NOVEL NEXT Chapter 261: Is There Trouble?
6/9 early morning
I woke up alone in a strange room. Of course, it was just my newly upgraded house, so I was only confused for a few seconds. The lack of Lividia was slightly more confusing, since she wasn't scheduled for any early morning training today. I got up, equipped my armor with a thought, and looked around. I found her in the living room just down the hall, looking rather put out.
https://imgur.com/a/wGJvGvt
"So, did you enjoy last night?" She spoke lightly, but communication talent was blaring warnings in the back of my head. "I only ask because your new consort deposited a few eggs in one of the guest rooms this morning, before taking a male form and teleporting away. How odd." She shifted, continuing to look straight at me. "She will need to be punished for overstepping her bounds, of course."
I was sweating. Did I actually manage to offend Lividia? I mean, I had an instant I win button to relationship strife, but I didn't want to be too free with it. Wait. "She?"
"Obviously. If there is to be a hatchery here, it will need to be constructed with our needs in mind. That room is frigid! I couldn't possibly keep my eggs in there, and we have only a handful of rooms!"
"Oh. Ok. Yeah. We can hammer that out. I was kind of worried that you were upset that I fertilized her eggs first." I had forgotten who I was dealing with.
"Hmm? Oh, certainly not. I will carry your heirs but it's your right to sow seeds in any woman you desire. Though actually, what do you think?" She shifted into her dragon form, nearly the size of a full Drake, "I might be large enough to lay now, if you were ready to begin producing heirs?" She was rather impressive, actually. All the light flowing through her body had produced some unusual effects in addition to the rapid growth. Her eyes were glowing with steady golden light, and her dark green scales looked like marble shot through with veins of gold. "I think I could manage it, if we can find a properly heated environment to keep them in. Can you command the house to make a proper hatchery? If you can't, I suppose we could always appropriate a chamber from mother's lair." Her anger already forgotten, we talked through what would be needed for the nursery over breakfast.
I had a few updates on missions, most notably that I'd put off moderate missions for long enough to be topped out again. I formally ticketed the mission to make friends with the Bloodscalp tribe, a mission I had abandoned in my heart long ago. They were not worth the trouble if I couldn't brainwash them.
Handing him a Golden Watch
Convince Thrall's advisor Nazgrel to retire from the military, focusing on some other aspect of his life such as a family, a trade, or artistic endeavors. You will be penalized if this is not accomplished before 6/13.
Reward: 1 Credit, Scroll of Normalization
Scroll of Normalization (testing): Allows the user to normalize something, making it so that nobody questions it. This must be a fact or phenomenon that is already true or in existence, but may be a very recent development. If the thing normalized is restricted to one person (X person is in love with Y person) then their personal timeline will be adjusted, making this retroactively true far enough back that nobody thinks anything of it while slightly adjusting past events and universal memories to compensate. If it is a larger scale change (x organization is ruled by y individual) then instead everyone will simply accept that things are this way now without making a fuss, though they are not required to like it. Enforced acceptance has diminishing returns for changes affecting groups larger than 2000 people.
Ghostwalker's note: the more focused effect works similar to the reality tuning we used on the undead in this setting, for reference.
Huh. I honestly didn't really think about the development process for mission rewards. So I'm getting a mini reality warp in my pocket? No, no I don't think so. I could probably make everyone believe that Malygos is and always was a woman, but I imagine the diminishing returns clause meant that I couldn't just declare myself the king of all Azeroth without people getting pissy. Even if it was basically true.
The mission was… not that big a deal. I had a time limit but I also owned his boss, Thrall, and there was no "no brainwashing" limitation. Thrall orders him to work with my organization on something, Vanessa mixes him a martini, Selena crosses a few wires, and he discovers a deep and abiding love of leatherworking. I had to be sure to not over rely on Vanessa's new gimmick, but come on. She's cracked the code. If I don't burn through her entire stock of drugs I have near instant capture of almost anyone on demand.
I set about properly assigning people to do the rest of the missions on offer. I went through each of them, reminding myself what they even were. Hire an aggressive stone giant without mind control. Kill 30 yeti in an hour. Establish a trade deal with kobolds without brainwashing them. Make a town adopt a strategy of absolute appeasement with a tribe of murlocs. Collect nobles from Alterac like they are Pokémon. Restore a long abandoned shipwreck. Convert a large town full of draenei on another planet to the worship of me. Make all the dwarven kingdoms come together as a single nation.
I also had to kill a bit less than three thousand Silithid, which I thought I might manage today with a nice full scale assault. Preferably with the goal of capturing and deprogramming Natalya, the Cenarian commander's wife. It's a worthy goal, and I've always hated just grinding without any kind of objective. I'd be sending in every single one of my respawning troops, including all of my heroes. Lividia, Jaina, Thrall, Annetta, Darcell, Katherine the Paladin, Kathra'Natir, Balnazzar, Sylvanas, Malfurion, Tyrande, Lillibeth, and Zagara could all just flat out die with no particular long term cost to me, and they'd be attacking at the head of an army of demons more than a thousand strong. Just to complete the experience, I might as well toss in my avatar of vengeance too.
My non-respawning troops would be focused on smaller threats, things that I could reliably retrieve corpses from or which I couldn't pull punches with. Mostly they would be on standby, but I could probably afford to send a team to secure and kill a whole bunch of yeti today. Theradras seemed like the best person to talk to the stone giant now that she and Vanessa had convinced Magatha to start traveling. I'd sent Scarlet missionaries into the Alterac Mountains already, so hopefully they had some contacts Talaada could prey upon; unfortunately, it seemed that there were only three more qualifying nobles at Scholomance and I needed seven.
The ship… well, I was thinking I might be able to fix it up pretty quickly now. I intended to move the ship out of its current location and see if the bronze dragons could time magic it into a better state. I might even just bring it to my front yard. Speaking of my front yard…
I called in a wisp from the Twilight Grove and ordered it to start in on an Altar of Elders. It stared at me, and then to my irritation I heard a familiar sound clip issued from the wisp: "I can't build there."
••••••••••
"Silas, I see that you made it so that altars, specifically, couldn't be built in the pocket dimension. You uh… wanna explain that?" Ghostwalker was in manager mode, so Silas decided to be professional for once.
"Balance. Xoroth is one thing, but if he can place an altar in his own impregnable fortress that's essentially an infinite lives hack and not even a particularly clever one. It kills the tension completely. He's already functionally unkillable with a respawn point on another planet; do we really need to give him one in a near-totally secure alternate state of existence?"
Ghostwalker shrugged. It seemed like an academic distinction to him, but Silas had been mortal far more recently than he had. He probably knew what he was talking about. "I'll allow it. Write up a report explaining that to the higher ups, though. If they disagree I'm not eating this alone."