Tag Archives: sha
Clobberin’ time
[OOC Preliminaries: Okay, so yes, I know, I’ve been criminally slow in updating the blog. I’ve been caught in an all-too-busy real life these last few months, and even when I have had some free time after work, I often haven’t had the mental energy to work on anything that required much focus. And I didn’t want to just toss stuff on here that was half-assed. Whole-assed only for my readers! (That sounded better in my head.) Anyway, thank you for your patience. I don’t want to make any sweeping promises that I won’t end up keeping, but I should be able to get back to more of a normal schedule from here on.]
[Also: Don’t think I’ve forgotten about my idea to do a blog-friends Siege of Orgrimmar group! More on that very shortly!]
[Also also: DAMMIT, Blizzard, I already DID that idea. FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.]
So, getting back to the long-overdue story of what the hell happened in those caves. More specifically, what the hell happened after I turned that corner and found Varian giving me the OH HAI GAIS face.
How about THAT, by the way, huh?
So, yeah, as you might imagine, Varian and I were pretty quick to recognize this as the opportunity it was for the two of us to sit down and hash out our differences like adults.
For whom the bell tolls
Well THAT was a big whole production to go through for not much of anything.
Last night, I gathered a select group of Horde personnel at the Emperor’s Reach – an ancient, abandoned mogu structure that we found in Kun-Lai – to finally tap into the power of the Divine Bell. Malkorok brought a battalion of Kor’kron troops to oversee the proceedings, including some who were hand-picked to have the honor of being the first to be gifted with new power. The best of the best. Juggernauts.
Blademaster Ishi was on hand as well, along with a few other select Horde heroes from the Pandaren campaign, and once everyone was gathered and ready, I took up the hammer…mallet…um…weird-looking club doohicky? Look, for honest, I’m not sure WHAT that thing was supposed to be. But it was better suited for ringing a bell than Gorehowl would have been, so whatever. Point is, I cracked out that bad boy, and for the first time in who-knows-how-long, the Divine Bell rang.
And so marks the last point in the evening that things went to plan.
As the Bell rang, we could see the dark, shadowy outlines of bizarre, twisted creatures appearing on the platform. Transparent and shifting, but just enough to know they were there. So THAT’S what these sha look like. Up to this point, I’d only seen them in bits and pieces – claws mostly – when they’d partly seized onto other people.
Yes, I said “partly.” I wouldn’t have thought that what happened to Burzum was only partial corruption by the sha. Little did I know. Because now, I was treated to a front-row seat as, one by one, the sha descended onto our Kor’kron juggernauts…and transformed them into sha themselves. They were horrible to behold – I can see why the pandas and even Tak-Tak yammer on about steering clear of them. I tried to urge the Kor’kron on and encourage them to seize control of the sha energy coursing through them, but no such luck. They couldn’t. They lost themselves to it. And in the end there was nothing to be done but for the Horde champions on hand to slay the Kor’kron-turned-sha before they ran out of control.
Clearly, Malkorok had overestimated the mental toughness of that first batch of Kor’kron. I was just about to let Ishi show the rest of the bunch how a true veteran of the Mag’har does it, when I was interrupted by a surprise visitor.
Want to know who?
YOU WILL NOT FUCKING BELIEVE THIS SHIT.
Anduin.
Yes, THAT Anduin.
Anduin Wrynn, Prince of Stormwind.
Anduin fucking Wrynn, Prince of Stormwind, former prisoner of General Nazgrim until who the fuck even knows what happened I mean WTF, and newest volunteer to be a speechifying hemorrhoid on my curvy brown ass, because, hey, why not give fucking EVERYONE a turn at this point, right?
So, yeah, fucking ANDUIN comes strolling on up like it’s something to do – props, by the way, to my alleged BODYGUARD Malkorok for the crack security job there – and starts yapping away about the dangers of the Bell, and Garrosh-you-mustn’t. You know, the ol’ Baine-Vol’jin standard. Same tune, different verse.
Worked just about as well for him. I shrugged him off and rang the Bell again, and this time, the sha magic descended onto Ishi. Unlike the initial Kor’kron, he actually put up a fight and resisted…for a moment, anyway. Then, after a minute, he was altered into a sha as well. Except in his case, even with his body gone, his voice remained.
His voice, but not his words.
While our champions fought to subdue him, Ishi started spewing out words consumed by fear and rage and despair. No sign remaining of the strong, brave orc I knew, despite my urging for him to retake control.
In the end, there was nothing left – again – but for our champions to put him to rest. But of all his rantings before he fell, there was one that kept echoing in my thoughts.
Why should we be slaves to honor, when we could slaughter the children of our enemies while they sleep? My blade thirsts for Alliance blood!
Control your anger, I told him. There is killing, and then there is murder, I told him. We’re not the ones who murder innocents. We’re not the ones who kill children, confused and far from home. Left to rot in a festering swamp. Baited into a coward’s trap, tricked into an early death by a vainglorious king…
And then I looked up to find the presumptuous whelp of Varian Wrynn yipping at me.
He was fourteen years old.
Among the orcs, that made him a man.
The human brat used some mallet to crack and silence the Divine Bell, and I was far past my threshold for patience. I swung my hammer at him. He ducked out of the way, and the blow slammed into the Bell, which was already cracking apart. The Bell shattered, and the pieces crumbled onto the whelp, burying him under a massive heap of metal and stone. I could hear him cry out as his bones snapped. Then silence.
Good. Let Varian have a taste of true suffering.
It’s back to the drawing board for us. For now. I’d underestimated the effort it would take to master this sha power. Ishi and the others were too weak-willed, and they failed me as a result.
This is what I get for not taking matters into my own hands.
When the time comes, soon, I won’t repeat their failure. And I won’t repeat the mistake of delegating our fate to lesser orcs. Too much depends on it. Too high a price already. The Horde will prevail, strong, proud, united in purpose – a rebirth of glory. And it all depends on me to lead the way. It’s ALWAYS depended on me. I see that now.
I won’t fail. I CAN’T fail.
I have a destiny.
I’m the One.
Divine do-over
So I think the internet has decided it doesn’t want me playing Earth Online for the time being. Spazzle was right – this is what I get for trusting Grizzle Gearslip to set up a stable network. Remind me to stick with construction and excavation projects for him from now on.
Probably just as well. I have more important things to be focusing on right now.
First and foremost in the “more important things” file: We’re back in business on the Divine Bell front – and then some. Courtesy, believe it or not, of some clutch work from one of the blood elves. I know, right? I won’t hold it against you if you need to go back and read that again to make sure you got it right. Anyway – Fanlyr Silverthorn was able to work some Kirin Tor mojo to sneak a Horde operative into Darnassus, where the Divine Bell was being held, then teleported it out to Silvermoon. That’s right, the night elves worked so hard to get to the Bell before us, tucked it away deep in the heart of their capital city…for like fifteen minutes, before they had it swiped right out from under them. Oh man, would I love to have seen the looks on their faces when they figured out what happened.
Of course, you would think that this would come across as GOOD news to anyone on the Horde side of the fence, but spirits forbid I should ever have a conversation with Lor’themotherfucker that didn’t involve him crying and moaning and wetting his panties over something. And let me tell you, he was in fine form this time around. I could barely even figure out what the fuck he was bitching about, something about his people being put in harm’s way or some such (as if people never, EVER get put in harm’s way in the middle of, you know, A FUCKING WAR), and Jaina being pissed off about something (as if THAT’S ever a bad thing). Seriously, I don’t know what hair he’s got up his ass, but enough is enough. Calm down already. Don’t flip a bench, Lori.
Anyway, I’m having the Divine Bell transported to Pandaria pronto so we can get to work. We found another ancient mogu structure in Kun-Lai that should make for a good site to conduct the first of what should be many glorious uses of the Bell. I’m having Malkorok hand-pick some of the very best of his Kor’kron to stand guard and participate in the proceedings. I’m also having Ishi head up that way to supervise the setup of the Bell and help me with the first trial. Hopefully, after Burzum went all sha-batty on us, and Krimpatul went MIA with the rest of the…casualties…at the Temple of the Red Crane, and Ishi himself got beaten to the Divine Bell by the damn night elves, well, hopefully I’ll have a blademaster finally do my Mag’har proud and help put a win on the board for us.
Once we tap into the power of the Bell – and by extension, the power of this “sha” magic – we’ll wield a power unlike anything either side has seen in this war. And unlike the mogu, we won’t be leaving our enemies any room to rise up against us. Never again.
Shadow boxing
Well, this just goes to show what I know.
After our whole SNAFU with the sha claw, Regent-Lord Eyepatch went back to Silvermoon to personally supervise his people’s study of that sha box we recovered. Before he left I tried to impress on him the importance of that project (I believe my exact words were “This is actually important, unlike everything else you’ve ever done in your life, so try not to make a giant fucking mess this one time, Lori”), and after leaving him to his devices a couple days, I sent some people up to Silvermoon to check on him and try to prod things along.
I just received a report back from Eyepatch. And so, remember last time, how uneasy I was about having to rely on the blood elves for all these important jobs? All the angsting I was doing over whether they could pull this off, rather than defaulting back to their standard “giant fucking mess” M.O.? Well, after all that handwringing I was doing, you would probably expect Ponytail’s blood elves to find a way to pull off some spectacular new level of fail.
AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.
Let’s even set aside the fact that Ponytail started out crying about how anyone who tried to probe the box magically ended up being affected by powerful, negative emotions, because hey, it’s totally fair for him not to think of that possibility what with him being RIGHT HERE WITNESSING THAT VERY SAME THING HAPPENING WITH THE KOR’KRON NOT THREE DAYS AGO. But then, we’ve long established that these blood elves aren’t exactly world-beaters when it comes to seeing things coming (DRINK). So, moving on, witness fuckuppery the next: even AFTER having these problems with the crazy outbursts, Ponytail’s peeps kept plugging away, and ended up releasing some kind of sha creature that had been sealed in the box. In a room with a couple of his mages and a handful of guards. And nobody else.
So okay, let’s recap that for those of you keeping score at home.
AFTER traveling around some of the sha and mogu sites in Pandaria…and AFTER being on hand for our failed Kor’kron experiments with the claw… Eyepatch brought the box back home to Silvermoon…so he could stick it in a basement with minimal guard and a grand total of two magic-users on hand to work on it. And then released a beastie that proceeded to kick the snot out of his generously snotty elves. To the point that if some of MY people hadn’t been on hand to save the day, that sha thing might still be running roughshod over Silvermoon and we’d be having to get Sylvanas to send a task force over to bail them out. (And by the way, don’t think for a minute that THAT wouldn’t make half the blood elf population drop a brick in its collective panties – HEY LOOK GUYS THERE’S AN ARMY OF UNDEAD HEADED THIS WAY OH SHIT NOT AGAIN.)
I mean, there are at least half a dozen reasons why that’s just a spectacular steaming heap of fail, but the winner right off the top of my head, I think is… WHY DID YOU EVEN BOTHER BRINGING THE DAMN BOX BACK TO YOUR HOME CITY if you weren’t going to positively SURROUND it with an entire fucking LEGION of your very best troops? You go to all that trouble for like five guards? Hey, guess what, Eyepatch, we could have put our sha junk under the watch of five random assholes right here in Pandaria.
LIKE HEY HOW ABOUT THESE GUYS EVEN, REMEMBER THEM?
So yeah, this is what Lori is crying about this week. Well, today. The week is still young. Meanwhile, he’s already sent me four messengers, with each of the last three delivering an extra addendum to his written bitch-and-moan fest. They’ve been arriving every couple hours, so I’m just imagining him sitting around in whatever palace he has up there (I’m guessing pink features heavily in the décor), sending off a letter, and then as soon as the messenger leaves, grabbing another parchment like “AND HERE’S ONE MORE THING!”
I did send him a response back to the first one. Although…just to amuse myself, I addressed it to “That guy in Silvermoon, you know, the one with the poofy hair.” I’m not sure which thought amuses me more: the amount of time it’s going to take them to narrow it down to Ponytail, or the look he’s going to get on his face when he sees it.
I know, I know. I’m a stinker.
More soon.
“‘Lori’? Seriously?”
Sha-touched
So of course, since Baine arrived here in Pandaria, he managed to get here just in time to bear witness to a frigging spectacular FUBAR with our efforts to make use of that sha claw. And naturally, Regent-Lord Ponytail had to be on hand too so I could have a nice bitch-and-moan one-two punch.
Like we’d guessed, infusing soldiers with at least some measure of the claw’s sha energy was simple enough. For these initial experiments, I didn’t want to leave much to chance, so we brought in a half-dozen Kor’kron for the tests. The idea is that the Kor’kron are the best of the best within the Horde ranks, so they would be most likely to have the strength of will and discipline to maintain control over the sha influence – and these particular Kor’kron weren’t even your garden variety. I had Malkorok hand-pick the very best of his people. Razors. If anyone was going to keep their shit together, it would be them.
Well, those Kor’kron may have been razors, but we wound up taking some razor burn. All of the soldiers we exposed to the sha claw suffered some severe changes to their behavior. Some became extremely temperamental. Some were listless and depressed. Some turned antsy and paranoid. And ALL of them became prone to violent outbursts playing off of whatever other mood swings they were going through. With the help of a few adventurers who happened to be on hand, we managed to slap some sense into the Kor’kron, but that doesn’t change the fact that the whole experiment went down as a pretty dismal failure.
And of course, cue Baine and Ponytail griping and crying and complaining, with an extra side order of holier-than-thou from Baine and estrogen from Ponytail.
I seriously need to find some better fucking minions.
Anyway, it’s becoming pretty painfully apparent that unless Lor’thefucker’s people back in Silvermoon make some breakthrough with the sha box they recovered, we’ve got everything hinging on us finding the Divine Bell so we can gain better control of this sha power. Which means we’re majorly counting on the blood elves who are working on interrogating Shan Kien. Which means, any way you cut it, we’ve got everything riding on Ponytail’s people.
Fuck.
Did I mention I SERIOUSLY need to find some better minions?
Memory lane
After the disaster up at Shado-Pan Monastery, Krimpatul and I brought the sha claw that we’d taken from Burzum back to the Sanctum of Two Moons. I’m hoping that if we examine it and conduct a few experiments, we can figure out a way to draw on that sha power without…you know…the accompanying crazy-going. While we get going on that, I’m sending Krimp over to Tian Monastery to round up the DPS trainees and bring them back to Domination Point. Hopefully they managed to pick up a few useful tricks from the monks there.
Oh, but hey, guess who was here to greet us at the Sanctum when we got back? Baine Bloodhoof, newly arrived in Pandaria. That’s, like, the best news I could get without there actually being any good news. Because I’ve been suffering from a severe deficiency in pain in my ass ever since Vol’jin took the big grave-flop…
* Much to his disgruntlement, Garrosh learned of Dezco’s tauren expedition during a planning session for the Dominance Offensive.
** Dezco and Anduin have (some of) this exchange at the Temple of the White Tiger.
[Old Orgrimmar background images provided by Rades from Orcish Army Knife, used here with permission and many thanks.]
A Shado-Pan of a doubt
So, based on the early returns, this sha energy and I are going to have a real love/hate relationship.
Let me explain.
While Burzum and Krimpatul were doing their respective investigating, I went back up to Kun-Lai Summit to do a little more checking around. Ponytail and his blood elves had cleared out of the Valley of Emperors, and by the looks of it, the mogu who had been up there had decided not to take their chances coming back after the grade-A ass-kicking I’d given them. Which, by the way, makes the mogu smarter than at least half the enemies I’ve run into over the years.
I flew around the mountains for a little while to see if I could spot any more mogu activity, but didn’t have a whole lot of luck, so I decided while I was in the neighborhood to check in at that monastery I’d heard about – the Shado-Pan Monastery, I think it’s called. I figured the monks there might have something they could tell me about the mogu, or the sha, or, hell, even just give me some idea why that Cloudfall guy at Tian Monastery felt the need to be so damn cryptic.
Problem is, all of that assumed the monks would actually, you know, TALK to me. When I got there, though, I could barely get anyone to answer the damn door. I knocked away for a while, and at first some fat panda dude poked his head out and asked who I was…but then after I told him, he just slammed the door shut again. After that, they just let me knock away all I wanted, and the only answer I got was one time when someone behind the door yelled “We don’t want any,” and this other time when I guess they decided to get cute, and one of them did a bad troll voice like “Dere nobody home, mon” – which, I can HEAR you TALKING, idiot, so there obviously IS somebody home.
Fucking pandas.
Eventually, Burzum and Krimpatul arrived, and we set up camp near the monastery to compare notes. Krimp reported that the sha outbreak around the Temple of the Red Crane was mostly gone, other than some stray animals in the area that had been affected, but that those animals seemed a good bit stronger than the garden variety. Seems like they were able to be infused with sha energy just from proximity to the manifestation there, which tells me that it shouldn’t be that difficult to tap infuse some of our soldiers with that power, assuming we can find a sha source to draw on. THAT’s going to be the tricky part, I’m guessing – finding a source – since it’s not like we can reliably just summon these sha things up out of thin air.
Burzum, on the other hand, gave a whole breakdown of the pandas fighting an ongoing sha outbreak near the Temple of the Jade Serpent. (By the by, don’t ask me why these pandas seem so obsessed with naming everything after rainbow-colored animals. Can the Temple of the Mauve Meerkat be far behind?) The sha down there were still much more active, and according to Burzum, the pandas there deliberately took steps to AVOID being affected by the sha energy. Because, I don’t know, I guess they feel like a dose of extra power might take the edge off their signature bouncy goofiness. Don’t ask me.
Whatever they’re thinking down there, though, it seemed like Burzum had gone native on us some, because while he was talking about it, he got really insistent about not thinking it was such a hot idea to try to tap into this sha energy. He seemed to get really stressed out over it, actually, to the point that I could even see him going a little pale in the face. I managed to calm him down some, but he still seemed more than a little antsy.
At that point, I gave the blademasters the rundown of the warm welcome I’d gotten at the monastery. Burzum wanted to try talking to them himself, and I figured what the hell, if he wanted to try beating his head against the wall, let him knock himself out. So he went over and knocked on the door, and one of the pandas stuck his head out to see who it was…and I’ll be damned, they let the fucker in!
So Burzum was in there for a little while, and I figured eventually he’d be back to bring me and Krimp inside with him – you know, after he’d finished buttering up whatever antisocial panda had had the bright idea to lock me out. After a while, sure enough, Burzum came out again, but instead of showing us the way in, he let the pandas shut themselves up in there again while he came staggering back to us looking more upset than ever. And I’m talking SERIOUSLY shaken – I don’t know what those pandas said to him, but dude was beyond just pale at the point and was looking out-and-out GRAY.
That’s when he started yammering a bunch of incoherent nonsense – “Is this what we’ve come to?” this, and “losing our way” that, and all the while getting more and more visibly upset. Krimpatul and I tried to talk him down from the crazy, but Burzum wasn’t having it. He kept ranting on and on, until finally the ranting gave way to flat-out growling, and the next thing you knew, Bruzum’s arms started to morph into these tendrilly black claws and his whole body seemed to exude shadows.
And that’s when he attacked us.
I’ll say this for that sha stuff – because obviously that’s what had to be coursing through Burzum’s system – it really is no joke. I’ve sparred with all the blademasters a bunch of times, so I know their strength, but this was way beyond the normal Burzum scale. It took Krimp and I everything we could muster to keep the upper hand, and even then we were only barely able to hold him off most of the time.
Eventually, though, Krimpatul got in a few solid blows to disorient Burzum, at which point I hacked off one of those creepy-ass claws at the elbow. That turned the tide in our favor for good. I made one last attempt to talk Burzum down, but he was long gone by that point. So Krimpatul and I finished him off. As he fell, he muttered something about “should have remained in Garadar,” and the rest was silence.
I’d just as soon spare Burzum’s memory from people seeing the state he was in at the end. He was a good man, and whatever came over him in those final moments, I’m certain his spirit will find its way to those of the honored ancestors, even if he’d fallen far from home. Krimpatul and I found a quiet spot in the mountains nearby and laid Burzum’s body to rest.
Except for that severed claw. That’s coming with me back to the Sanctum of Two Moons so the braintrust can give it a good going over.
Rest well, Burzum. Spirits willing, we’ll make sure you didn’t die in vain.
Sha hunting
I’m giving the blood elves a few days to see if they can get anywhere with Shan Kien — that’s the name of that mogu dude we captured in the Valley of Emperors — but in the meantime I’m going to try to explore other avenues. From what I’ve been able to gather, the mogu’s Divine Bell artifact was able to focus and infuse the power of what the pandas call sha. Basically dark power come alive, sparked by emotions like anger or fear. And even though this Divine Bell sounds like it’s the key to harnessing this sha power to the fullest, that doesn’t mean we can’t do a little testing at the source.
After we’d finished our visit to Tian Monastery the other day, Burzum had stayed behind to see if he could learn a few new tricks from the pandas. I had Gurtash stay with him, and after I’d left for the Sanctum of Two Moons, I had the rest of the DPS kids brought over to do a little hand-to-hand combat training. Now, personally I’m not so big on the fancy martial arts moves — I’m a much bigger fan of just pummeling your opponents to death when you’re not hacking them into little pieces with an axe. But then, that’s ME. Seeing as I’m 300 lbs. of rock-solid awesome and not some skinny fourteen-year-old, I don’t really NEED a whole lot of bells and whistles in my asskicking toolkit. But I figure it might be good for the kids to see if there’s anything useful they can pick up from the pandas.
Also, side note, since I forgot to mention this before — on the way back from Tian, I made a stop at this place nearby called the Arboretum, where they train cloud serpents for some big race. It took some doing, but I managed to talk them into letting me participate in the race even though I didn’t have my own cloud serpent. I will neither confirm nor deny that “talking them into” this involved slapping a few pandas around. Anyway, the race was pretty fun, and you seriously should have seen the looks on the other riders’ faces — and their cloud serpents, for that matter — when Mortimer left them all in the dust. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: wyvern > all.
Anyhow, I digress.
Getting back to the actual business at hand, I’m having Burzum head down to a temple in that neck of the woods that’s been hit by a pretty major sha infestation. Temple of the Jade something-or-other, which really doesn’t help narrow it down much, seeing as it’s in a region called the Jade Forest, and half the stuff around there is called the Jade Whatever-Whatever. Lesson: them pandas sure do love them some jade.
Meanwhile, I’m assigning Krimpatul to investigate another temple not far from our base at Domination Point, a little ways to the north. I hear tell there was a major sha outbreak there until pretty recently, so he might be able to learn something there. While they’re both doing their thing, I’m going to do some extra checking around in the northern mountains, and then the two blademasters will meet me there to compare notes. I hear tell there’s another major monastery in the northwest part of Kun-Lai Summit, so it might be worth convening there and seeing what the monks have to tell us.
More soon.
I think I can remember your name
I’m scheduled to fly back to Kun-Lai Summit in a couple days to check in again with Lor’the’motherfucker’s Reliquary peeps and see how their research is going at the new mogu site. I’m pretty well certain that if we can figure out what happened to this Divine Bell, it could be the thing that finally tips the scales for us against the Alliance. So I’ll give Regent-Lord Cyclops and his crew a few days to prance around up there, then stop in and see how badly they need me to hold their feet to the fire.
In the meantime, I’m taking a little time to have a look around some more of Pandaria, starting with where Nazgrim got the ball rolling a couple months ago, the Jade Forest. I decided to bring Gurtash for the trip, along with blademaster Burzum and Ben-Lin Cloudstrider, who’s seeing mainland Pandaria for the first time and is plenty curious about her homeland-that’s-not.
First stop was Serpent’s Heart, site of that big battle Nazgrim fought between…well…his monkeys and the Alliance’s fish men.
…
Yeah, I needed a minute there to be sad again.
Anyhow, this was my first look at the handiwork of this “sha” that I keep hearing about…specifically, in this case, the Sha of Doubt, because I guess they all decided to divide up into jurisdictions or whatever. Anyway, pretty creepy stuff, not least of all because even the land itself seems to have been infected by whatever dark energy these sha things generate.
After that, we flew around checking some of the regions to the north, and wound up paying a visit to a place I’d heard of once before, a long time and another world ago…
* Tian Monastery was mentioned to Garrosh here, in an alternate timeline.
* Like this?
[A quick OOC note: Garrosh’s adventures at Tian Monastery will be spread out over a series of web comic installments. The comics are a lot of fun to put together, but are also something of a beast time-wise, so please bear with me if the next few posts have longer gaps between them than you may be accustomed to here. Thanks for reading as always!]
Never send an elf to do an orc’s job
Okay, so I’m starting to get sick of Lor’thefuckhisnameis.
After the blood elves’ Reliquary people found the records of the Divine Bell, I had Regent-Lord Ponytail send his archeologists up to Kun-Lai Summit to do some followup digging at another mogu site. I gave them a few days to work and then made a trip up to check on how they were doing. It didn’t occur to me that I might need aspirin while I was there. Shows how much I know.
Ponytail was there with the archeologists and some of his Blood Knights, and hoo boy, I had barely dismounted Mortimer when he started in with the griping and the complaining and the crying like a little girl. You know, I’ll tell you, a couple months ago I barely even knew who Captain Eyepatch was – okay, let’s be honest, most days I still don’t – but lately the guy has been turning into a regular Baine Bloodhoof Bitch-and-Moan All-Star. And wait till you hear what the dude was complaining – AT GREAT LENGTH – ABOUT. Apparently, while the elves were flitting around the ruins doing their digging, some mogu statues came to life and attacked them (SEE? SEE? THIS IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT WITH THE FUCKING STATUES), and Ponytail got his panties all in a bunch because his people nearly got roflstomped and statuespanked and OMG Garrosh why didn’t you warn us something like this might happen.
Which, first of all, go back and read that last part again.
Okay, done? Let’s recap.
Regent-Lord Hair-Care and his peeps were sent to some mogu ruins.
Mogu ruins. Ruins of building built by the MOGU. Who have been turning up again lately, all over the place.
Ruins that were decorated with mogu statues. STATUES, which it’s been established that the mogu had the power to animate.
And so these people, these brilliant brilliant elves, were utterly stunned and blindsided when, lo and behold, some mogu statues fucking WOKE UP on them.
This, by the way, after the LAST dig site featured one of those freaky statue dogs spontaneously reanimated and jumping them.
Is anyone else seeing how ridiculous this is, or am I just an asshole? How much more warning do these fuckwits need? And I mean, let me tell you, Ponytail would NOT shut up about how badly his people took it on the chin after they got surprised. Dude was going full-bore Tirion on me. But really, how sad is that? These people are totally flabbergasted by the appearance of a hostile enemy KNOWN TO BE AT LARGE, at a site that is KNOWN TO HAVE BELONGED TO THEM?
Seriously, how could Lor’the’motherfucker POSSIBLY get blindsided by that? Unless, you know, the mogu came at him from his left. OH YEAH YOU BET YOUR ASS I SAID IT.
But for real. Look, a lot of you guys have gone on missions for me. Doesn’t this sound like, you know, a STANDARD occupational hazard? Hell, never mind THAT, even – I know some of you are amateur archeologists yourselves. Beats the hell out of me as far as WHY, sounds like it would be boring as all fuck, but whatever – from what I hear, when you people are out digging for fragments in Pandaria, every so often one of those little sha buggers will pop up out of the ground and try to take a bite out of you. And STRANGELY ENOUGH, I never hear any of YOU complain about how you didn’t know it was coming and holy crap how do you expect us to defend ourselves and ow it hurts it hurts I have sand in my vagina ow. No, because you guys HANDLE YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS.
Anyway, bottom line is, after making me seriously question how much I want to depend on these elves, Hair-Care managed to scrape together a few possible leads on another mogu site a ways further north. I’m having him head up there to check it out, while I take bets on what he’ll wind up crying about this time.
“Lor’themar! My name is LOR’THEMAR! LOR’THE-FUCKING-MAR THERON!”
