NOVEL NEXT Ulduar
6/16 morning
I procrastinated a bit before heading back; no stress overpowered solitaire world was really nice as a change of pace. Not the most memorable handful of days, but still. My last act on the way out was assembling my next two test cases for truck enabled interdimensional expeditions, and ordering a prep course to be designed based on what we’ve seen so far.
My first five had been a bit of a scattershot approach, just hoping to establish a baseline. Now, I wanted to know how groups worked, if they worked at all, and how company upgrades worked. I knew from Onyxia’s case that regional upgrades that provided a personal boost were at least partially effective. What about stuff like the perks Talaada started picking up from minor missions here?
As such, I had three pairs picked out. First and most disposable were Mezzo and Pryzhum; my Imp and my Satyr were both fairly mediocre these days. Mezzo was an imp that was also trained as a queen. Frankly, he was weak enough to be nearly irrelevant to any fight I was going to bother summoning demons for. He had, however, successfully collared Zelena a while back. That was worth a few points on the resume, and personal power hadn’t mattered for most of the people sent so far. Pryzhum wasn’t a very clever Satyr, but she was a blademaster hero ever since I killed Rend Blackhand. If that translated over in any way, she’d be an elite soldier no matter where she ended up. If she had the more intelligent Mezzo around to tell her what to do, so much the better.
The younger edition of Malfurion and Tyrande would be my second stab at it. They were a couple, so if the power of love mattered at all they’d benefit from it. Tyrande had received a few mission upgrades to become a Priestess of the Moon hero and receive “divine guidance” in the form of advice by the elder Tyrande, but no regional upgrades. Malfurion didn’t have any unique power boosts, but he was a very intelligent and reasonably powerful generalist druid. Tyrande was the real prize here when it came to unusual perks; Malfurion was just being included to help test coop.
The last duo would be Tony and Sally. Neither one had ever really failed me unless they were beaten by overwhelming odds, so they seemed like they’d be an elite expeditionary force. I wasn’t going to risk splitting up a happy couple of people that seemed to be really hitting it off, so I was only going to send these two if the other pairs seemed to be doing well.
In any event, all six had orders to watch the Isekai show highlight reels and consider what they would do in any given situation, and would have a day or two in Zin-azshari to do as they pleased before it was time to go.
••••••••••
I assembled a small posse before arriving in Ulduar via apportation. My counterfeit Nanna was only too happy to escort VIPs like Rajh, Archaedes, Eros, and Venus. Archaedes also had an extra edge in the form of the VIP Service talisman. Between that and my awe aura, the average titanforged in Ulduar was falling over themselves to assist us in any way.
We started with an inspection of the Halls of Stone, with the goal of being seen by as many people as possible. I demanded that anyone who worked with the Forge of Wills give an oath of fealty to me or be dismissed. That worked fairly well; I kinda expected that this was going to turn into a fight, and I wanted the sides to be nice and uneven long before that.
We had a fun time when Loken came to confront us, actually. All of us on both sides were doing our very best to maintain a false sense of decorum and civility. He was still feeling us out, after all. As such, when a half dozen ninja archmagi and shadow priests appeared out of nowhere and assassinated him, the rank and file naturally turned to Archaedes to take charge and lead the investigation. Even Loken’s iron dwarves, hard coded to obey him, fell in line after Nia and the Medivas (featuring Xal’atath) warped out of there.
We couldn’t stop winning. Merely having legal Authority was more than enough to capture over 90% of the residents of the Halls of Stone and the Halls of Lightning. Essentially the complex built around the Forge of Wills and the main administrative building. Loken’s death triggered a failsafe calling in Algalon the Observer to do a performance review and possibly shut down the whole operation, but with his inflated importance Archaedes was able to request a private meeting in his office first. It was a bit of a protocol breach, but the email was very persuasive.
Of course it was an ambush, so he probably should have followed protocol on that one. I’m pretty sure that Jewels of Discord are the only reason we were able to capture him at all. The dude was huge, made of stars, could casually ignore every form of disabling magic I knew, had a secondary mind exclusively dedicated to offensive spellcasting, and moved like the fucking Flash. He managed to intuit that the necklace he just put on was a poison pill and kill Rajh in the time it took for me to input the paralyze command.
That was a shame and all, but Rajh wasn’t that big of a deal as long as I moved the rest of his subordinates back into position. He was shipped out for resurrection while Ironaya chanted over Algalon for 20 minutes. Between the guy who built the facility and the guy who was sent in from corporate, we were able to override the majority of the automated systems in Ulduar. That didn’t make storming the already heavily subverted prison of Yogg Saron easy, but it did mean we didn’t have to fight through a giant flame spewing tank and orbital defense array first.
Archaedes was taking point, and getting massive dividends out of his training as a Fairy Dragon. Fairy dragon was a very niche pick as part of a military formation, only really useful as a mobile scout or a tech option against mages, but as an insurance policy for mostly non-combatant VIPs it shone. Total immunity to magic, fairly high speed flight, and the ability to briefly flicker out of existence upon taking a hit meant that we could use him as our face throughout the whole operation without a substantial risk of losing him.
It was a good thing, too. Archaedes wasn’t the type to project authority, as he was the ultimate handyman and support, but most of his coworkers had a positive opinion of him. The highest ranked people here, including the rest of the Keepers and the Archivist, recognized him and were willing to talk for at least a few moments when they saw him. They were all paranoid messes with a very loose grip on reality at this point, so that didn’t always mean that he could talk them down, but it did mean that the elite capture/assault squads right behind him could flood into the room and get a preemptive strike.
The keepers were mostly in the catalog, so discord jewels gave me a huge edge there. The problem came from their minions, who were almost invariably far more compromised by Yogg Saron’s influence this deep in. The ones that were really far gone tried for that resource denial gambit I saw from the Nightmare, but were stopped by their own allies as often as they were stopped by me. I was able to talk about one in ten of the defenders into swapping sides or sitting out the fight, but when words fail an endless tide of demons must suffice.
The biggest problem came from Mimiron, the father of gnomes. He didn’t show himself immediately, and instead of paranoia he had a slightly different mania to contend with.
“Archaedes! Wonderful to see you! I was just about to start testing on my newest device, so once I finish up I’d love to meet your friends!” The manic laughter of the human sized Cybernetic gnome filled the workshop as a giant tank came barreling towards the front door, lobbing napalm and bolts of lightning at anyone who got too close. We had to do quite a lot of dodging while I tried to time my blinks to land near the Semidivine IT professional in the cockpit and wrap a necklace around his neck. Even when I did, it turned out that this whole stage of testing was fully automated.
To the old god addled Mimiron, it seemed perfectly intuitive for a single button to activate a destroy all life setting for literally everything in his part of the complex and “stand down” to require a 256 digit alphanumeric code. After all, if someone attacks the workshop you want to be able to mobilize quickly and you don’t want to accidentally deactivate your defenses in the middle of a battle. Duh.
I’ll admit, once I got Mimiron out of there I said fuck it and left Leotheras, my current Death-seeker, to handle it. It wasn’t much trouble for a demon hunter/berserker/titanic watcher, though he was playing keep away more often than he was making attacks by the end. Especially once the collection of high tech weapons fused together into the super robot named V-07-TR-0N. For what it’s worth, Mimiron was thrilled at all the new data even after we finished capturing him.
I couldn’t believe how well that went, honestly. I took casualties among my demons, but not actually enough that I couldn’t fully staff the whole facility with titanic dommes. Science talent meant they could run everything pretty easily as long as it was explained to them. The area immediately around Yogg was the only place where I was facing direct, unambiguous enemies that knew the score, and I had them outnumbered a hundred to one. I assigned the keepers to shore up the defenses as well as they could; I wasn’t quite sure yet how I was going to handle Yogg.
Going in and stabbing him a lot would probably work. Probably. Short term, at least. Xal’atath briefed me on this; all of the old gods, with the probable exception of G’huun, always had redundant cores in out of the way locations. Killing Yogg Saron would rob him of the lion’s share of his power, setting him back millennia, but he would almost certainly survive. Where he would reform and what form he would take would vary, N’Zoth was fond of fish and she’d obviously opted for a dagger. It was extremely unlikely he’d be in as poor a condition as she was. I also didn’t know if Xal’atath’s endless hunger would trigger from “killing” an immortal and decentralized being. If it did, I wouldn’t care because he’d survive as a Tier 1 civilian version of himself.
Ideally I’d capture him, but I wasn’t actually sure how to do so. We’d already thrown a Discord empowered necklace into the prison with an empty Overlord, but he hadn’t been compelled to wear it yet. He hadn’t tried to take control of the bait overlord either, for that matter. I was scheduled to start the ritual capture of The Lich King in about an hour… I really needed to decide what to do here.
••••••••••
Day 5-16, over the course of 6/16
Vashj was getting rather tired, as she had nowhere safe to rest and the altars of refreshment in safe regions were slowly being used up. She was immune to the Rogues’ future sight, but that didn’t make her chosen prey substantially less evasive. She’d probably doomed Sanctuary to domination by the lords of Hell already, but there was a huge difference between taking out their fortified camp and finishing off the Sisterhood completely. At some point she failed a mission to save Deckard Cain, and I can’t say if he died or if he escaped. Canonically he will make it out alive and show up in act 2 if you ignore him in act 1, after all. The Horadric Malus quest was also failed, but that was less of a mystery. She killed Charsi the Blacksmith, the quest giver you’re supposed to hand the Malus in question to.
I wasn’t going to try to pull her out; hell, I still didn’t know if I could. She might net me an evil demigoddess of anguish, but if she failed at that I was already trying to figure out what kind of discipline would be appropriate. Hell, even if she bagged Andariel it still seemed like a pretty poor showing, just not one worth getting angry about. If someone was doing this poorly when I actually had everything lined up and always had a full complement of 22 deployed? Instant extraction and a disciplinary hearing.
For fucks sake, Imriss was doing better and he didn’t even have missions. We already had plans to send over a few Draenei from Telaar to take over Garadar in the main timeline. Turn them into Mag’har, have the ops team shuffle around some amulets, and we could capture over a hundred orcs per day off the back of Across All Timelines and Imriss’s efforts at kingdom building. In contrast, Vashj has netted me half a dozen decent archers, one of which is also a necromancer, and was trying (and mostly failing) to get me a demon lord and a lure upgrade I’m never going to use on purpose.