effect took bouncing from one undead to the next. So what we were looking at was the hazy footprints of their deaths. Or re-deaths. Or whatever.
So, tracing back to where the haze was at its most dense was the most likely way to get to the starting point. That brought us to the old town inn – specifically, underground, beneath the cellar. From somewhere down there, all the purple ribbons came spreading out, up through the cellar and out of the ground along the outer walls of the building. Whatever it was exactly, it looks like it detonated there. And according to the warlocks’ best guess, the haze will continue holding the “contagion” until it dissipates. As for how long that will take, they ballparked it somewhere between hours and centuries. So, lots of help there. Really, guys, I appreciate the info so far, but couldn’t you give me a LITTLE better idea of when it’s going to be safe for the Forsaken to come back down here? Is it tomorrow or the end of time, or what?
The next question that comes to mind is, you know, how the fuck this magic doohickey got there. And since we have a fairly powerful magic-user on staff who actually has a pretty long history with Southshore, I’m thinking it’s time I had some face time with our man Helcular. He had been supervising things in Southshore before everything went kablooey, at which point he was evacuated to Tarren Mill with as many other Forsaken as they could pull out in time. I’m having Cromush and Drok continue the work down here in Southshore while I fly up to see him. More soon.
