World of Warcraft - Interbellum (IC Thread)

[MrAbdiel]

Spoiler: OOC:

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I appreciate that I've been inconsistent with the formatting of this little split-venture. I've vacillated on whether I address a particular zone, or particular character; but I'm settling for now on character. It's my CREATIVE PROCESS GIVE ME SOME ROOM TO BREATHE YOU PHILISTINES

Isaera

"Well. I doubt the uninitiated of other races could pull it off. But for a Sin'Dorei with no formal magical training like myself, a simple living's adjacency to mystical practise is enough to learn the ritual. It's a simple realm-tap, and crystallization method. The innovation is the shrouding that keeps the inhabitants of the plundered realm from noticing." Sin'Dorei. A term you've heard in passing, but never from an elf that formally identified so. The term, Balandar explains, was given by Prince Kael'thas to the wounded elven nation as a way memorializing the catastrophic losses to the Scourge and, theoretically, giving a respectful burial to the idea that the elves will ever have again a lasting kingdom in the riven and plagued lands so long watched over by the Sunstrider dynasty. The remnant people - the blood elves - are anchored not to a land, but to a past, and a destiny; both contained in their blood.

T'zinga detects the intimacy of the topic, as she closes up; and interrupts only to pass a set of keys to Balandar. It seems the partnership they've entered extends to trusting him with the shop, and allowing him to lodge there rent free while in town. She bids you a farewell and steps out and into the rain, gesturing with one hand to flare up a pale dome of energy to deflect the droplets in a cantrip nearly identical to Isaera's. Then she's gone, and it's just the two elves, and the required privacy to share this new miraculous cure for the mana-wasting. You watch Balandar mark out a magical circle, the small kind used in summoning small quantities of elements and energies rather than creatures of complex objects; and after augmenting it with a shrouding adjustment of medium complexity, he activates the realm-tap. By now you've anticipated the realm in question, and you're not wrong. This is fel energy being captured and crystalized - but it's not fel magic per se. The process is an arcane handling of fel energy instead of a fel handling of fel energy. There's no way to accidentally overcharge a crystal for catastrophic results, or to somehow capture a fraction of a demon's essence. The ritual dips a ladle into the infinite sea of churning power that is the Twisting Nether, the convulsing mystical barrier realm between what is and what must not be. The final result is a slim green crystal that can fit in your palm and, as Captain Balandar Brightstar demonstrates, can be freely drained of mana with gestures intuitive to elves across the world. Green energy wisps away from the crystal, shrinking it slightly in size and leaving a residue of common table salt; and the captain does not appear possessed, or maddened, or pained. He just wears the flush of good health of an elven countenance furnished with the mystical union it requires. It looks good on him. He relinquishes the crystal to you. "What do you think, fair enchantress? A miracle of our magisters, wouldn't you agree?"

Spoiler: OOC: Ritual: Shrouded Realm-Tap (Twisting Nether)

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You learn a ritual that any elf, or anyone with the Ritual Caster advantage, can replicate once per day. It produces a fel crystal that can be mystically consumed to satisfy your racial need for magical nourishment.

Spoiler: Expertise: Magic - DC 10

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This is an incredible discovery. Limitless consumable mana to sustain your people - and the only parties harmed are the demons who you're stealing it from! Hahaha!

Spoiler: Expertise: Magic - DC 20

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This seems a little risky, but a worthwhile risk. Your people split from the night elves because you were willing to make arcane advancement a priority despite the fact that it tremored the realms, and they preferred to subsist in elegant barbarism on the divine fumes provided by a goddess so long forgotten she might never have really existed. You ought to be careful with other elves you show this technique to. Clumsy usage could be harmful.

Spoiler: Expertise: Magic - DC 30

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There is a small class of elven warlocks who will be legitimized by this practise, and you worry that the development of this technique's greatest risk is that it empowers not fools, but reckless prodigies to delve further and further into those forbidden magics. But then again, if your people don't standardize and formalize the manipulation and containment of fel energies, who will? The humans? The orcs? Any time the fel is in use, there's a demonic angle; but if you're as smart as you think you are, you can keep ahead of it.

Spoiler: Expertise: Magic - DC 35

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It's so subtle and apparently harmless that this can only possibly be a demonic ploy - a 'first taste is free' gambit by whatever demons inherited leadership of the Burning Legion after the battle of Nordrassil killed Archimonde the Desolator. If you're right, this means that those driving this technique are suspect. Probably not Balandar, too far down the chain; but maybe Rommath or, gods help you, Kael'thas himself.

Jakk'ari

"Aha! Taz'Dingo!"

Your shot is good; almost perfect. It slides between two of Jevan's stones left as the rump of his failed construction, banks off one of Targ's suicide stones, and has enough momentum to almost bump Hezlak's final construction out of sequence... almost. Hezlak whoops, Jevan and Targ release melodramatic groans of disappointment, and you feel the bittersweet pang of a gang narrowly lost, but well played.

"Blame de dwarves, mon. They be on me side dis round!" Hezlak, whose accent seems to become less academic and more cousinly as he drinks, flicks over your empty mug and howls in laughter at his point. Then everyone laughs when he falls backwards off his chair, spilling himself, his own drink, and his rush'ka mask from his hip, the sacred wooden carving in the likeness of Kimbul the Doom of Prey skittering almost out of reach before he recovers it with one hand, still shaking with laughter. Once the fit as passed and the game is packing up, the shadow hunter regards you with noe equally inebriated eyes. "Ah, I like you, Farraki. Here: I honor your hunter spirit, even if your prey eludes you tonight. Choose one, or the other." He holds out to you in his hands his wager, now halved. In his left hand is the bag of coin of non-trivial weight. In his right is the brass key of no obvious purpose. The grin on the Darkspear's face tells you he has no intention of letting you know what the key is for - that's part of some other, greater game his is playing with you that is beyond your present reckoning.

Marion

The mysterious orc gestures to the other chair, though he doesn't look up at you. The lack of movement of his head beneath the cowl begins to suggest he either has no intention of looking directly at you, or perhaps he is blind and cannot. But his voice has a dry rumble to it as he speaks to you; a sound that brings to mind the rough fluttering of flames leaping when suddenly given new fuel.

"Your accent. You're from the mountain kingdom, yes? A daughter of those betrayed for having the audacity to survive, instead of the decency to fight, and lose, and die. Dishonored by those who have the privilege of defining honor after the fact. Like young Darbel Montrose, only... Smarter, perhaps. Do you know..."

The orc continues speaking, even as he dispenses something from his sleeve - a folded square of orange cloth. No - orange silk. It is embroidered with a symbol that very few people on Azeroth know - the marque du maniard, the icon of a long lost house of Alterac nobility that vanished in a shameful implosion after discoveries of internal degeneracy and witchcraft. Yet the family's centrality in much of Alterac's political games left a chasm that marked the end of Alterac's strength and integrity, and for a hundred years it slackened and fragmented into princedoms under a purely symbolic crown. Since then, the symbol has been adopted by a supposedly fictional syndicate of Alterac nobles who would pay any price and make any sacrifice to restore their nation to strength and glory. But surely such a group, if they existed, can't be active anymore. Can they?

"Do you know... That just as there are humans who see no value in the Alliance except in as much as it serves their ends... There are orcs, who relate to the Horde just the same? How strange it is, to be enemies of our enemy's enemy - and yet no one's friend."

He withdraws his hand from the cloth, seemingly leaving it for you to claim. Out of the corner of your eye, something seems to be going on with Mor'Lag and some others near the table - but the orc before you is tracing something on the table with his long nails. Some kind of demon symbol - not a casting, just a showing, and one you'll miss if you look away for a moment. There is no doubt in your mind that this orc is offering you something, and that something suggests a modicum of power. You further know that no such creature would offer you something unless he expected to use you to achieve his own purposes through you. But if there's one thing you know above anything, it's that you are not a pawn in a desiccated greenskin's plan; and if he thinks you're some dumb young magelette he can manipulate, he's got another think coming. Orc warlocks are famous for falling short of their goals because they're not as quick as they think they are, after all.

"Tell me, young miss. What do you most seek in this world - and what would you give, to get it?"

Mor'Lag

Marion excuses herself over to a table with hooded orc who strikes you as at least an elder, and possibly some kind of shaman or warlock. You are left alone at the table - or as alone as you ever were - while the two have some discreet exchange that seems important enough to overcome Marion's stated distaste for orcs. But before she can return, you encounter a conversation of your own.

"Oi; clanless..."

Your interlocuter is another female ogre - a single headed, binocular type who is a little taller than you, considerably flabbier than you, and much drunker than you. She has Stonemaul markings on her arms, and exposed midriff; a set of tattoos that describe her as a valued member of her people, on account of her loyalty and personal service to a clan chief who you are sure would be contextually obvious if you were a Stonemaul yourself. She is surly, and angry; and she brings in her wake the moment you worried would come: the moment when someone recognized what you are, and what you lack, and what you bear, and adds those things together to understand like you do that you don't belong here. "Don't I know you? Aren't you two the one that broke ranks and ran when we were poised to take the Gulch from the bloody Kaldorei?"

She has mistaken you for some other clanless ogre who has performed an act of cowardice in service to the horde. But her inability to distinguish between shamed ogresses doing mercenary work as they drift purposelessly through the world is understandable. "You don't deserve this."

With that strident declaration of your worthlessness, she snatches the drumstick you were gifted by Ogg'mar off your platter, and bites an obnoxiously huge chunk out of it, chewing so openly most of it simply falls, wasted, onto the shelf of her chest, and vanishing into her cleavage.

Spoiler: Complication: Hates the Horde

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You can't turn your despair inwards forever; and an insult that is true is as worthy a summons for a fist as one that is false. And to be shamed by another ogre here infront of these horde runts... It's too much. I'll give you a VP right now if you attack this ogress and start a brawl in the Bloody Dwarf, damn the consequences.