Tag Archives: grom’gol base camp
Trails in the wilderness
Out in the middle of the Stranglethorn jungle, a ways north of Grom’gol, there’s a hill where a big chunk of zeppelin wreckage is jammed into what’s left of a tree. It’s been there for years – I guess at some point before the Horde had established settlements here, a goblin zeppelin crashed somewhere in the jungle. The chunk of wreckage stuck in the tree is all that’s left of it.
(By the by, is it my imagination, or do these goblin airships seem to crash an awful lot? How exactly did these flotatation-device-needing motherfuckers manage to land their zeppelin-service lifetime contract with Thrall?)
When Nimboya’s contacts in Bambala turned up in the form of that hunting party, they brought some news with them from that spot in the jungle. Seems that in the last day or two, some large piece of burlap has been flapping in the breeze from the wreckage, and loads of random pieces of armor have been turning up – both on some of the animals in the area, and laying around on the ground near the wreckage. Since that sounded familiar enough, I headed over to see if there was anything else that could lead us to that Tembw’bam fucker that the DEHTA hippies were talking about.
Hoo boy, was there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
When I got there, sure enough, there were helmets and gauntlets scattered all around the place, along with a few stray swords and axes. Tattered cloth caught in the wreckage up above looked to be the remains of a standard frostweave bag. My best guess is that our boy was flying by with some bags full of armor and weapons, got one of the bags caught on the wreckage, tore it, out spills that bunch of his junk, and off he goes. Now, as for how the fucker managed to cram two swords, a couple axes, five helmets, some mail leggings, four pairs of boots, and a dozen gauntlets into a backpack…well, don’t ask me to explain the physics there. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve wondered that about someone, to be honest.
So I was scouting around the tree on the hill, looking through some of the gear that had dropped and trying to see if I could take a guess at which way the dude had been going, when lo and behold, a druid in flight form comes zipping over and tries to grab up some of the stuff in his talons. Of course I started off trying to reason with him. By which I mean drawing Gorehowl and showing him the reason why this whole shebang was a bad idea on his part. Or, well, tried too, because he was a dodgey son of a bitch. Fucking bird. He kept zipping around in the air, and smacked me a couple times with one of the gauntlets he was carrying, then turned into a cat and pounced on me, then he did some shit as a bear, then he was a cat again, then a bird, and more zipping around, and OMG fucking druids.
So yeah, that was annoying and all, but here’s the fucked-up part. While I was trying to smack him down, he was going on and on monologuing – only he wasn’t monologuing at ME. Dude just kept yammering on to himself, or to the other voice in his head, or whoever the fuck it was he thought he was talking to who wasn’t me. But he sure as fuck thought he was having a conversation with somebody, ranting and yelling and finding every single thing around him absolutely fucking hilarious to boot. And agreeing with himself a lot.
The one thing that came out of all the yammering was that I was able to confirm that the flappy fucker was who I thought he was – our prime suspect Tembw’bam. Seeing as he addressed himself by name like two or three times. The down side was that after we spent a few minutes mixing it up, he must have realized that it wasn’t happening – either that or the voice in his head remembered it had a meeting with Greatfather Winter and the Noblegarden Bunny – and he flew off. I hopped on Mortimer and took off after him, but he had already gotten a pretty good head start at that point, so I wasn’t able to catch up with him. I did see where he went off to, though. Last I saw him, he was flying into the ruins of Zul’Gurub.
I’m at the entrance to the ruins now, and just fired off a flare to get the rest of the crew down here. It shouldn’t take them long to arrive, and at that point we can head in and see what Captain Double-Speak is up to.
Welcome to the jungle
We’ve spent a good solid day investigating in Stranglethorn Vale, without a whole lot to show for it. On the way down, I arranged to have Mokvar and Krog take the zeppelin down with me. Figured it would help to bring a record-keeper, plus a trained investigator who can do a little stealthing around.
Based on the conversations I had with the DEHTA people – or, well, what I remember of them – our most likely suspect in the animal-arming weirdness is a troll named Tembw’bam, who used to hang with the DEHTA guys until he decided they weren’t hardcore enough for him over the whole animal rights thing. Yes, you read that right. According to what they tell me, this Tembw’bam dude went so crazy living in his animal forms that he basically renounced being a humanoid. Like he looked at the animals, and looked at the other people, and went over to the animals like “Fuck that shit, I’m with you guys.” Which to be fair, I don’t know if I can blame him, depending on the people he had surrounding him. I mean, lock me in a room with Dontrag and Utvoch for a few days and self-identifying as a meerkat might start to sound pretty good to me, too.
Anyway, once we arrived here, Commander Aggro’gosh put some of his scouts at our disposal, and we started sending out search parties led by me, Mokvar, and Krog. I even stopped by the Nesingwary base camp with my group to check in, although I have to say, it’s kind of disappointing dropping by there. I mean, I hear the camp is spruced up a lot now compared to what it was like back in the day, but here’s the thing. As much as the facilities might be better, it just isn’t what you’d call a no-kidding-around on-top-of-shit hunter’s camp. Look, I’ve met Hemet Nesingwary. I went hunting with him a few times back in Nagrand. THAT dude is the real deal as far as big game hunting goes. His kid, Hemet Jr.? Total slacker. You can tell his heart’s not really in it – he’d really rather be focusing on his music, or some shit like that – and it shows. But you know how it goes. The boss takes off and leaves his son in charge of the company, nobody can say anything because, hey, it’s the boss’ fucking kid, but the kid doesn’t really know the business well enough to ride the staff the way the old man would, and so everything gets lax and sloppy. Fucking legacy kids.
I tried talking to Hemet Jr. some, but between him and the other hunters at the camp, the best I could get was confirmation of there being a lot of animals turning up with weapons and armor on them. Tigers especially lately, for whatever reason. That might just be because there’s a decent tiger population near the camp, or maybe because there’s more to it, who knows – and by the way, can I just say again? Hemet SR. would have been able to put some tracking on that shit and get an idea of what’s what. No such luck with HJ.
We’ll keep at it a little longer, and hopefully something will turn up. While we were making the rounds, Nimboya sent word to some of his people over in Bambala, and we just had a troll hunting party stop by the base here, so maybe we’ll get a lead there. More soon.
Mag’hari house guest
Sorry I haven’t been posting the last week. I’ve been pretty busy here in Orgrimmar, and not even with anything big and momentous like wiping out the Alliance or even the aftermath of Deathwing biting it. This past week my Greatmother has been visiting from Nagrand, so I was showing her around and just generally keeping her out of trouble.
As it turns out, just getting her out here was a big production all by itself. I offered to send a mage to port her straight here, but oh no, no way, turns out apparently old people don’t trust mages and their new-fangled portals, no sir, so we had to arrange to get her out to the Dark Portal to come through that way. By the way, funny how she didn’t want to take a mage portal because those things are dangerous and unreliable, and yet she was totally okay taking the DARK PORTAL which by the way HAS “PORTAL” RIGHT IN ITS NAME TOO, only with dragon heads carved around it and warlocky fel magic buzzing all over it because we all know NOTHING ever went wrong with THAT.
So anyway, we finally got her out to the Dark Portal and through to the Blasted Lands, and then over to Grom’gol to catch the zeppelin up to Orgrimmar. On the way I hear tell she promised home-knit sweaters to a couple of the Grom’grol guards and one of the goblins on the zeppelin, because, you know, you really need a sweater when it starts getting nippy out there in the tropical jungle. I bet most of the problems the Darkspear ended up having in Stranglethorn could have been cleared right up if someone had through to crank out a few cardigans.
So we finally got her up here to Orgrimmar, and I have to admit, I was kind of hoping that she would be at least a LITTLE impressed with the place, or with me being Warchief, but oh no. First thing she comments on is how we’re still under construction even with the Cataclysm happening however many months ago, and how it wasn’t even that big of a cataclysm, not like in her day when Draenor literally got ripped into pieces, and us young ’uns have it so easy thinking a few earthquakes and some tidal waves count as a capital-C definite-article The Cataclysm – and meanwhile they had their settlements rebuilt in a few weeks. Which, everything else aside, yeah, like I needed another reminder of how those goblins are seriously taking their damn time on the construction work.
Oh wait, hold on, let me correct that. That wasn’t the first thing she commented on. No, the FIRST thing she commented on was the ritual tattoos I’ve gotten since the last time she saw me, like “Oh, is this what you kids are doing nowadays? All these young people running around with their tattoos, calling them ‘ritual’ and acting like that means they’re in touch with the ancestors. I know my ancestors knew the actual rituals. You know they’re only going to stretch and sag as you get older, don’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you…” Oh and then there were the pieces of Mannoroth’s tusks that I wear on my shoulders – “You wear those to work? For important meetings and everything?” And when I pointed out how they’re from Mannoroth, who killed my FATHER, and how I’d used parts of the pit lord’s remains to fashion the shoulders and my throne in Grommash Hold, all I got for that was “You don’t think that’s a little tacky?”
Also, as if all that wasn’t fun enough, for the first two days pretty much all I heard about was Thrall and how proud she is of him for saving the world from Deathwing and how great it is that he and Aggra are having a baby and by the way WHEN THE HELL WAS THRALL GOING TO TELL ME ABOUT THAT?! First the wedding and now this, the FUCK, man? And anyway, that was all kinds of fun, being reminded on and on about how awesome Thrall is, and how happy she is that she’s finally going to have great-grandchildren. And then she made some mention about how apparently Kilrath has a daughter around my age that she wants me to meet, and yeah that was all kinds of awkward. Ugh.
Over the next few days a bunch of the other Horde leaders came by to meet her and pay their respects, which I’ll admit was pretty cool of them, and she seemed to like Baine especially, gave him the whole “nice young man” deal that old ladies love to throw around. And everyone was nice to her, don’t get me wrong, but like…I mean, I know I can get cranky sometimes, but I really try to watch my mouth around Greatmother. Not least of all because if she catches me swearing she used to give me a good hard yank by my ponytail, which was one of the main reasons I cut it off eventually, but I’m also not in much of a hurry to find out what she would come up with for Plan B now that it’s gone. So anyway, I try to rein it in when I’m around her, but I swear the other leaders were making a point of giving me bad news in front of her and just generally saying things to see if they could set me off. Vol’jin especially. Meanwhile Greatmother just seemed to get a kick out of everyone. I don’t think she’s really clear on what the Forsaken actually are, though, what with her calling Sylvanas “that nice elf girl” that seems like she could use some sun. (More like she could use some SunWELL, am I right? OH YEAH I WENT THERE.) I’m thinking it’s just as well that I don’t clear that one up for her.
Anyway, that’s a sampling of my week, and I’m sure I’ll roll out a few more stories about it if you want to hear, maybe toss a few quotable quotes in the Twitter feed or something (#shitmygreatmothersays maybe). For right now, though, she just left to head back to Nagrand, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a tavern to go visit.
[Header image provided by Khizzara from Blog of the Treant, used here with permission and many thanks.]
