5/29 early morning
I woke up with a freshly captured Shailea. I mean, technically I captured her well before she came to bed with me, so I probably should have let her go and seduce Lenny. In my defense though, I wanted to have a threesome with her and Lividia. Something about purple skin was really hot to me all of a sudden; probably my new Ysera fetish. For her part, she now had the sacred duty of getting some moderately sketchy human guy to fuck her so that we could get a handful of rewards that were only modestly useful. She'd do it, either of her own volition or while possessed, and she seemed willing to at least try as a free agent. That was good; I'd probably let her say no if she wanted, but then the whole process of capturing her would feel like wasted time and effort.
I checked for status reports. Lo'Gosh's crew had let themselves get roped into some dragon slaying mission for some reason. Sure! Why the fuck not. You kids have fun until Broll joins up, I'll call you if I need you. Except you Valeera; I'll always need a super-rogue and you have a Dreadlord in your head. Once he's captured later today I'm definitely sending you on some missions.
Keryn was unfortunately only able to get very surface level intelligence on Scholomance; it was locked up tight, and she wasn't anywhere near good enough at lockpicking to get in without a key. Sending in an infiltrator is definitely the right play if I want to do anything but fight in there. I wondered if Valeera would be more able to pick the lock or sneak in with a group; if so, she's probably going to be doing an assassination mission on Krastinov later.
The Classics had the magic stick of Helcular, and would be ready to resurrect the lich just as soon as they could get to the Southshore Graveyard and do some grave robbing. I told them to hold off until this evening. In the middle of the night just feels like the right time to rob a grave to resurrect a Lich, my necromancers should be available by then to subdue him, and I should have a major mission slot in need of filling. Today can be travel and free time, and possibly they could check in with Calia and see how her powers are developing.
Darcell was undergoing the Test of Strength, and generally enjoying the mission. Her first task had been to throw herself off of a cliff, and she'd been entirely too ok with that for me, but she was right that I would have resurrected her if she'd actually died. Plus, she was a troll at the moment; if she hadn't died she'd be fine in a day or two, tops. After that was harpy sabotage and assassination which she handled herself, and now she needed to find and kill an earth elemental with friends. I sent team Dremuus. After yesterday they needed an easy win.
The Wailing Caverns had proven stubborn enough that they were going to be the first major mission for the Heavies, backed by the Royal Guard, Varian, and anyone else that seemed like they would be useful. Sure, if things had calmed down that would mean a hilariously one sided attack, but I am not here for fair fights. I'm here to save/enslave Naralex then kill/enslave every other druid in the caverns. Especially Serpentis.
I was putting Doris directly back into Shadowforge City in a new Dark Iron Dwarf persona, just in case something still happened. For all I know this was just the preordained "someone tries to kill Thaurissan" day and the senate was going to pull a Caesar on him. They seemed to hate him enough for it. Better to have and not need the backup.
Desolace was going to be complicated, but I decided that my best strategy was to send the recruitment team right on down to whatever clan was closest to Le'Prah and *make* them accept him as leader. Then capture him, obviously. I will absolutely take a clan of centaur, and they operate on a might makes right paradigm, so capture will make my centaurs stronger and thus more likely to be obeyed. More socially adept, too, which will presumably still matter even among centaur.
I needed to learn some necromancy and shadow magic if I was going to get the most out of Sylvanas's teachings, but I was definitely planning on repeating my training with her from yesterday. Including the after party. It was just way too effective to do anything but go all in, and afterwards was a great way to restore morale.
••••••••••
I did my rounds at the Twilight grove, noting that the hunter's hall had indeed been turned into a bunch of apartments and crafting studios. Most of the elves there were not particularly well stocked with raw materials; they only had what was available from Duskwood, and most of them were not trained to use weird corrupted materials the way Eva did. I needed to get Tony out of the training position or I needed to assign other people as gatherers.
I decided to do both, while also finally implementing that teleport network I've always wanted. Eva had made a dozen of those teleport beacons since telling me about them, and I could distribute them pretty widely. I sent out four of my most young and restless draenei and elves to the Classics and set them to planting beacons strategically around Arathor and Alterac while hunting any animals they came across and sending them back to be skinned and butchered. Herbs and ore would be gathered or marked on the map for prospecting teams, as appropriate. Once the Eastern Kingdoms were canvassed I'd send a team to Kalimdor and repeat.
Tony would be going south into Stranglethorn with my harpies and one of the other druid spirits as escorts and trainer, respectively; hunting a ton of animals for their meat and leather is basically what that zone is all about, and he could use the practice. Importantly, I'll also have my gathering teams do some minor missions while they are out. Well, either the gathering teams or field teams, depending on what seems more appropriate. I wanted some more regional upgrades and I was starting to run low on low hanging fruit.
For now, making the network would take precedence, but Irma was working on a system for requesting certain materials. Once I have a reasonable process in place, I'll have my dragons flying and teleporting around like good worker bees, filling work orders as needed.
She had one other money making scheme, in addition to investing in a prospecting business to properly extract the ore we could sense. Selling off necklaces. With proper marketing and Discord Jewelry in play, we could just tell everyone "hey, these amulets make you superhuman."
People tend to be less suspicious if they think they know your angle; extracting ridiculous amounts of money out of the richest people we can find just might work. We did want the money, but more importantly? Wealthy people tend to be good at making more money. Either because they were actually highly competent in whatever field they specialized in, or because they knew how to leverage whatever advantages had fallen into their laps. True idiots don't stay rich for long; the ones that seem to tend to be living off of a stipend from the people who actually control their money.
According to Dena, people had noticed when Ursula suddenly lost 10 years of age, and she hadn't exactly been an old hag. Irma's proposal was to set a relatively cheap price point, perhaps 80 gold, and start offering them to prominent older ladies in Stormwind, Ironforge, and perhaps Shadowforge as well. Or the husbands of such. The price of a fine warhorse seemed like a good balance point.
Once we had sold a handful, we would "admit" that those had been loss leaders, an advertising stunt. There was a severe limit on supply, and we could only make a few per week. Which we would auction off in prestigious closed door events run by our patron, the king himself.
Back to a less sexy part of administration, I upgraded my tree of life into a tree of ages. It didn't do much immediately, but it was a prerequisite for the entire second tier of night elf tech. With what was left, I bought an armor upgrade for my units. I didn't have a ton of them yet, but given that they all got free conjured equipment, it seemed like a good idea to give them really good free conjured equipment. I still had a lot of energy, but that burnt out my essence and the Ancient of Wonders didn't have anything good at tier 1. Or at least nothing I couldn't get elsewhere.
I decided to save my energy for now and spend it tomorrow; I should probably at least start producing some actual units in numbers.