5/14 noon
I pulled out some wolf meat and grilled it up in the kitchenette. Lillibeth/Prudence and (I checked my notes) Monze Smokebreath would probably enjoy some wolf steaks. Assuming I could cook them. Luckily "cooking wolf meat on a wood stove" was apparently one of the things that "Erich Bismark" knew how to do, along with various farming chores and some basic animal husbandry. Sometimes I forget that I've possessed some rando refugee farmhand. He didn't have any connections or friends to speak of, so I wasn't likely to meet anyone he knew. If I did, they probably wouldn't recognize me dressed as a priest and claiming to be a lord, especially after body tune up packed on the muscle.
Musing aside, I made dinner so that I'd be ready to call Zelena. I'd overestimated how much time coordinating everyone would take, I guess. I'll be able to have a nice little meeting with her, then my afternoon is pretty much wide open. I sat down at the table and ate my steak with a knife and fork I'd found in the kitchenette, flipping through my updates.
I chuckled when I saw that the current reigning monarch of Stormwind was listed as Varian Wrynn (weak), and he was 71 hours from being captured. This man truly had absolutely no willpower to speak of, at least when it came to resisting outside influences. I might want to give him a handler or something, but at minimum I want him emotionally reliant on the retinue. He was pretty far along, so I could put in a few compulsions, no problem there.
Putting the opinions of a member of the retinue over those of someone outside of the retinue- affirmation
Putting the opinions of someone outside of the retinue over those of someone inside the retinue- shame
Committing to decisions approved of by Erich Bismark or Katrana Prestor- euphoria
Committing to a decision that you believe Erich Bismark would disapprove of without getting the go-ahead from a high ranking member of the retinue- paralysis
With this combination, he'd be a mouthpiece for the retinue, and hopefully he'd get more confident in that role. I think I might put Talaada in place as his spiritual advisor; inducting a weak willed man into a cult is a tried and true method of control, and she could really spread the message with royal backing.
She'd be especially convincing since she would be able to perform actual miracles. As a great, and well advertised, faith healer, people would come to her when they lose arms or get magical cancer or what have you, and they would be healed of just about anything you can imagine with only a few exceptions, and the exceptions would shrink as I picked up more defenses.
I checked on Zelena, and I'd missed the moment of her capture; oh well. She was captured anyway. I cracked my knuckles, and I was ready to go.
I opened up a channel of communication, and heard the thundering of hooves, but no speech. I decided to risk talking to her with a whisper. "Are you somewhere that you can speak in private?"
The hooves faded into the distance, and I got a response. "Huh?"
"Hello, Miss Felwhisper. I am your new master. Can you bring yourself somewhere safe so I can speak with you? It wouldn't do for me to put in all this effort and then lose you to the Legion. I'm quite excited to meet you."
"How did this happen?" I sensed shock from her, but no disbelief. When I told her that I owned her, she believed it.
"My servant, Mezzo, gave you an Amulet. The rest is history. Now be quiet until you're in a secure location." She accepted my orders, but I heard a clip clop of hooves running quickly across hard ground. She wanted answers, quickly. Or orders. Or my dick. Honestly these girls all seemed to respond a bit differently to capture.
"Alright. I'm in my home."
"Will I be in danger if I appear there for a moment? I'd like to see you."
She seemed excited. "No? But how? Can mortals simply invade Legion planets easily now?"
"Not mortals. Me specifically." That got a little gasp of delight from her. Alright. Seems like this is a girl who likes power. I used apportation to appear next to her.
I hadn't really known what to expect. Satyrs are basically a single gender species in game, even though from their lore they would obviously have women as well as men among them. I'd been a bit worried that I'd arrive and she'd be, at best, incredibly butch and covered in thick hair. That was not what I found.
Zelena was actually quite easy on the eyes. Her hands were taloned, her legs were covered in shaggy reddish fur, she had a leonine tail with a tuft at the end, and she towered over me at nearly nine feet tall, but she looked quite a lot like the night elf she'd once been from the waist up. Her eyes were red and she had four horns growing above her pointed ears, but her face and torso were smooth and pretty, with a wild mane of curly red hair. It made me think, and I checked; her species was satyr, not elf. Apparently some transformations do go deep enough to count as a whole new species after all. Deliberate acts of gods acting as the cutoff for that kind of thing seemed like it would make sense.
https://imgur.com/a/HTFDA5F
I looked around her dwelling, partly to see how she'd react to being left waiting. It was a small building. One large room, mostly storage space and a table. I didn't see anywhere that was obviously for sleep, but there was some kind of faintly green tinted meat hanging from a window. When I saw the hanging meat, I noticed how hot and dry the air was here. Why was I not surprised that a demon world was some kind of burning hot wasteland?
I looked back at the Satyr, and gave her a smile before touching the wall of her little cabin to open a portal to my apartment. "This isn't too bad, but I know somewhere with even more privacy." And a lower temperature, and higher humidity. Yeesh, now that I was thinking about it this was not a pleasant place.
I led my new demoness into my apartment; she seemed extremely pleased at the show of power. "So. I won't be binding you to me directly for the moment, but I will definitely be doing so eventually." I didn't think it would be too difficult with a fully willing demoness already bound to my will, but no need to be hasty when I had a whole day set out for growing myself further as a demonologist. "I would like to know more about you, tell you about the benefits of service to me, and give you your first mission."
She sat across the table from me nervously, reminding me of a job interview. She wanted to impress me, but didn't have the slightest clue what I wanted from her. She didn't seem terribly socially apt, honestly.
"So. What skills do you have? I'm pleased to see that you're attractive, but I have enough beautiful women working for me that you'll need more than that to stand out."
"I'm good with animals." She spoke evenly, but I could sense her nervous tension. She wanted to impress me. "I can bend them to my will, and enhance them with my magic." Damn. That would be more useful in Azeroth than back on… whatever Legion controlled planet she lived and worked on. Mostly for effect, I pulled out a piece of paper and started writing as she spoke.
"Any personal possessions I might find useful? Items, currency, slaves, animals?"
"I care for a herd of Felsteeds, but they are in shambles at the moment. I'll need to fully desert if you want me to bring them all to you. I have several Wyrmtongue acting as my servants, and a Gan'arg smith. My personal possessions are not much. I have a few knives and some silver and gold from when the masters have rewarded me."
I nodded. I didn't think I'd need the felsteeds for now, but I'd probably poach one for myself at some point. Adding it to my giant list of things I'd do "at some point". A lot of this would come down to how the process of binding a demon without summoning it works. If I could have her drag Wyrmtongues through the portal to my apartment and capture them with a five minute ritual and no diminishing returns, I'd end up with quite a lot of Wyrmtongues eventually.
"Personal combat abilities? Magic, weaponry, whatever? How dangerous are you?"
"I'm primarily a tracker and hunter, or I was when I was still on Azeroth. I'm good with traps and exhausting my prey." So she fought with melee weapons and traps and could apparently bend animals to her will. She's some kind of melee variant of a hunter; I couldn't help myself from categorizing her in game terms. Did hunter ever get a legitimate melee spec or do they still just have three variants of "archer with a pet"?
Focus. Focus. You're conducting an interview.
"Useful. Show me how you fight, now." I figured that I could get in a little practice, so I pulled my sword and torch out of my inventory and we had a bit of a spar. She was immediately put on the back foot, as would most people if their prospective employer drew a sword on them during a job interview and vaulted over the table. She definitely knew how to use her weapons, but in a thirty second fight she didn't manage to turn the fight around on me. Given the element of surprise was on my side and she didn't want to risk hurting me pointlessly, it was clear that she was fighting entirely defensively. I was pretty sure she was actually a better fighter than me using the skill chip, but not by a lot. In fact, after I backed off and let her know the fight was over, it felt like a replay of the whole fight was happening in my head, with martial talent showing me every point where I did something wrong, or could have capitalized on something that she did. I had definitely not been keeping track of her substantially greater reach, for one thing.
"Alright. Weaponry isn't really my specialty, but I'm fair with it and I didn't land a single real strike on you. So not bad." I backed off and went to sit at my chair again, carefully watching how she responded. She didn't seem offended by that little stunt, or overly jumpy. At least no more tense than she'd already been. Good, good.
I moved on into an explanation of how the retinue operated. Physical enhancements, extreme resistance to mental domination, stress, poison, and disease, and improved recall of neglected skills, all at the low low price of eternal servitude. She seemed to find the deal perfectly equitable, as had every already-captured girl I'd ever told about it.
"There's one more thing I need to know. Who is the most powerful demon you can lay hands on for a few seconds without likely repercussions?"
She seemed a bit taken aback by that question, but considered it seriously. "Probably Mistress Nozara. She's the one who owns my ranch, and I answer to her directly. She's an Eredar sorceress." Which meant a Man'ari eredar, the demonic variation, barring some really shocking twists. The Draenei of today had split off from Eredar society when mainstream society had become "snort demonic cocaine and destroy/subjugate all life in the universe in the name of the dark Titan." That's a vast oversimplification but it's all you really need to know right now.
"Mark her with this stamp." I handed it over. The thing about Man'ari Eredar was that they didn't actually reproduce as far as I knew. They'd sold their souls for power and eternal life, and become something different. This Nozara lady was probably ten thousand years old and if she died she'd just be reborn in the twisting nether with, at worst, a demotion. If she wasn't powerful enough to break half of the girls in my retinue over her knee with just a thought, she was either lazy or she just had almost no talent or taste for combat by the standards of her species.
Of course, this was an Eredar who was put in charge of a random ranch in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, so I wasn't expecting Zelena to show up having captured me Kil'jaden the Deciever, but with tits. Even a mediocre mage with thousands of years of experience would be a great boon, and I might be able to work my way up the food chain. Hell, I might even have Zelena do a minor mission on Xoroth and see what the reward would be for kicking that hornet's nest by doing a regional mission there.
"I will call upon you tomorrow. Check the Notes tab reasonably often; I will use it to contact you when I'm ready." I opened up the portal back into her little house, and shooed her out. That went well.
••••••••••
I called up Marge and confirmed that she was still working on the ship, but had a few leads. I checked and confirmed that the orc woman was still asleep, with Prudence watching her. I checked my phone for updates and ideas of what to do next and saw that Stitches was captured, meaning that I could check in at Raven Hill.
I was about to teleport there when I saw something else: an update icon. I usually don't bother you all with these, especially since The Company tries to avoid being disruptive. When they broke body tune up and athletic talent into two separate perks for example, they gave me athletic talent sharing for free so that I could just keep doing what I'd been doing. This one on the other hand is a bit of a biggie: Onyxia's profile had been updated. She's now tagged for rebates on several defenses, including body, stress, and mind defense.
Onyxia is tier 6. This means that she is worth 50 credits, if I were to purchase her. A rebate is up to a 40% discount on the price of a defense perk, limited by the credit value of the waifu in question, though stacking with other waifus who provide the same rebate. So I could get up to 50 credits worth of rebates from Onyxia; with all of these new tags, not only *could* I get a discount but I absolutely would. I fully intended to pick up basically every defense eventually, especially corruption and fatality defense.
I'll stop ranting: the long and short of it was that I'd just gotten 14 extra credits out of nowhere. Two for body, two for stress, and 10 for mind. I had 23 credits now. Twenty three. What am I gonna do with all these credits? I try to avoid impulse buys, but this is exciting!