Secret stash of the animal kingdom
After the mind-fuckery of the whole Faranell situation, I decided I could stand to have a little time to step away and clear my head. So I shoveled the latest batch of paperwork off on Eitrigg (who has been LOVING ME, let me tell you, since I realized I could get away with sticking him with that kind of stuff) and got my gear together for a fishing trip. Used to do that all the time with Dranosh back in Nagrand, not so much the last few years since I suddenly turned into a grown-up and had to be all responsible and shit. Guess that’s just the price you pay for being successful.
When I headed upstairs to get Mortimer, Gurtash was there cleaning his stall, so I figured what the hell, the kid probably doesn’t get to go on a lot of fishing trips, so I invited him along. We flew over to the Southfury River, and skipped across to the Barrens side. There’s an old dock there, not far from Nozzlepot’s Outpost, that’s pretty convenient for fishing. We camped out there for a little while, and right off, the kid lands himself a 17-pound catfish. That’s all I needed, a cocky 13-year-old, right?
We fished for a while, and then at one point Gurtash decided to stretch his legs some and ran around a little near the dock. Not too far, still within sight of me…which was a good thing, since while he was zipping around, he managed to catch the attention of one of those lions that wander around that part of the Barrens. And so here comes the lion trying to chew on Gurtash. I charged over and smacked the lion down – no biggie, I didn’t even have to draw a weapon to do it, just whoosh, pow, dead.
None of this was any big deal, but after I dropped the lion, I noticed something kind of weird.
The lion had a pair of worn mail boots. And when I say “had,” I’m not saying he had them stuffed in his pockets or something, because guess what, lions DON’T HAVE FUCKING POCKETS, so just to make sure you’re getting the full picture, the lion ws WEARING them. On its back feet. Which…you know…strikes me as a little strange for a lion.
I took a couple minutes to WTF over that, but then I just shrugged it off and went back to fishing. Thing is, though, once we were back at the dock, it didn’t take too long before a crocolisk from the river decided that Gurtash smelled awful tasty, and came trudging on up after him. So once again, Garrosh to the one-shot rescue.
And, um, after the croc was dead, we noticed it was wearing a…barbaric loincloth.
Kind of odd, wouldn’t you say?
I thought it was a tiny bit peculiar.
Didn’t really see that one coming.
Nope, sure didn’t.
Oh, and also…
WHY WOULD A FUCKING CROCOLISK HAVE A FUCKING LOINCLOTH?!?!
I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone that all this started getting me pretty weirded out and curious. So I finished up the last batch of fishing with Gurtash, got him all strapped in on Mortimer, and sent them both back to Orgrimmar. Once they were on their way, I took a little time to do a little hunting, and wound up littering the area around the Southfury with a decent-sized batch of dead crocolisks, lions, and raptors.
The outcome? A lot of them didn’t have much of anything on them, other than claws and fangs and the usual animaly crap. But out of a couple dozen dead animals, I wound up finding a cloth vest, a pair of brackwater boots, some mail soldier’s gauntlets, some amulet on one of the crocolisks, and, maybe even more disturbingly, a blunt claymore, a curved dagger, and a birchwood maul.
Which…um…kind of raises the question, why would animals be wandering around with all this shit?
Has anybody else been running into this problem? Finding animals carrying stuff around with them that makes not a single fucking bit of sense for an animal to have? This actually isn’t a rhetorical question – I want to know if other people have been seeing this or if I’m just crazy. So, everybody reading this, chime in if this sounds at all familiar, and let me know what you’ve run across and where. Comment on this post, e-mail me (garrosh1337@gmail.com), shoot me a tweet, whatever. I want to figure out what the hell is going on here, and the only way I’m going to do that is if I get as much information as I can.
So, you heard me, get commenting if you’ve seen something! And you know what, if you HAVEN’T seen something? Get out there and go all Nesingwary on some animals just to make sure, then check back here! YOUR WARCHIEF HAS SPOKEN.
This is something that I have noticed a lot actually. Sometimes they even have money and jewels on them. I have a feeling that there may be some sort of animal conspiracy out there. That is one reason that I became a hunter so that if some shit went down I would have loyal companions that might actually take pity on my because I have been really nice to them. Although, come to think of it they might not actually feel that way because more than once I have ran off while they were getting the crap beat out of them so that I could avoid death. I always resed them and gave them a nice treat after though.
Yes! Indeed, I was starting to wonder as well.
I even thought I was seeing things… but of all the animals I’ve killed over the years, at least 30% came with weapons or armor on them.
Must be a conspiracy, indeed….
It’s also happening in your old stomping ground, Warchief. A junior colleague of mine found a Blood Knight Helm on a talbuk the other day.
The only logical explanation would seem to be pollution from expiring noobs. They litter the landscape with their gear, which gets picked up by randomly-passing animals.
The thing that used to puzzle me back when I used to pull the busy-work assignments was how many animals lacked fairly essential organs. You’d think that things like hearts and spleens would come one per critter, but you’d be thinking wrong. At least in the Barrens, anyway.
You are completely right! I got sent once to gather 4 Zhevya hooves so logically I would just kill one and be good. I even made sure the one I was killing was walking around normally before I killed it, but by the time I got to the body there were no hooves at all! I ended up killing around 10 to get the 4 hooves.
More disturbing were the ones wandering around without heads or hooves.
Yeah, I’d heard rumors about some raptors in Arathi that typically didn’t have hearts. And I mean, large carnivorous animals can be bad news as it is, but can you imagine being some noob and getting a raptor after you that’s literally heartless? That’s some scary shit.
Some of these incidents can be pegged down to other hunters playing catch-and-release with their bounties – DEHTA, which pays a bounty for human ears in the Borean Tundra, pays per group of *fifteen* ears, not by the pair! This leaves enterprising purveyors of ultraviolence slaughtering pearl divers only to discover that someone else has already relieved a diver of an ear, or of *both* ears, and then let him go!
Less easy to explain are the lack of vital organs entirely – one can survive without ears, but Westfall’s goretusks seem to survive and reproduce *while having no livers*. Truly biology is fascinating.
You may want to check with the Tauren back in Mulgore. There have been disturbing rumours of armed combat between rabbits and prairie dogs.
This reeks of an alliance plot to arm anything that might be able to attack us. FYV!
FYV indeed, whether he’s involved in this or not!
By the by, I love the thought that the acronym “FYV” might actually take off.
I always assumed that these were incidents where a predator had feasted upon the corpse of a young adventurer and accidentally ingested his boots/belt/mail shirt/what have you – so upon slicing open a deceased animal one might find a bile-smeared item lodged in its stomach lining.
That these creatures are actually *wearing* these items is bizarre, since the only “animals” known to have mastered complex tool use are the raptors of the Barrens (who therefore don’t really count as “animals”, and might feasibly be enlisted in the Horde! Subject Nine, at least, was a *very* clever girl).
I just realized; oh shit the raptors are *already* in the Horde. They’re allied with the trolls!
I had a raptor pet once that was so decked out in feathers and beads, I called him my Pimp Raptor. But I have read reports of a location somewhere in the Barrens with strangely armed mammals. Not ‘arms’ but guns and other weapons of destruction….
Hell, even those boars in the pens outside Orgrimmar seem to have caught on. Marogg asks for a hand with some bacon-gathering every now and then, and I’ve grabbed the occasional bit of low-end gear off the squealers. Figured they were remnants from lowbies who pulled a few too many.
Well, if that’s the case, at least they died in the name of bacon.
It’s when I kill the murlocs underwater to find they had a glass of ice cold milk that boggles me. I mean, how do they even keep it in the glass, let alone cold?