(2023-03-13) A Normal Letter With Zero Eldrich Horror Tentacles

Details

Author:	Athena
Summary:	Roper writes Mistake back about what's been going on in Northrend with dragons, rifts, and the fine dining options for Death Knights. 1500-ish words
Rating:	M for Mature 17+

Chain: Is This Your Card?

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[The letter arrives with a chunk bitten out of it in the upper right hand corner, and the pages yellowed with age. Roper’s handwriting is still mostly legible, although some of the letters have faded enough that it’s a guess for what they are in the context of the word. He’s written it mirrored in an echo of Ally’s letter.]

Mistake,

If I’ve understood right, this letter will get to your mailbox, assuming it doesn’t explode in the fucking aether. If it’s [there’s a piece missing]

– my fault. I sent a normal letter with zero fucking eldrich horror tentacles, spy’s honor.

You know, with Outland, at least it had the decency to look as truly fucked up as it actually is. Northrend’s too fucking pretty to be as [there’s a piece missing] –

so there’s that. At least I’m saving on the money buying fur lined underwear. Which is good because everything has been at a fucking premium, and not just from reduced stock. There’s been a special tax that only seems to crop up when I’m walking around in the saronite. Surprise, surprise.

That whole debacle with the Alliance being infiltrated by the Cult of the Damned made the paranoia deeper, and the suspicion worse. That the Ebon Blade has nothing to do with the Scourge now doesn’t seem to matter. Funny though, how fast they were willing to forget that the sin’dorei used to be fucking Alliance, even if they’re Horde now. I’d ask for some consistency, but if I’m asking for the impossible already, I should probably use the ask on a portable machine that washes, dries, and folds laundry.

If you think the journal was bad, you should have met the guy who wrote it. In fact, if you go outside and hear the wind sounding suspiciously like it’s saying shit about gentlemen adventurers, that’s probably him yelling from Northrend. He’s like nine feet tall and six feet wide, give or take three feet, and I’m pretty sure I saw him jump off a cliff the other day.

He’s still alive. He might be a dragon in disguise, I don’t even fucking know anymore.

In case you didn’t hear, that’s what fucked up the mail. You remember Malygos? He’s back and he’s worse than the reports from whenever I’m remembering. Absolutely fucking insane. He’s snatching up mages, sticking them in floating cubes, sucking out the arcane out of them, and sometimes disintegrating them, and that’s the nice extracurricular stuff. He’s been gathering up the leylines like ribbons apparently and spinning them into a floating fortress they call the Nexus, which is making sure we hover on the edge of exploding into pieces, becoming another Outland.

The only thing standing between us and total annihilation is the Crimson Dragonflight, who are involved (because see re: total annihilation) with the world’s crankiest dragon lord (I followed protocol – sent Tibault to talk to him), and Cobalt Company throwing – if I got this right – a magical bandaid at the forming rift poised to rip open a tear into all realities along the leylines. And the aspect is still alive and being crazy, gnawing at the bandaid.

Anyway. So, Syarra and I got a nice, only slightly raided and smashed place in Kaskala, with the tuskarr. They’ve got that death god (journal was accurate, which is annoying as fuck) Karkut, and they’re kinda shaman-y about it all, with ancestor ghosts and shit, and those tuk-hariq things are kinda their immediate problem. So, we don’t really register as any fucking weirder than any other thing, I guess. Syarra and I’ve been wrecking the kvaldir in mass batches, because I cannot stress this enough – they’re fucking animated seaweed and salt water. It’s like a Darkmoon Faire carnival game. About as filling as popcorn, but we’re doing fine so far on the fine dining Northrend offers. Sentient rat really isn’t so bad once you get used to the gamey taste, and you set your standards six feet into the ground.

They’ve got mail set up in Unu’pe, another tuskarr place. You can send me shit to there. It’s easier to pick up than Valiance. And if the letter turns into an eldrich horror from the twisting nether of arcane spaces, well, I just look that much more badass assuming I can take it out, and if I can’t, well, it’s kinda not my problem anymore.

Thanks for the stuff. It’s for something for Syarra to bake, and some things are a pain to get in enough quantities for her experiment with it. Bartering for honey was a fucking nightmare. I found a tauren who’d brought a jug of it from back home. Problem was I don’t speak Orcish or Taur-ahe, and he didn’t speak Thalassian, which I also don’t really fucking speak. So, I had to find another Tauren who did understand some Thalassian, and then try to use the Thalassian I knew and the Thalassian she knew, and have her translate it back to Taur-ahe, and there was a point where I tried to explain that I wanted the honey, the whole jar, to take back with me, and I’d give him money for it, and what happened in translation was something where the honey tauren thought I wanted to eat his babies and take them back with me.

So. Yeah. That went well.

I don’t want to talk about how much gold I paid for that jar after that.

You know, if I had a translator who could speak fourteen different languages on hand, that’d be real convenient. Just saying. They’ve got fur lined underwear up here and everything. And we’ve got pillows and a table with tea in Kaskala. Gonna be getting a tea party with Lady Cressidha any day now, so you know it's high class. That and I'm there, so it's as classy as it gets.

Syarra’s got at least the three languages, which is good when we're working together, but she’s also been busy working the Crimson Coterie angle as much as she can, making sure they know she's doing what they hired her for. They’re a mercenary group of mostly sin’dorei as far as I can tell, led by someone named Elowel Aro’ephel, with her advisors Geth Jadelight and Kaszimir Thas’alanar. They’ve got some interest in Cobalt Company, but I’m not sure why.

We need them, though, to work on our same public relationships problems on the Horde side. It’s easier at least with some. The Forsaken set a nice, comfy low bar to clear. But that’s just for the baseline. Actual respect is another thing, but of the two, the Alliance is still more likely to pull another Thassarian on us, and try to see if they can just get us killed in a loophole, sending us off to conveniently die like we’re all stupid enough to fall for it. The Horde, and the sin’dorei in particular, are just more likely to overlook the Ebon Blade, which doesn’t help us long term when someone eventually looks into budget cuts for who gets a piece of territory and things like “personhood rights.”

Check in on your brother for me, if you haven’t already. Duskwood is one of those places we’ve got a decent ability to reframe the narrative of Elite Dead versus Evil Dead. He was doing good when we left. He’s been trained well, but he’s a little too good at blending into the background. Quiet and slow will work, but only if he’s staying where they can also fucking see him. If he gets too lamppost about it, they’ll forget he’s there, which is good for him, but doesn’t do much for the rest of us.

If you go there in person, just keep an eye out for a kaldorei Death Knight: tall, dark, long blue hair in a braid, ready to kill if she thinks she can get away with it – Enaliya. You run into her, you use my name, and only mine. She knows who I am. And yeah, if you have to, you make it a threat, but don’t kill her. Her existence belongs to someone else to call in. But, she goes fucking crazy and comes after you though, send word. I will come back and take care of it. Count on that.

Let me know if there’s any point in sending back what I owe you for him. I’ll be scraping the bottom of the barrel with it though. We’re not with the bulk of the Ebon Blade still, although that might change soon, and anything I could pass on is going to be either old information, or possibly inaccurate because I haven’t been back to Archerus since we left. For all I know they’ve started decorating for Winter Veil and Noble Garden all at once with Mograine gone. Fuck, they might even be baking cookies. Brenda from Accounting might be mad with power.

-R

PS – Thanks for the info on Aze. Send her one of the really, really annoying ones I put in the rejected pile.

PPS – Seriously, if you want to experience the slowest invasion in the history of Azeroth, you can come north. We’ll have sin’dorei honey cake bread things. Eventually.

PPPS – The mirroring was a mistake. I can admit that now.