ALL NOVEL Travel Montage
4/28 Morning
I woke up with one primary thought in my mind: I’m not a huge fan of roughing it. The tent was small and the ground was not particularly comfortable; even with a bedroll. Sleeping with beautiful women is nice, but we were crammed in together in the limited space. The pocket apartment on offer from The Company went from a low priority to a beautiful dream in my head. Enough complaining though, I’m still in an exciting and beautiful fantasy world amassing a harem while learning magic powers.
None of us had any inspired plans for breakfast, so it was cheese and bread for all. Drusilla summoned her imp, a creepy little bastard with dark green skin and luminous yellow eyes, to back us up in the event of a fight. She’d been letting him roam free in the twisting nether while she was walking among polite society, and he didn’t seem thrilled at the resumption of his duties.
“Ah, why didn’t you just go ahead and die like I suggested? No need for me then.” Squint, “you get younger? Mortals don’t normally do that, right?”
“Why yes Noktog, thank you for noticing. I'm afraid I will not be taking tactical advice from you, however.”
I pulled the new necklace out of my inventory, finding a leather collar with emerald studs. Not really my style. “Good news Darcell, you’re fully attuned to the gems. That means you get one of your own now. I’ll want mine back.” Having turned a simple swap into an exciting rite of passage, I put on my first simple malachite pendant. I decided to save my daily mission dismissal for this evening, when we’d be near Darkshire. If I got very lucky we’d be given something we could do before bed.
We packed up and started out at a sustainably brisk pace. We were all in phenomenal shape thanks to body talent, so we could get through a lot of chatting as we walked.
•••••
“Most of my mom’s recipes were fish and herbs. I could never get mud snapper to taste like she could. I always use too much silverleaf, or too little.” We were trying to figure out what to cook for dinner, and slowly realized that we were all very limited in what we knew how to make, me more than the others.
“Even so,” I noted, “we definitely should have brought a few fishing poles. We have enough to scrape by for the full week, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to eating no meat except dried wolf jerky for the whole time.”
Drusilla chimed in, “I can stew it. If I add in a bit of that wine you have, I’m sure it’ll come out well enough. It can’t possibly be as bad as the salt beef they used to give us.” Shit. I could have probably sold that while I was shopping.
•••••
“My stories aren’t particularly exciting,” Drusilla deflected, “During the first war I was just an apprentice conjurer. I could contribute, but in general I summoned a few scorpids to harass their spear throwers and necrolytes, then returned to camp or provided supporting fire if they were particularly desperate. If they needed ranged combatants, better to have an archer in my place.”
“Seriously? You were at war for, what, twenty years and have nothing interesting to say about it?” I protested. “How about how you became a warlock?”
“Oh that? Simple. I wasn’t the first person to notice it, but the orcs' magic was powerful. I found one of their grimoires after a battle and squirreled it away to study. I learned just enough to be able to figure out how to summon one of their fiendish servants for myself.” She nodded at Noktog. “Then I very carefully learned what he was willing and able to teach me. He complains, but this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s impossible for him to die while he is bound to me like this. He’s not actually a part of the Burning Legion; just a wild imp. I hardly need to put any effort at all into controlling him.” That evoked a bit of grumbling from the imp, but he didn’t deny it.
“Later on, a more advanced conjurer named Gakin noticed what I had done and called me on it. Luckily he was a fellow seeker of power, and we were able to cooperate instead of opposing one another. I was a better warlock than I was a conjurer, but only slightly. The rest is history.”
•••••
“So basically no, I have no affiliation with the Defias Brotherhood except through your group. I also am not part of any larger group, and have only had these powers for about a week. I did pick you specifically out of the lineup, I do intend to try to fix as many of the problems in the world as I can, and I honestly do think you can be a huge help to me moving forward.”
Darcell wasn’t taking it quite as well as Drusilla had, but she didn’t freak out either. In her defense, learning that you had been brainwashed for the greater good by some random yahoo with a nascent god complex that was playing the whole situation by ear can’t be easy on a girl. I’d turned off her trigger to forget whenever she started questioning me so I could get her real feelings on the matter.
“So you’re… what? Some lucky townie? You don’t have all the answers?”
“I know a lot more than most people in the world do, especially about the future, and I can learn magic much faster than almost anyone. Nobody has all the answers in this world, not even people who can literally see the future. I’m gonna do my best, though, and I doubt I’ll make things worse by trying. So, any requests? I’d ask if you were in, but that’s kinda written in stone already.”
“Don’t make me do anything fucked up. I don’t want to kill kids or whatever.” That made me stop walking in shock.
“Look Darcell, I’m not going to be killing any kids. If I start going down that road you remind me that I have enough power to handle it a better way. Yeesh. Even if a kid was somehow a threat to me I could just throw them in prison with a necklace. Speaking of which, about those guards that tried to capture you guys…”
•••••
We stopped for lunch at around noon. Dinner plans aside, we didn’t do anything fancy. I did notice that a decent chunk of my extradimensional food had gone missing at some point, which Darcell recognized as food she’d conjured while working out. Come to think of it, I hadn’t given her the stamp that she’d used on Keryn either. It was a little concerning that something like that could happen, but hopefully it wouldn’t be a problem. Everything that she’d pulled out was something I’d have given her at the time if she’d asked. Another example of the Company not explaining shit, I guess.
•••••
As I finished up explaining that Stormwind was actually under the control of an extremely manipulative black dragon and was about to get into the current situation in Gilneas, we heard high pitched, yipping laughter. As half a dozen gigantic anthropomorphic hyenas rushed out of the treeline nearby, I found myself wondering why there weren’t more people patrolling this damn road to keep this kind of thing from happening.