Hey there, folks;

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been struggling harder than usual to fill these pages. Frankly, I’m a bit beat down about Azeroth these days, and have a number of other projects vying for my attention that have considerable consequences/rewards involved, such as finishing my degree and getting a job.

It’s a rough decision, because I love Tenthunders’ voice and writing him has been a great sideline to the more serious stuff I have to do. But every time I think about logging in, lately, I realized I’d rather take a nap or read a book. So, I’ve cancelled my WoW sub, which will make even occasional updates of this blog unfeasible. I have a couple of entries “stored” up that I’ll put out when I can, after which the blog will go into indeterminate hibernation.

It’s far from impossible that I’ll be back. Wow-addiction has a habit of creeping up on you like a hard-to-eradicate fungus, so six months from now there may be something to say again — at which time I will attempt to let people know via the WoW RP forum and wherever else seems appropriate.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best in your own travels — in Kalimdor and elsewhere — and thank you very much for reading and commenting!

Yours,
AG, Tenthunders’ editor.

After shopping and sight-seeing in Everlook (try the snow peas!), if you’re anything like me you desperately need a break from goblins and goblinkind. Fortunately, unlike Azshara, Winterspring is still largely wild and offers a great supply of silence and peacefulness away from the bustle of the town.

Relative peacefulness - we’re still in Kalimdor, after all, where even the sunniest pasture is mandated by divine law to contain at least four rabid, territorial top-predators. Does everything want to eat you over in the Eastern Kingdoms? Perhaps I shall find out one day.

A cobbled road goes west from Everlook towards the famous hot springs, but on the way I take a detour north to Starfall, having been advised by a reader that I will not be spitted by the resident elves. Along the way I impulsively plunge off the track into a broad, gently-inclined basin covered in deep, ancient-seeming snowfall and dotted with ferocious bears. I inform the bears that I have decided to refer to these deep gullies as “snowrroyos” because even though “arroysnows” rhymes better it is not euphonious. But then I begin to suspect that some of them might recognize my outfit as having previously belonged to their Uncle Gladpaws. I would ask them, but despite public confusion regarding our mutual trades, shamans - unlike druids - cannot talk to bears. Or date them, hurr hurr.

Starfall lodge turns out to be lovely - bizarrely, the whole thing is exposed to the cold and wind from three sides, but you really can’t compromise on that airy elven architecture. It is hard to argue that fully-enclosed, traditional lodges with working firepits have the same elan and subtle accents that mark the classical night-elven retreat, and having to wear your furs indoors and constantly fidget to keep from freezing to death is worth the intercultural experience.

Even the cabins that you can let in the village - though they do have four walls at least - have no doors in the doorways, which is very comfortable in Teldrassil I’m sure but could use some winter adaptation. I ended up asking Barry the kodo to just sort of… plug the hole with his body. Then I climbed out the window and draped some blankets over his ass so it wouldn’t look so deliciously like a ham to passing tigers, of which there naturally are many.

The tigers, or wintersabres, are the wards and companions of the night elves who live near Starfall, and they are extraordinarily fond of them. They sell these woollen sweaters at the lodge that have embroidered images of wintersabres cuddling and coyly showing you their bumholes, all in loving pastel shades with some kind of magical sparkle woven into the fabric. Although I previously described Starfall as a hunting lodge - and everyone carries bows around with them in traditional Kaldoril manner - they’re really investing heavily into something called “Ekotourism” whereby rather than killing the various slavering predators you come across in the wilds, you run away from them and hope they don’t kill you. Ekotourism was not very popular before the advent of cheap, off-taxi flight in Kalimdor, but it has gotten on in a big way now that you can hover over the heads of vicious, snarling beasties and take spasmographs of them in the lovely purple twilight.

They even tame them. The elves do the wintersabres, I mean. You can get directions from Starfall to a lonely outcropping of snowy rock where live the wintersabre trainers, but these guys hadn’t gotten the memo about Tauren tourist-dollars being welcome I guess, because the reception I got on arrival was decidedly frosty. Offers to conduct business from outside stabbing range met with grim silence. Maybe they were afraid if they let me ride the wintersabres I’d weigh them down, or something, so perhaps some of our Alliance correspondents can fill us in on the appeal here. It didn’t even seem like the sabres were moving around much while I was there. It was late afternoon and apparently siesta time, so it took quite a bit of poking to get one of the things off its behindus. Whereupon things went about as well as you could expect.

Maybe he was fond of Uncle Gladpaws as well.

In a side note, thank you very kindly to the reader who reminded the Sunday Funnies of the journal’s existence. Really, I don’t blame them for dropping me given the irregular updates! What can I say — unfortunately I expect that irregularity will be a feature of TwT for the next little while, but a week (or two) of no updates should not be taken as a sign that it is dead.

Cheers, folks.

So let me tell you something you might not know about Winterspring: it’s pretty cold.

It’s not as cold as Icecrown, thank goodness. The sheltered valleys and abundant tree-cover break the force of the wind, and the great soft heaps of snow everywhere do something to insulate the place. It’s a quiet, civilized sort of freezing. Still, it is called Winterspring for a reason, and particularly if you’re just coming down from the burning (or magically-temperate) reaches of Hyjal, It can be a shock to your system.

My first few days in Everlook are troubled by the difference between my usual travelling garb, and the continuing mysteries of goblin hospitality. How can they be so keen to make a gold coin off of the slimmest of opportunities, sharpening their considerable intellects on the grindstone of profit, and yet have never had the thought cross their mind that some people are bigger than they are. So they establish nice cozy hotels in out of the way places just perfect for a hunting trip – filled with goblin-sized beds, goblin-sized chairs at goblin-sized trestle tables, and most uncomfortable – goblin-sized latrines out back.

Without proper winter garb, I listlessly wander between one cramped interior and the next, listening to the exaggerated tales of other, more snugly-attired adventurers. They chortle good-naturedly in their layered furs, sipping on hot pine beer and exchanging stories of gnarlpine villages plundered and enormous cats wooed. Oh to be one of them!

Finally it occurs to me that I may as well see if I can put the goblin entrepreneurial spirit to my advantage. “Look,” I said to the innkeeper. “Recommend me a tailor, I want to get some winter clothing.”

Therefore I find myself on the front lawn – actually just a snowbank, of course – of one Elle Bonespittle, goblin coutureuse and seamstress. She makes me sit out there for quite some time for reasons that never become totally clear to me, although from the sounds of thumping and clattering that come from inside her hut I gather she must be making room for me. Finally she brings me inside and sits me in the middle of the floor, and then proceeds to examine me closely from all angles as if trying to decide how I should be defused.

“Hm, maybe something in mauve?” she asks.

“I’m not sure mauve is really my colour, but sure, whatever. I am in your hands,” I say.

“And are we doing something about–” she says, and gestures vaguely at my face. I shrug, indicating by my expression that I don’t understand what she means. She shrugs back, more emphatically, and then makes the same gesture, only with elaborations this time. She seems to be taking in my beard, face, and hump as well as the upper region of my shoulder.

“I’m really not sure I understand,” I say.

“It’s just that you seem like such a lovely modern gentleman,” she says, laying a hand on my bicep in a manner I suppose is meant to reassure me about her intentions. I can feel a headache knotting behind my forehead. “And, well –” And there’s that gesture again, getting more curlicues on the end of it every time she makes it.

I’m not a stupid guy; I mean, I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m lacking in common sense, but I can write a travel journal, so you have to figure I’m capable of some higher cogitation and I don’t habitually drool while staring for hours at penguin-patterned wallpaper. But I know that I’m getting that look on my face, very beetle-browed and pinched up, the kind of face that Tauren make when they’re thinking very hard about something that’s beyond them.

“I, uh. I just want some warm clothes, you know – furs.” This is firmer ground. Stick to my guns.

“Yes, and that’s adorable, I mean – I really love spirituality.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Uh. That’s good. Yup.”

Suddenly she’s three inches from my face, standing on her tiptoes with a pair of enormous shears in her hand. “FANTASTIC!” she shrieks with glee.

“Absolutely.”

“I know just the thing!” and she runs out, before sticking her head back in. “It just came in this morning!”

For a moment I stare at the wall and drool, which aids immeasurably in reestablishing my sense of reality, and then I follow Elle outside, to where an enormous dead bear has been rolled out onto the snow.

“Marvellous, look – it doesn’t need a thing. It’s just perfect for –” Elle gestures at my upper parts again, with both hands now, conducting a symphony of the inexpressible too delicate for my ears.

“My thing.”

“YOUR THING!”

“So.” I poke at the bear. It’s definitely dead. “So, should I just… just like … throw it over my shoulders, I mean… is there any tailoring going on here?”

Elle looks vaguely hurt. “I thought we had an understanding,” she says.

“Yes, I, erm. I apologize.” Apologies seem safe. Can’t go wrong there.

“Fine,” says Elle with leaden emphasis, grabbing the bear by the scruff and cutting the jugular with her enormous shears. I step back out of the way, trying to warm myself by the bellows next door as Elle gets to work. There’s blood all over the place in short order and the little tailor is gradually disappearing into a mass of ex-ursine components. At one point it looks like she’s building a kind of pillow fort out of meat.

“So what’s it like living with goblins?” I ask the Dark Iron dwarf who runs the forge, one of the few permanent non-goblin residents at Everlook. He just gazes at me evenly beneath his bushy brows, and then slowly shakes his head. One glance over his shoulder at Elle and the remains of the bear and he mutely gets back to work. I’m not even sure he’s building anything, I think he’s just resmelting the same stuff over and over.

That’s a bit weird.

Elle doesn’t even seem to remember that I’m there or what she was going to do with the bear, but she’s making elaborate diagrams on the snow. I mumble something about going inside for a bit and she grunts an acknowledgement, glancing up at me as if seeing me for the first time. I retreat into the hotel.

My dreams were uneasy that night, filled with images of shears chasing me down long furry corridors, but I was pleased to find that in the morning a pile of excellent winter garments had been delivered for me along with an only mildly-terrifying bill (spattered with bear blood). I wasn’t really sure how I would feel about wearing them given the scene of the day before, but warmth amends all faults, as you can see:

It’s time to go north. We’ve stuck pretty close to “civilization” for a while now, and consequently we’ve been leaving behind a lot of the things that make travel so enjoyable. Silence. Reflection. Fishin’. Scenic Vistas. And more fishin’. Here you will find a spasmographical account of flying from the heartland of the Horde to the very edge of remoteness, in not-so-great a distance. Despite the machines of industry and the flames of war, Kalimdor remains a place of one hundred wildernesses, and high above its central plains the Steamwheedle Cartel has built a research station and provisioning centre, at Everlook. No one can fault their ingenuity or bravery — but let’s try, shall we?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: not to toot any horns, but is that a cool screenshoot or what?]

I can’t be held responsible for the failure of my train of thought to make a lot of sense, okay? I’m working hard at my cooking lessons and the latest one involved making up vat upon vat upon vat of Kungaloosh. And then, well — someone had to drink the stuff.

It’s nice that, when we meet under a flag of truce, Alliance and Horde can now freely compare notes about the dangers of living next to very intelligent, small people. For a while the Alliance was miles ahead of us in the business of employing terrifying midgets with enormous brains. They chuckled at our rustic, backwards lack of mad, world-ending science. Well not no more.

I’m given to understand that gnomes are, if anything, more dangerous than goblins, and that at one point they lived as hobos along the Dwarven tramways, carrying their adorable little bindle-sticks and playing adorable little steam-powered harmonicas, because they’d blown up their own city and turned half their own species into flesh-craving zombies. Which is one way to make an impression on your erstwhile allies, I suppose; if I were a human monarch I would certainly be enthusiastically loading gnomes into very fast sailing ships and throwing them at the Horde in as great a number as possible, both in the hopes that they would somehow demolish my enemy’s civilization, and so they would be as far away from me as fucking possible.

The big difference, I conclude from my note-comparing, is that gnomes are chiefly dangerous by accident and because they are not paying attention, and goblins are chiefly dangerous because they think it’s funny. Yes, they do think that making super-intelligent raptors will somehow (???) lead to profit, but I suspect that’s just a rationalization they use to get funding for things they think are going to be a good time.

If you want to experience this goblin propensity for scientific tragicomedy I cannot recommend highly enough a diverting tour of the (world-famous) Secret Lab, located in Southern Azshara.

The southern branch of the Azshara rocketway winds through a wide swathe of relatively untouched wilderness, giving a glimpse of how remote and untrammelled the twin peninsulas were before Orgrimmar broke through the hills known as Durotan’s Guard (because it protected the northern flank of Durotar and served as part of Orgrimmar’s fearsome natural defenses). The still-standing forest of birch and pine now serve as the Horde National Ghost Repository, containing our abundant reserves of dead Highborne. One day we shall find a good use for them.

In the meantime it also serves as a flimsy camoflage for the (world-famous) Secret Lab, which can be seen as far away as Theramore Isle due to its constant burning. In this crucible of machinery slightly less well-thought-out than the Kodo Urinal or the Scourge-based Landfill System, young goblins pit themselves against the treachery of their own imaginations, all under the fretting, prematurely-aging eye of Ms. Greely, M.Sc., who is probably too sensible for her world or who has not yet discovered that enough booze can make the worst job a tolerable haze. While she flits from one crisis to the next, it is generally pretty easy to get yourself a visitor’s pass and have a look around at the future of Horde-gineering.

While you’re there, be sure to get yourself stalked by the latest super-intelligent top predator to come out of the Brain Vats; it’s sure to be a thrill! Mine went down a little easily, to my disappointment, but I kept the thinking cap anyway. I’m going to slip it on the Warchief and we’ll see where we go from there.

Since the cafeteria burned down there’s not much to eat on the premises, so you should pack a picnic to eat from the nearby clifftop, whence you can observe exploding tanks of volatile gases at a safe distance. The alternative is hunting and foraging, and this can have unpleasant consequences in an area as polluted by goblin technology as southern Azshara. For example, I tried butchering a wild hippogryph - with a metal knife - that turned out to be heavily, deeply electrified. As a result I can no longer control the muscles in my tail, and it sticks rigidly out at embarrassing moments, sometimes tripping up well-armed passers-by who then belief I wish to “have business” with them.

One of the hyperintelligent raptors suggested to me over tea that it might be getting on time to move along out of Azshara and I think they may be right.

One problem with sightseeing in Azshara is deciding whether or not to hire a guide. Without a guide, it’s possible that you will inadvertently walk into a mine field, or be shot by elves. With a guide, you will have to cope with the twenty-four hour a day worry that they, too, may be trying to kill you. Well, not exactly trying. There is, after all, a strange innocence to the little bastards, a good-natured glow to their habit for either destroying everything in sight or turning it into an implement for destroying everything else. They don’t mean you any harm, per se, but if you happen not to survive the round of mortar-frisbee they arranged (at great expense) for you this afternoon, there’s no point in letting all that ground-chuck go to waste, is there? In your memory, they will offer buyers of the world-famous Taurenburger a one time special discount of five percent, not to be combined with any other offers, family members of the deliciously deceased ineligible.

My guide’s name is Mitzi, and today she informed me we are going to play “golf”.

“Golf” is a beautiful thing and I recommend it to anyone who has a few weeks to spare between bouts of trying to stop the world from literally falling apart at the seams. Like the Barrens, it is best experienced while intoxicated. Unlike the Barrens, you don’t have to get loaded before you set out, because they’ll bring the stuff out to you while you’re puzzling over the rules, or the short pants they make you wear.

Mitzi gets me up at the crack of ten by pushing me off the roof. Then, semi-conscious, I am loaded into a wheelbarrow and propelled by constructs to the rocket-station. I properly wake up around the time we stop to take in the sight of Trade Prince Galliwix’s looming visage being burned, chopped and carved out of the living rock. Shakily I make a pot of starfire coffee up under his vulpine grin, reflecting more kindly on dwarves; dwarves may put holes in all of my favourite hillsides but at least they don’t fill the thing with dwarf-shaped beanbags and then toss in dozens of bawling, terrified children to fend for themselves, perhaps by eating eachother. Goblins think this is a child-minding service well worth paying-for.

I am informed that the gentleman being memorialized forever in this manner acquired his high position in the Horde after trying to kill Thrall with a spider-tonk. Wait, what? I bought Thrall like five beers after the whole Wrath-gate thing, and gave him lady advice, and I get Garrosh riding my ass about how the Horde “doesn’t need healers”, and Galliwix gets to be head of the Horde goblins. This is… I mean… I … Im going to get drunk and hit something with a club.

So we get up there. It’s about noon. It’s the greenest place in Azshara, and for a moment my heart melts. Those little bastards, I think fondly, they’ve been gathering rain-water in barrels, or they’ve tapped into the underground reaches of the Southfury, and all this lumber-clearing is just the first step to covering Azshara with lush green parkland. What a marvel!

No, it’s – it’s some kind of solidified oil product. Like, they took that tar that boils on the surface of Un’goro and cooked it into grass. Just the smell is giving me a headache; fortunately,Mitzi has lots of my medicine handy. I work my way through the trestle-full while she explains the rules of “golf” to me.

Rule one is I hit this little ball with a club. Okay, I’m on board.

Rule two is I try to get the little ball in a little hole. Sure, whatever you say, Mitzi, this is all making a lot of sense to me. It’s like… ish like LIFE, y’know? We’re all, all just… jusht tryin’ to get our ballsh in… inna. hm.

Rule two is that if my ball falls into sand or water, I have to pay a forfeit which involves Mitzi paddling me with a wooden replica of Frostmourne.

Rule three is that if I take too many tries to get the ball in the hole, they release the Core Hounds. What – wait, were there two “rule twos” just now?

It goes on like this, I nod along. Actually, I really should have paid closer attention because rule fourteen or something involved teeing off a rocket sledge. That wasn’t really a problem; my motor skills improve with sufficient liquid encouragement.

The problem was trying to balance a dividend income portfolio with 5 pts up on prime in the split-bamboo pig-fence futures while doing it.

Listen, I wasn’t saying that rockets are worth more than trees, okay, I was just saying they’re a lot of fun.

Winter’s Veil is here, and it looks like my journeys will be postponed for a bit, since my spasmographer — who produces the images you see here that go along with my text — is taking vacation and won’t tell me where he’s going for fear I will follow him.

So before I continue my authoritative guide to goblins, and before I get back to Thunder Bluff to be harrassed by my relatives for a few weeks, I thought I’d talk about this little war we’re having, which happens to be somewhat about trees. At least, trees are one of the more reasonable things to fight over, being real and useful and pretty.

I am a card-carrying member of the Cenarion Circle and Expedition, as well as the Earthen Ring. Actually, it’s not a card, so much as a hippogryph with my name on its underpants, and my address so that if he gets lost he can be returned to me. And he carries me, rather than me carrying him. That’s not the point.

The point is, I actually spend a lot of time around night elves without either of us clubbing the other over the head. And naturally, the question of why is difficult to avoid. Why, they say, if the Tauren are so religiously close to Nature, do they remain allies with Orgrimmar whose relationship with trees is one of a decidedly gustatory bent? How can we conscience the aggression, as they see it, of our homeland against theirs?

There are partisan answers. You may know some of them. To many of us in Kalimdor, the Alliance looks rather more like an Empire than an alliance — the Empire of Stormwind, in which dwarves and elves answer to a human king, gnomes answer to their dwarven protectors, and the Dranei wander through the party with a politely confused expression on their priestly features, asking everyone if they’d like a set of windchimes. The Dranei think that if everyone had their own set of windchimes we’d all calm the fuck down. I … well, maybe they’re right.

Maybe if the night elves hadn’t opened fire upon sighting Thrall’s lumberjacks, maybe if they’d taken the time to explain their relationship with the forest, maybe if the Alliance had tried to negotiate a treaty to trade building materials for the more sustainable resources of Central Kalimdor — like Quilboars — while Thrall was on the throne and his faction still spoke for peace within Orgrimmar. Maybe things would have turned out the same way. Maybe not.

But none of these arguments answer the real question — the question about Tauren and nature. The question about Why the Horde.

First of all, Tauren don’t worship nature. Not in the same way the elves do. We don’t have a goddess. We don’t build temples. And trees cut down to make houses isn’t a crime to us if the house is well-used and well-loved. We can’t worship nature because we see ourselves as a part of it. Inseparable; it sees to our needs, but not without struggle, not without cost. No spiritual connection — which we have — can attenuate the need to take and transform the things around us for our survival. Indeed, the intimacy of that relationship is the basis for the spirituality that causes the elves to question our allegiances.

The destruction of eastern Ashenvale and Stonetalon is reckless, in some places wasteful, in all places tainted by the hatreds and foolishness that come with sustained, bloody conflict. But at its heart is the driving need of two people to survive — though I confess, I do not understand why the night elves claim to need every tree and animal in northern Kalimdor, yet seem to pay so little relation to them that they may as well be pretty paintings on a canvas, not the utterly basic material of their lives. The orcs are using these things shamefully, but at least they use them out of need.

Sorry, I’m being a jerk again.

So I mentioned that many of us see the Alliance as an empire. And I would suggest that most of those outside of it see the Horde as a singular despotism, a rigidly bounded tribe. A… well, a Horde. I guess. So that’s our bad. Kind of an unfortunate name, right?

The sternness — sometimes brutality — of Horde authority really comes from looseness, not rigidity. Every member of the Horde has an allegiance — or more than one — outside of it. Bloodhoof, Darkspear, even the old Fel Horde clan ancestries; ties of family, indebtedness, reciprocity, criss-cross the shapeless bulk of the Horde, give it meaning not obvious from the outside. They give it strength, and also weakness — just ask a Grimtotem where his loyalties are. Before you rip their throat out.

The Horde are a band of misfits and outcasts. A collection of nations manqué, if you’ll pardon my elvish. All of us bring an experience of weakness, of failure. All of us are looking for the kind of stability of history that people living in a place like never-conquered Ironforge take for granted. So if our manners are lacking and our civilization doesn’t seem to have much in the way of civility — which I will grant is sometimes true — it isn’t finished yet. Nor is it done.

Bloodhoof stays with the Horde because it was Thrall who helped bring our tribes to unity and security in Mulgore, from the brink of extinction at the hands of the Centaur and Quilboar. And we stay because their enemies are too-often our enemies: the same night elves who express disgust that I would ally myself with tree-cutting orcs are usually blankly surprised when I aske them why they ally with dwarves who tear whole hills apart that have stood for ten thousand years. Hills that fed my forecows.

And we stay because they need us. Perhaps more than many of them know.

Oops, sorry. I did promise, didn’t I?

Well, I won’t belabour the point. Nothing I say here is going to make any impression on any of the boisterous pinheads on any of the thrones of the world. Nor will it keep that seriously crazy little dwarf woman from stapling fawning postcards to me with a poisoned knife.

Hopefully though, it will make tons of hate mail drop through my front door in Thunder Bluff — that way, I can excuse myself from my relatives for a few hours to answer it, and be spared the joshing about my fishing skills.

Man, that shit takes time. At least there’s a daily lesson now.

Editor’s Note: The enormous changes wrought by Deathwing’s Appearance have placed considerable strain on the author’s mental and emotional stability, as will be explained below. However, we can assure you that, on pain of horse-whipping, he is going to get back to writing an actual travel-oriented journal RIGHT SOON and no more of this meandering nonsense. Please look forward to purchasing your copy of THE GOBFATHER: A Traveller’s Guide to Azshara and the Steamwheedle Cartel, very shortly.

So, when I heard that the leader of the Bloodhoof clan, Grandfather Cairne, had been assassinated by the same fuckers that used to push me into mud-puddles at camp, I made a face like this:

When I discovered that some gigantic-ass dragon had deformed the continent of Kalimdor, thus rendering all of my carefully-researched, personally-vetted, extremely reasonably priced travel advice obsolete, a mere curiosity, I made a face like this:

It’s been a hard week. It’s also been a long, very busy week, and a week of thinking about where to go from here. I had a choice: should I, in a sense, start over from the beginning, updating my advice and guidance for travel through the new lands of Kalimdor and beyond? Or stick with the original project of heading for Undercity and rubbing shoulders with the dead. (and then picking their shoulders up off the ground and apologizing, offering to sew them back on with some fishing line I have).

So I’ve mostly just been sulking around Durotar. Mulling things over. And slowly as I’m doing so, it dawned on me - holy shit, who are all these kids? Where the fuck did they come from?

I’m talking mostly about trolls. And then, mostly about troll druids. It seems like every Tom’jin, Di’k and Hah’ri has decided that what she or he really wanted out of life all this time was to pretend to be a cat, and all it took was the near-annihilation of all civilization at the hands of the Old Ones to make them realize that now is the time.

“Trollmom, Trolldad - I ‘n I’ve decided to become a druid.”

“What? We been hunters and shamans for generations, mon - no son o’ mine gunna stuff leaves down ‘is shirt and call ‘imself an ‘ealer!” Trolldad waves an arrow at his errant child’s nose.

“Healin’ over time may be fine for de lazy moofolk,” adds Trollmom. “but we bring de chain heals, son. How can you turn your back on our family tradition?”

“It’s… it’s not like that anymore. We don’t turn into trees. Look, all my friends are doing it, and I want to fit in!”

I fell in with a crowd of these young types on the outskirts of Sen’jin and shot the breeze for a while. They were out there keeping looking for a Draenei lady that had been raiding the village, apparently all on her own. “She keeps ducking behind the rocks,” one of them told me. “I think she’s waiting for a friend.”

“Huh,” I said, and then: “so, how did you know you wanted to be a druid?”

“Well, one day, I and I started growin’ hair all over I’s body, and channelin’ the great generative juju of mama nature. Got it all over the carpet.”

“That’s not being a druid, that’s just puberty.”

“What? No, mon, I have a sacred callin’!”

Then the Draenei came back and blew apart the rock next to us with lightning. I called up Drools and Fleatail the spirit-wolves and sent in Stirfry the Fire-Elemental to keep an eye on them while I got out my mace. Then some very painful things happened and I woke up under a tree being fanned by the tail of one of the tr-uids.

“Did I win?” I croaked.

“No, mon, but I think one of your spirit wolves gave the Burning Regret to the Draenei’s Earth Elemental totem.”

“Burning Regret?”

“Yeh, when you got rendez-vous with a lady-friend and one of you has been not very careful, mon, got hygeine problems, you get –”

“Yes, that’s alright, I get it now. What about Drools?”

“He attacked a cactus, mon.”

“And the fire elemental?”

“That blue lady, she picked him up by the skinny bit at the bottom ‘dere? And then she hit you with him until you stopped movin’.”

“did youtry to help?”

The group of them looked at eachother.

“Mon, we only nuggets. Give it a few months.” Then they went back to collecting flowers and murdering practice humans and dreaming of the day when they can move out of their parents’ place.

At least they aren’t orcish mages. Try explaining to your orcish mom that you started spurting fireballs in your sleep, and that’s where the dog went.

As for my part, the severe beating has cleared my head somewhat. I know where I’m going, and what I’m going to look at when I get there. For in this suddenly topsy-turvy world, there is one thing upon which we can still rely, a rock-solid foundation for the astute wanderer.

The profit margins of Goblins.

But rest assured, that dragon is going to

Get what is coming to him.