NOVEL NEXT As the Master Wills
6/16
Pandaria: Defeat Emperor Shaohao
Reward: Legacy Megapixel (one use)
Azshara wasn’t very happy to be turned into a pandaren. They were short, pudgy things that wore altogether too many clothes. She didn’t even like having them as slaves. Unfortunately, the Pandaren “emperor” needed to be brought to heel and it was up to Azshara to do it. Why wasn’t clear to her, she just knew that she had been asked by her fiancé to do as his high priestess directed. She would never deny a request from him, that would dishonor the office of Lowly Fucktoy, even if this whole plan was beneath her dignity.
The priestess, Tal’shiar or whatever her name was, believed that the young emperor had an unexamined ego underneath his pretentious spiritualism. The young man, not even into his third decade, would be easy to seduce and entrap if she approached him as one of his own.
His people and the Kaldorei had rather little interaction outside of border skirmishes, so Azshara would claim to be a Pandaren magister (as if such things existed!) who sought to connect with the land of her ancestors and establish diplomatic ties. Admittedly a bit of sightseeing did sound nice, and she had been assigned a companion to assist her. Anveena seemed to be a pleasant and biddable girl, and she was able to somehow serve as a conduit to the Well of Eternity while Azshara was forced to spend time so very far from her home.
The emperor was on some kind of quest to empower himself. Azshara could respect that, of course, but his method seemed… off. He wished to divest himself of all negative emotions, and to do so he was using strange wooden masks to force those emotions to take on a physical form. He and his companions would then strike them down with their charmingly rustic Ki magic before wandering off in a random direction, hoping to find something that triggered more emotions he didn’t like.
“It is a different method, but I might be able to assist.” Azshara offered after introducing herself as Sharaza, focusing her glamor on this man as much as she could. “My Lord developed a meditation technique to help rid us of unhealthy pride. Remaining within a runic circle for a time will open your eyes to your place in the universe; it’s a requirement for anyone who wishes to join the Imperial Court among the Kaldorei.”
That was all it took. The fat idiot was willing to try anything suggested to him, so he found a courtyard and allowed her to inscribe one of the most subtle, if slow acting, circle designs. Pathetic. She looked forward to when he was properly subdued and she wouldn’t need to feign respect for him anymore.
He’d be meditating there for a few days. Making the circle’s effects undetectable to powerful beings, like the animalistic ones he had accompanying him, made them take much longer to function. While he meditated, Anveena somehow managed to convince Azshara to learn how to cook. Well. She supposed that she might as well learn. She had nothing better to do, and for some reason she felt the urge to be more helpful.
“The master doesn’t need to eat, but he does like to.” Anveena pressured her with a mischievous smile. “Surely that’s what you need to elevate yourself over someone like Lividia in his eyes. Cooking, cleaning… domestic tasks that one would expect from a wife. If you’re going to do them though, you need to really dedicate yourself to them.”
As the empress threw herself into the culinary arts, still passively drawing more energy in a day than most did in a week to fuel her glamour, Anveena looked over her list of dos and don’ts on her amulet. She was not to allow Azshara to become self aware. She was not to change Azshara’s self image as absolute monarch and perfect woman. She was not to make her desire service for its own sake. She was not to have her desire sex with anyone save the Master. However, within those guidelines she was to make Azshara demean herself as much as possible.
Anveena had grown up on a farm… well, she remembered growing up on a farm. She didn’t see anything demeaning about a woman, or a man for that matter, cooking or cleaning for the one that they loved. However, she had spent 30 minutes with a copy of Azshara’s mindset overwriting her own, taking notes. The arrogant queen absolutely would find being a homemaker demeaning; by the Light, she’d find anything but a life of mindless hedonism and shallow praise to be demeaning. Anveena hoped she’d get to be there next time the master wrenched Azshara’s true personality to the surface, but mostly she just hoped she’d been helpful!
••••••••••
“Alright,” Kathy took a deep breath, “we only have two minutes left. Do you have any questions, Miss Primrose?”
As one of the more concise speakers on the ops team, Kathy had been chosen to do the check in calls for each of the otherworld expeditions. Onyxia, like the others in the first batch, had mostly needed an extremely compressed and tailored version of the preparation course. She hadn’t even tried to extract any love confessions or oaths of fealty, resulting in a painfully small retinue. For all that, she’d been doing fairly well, especially compared to a certain Highborne handmaiden. She was tactically pursuing missions and, in doing so, provided valuable resources to the true timeline.
“No, I’m afraid I’m still processing. I was mostly just writing everything down while you spoke.” Aerith looked over the list of bullet points quickly, “So every sixteen days I can convert someone who has been captured in another world through touch, and every other method of capture that would work for Lord Bismark will work for me, save that I do not have the tools he has at his disposal, yes?”
“Yes. If you don’t have any thoughts I was authorized to try something on you specifically.” She paused for a few moments. “Did you feel anything there? Do you look or feel different in any way?”
“No?” Aerith answered, “Should I?”
“Probably not. I just tried to apply a skin to you over the link. I’m fairly certain you’d have noticed if you suddenly gained the appearance and powers of a brunette Jaina Proudmoore. It was a long shot, don’t worry about it.”
“Damn.” Aerith grumbled; that would have certainly helped. “Well, does Lord Bismark have any preferences on how I proceed, any goals he specifically wants me to pursue?”
“There is no person in Northrend at this time that is uniquely useful to him.” Kathy answered quickly. “Missions, especially ones that provide some manner of unique benefit or reward that assists the whole retinue, should take priority over mass capture. Thanks, I’m updating the briefing for everyone else.”
There was little else to discuss so, after less than a minute of Kathy trying to explain what was wrong with her ritual circles, Onyxia went back to the small desk she’d been given to plan. After her heroics in the Nexus and Oculus, she’d been given her own tent and all the comforts that could be spared in this light forsaken camp. Not much comfort, mind you, but they tried.
With those marching orders, she realized that her time here was done. Neither of the missions left to work on here really benefited the Master if she managed to accomplish them. Not in any dramatic way.
Defeat Malygos the Spellweaver
Reward: instant capture of Kyrygosa
Patron: Aluneth
Become an exalted hero of the Kirin Tor
Reward: Remote Access to Arcane Sanctum building in primary timeline
Patron: Once, Erich Bismark may declare any one person to be the leader of the Kirin Tor. They will be accepted and obeyed without complaint initially, but mismanagement will erode their authority.
Defeating Malygosa would certainly give Aerith a powerful ally, but not so powerful as to be worth the weeks or months of painful effort to attain her. Aluneth sounded like a name; instant capture of any individual was to be considered nonessential. Becoming an exalted hero of the Kirin Tor was more promising, but only a bit. If her current heroics hadn’t gotten her there yet, Aerith wouldn’t meet that quota without defeating Malygosa. Again, not a good return on investment.
Perhaps most damningly was a logistical issue with one of her most recent personal mission rewards: She could become a dragon now. Unfortunately, all of the dragons here in this camp knew quite well that Aerith Primrose was not a dragon. If she tried making the switch, she’d be picked out as a particularly devious blue dragon infiltrator within a few hours. Perhaps days if her amulet could disguise her scent.
So, how to gracefully bow out of this war? She still wasn’t technically a member of the Kirin Tor’s army; she was a contracted mercenary. Subcontracted, technically, as Caroud was the one that actually signed the dotted line. Hmm. She’d arrived and immediately started going out on dangerous missions daily, leading eventually to three of the most successful assaults that the Dalaran Offensive had attempted thus far. She successfully freed multiple imprisoned dragons from the Oculus Rings, as well as allied soldiers from both the Horde and Alliance in the Nexus.
Ah! That was it.
She lay down in her bed; the call had come while she was preparing to sleep anyway, so she was already in her night dress. Once she was comfortable, she started screaming and thrashing around.
Within two days, she was carried out on dragonback along with her team. The librarian would be staying here, unfortunately, but with any luck she’d be able to take part in any final assault on Malygos. Liandra and Aerith were disguised as one another, and the druidess would make her way back to the city of Dalaran to rest and recover from her “stress induced mental break”. While there she would keep an eye on the Violet Hold and perhaps look into the postal situation, at least until she could come up with a plausible excuse to leave and get off the Kirin’Tor’s radar.
In the meantime, Aerith split off and headed south before taking on a new draconic form. Blue wasn’t her preferred color in this political climate, and as a human physically in her mid 20s she was quite small. Even with her regional upgrade she was only in the weight class of a rather large and muscular Drake. It was still such a dramatic upgrade that she didn’t regret the temporary loss of Caroud and Liandra in the slightest.
She was heading towards the region around Warsong Hold, the orcish foothold in the area. There were a number of remarkably profitable missions involving the Horde, which Aerith couldn’t have really done as a human.
Break the siege on Warsong Hold
Reward: 1 amulet per {16 day period}
Patron: Reversing Mirror
Subdue the Magnataur of Gammothra.
Reward: 1 clutch of 3 Nerubian larvae, each capable of training one person as a nerubian unit other than a drone (or three as spiderlings)
Patron: 1 clutch of 8 Skitterer Eggs
Save Farseer Grimwalker
Reward: Onyxia/Aerith gains the ability to cast divine shield, becoming almost perfectly invulnerable for 8 seconds.
Patron: Earth trained shaman in the retinue gain the ability to cast the spell Ancestral Spirit, allowing him to resurrect people whose bodies and spirits are reasonably intact.
Some reasonably useful tools, both for herself and for the Master. More amulets would mean more touch capture and hopefully allow for communication between one another. Divine shield was a potent trump card used by the Knights of the Silver Hand; she didn’t particularly covet it but she would absolutely take it. Finally, the ability to train herself and a few others as reasonably powerful units would be most excellent. She felt that Spiderling might be best for her, actually; in her dragon form she had an abundance of raw power, so dramatically improving her speed would shore up her primary weakness while allowing her to train two others as spiderlings as well.
The rewards for the master were somewhat less impressive, but good enough. More resurrection could only help, skitterers were an extremely effective method of capture, and the reversing mirror would at least be worth some credits even if he didn’t want to use it. She felt comfortable with this route, so she set about preparing for it.
Onyxia decided that her visage as a blue dragon would be an ethnically ambiguous troll. Perhaps a frost troll, perhaps a dark troll; someone that could approach the Horde, start doing dangerous things, and be accepted as a powerful ally. She would leave her backstory vague, and if confronted “reveal” that she was a rogue blue dragon that didn’t wish to fight her own flight but wanted to aid the battle against the Lich King. Most on the Horde would accept that as a tragically honorable story and assume that they knew everything at that point. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but it would hopefully give her somewhere safe to rest in the area while she worked.
She landed on an isolated plateau, and thought upon her new visage. Deliberately making a visage to look a certain way was difficult; you had to identify with it strongly. It would only work if it were a deep reflection of how you viewed yourself. Black dragons were better at it than most, as they were able to accurately view visages as the tools they were, but it was quite impossible to take a mortal form you felt uncomfortable wearing.
Onyxia cheated a bit by drawing upon her old guise as Katrana Prestor. This form would be more visibly fit than her human body, of course, since she was appealing to a warrior culture, but she was willing to cheat a bit and have an unusual hair color and style. Trolls didn’t often have black hair, but a shade of blue so dark as to seem black wasn’t unheard of. The style would match trollish fashion as best she could manage; she wasn’t an expert but she knew some basics. In only half an hour and a bit of chanting, Onyxia was able to create a reasonable conversion of her old Katrana persona for a Horde demographic.
Katrana wasn’t a very trollish name, and she might slip into a Stormwind accent if she stayed too close to that mindset in any event. She chose a dragon name first, Tivanagosa, which she could then shorten easily enough. She repeated it to herself a few times, then checked her reflection in a stream.
Ti’va nodded. This would do.
••••••••••
Company credit budget: 9
-1 permanent purchase: Lividia
-1 permanent purchase: Talaada
-1 Letter of Recommendation: Child by Lividia, Child by Azshara, Child by Aegwynn, Tony, Nefaria (subject to change)
-1 Animal folk become more human looking, generally looking like basically attractive humans with pronounced animalistic traits.
-1 PvP is never incentivized. Should two testers come into conflict it will be on entirely personal grounds. Drawbacks involving PvP can override this; you knew what you were signing up for.
Remaining budget: 4 credits
https://strawpoll.com/jVyG8mNv6n7
••••••••••
And Azshara managed to capture the good Pandaran emperor.