NOVEL NEXT Books of the Old Gods
6/12 Late Morning
I interrogated Xal’atath for a bit, and while she knew about general tendencies she unfortunately didn’t even know much about the current tactical situation. I had a green dragon, currently enslaved by C’thun but captured by Ysera’s perk, tapping the Old Gods’ communications. She looked over the chat logs, but the gods tended to be a bit coy so they didn’t go into details on anything, even with each other.
C’thun was genuinely nervous about me and was already planning to retreat deep underground for a few centuries if pressed. Yogg-Saron hadn’t noticed Nanna yet, but suspected that I might be involved in the situation at the Forge of Wills. I might need to step up my time table there. N’Zoth probably had several backup plans, but he didn’t share them in the discord channel. G’huun was a particularly blank space, since he had been created long after Xal’atath had been torn apart. Most likely partially using samples of her own body. He wasn’t included in their communications either, as a bit of a snub. He had his own minions, was partially subverting the mortals, attempting to take over his prison, etc. but he was also incredibly young compared to the rest. As a result, he was an arrogant hothead with no backup plan in their eyes, in addition to being terribly weak.
Xal’atath could also give me a general overview of each of the Old Gods’ personalities and likely tactics. C’thun was the most direct of the big three remaining, preferring to amass an army and simply expand like a relatively normal imperial power. He could corrupt and enslave mortals, but he didn’t really rely on it as a primary tool, preferring to rely on his proven servants like the Qiraji and the elementals.
Yogg’Saron was one of the better corrupters when it came to using magic. He enjoyed twisting the minds of his victims, and was quite good at it. He favored the cackling tentacle festooned type as a logical endpoint of his work, but the most important thing was that they served him. He was responsible for the Curse of the Flesh, which had transformed so many of the Titans' beautiful and highly void resistant creations into corruptible and depressingly mortal meatbags. He was also responsible for the Emerald Nightmare, and had once made a corrupted dragon known as Galakrond, so large and powerful that it had threatened the Titanic Keepers in general.
N’Zoth, in contrast, didn’t actually like overriding the minds of his servants. He tended to be a soft touch, nudging and whispering. It saved him energy, which was good because he was the weakest of the original old gods. He also was admirably skilled at just talking and making deals with (mostly) free willed people, and had the best future sight of any of them. He was most likely responsible for the bad end future stonewalling any attempts on my part to retcon myself into the role of Nefarian’s stepdad. He had the most minions, but the majority of them didn’t realize they were his minions. Huge numbers of people around the world heard the call of N’Zoth and found themselves doing bizarre things that would ultimately work to N’Zoth’s advantage some time in the future, and the majority of them were then abandoned and left to their own devices. They were essentially impossible to coordinate, which was why he relied on the Naga when he needed muscle; he only really needed to manipulate Azshara to get what he wanted there.
It wasn’t quite as much intel as I was hoping for, I’d at least partially known a lot of it, but I wasn’t complaining. I was generally having a pretty good day. My defensive measures blocked a potentially very bad attack on Light’s Hope Chapel and let me know a potential new hive of Nefarian’s influence. I was planning on heading to Tyr’s Hand to help out with the investigation, but early reports seemed to point at the infection being relatively minor so far.
First, I had a regional upgrade for Malygosa. She gave some really good options.
Strength: Essence of the Blue: Erich gains the Dragon Heart heritage perk associated with the Blue Dragonflight. Refund credits can only be spent on dragon heritage perks.
Agility: Notoriously Slutty: if someone does not explicitly know the motives of a member of the blue dragonflight, the default assumption will always be that they are seeking sex or something sex related.
Stamina: Last Survivor: any time a member of the retinue dies within one mile of Malygosa, she will be healed and have mana restored to her, scaling to the power level of the retinue member. Can even resurrect her from death.
Intelligence: Incubator: your pocket plane gains a room which may safely accelerate and facilitate the incubation of a dragon egg. This allows for a single egg to be reliably hatched in its optimal state after only 8 hours in the chamber.
Spirit: Spellweaver- you gain the Ritual Circle binding, teachable and usable as an arcane spell. This is distinct and separate from the Tantric Arts binding. You may teach members of your retinue to summon magic circles which can be used to bind targets. This starts as the base version of the binding but unlocks all of its upgrades and variant uses for purchase.
Strength and stamina were both pretty meh, comparatively speaking. I could just buy dragon heritage with credits if I really wanted to, and so far it just hasn’t seemed worth the investment. Stamina only really kicked in if my troops were getting slaughtered, which wasn’t exactly a situation I wanted to lean into. Agility was hilarious, and I wanted it badly, but not enough to lose my head and waste the upgrade.
Intellect gave me the option of hatching eggs in accelerated but optimal conditions. The kind of conditions that produced Onyxia and Nefarian, which normally took months and months. It was certainly an appealing thought, especially given that Lividia and I had an egg of our own in an oven two doors down. I ultimately decided against it; not because it seemed like a bad idea, but because I could probably do something similar with tools I already had. Finding a natural volcanic vent and building a hatchery there in the Xin’Azshari timeline would accomplish pretty much the same thing without eating a regional upgrade slot, so I added it to Talaada’s to do list, along with sending agents outside the Kaldorei empire to see if we could get more ancient/accelerated regional missions.
That left Spellweaver. It frankly seemed quite janky, overpriced, and unreliable for a full company binding, but god damn it was a full company binding. Ritual Circle would allow me to make magic circles that could capture people and place them into a trance where I could reprogram them. The reprogramming bit would have been a bigger deal if I didn’t have mind runes and wasn’t soon to have a hypno app, but the capture part was still pretty nice. It required that I actually create a physical magic circle and keep the target to be captured inside of it, and unlike my amulets the chalk (or whatever) circle on the ground was extremely vulnerable to being disrupted and was completely escapable. I went with that one, despite the shortcomings. I already had all the tools I needed to compensate.
No new knowledge flooded into my mind immediately. Instead, a new app appeared in my amulet. The ritual app gave me a budget of 6 points and 4 categories to invest in. Size, speed, activation, and power/subtlety. I randomly distributed my points (2 size, 2 speed, 1 activation, 1 power) to see how it worked, and the app asked if I wanted a sphere or cylinder. I chose a sphere, and was presented with a diagram of how to draw the circle and it’s vital statistics.
May be drawn up to 9 meters across
Requires 27 hours to capture
10 minutes of chanting in order to prime the circle for 40.5 hours
Effective on targets up to tier 6, mostly undetectable to targets below tier 4.
I quickly processed the elaborate design and memorized the activation incantation. Even when I closed the app and took off my amulet, I still remembered it. I had a binding that didn’t necessarily require an amulet every time, boys! It wasn’t actually a very complicated spell. Just long, repetitive, and channeling company energy. I toyed with the sliders, and naturally went to extremes, investing as much as possible into each option just to see what happened.
I could get a design that could cover two thirds of a kilometer, but it would be bleeding obvious to everyone within the area of effect and would only capture tier 1-3s who stayed inside for ten days, plus I’d need some poor team of retinue members to chant continuously for the whole duration. I could capture someone in only 20 minutes, if they were a tier 1-3 that didn’t mind standing in a 1 meter wide glowing circle while someone chanted at them for the whole time. I could make a circle that lasted forever until it was damaged, but it only left me 2 points to spend elsewhere, and I could make a largely undetectable circle that could bind the titans and old gods themselves… In ten days, if I could shrink them down enough to fit in a one meter wide circle while someone chanted at them.
Tl;dr, I had 6 points to spend that could rocket the ritual up to an extremely high power level in one area or another, but any aspect of the ritual I didn’t specifically invest in would be extremely unimpressive. Don’t get me wrong, 20 minutes to capture a restrained tier 3 was pretty good, and a full hour for a restrained tier 6 was also great. I was pretty glad this wasn’t my first binding, but it was far from useless if I supplemented it with other things.
Naxx was ready to go, so I put team gnome to the task of figuring out ways to use these bad boys as well as having Ops draft a memo to my capture teams, suggesting that they familiarize themselves with the new binding. Ritual circles became a core part of Scholomance education.
Hell, I told Hel’Nurath, Illucia Barov, and High Inquisititor Izzy (she preferred the new name even when she was pretending to be her ugly old male self for now) about them too; if I had minions with torture basements that their organizations have decided to just not question, why not put them to better use?
I went over my notes for the day. I was planning on heading over and personally assisting with the last bastion of the Scarlet Crusade myself. We would probably focus on killing or capturing the top brass today. As Izzy was demonstrating quite nicely at Hearthglen, once you own the leadership in a Scarlet Enclave, the rest will fall in line. Anyone who Nefarian already had would need to be replaced with a lookalike, but… eh? What can you do?
This afternoon I had the grim task of Razing Gadgetzan. I had been putting it off, but objectively I’d already let the infection get pretty damn bad. I could make myself feel better by stockpiling the corpses for reanimation after I took down Nefarian, but I was still planning on slaughtering an entire city. I suddenly felt a bit more sympathy for Arthas’s decision to cull Stratholme when it was infected by the Scourge Plague; it was the only logical option. I’d be there for that, too. It felt wrong to just outsource it.
I forcibly took my mind off of the Culling of Gadgetzan, and looked over the chat logs coming out of Uldir. They politely but categorically refused entry to my agents, citing concerns about contamination. I wasn’t sure if I believed them or not, but I decided to pencil them in for a surprise inspection by Prime Designate Eros this evening. If everything was on the level and the situation was normal, I intended to keep it that way. If they were compromised, hopefully I could get in before they did anything too destructive.
••••••••••
Nefarian didn’t typically favor the form of a troll, but for entering Zul’Gurub it seemed like the best approach. He had the Loa Ritual chip installed, allowing him to convincingly play the part of an arrogant but opportunistic wandering prophet, here to serve the Blood God Hakkar. When a guard tried to interfere, he Nefarian smiled.
“Stop! None may approach the blood god without a proper offering!“
“Quite right,” Nefarian agreed, before hexing the man with weakness and lunging forward. He allowed his hand to partly revert to a claw as he drove it into the shirtless priest’s chest, ripping out a huge chunk of his flesh. He cracked the bones beneath, allowing him to rip out the heart. “I believe he may enjoy an offering like this.”
Having seen the seamless transition from civility to brutality, the trolls led him to Hakkar’s Ziggurat. The great serpentine being had already established dominance over the jungle troll’s Loa, rendering him nearly invincible. Though Hakkar might kill them for leading him here unopposed, the stranger would kill them just as quickly. Bringing them to face one another was an unknown possibility, and in a hopeless situation the unknown is a beacon of hope.
“Greetings, mighty soul flayer. I come bearing a gift, and wish to treat with you.” Within his sleeves, Nefarian fingered Peddlefeet’s Arrow. He had no romantic interest in this insane, blood crazed god, but having him fall in love with Nefarian would be reasonably likely to lead to amicable cooperation. He couldn’t capture the Blood God for fear of a penalty, but emotionally compromising him seemed adequate in the short term.
The heart was snatched from Nefarian’s hand and greedily devoured in a flicker of movement. While he was distracted, Nefarian flicked the arrow at him. Assuming that the god was able to keep his composure, as any intelligent being would, Nefarian wouldn’t need to worry about instant capture. He could make arrangements, complete the mission, and then inject Hakkar to ensure he became more palatable as a lover. A deity seemed like a most agreeable mate.
“Wait. What just happened?” Hakkar roared in confusion, “I love you? How did this happen?!”
Penalty mission!
Work For It
All members of your retinue become familiars instead of companions, losing the romantic/sexual conditioning standard to retinue members you find desirable. In addition, regardless of any mental or emotional changes made manually, members of your retinue will respond to your romantic and sexual overtures as if they were their base selves, fully aware of all actions you have taken towards them.
Mission: Gain a genuine love confession from someone you see as your equal or otherwise feel genuine respect and/or affection for. They may be captured, but the mission will only trigger if they earnestly have fallen in love with you.
Reward: The Confessor will become your queen, sharing equal access to all company assets (lures, talents, love confession based capture, regional upgrades). In addition, your retinue will lose its resistance to romantic/sexual influence in relation to you.
“DAMN IT.”