Tag Archives: faceless ones
Polyphonic pro moronic
After my trip up to Hyjal a few weeks ago – the Twilight’s Hammer crackdown part, not the grabby dryad part – things have quieted down some up there, but there’ve still been a few random Twilight flare-ups here and there. Mostly they seem to have gotten fewer and farther between, but every so often I’ve been getting reports of them turning up again. Usually the reports end with them promptly getting smacked down by our people.
I just got another heads-up from Stonetalon. First the basic information itself: Dontrag and Utvoch (of course) were making a scouting sweep around Battlescar Valley, doing a little followup on the skirmishes we’ve had there with Alliance forces, when they ran into another one of the faceless ones we’d found down around Thal’darah Grove. It must have been the runt of the faceless litter, because D&U were able to smack it down pretty easily, but they decided to have an extra look around the area. A rare non-retarded move by those two, I know. It happens.
Turns out, this was creepily close to the makeshift graveyard that we’d set up in the valley after everything that had gone down there some months back. They found a few signs that someone had been poking around there, but the main disturbing news item was that one of the graves had been dug up – specifically, former General Grebo. (Okay, I’m not sure why I felt the need to call him “former General” – I mean yeah, he ended up dying in disgrace and relinquished his rank as a result, but, I mean, he’s dead. He’s pretty much “former” everything.) Someone had dug up Grebo’s grave. It was empty. I’m not sure I want to think about what they want with his remains, but when your best case scenario is that someone decided to Calder Gray it up, that can’t be a happy thing. I may get Krog up there to do some checking around.
Anyway, that’s the basic information itself, which obviously isn’t fun. But on top of it, the news came to me from D&U themselves, which tells you right there that just GETTING the update was even LESS fun. Because I think I’ve just discovered ANOTHER down side to the whole Earth Online situation – the two of them decided to deliver this little tidbit to me IN TELLS while I was ON THE GAME. Which, first of all, that’s supposed to be my down time, to relax. Second of all, there are actually OFFICIAL CHANNELS they could use to report things, which would not involve intruding on the aforementioned down time, and, you know, distracting me with WTF news while I’m trying not to die to an elite. And then, just to finish off, the pickle on the crap sandwich of the whole situation if you will, the TWO of them decided they were going to deliver the news by BOTH getting into whispers with me, INDIVIDUALLY, at the SAME TIME.
Read that again. Once more. Now think about that. Are your ears bleeding yet? No? Read it one more time then. Now think about it some more.
See?
Do you have ANY IDEA how frustrating it is to try to drag a story out of TWO mental defectives SIMULTANEOUSLY, on the same topic, while trying to keep straight which idiot has told you what, and half the time it’s all you can do to keep straight which one of them is which? It’s like fucking moron stereo with extra reverb, turned up to eleven.
I think I need to roll an alt.
Old God mop-up duty
Scouting reports have finally come in from around Kalimdor, after the business with the Old Gods’ spawn in Thal’darah Grove last week. The Twilight’s Hammer is definitely weakened and scattered in the aftermath of Deathwing’s defeat, but they’re still out there licking their wounds. As for the Old Gods and their minions themselves, that’s a little tricker. We don’t really know very much about the Old Gods proper – in the late stages of the war with Deathwing we kept hearing references to an Old God named N’Zoth, but we don’t have much idea where he’s hiding, or how many Old Gods are still out there, if any, or where they are.
That’s the thing about the Old Gods – however many of them are left, they’re hidden away somewhere, buried deep in the bowels of the earth or at the bottom of the sea. With the ones we’ve fought so far, C’thun and Yogg-Saron, we actually had a pretty easy time of it, since in both those cases they were contained in one location, and even then it’s hard to tell just how deeply and broadly they’d managed to take root in the surrounding area.
But for the ones still on the loose, it’s a whole other problem. All we really know is that there’s at least one more of them (strictly speaking, there’s probably at least TWO more of them, seeing as how the Twilights keep talking about the Old GODS rather than the Old GOD, or just plain That Dude N’Zoth), and that they’re located, well, DOWN THERE somewhere. Hell, one of them could be tucked away somewhere under Orgrimmar for all we know. I guess the Titans supposedly imprisoned them all underground, although, first of all, Titans, nice job letting the rest of us know where they ARE so we could maybe help keep an eye on them, or at least not go digging around too close and maybe accidentally let them loose delving too greedily and too deep, and second of all, bang-up job keeping the three we know about contained all air-tight like they have been. Hell, one of those three is STILL contained as far as we know, and it hasn’t stopped him (her? it? they? do we need to invent a whole new pronoun for these things?) from stirring up all kinds of trouble with Deathwing and Ragnaros and the Twilights.
And that’s not even getting into their fucking SPAWN, whatever the fuck that even means, like the faceless ones and the tendrils and whatever else. I mean, look at what happened in Dragonblight and you’ll see my point. Apparently these Old Gods have like a zillion of these creepy-ass offspring or minions or whatever the fuck, all burrowing around underground where they can just roll up on Wyrmrest Temple and pop out of the ground with those fucking gigantic living-mouths-with-tentacles, which by the way, what’s even the POINT of keeping the Old Gods “imprisoned” if they can apparently just shit out THOSE things at will and send them wherever they want?
So anyway, yeah. Old Gods suck.
Point being, the Old Gods are the real problem, but they’re also damn hard to pin down, so most of the time the best we can do is try to stay on top of the Twilight cult and hope that keeping them under wraps will help us put a damper on the Old Gods indirectly. Which brings us back to the scouting reports. We’re still seeing some pockets of Twilight activity in a few areas. In particular I’m getting some reports on a remaining enclave up in Mount Hyjal. I may make a trip up there to have a look myself. Not to mention it might be good to check in and get a little face time with Hamuul Runetotem, seeing as I never got around to sending him a “Get Well Soon” card after…well, you know. Although he’s seemed kind of uncomfortable around me ever since the first couple months I was Warchief. Not sure what’s up with that. Anyway, I’ll probably have a chance to talk to him soon.
Krom’gar’s shadows
I still don’t put a lot of stock in superstitious stories about things that go bump in the night. Turns out, there wasn’t some mysterious spooky stuff going on in Thal’darah Grove like the men were talking about with the whole “Krom’gar’s shadow” thing. I knew there had to be something reasonable and real behind it all, and hey, check it out, hold on to your ass for the surprise incoming – Garrosh was right again. I knew there had to be some kind of sensible explanation. Real as ghosts and goblins.
I just wish it was something other than what it was. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So I went down to the grove yesterday afternoon to have a look around. Took a hell of an effort to get Mortimer to land there at all – I’m not sure if he just remembered the last time he was there and didn’t want to get too close again, or if something else was spooking him. Either way, he put up a fight before we finally managed to land, and even then, he was pretty antsy the whole time there.
The grove is just eerie to walk around in now. I’m not sure if that’s just based on my own memories of the place… It’s probably hard not to be creeped out by a place where you know you damn near got killed. (Then again, if that’s all it is, I’d probably better figure out a way to get over it, otherwise I’m on pace to run out of places where I WON’T feel creeped out. Thal’darah Grove? Check. Ring of Honor? Check. Twilight Highlands? Double check.) I don’t think it’s just me, though. Most of the debris from Krom’gar bomb has been cleared out, but the land still looks scarred from the explosion. Even with the work that’s been done to re-level the soil for replanting, the terrain just looks skewed, almost as it the ground itself is still trying to pull away from the impact point. At the very center of the impact, the ground still looks scorched.
And then there’s the smell. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it hangs in the air. How many months ago now? And you can still smell it. That stink of burning trees and charred flesh and sulfur and a hint of blood. I can’t think of any time ever in my life when a smell was PALPABLE – you can actually FEEL it on its way into your nose.
Most of all, though, the grove is just hauntingly still. I don’t mean quiet, or tranquil, or uneventful even. I mean STILL. Like the whole place was just frozen. Like the land itself decided it couldn’t bear what we’d allowed to happen here, and time decided it wasn’t going on another step. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. Just endless stillness in an empty landscape under dank, ruined air.
Or maybe I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Who knows.
I looked around the grove for I don’t know how long, and didn’t really find anything noteworthy, other than tons and tons of nothing. I saw some of the attempts at construction D&U had mentioned, that had just crumbled apart, and walked through some of the failed attempts at fields. Nothing really telling, just mode fodder for the eerie heap. But I knew “it’s kinda spooky” really wasn’t any kind of an answer, so I just stayed around and kept watching, wandering in circles, looking around until dusk fell.
Then it started making more sense.
As the grove grew darker, I started spotting dark figures moving in the distance. I wasn’t even sure at first how many – it could have just been one weaving in and out of sight, or many, I wasn’t sure. Like I said, I’m not superstitious, but I’ve got to admit I couldn’t help but think of the name the men had given the weirdness here, and wonder if I was about to run into yet another dead Horde officer come back to haunt me. But the shapes I was seeing were much too big to be an orc, even hopped up from shadow-necro-whatchamafuckery, so I pulled myself together pretty quick and starting making double time around the grove to find out what they were. They were huge and lumbering, moving around slowly, actually lurking more than moving, but in the growing darkness I wasn’t able to get a clear look until I was almost on top of them.
Faceless ones. About a dozen or so, skulking around the place.
I don’t have to tell you I’ve already had way, way, WAY more than enough of all this Twilight Old God tentacle-beasty bullshit, so once I knew what I was dealing with I didn’t waste much time putting Gorehowl to work. As I was cutting through the first couple of those ugly fuckers, I started noticing more movement scattered around the grove. I kept making my way around, hunting down the faceless ones, and I was able to pin down the new shapes that were moving – tentacles, sprouting from the ground, budding out of the earth gradually, a few at a time, like some sick mockery of the fields we’d been trying to plant.
At least we know why the soil had turned bad on us, I suppose. And what had gone wrong with construction, too – while I was making my rounds I spotted a few of the tentacles lashing randomly at some of the half-finished scaffolding in the area. It’s really these tentacles that concern me a lot more than the faceless ones. I hacked down as many of them as I could, but who knows how much good it’ll do. It’s like when you have weeds in your garden – you can go around yanking out the stems all night, but who knows how deep the roots go.
I’d gotten reports of an infestation like this at Stonetalon Peak, tendrils sprouting from some sort of Old God spawn…apparently the infestation runs through more of the mountains than we thought. Granted, these particular beasties seem to be pretty small potatoes – the tentacles died fast enough, and even the faceless ones were a lot weaker than others I’ve run across before. Maybe the Old Gods are weakened some after what happened with Deathwing. Maybe not. Hard to say. Either way, though, I don’t much like the look of this, not least of all because if we have more of these tendrilly freakshows cropping up, it’s not much of a stretch to think there might still be some Twilights up to something too.
I’m going to have to send out some more recon teams to check up on this. Old Gods, Twilights, whatever, I don’t want any of them getting a chance to come up for air. Especially that damned cult. I kind of have an axe to grind with them. And by “grind,” I mean “cleave as deep as possible into each and every one of their skulls.”
