Dalaran Day Care

I really hope Ms Liddie is not Challe mark 2.

The pet cemetery near by and her self admitted need for wine does not bode well.

A Learning Curve

I learnt several things yesterday. The first of those things is that I’m a terrible Mistweaver Monk.

I hadn’t really played her since the pre-patch which brought so many changes but either I haven’t properly looked through her spell book and am missing half a dozen useful spells or I’m doing something very wrong. I got my artifact and am only level 99 but it felt way harder than doing any of the three Priest artifact weapon chains.

Secondly I discovered there is a real dust problem in Dalaran. Having acquired the weapon, I felt my Monk needed a change of hair colour to match her outfit so wandered off to the Barbers. Having accidentally clicked on the rug, I came out to discover an infestation of bunnies running around.

Then when sitting down to take a screenshot of said bunny, I noticed a floating Pepe hanging around next to me.

All in all, a rather lucky day made perhaps even more important by the fact that it was World Suicide Prevention Day yesterday and that it’s nothing short of a miracle that I’m still here to write about the joy of something so insignificant as finding a little orange bird in a video game. I know I’ve talked about depression before but one thing I haven’t admitted is that my postnatal depression almost killed me. I remember those feelings of emptiness, of believing that my son wasn’t real and the despair… I could have drowned whole continents. Yet whenever I tried to seek help I was dismissed, patronised or told that there was something fundamentally wrong with me because of the “unnatural” feelings I had. In the end, I reached a point where I felt not only was my life pointless but that I was already blighting my son’s. Killing myself before I did him any more harm seemed the only logical solution.

My life was saved by the kindness of a passing stranger* and so I’d like to pass that on, please if you’re feeling depressed and that you don’t see any point going on, talk to someone. The one lesson I’ve learned in all this madness is that the way we see ourselves is very often warped and twisted like a fairground mirror and that to get a true picture, we need to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes.

*(and also the amazing support of Mr Harpy who never gave up on me)

Blog Azeroth Shared Topic: I believe!

Last week’s shared topic caught my eye for a number of reasons but I’ve been so distracted I failed to get a post written in time. However that nagging desire to put pen to paper refused to go away so better late than never, here’s my contribution.

Canon refers to the actual events and characters that exist in a fictional world. Headcanon refers to any situations or characters that are imagined by fans of said fictional world. Sometimes they are silly, like the fact that Garrosh’s favorite treat is lemon squares. Sometimes they are serious, like positing that tauren store grief in the lungs. For my writing, I’ve come up with a lot of headcanon. Got a theory about a torrid romance between your favorite auctioneer and the patrolling guard? Given any thought to where mounts and pets go when they aren’t summoned? Do you know how your characters do their laundry, or what Baine Bloodhoof does in his free time? What are your headcanons, and where did you get the idea?

Suggested by Akabeko.

Long before I actually rolled a Gnome, the Longberry sisters fascinated me. I used to follow Bimble around Ironforge buying apples from her as an excuse to engage in conversion.

With time she and her sister Ginny morphed from being innocent fruit and reagent vendors into something slightly more sinister in my head. Instead of just helping the inhabitants of Ironforge get their vitamin D, something they clearly need large amounts of since they live underground, Bimble and Ginny are actually Gnomish spy-masters in the pay of SI:7. Shipments of fruit come in from all corners of Azeroth and hidden within the crates of sour green apples and heavy moon harvested pumpkins come reports of troop movements and blood stained battle plans. So if you happened upon the right code word next time you buy your juicy pomegranates straight from the Twilight Highlands, who knows what information might fall into your hands. Of course the consequences for messing with such things might be lethal, after all everyone who has ever read Christina Rossetti should know the perils of purchasing fruit from small creatures.

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy.”

from the Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

I’ve also been running Violet Hold quite a bit recently. On Sprout I still needed to kill Moragg and since I went to school with a girl called Morag who I didn’t particularly like for a number of reasons, I really wanted to tick that off (to be fair, I was far nastier to her than she was to me, including “poaching” the boy she liked in 5th year by making sure he danced the last dance of our summer ball with me rather than her. It later turned out he was afraid of dogs so that relationship really didn’t work out but that’s another story).

One thing has always bothered me about the Violet Hold. What crimes did these “dangerous” prisoners commit? Can they possibly have topped the terrible things that we the player base have done and if not, why are we swanning around in the Kirin Tor’s tabards whilst they languish in magical prison cells. Thus to sway my own guilty feelings, I started coming with possible offences for these monsters.

This chap above for example might not look particularly ferocious when trapped behind a forcefield but meet him face to face and you’d soon be singing a different tune. His line of “Free to–mm–fly now. Ra-aak… Not find us–ekh-ekh! Escape!” is purely diversion, he doesn’t want to escape, he wants to eat your face with a side order of salted eye chased down by a pickled egg.

Moragg might look like a typical demon, the sort of thing you warlocks can make friends with these days, but secretly it loves nothing better than watching people get down and dirty. This was going fine until the demon happened to come across this:

The tiny gnome peered over the railing into the secluded Dalaran courtyard.
“The view from the balcony is amazing.  You have to come see!”
Armor legplates creaked as Marcus walked over, taking in a deep breath as he absently scratched his scruffy chin.
“The Hero’s Welcome is no slouch.  And there’s something in the room that might interest you.”
Tavi bounded into the room, pausing only a moment before jumping onto the massive bed.

from A Steamy Romance Novel: Northern Exposure

What happened next had a profound and rather disturbing effect on the poor creature. We’ll never know what exactly caused the outburst but once the demon was distracted (you really don’t want to know how much blindweed that took), the body count was in the hundreds.

I actually spend far too much time coming up with stories both for my own characters and those they encounter. I suppose I feel that all of them, from the one line baddies we slaughter on a daily basis to the passing NPCs deserve a story of their own and without the words to sing it themselves, we need to tell for them.