Coming up in the journal we have a proper pictorial overview of Orgrimmar, but first I wanted to devote a little space to some terribly amusing people who don’t get a lot of credit in print: the Burning Blade. These guys are hilarious, although I suppose to be fair, I should say that they’re not trying to be.
They’re just adorable, though. They think they’re a secret cult that’s infiltrated the city, when in fact the other orcs are happy to have them around because it means there’s always someone whose face you can pummel on a boring Dursday night when nothing is doing.
Check out their secret hideout! It’s totally unsuspicious, right, and clearly invisible to all but the initiated.
[…]
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last night the drums took my spirit up into a whirlwind and i heard a voice coming from beyond the world
“I think you are another of these desert-loving English…No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing. Or is it that you think we are something you can play with because we are a little people?” –Lawrence of Arabia
I take a sip of my beer. They keep the kegs down in the Cleft of Shadow where they stay cool; it’s so hot and the sun beats so hard up on the battlements of Orgrimmar that you can’t get through watch-duty without cool drink, and as long as its watered the warchief lets the watch have their beer.
At least I’m wearing a hat. Kavok Len, Breach-pierce clan (I do not know this family) stares out at the horizon and I don’t know how that sun hasn’t made him blind by now. At the least he must have a monster headache. I’m sitting up here with him and the rest of his men on a dog’s afternoon in Orgrimmar. Southern wall; afternoon watch. This is the time to stay out of the sun for those who are off-duty, so there isn’t much for a tourist to do. And what can I say, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I have a streak of masochistic curiosity!
So people, even in the Horde, say the orcs are rapacious; they take what they want when they see it. But they don’t come from a place like Durotar. I’ve never been to Nagrand but from what I can tell, Nagrand is like Mulgore but with less gravity.
And yet when the orcs found Mulgore, they gave it away.
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I have not, in fact, lost interest in life or in updating, it is just really hard to find Tauren women, even when you have a sizable friendly guild to lean on. Increasingly, Ten Thunders is having adventures that involve other people to do some degree, and I am having an awkward time setting up the necessaries.
If you enjoy this blog, please don’t hesitate to email or leave a comment for Tenny’s editor, detailing any characters you have on US-Kirin Tor that might wish to make guest appearances. Having some RP clothes around is an asset, but we can usually scrounge up what we need.
Anyway, hopefully you will see the conclusion of Maraudon Park here in the next few days!
Thanks very kindly for reading.
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So, in between my trip to Tanaris, and leaving for Durotar on my next adventure, I stopped in at home for a few days. This turned out to be long enough for my darling mother, who is a saint and who will in no way drive all the ancestors mad when she joins them, to scout my marriage prospects and arrange a blind date with an “adventurous” young Tauren lady that she feels will match my disposition.
Having heard about the primal beauties of Maraudon, she further arranged for us to see the place together. This tragic spasmodiary is the retelling of that day.
[…]
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As you could probably guess from my entry, my memories of the Shimmering Flats aren’t the clearest. It turns out though that we had a pile of spasmoluminographs that got forgotten about until now.
We’ve reached the end of our first trip together, so to celebrate, here is the first half of a large spasmojournal! Keep safe out there, travellers.
[…]
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So, the third reason to go to Gadgetzan, on the edge of the waste, is the Arena.
You know, if you want to fight some humans or… short humans… or whatever the Draenei are… you don’t have to go through all the trouble to come here. We always need spirited volunteers in Warsong or any of a dozen other trouble spots.
Some people, however, prefer to kill and die for less geopolitically-significant reasons, and in a place where others can picnic while watching the blood fly.
And some people want to make money off of it. Generally the arena gladiators these days are such types, basically another kind of tourist. Some collect vistas, others recipes, some collect dwarf beards, some people collect arena kills.
The Gadgetzan arena, however, was originally an artifact of the lack of any powerful authority in the wilds of Southern Kalimdor.
Bluntly, it was a prison with very short sentences and very stringent release conditions.
The goblins realized that an ingenious way to resolve disputes between visitors much larger than themselves was to throw them into a pit and make money off the resulting spectacle.
They also like to throw people in there who have been less than honest in their business dealings.
That would be me.
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“Alright, tell me about the ‘kittens’.”
“Stop making air-quotes with your fingers,” said Tankspin. The goblin was looking nervously around the bar, where the three of us sat in cool shadow, out of the blast furnace of Gadgetzan’s central ring road. He’d ordered for the three of us, sizzling turtle-steaks cooked troll-style in fireweed curry. Desert goblins first tried to import familiar food from the east, but soon turned their genius for jury-rigging to the possibilities of desert cuisine. The hot, greasy food helps cool you off, while also increasing thirst, thus ensuring nicely-padded bar bills for the establishment. The local trick is to soak up the spicy sludge with hunks of Narisloaf, a kind of local bread that uses a ton of olive oil to thin out the millet flour – no grains in the desert, see, but the olives will grow near the salty flats by the ocean.
“Sorry, the kittens. What’s the deal?” I asked. Next to me, Crosseye the Tauren was picking miserably at his food. He was another brother with an unfortunate name; apparently when he was being born the lads had seen some poor dumb wolf, caught up in the chase, plough straight into a tree. This was the funniest thing that had happened all year in his village (Mulgore is close to heaven but there isn’t much going on), so he got saddled with the memorable moniker of “Crosseyed Wolf Ironhoof”. Not terribly bright and (unsurprisingly) given to melancholy, Crosseye seemed to be on a perpetual, self-imposed wandering exile, and was following Tankspin around for lack of any other destination.
“People come to Gadgetzan – all kinds of people – to escape the restrictions placed upon business by irrational nationalism, friend,” he explained. “Horde, Alliance – that doesn’t matter here. Only the colour of your coin. Tanaris is a gold-coloured land, and we are its priests! Gadgetzan is its temple!” He was waving his arms around expansively, while somehow ingesting, at the same time, a continuous stream of turtle curry and narisloaf.
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Old Tauren joke:
“How can you tell if a goblin is trying to rip you off?”
“His lips are moving.”
—
If you’re following the same route south that I did, you might be feeling a little worried about the contents of your waterskin and ration pack at this point. Shimmering Flats and the Mirage raceway are a good place to let go of your worldly goods, intentionally or otherwise, and a bad place to acquire new ones. The Elders teach that each part of the Earth Mother’s body teaches us something about her; in Southern Kalimdor, you see her discpline. Mother made the desert, they say, to test the people’s devotion to the old ways.
But screw that, the goblins built a great big town on it and stuffed it full of goodies, so let’s get a room at the inn and sleep inside for a change.
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