Venomous Insect Follies — Taurajo and South Barrens

I can tell from here that you are a clever and perspecacious member of the Horde. After all, you are reading this journal. I wager that not only do you enjoy a commitment to Victory or Death, but you also know the difference between them! If you don’t, well, you may still be chief Garrosh and thus be tough enough to get away with doing very silly things.

However, for the rest of you, I hope you will take this wisdom to heart: if your Tauren hunting guide tells you not to poke the Silithid hive with a stick, you really ought not to poke the Silithid hive with a stick. You may have grown up poking all manner of things that look like Silithid nests. Perhaps you played with scorpions in your carefree youth in Durotar, letting them sting you over and over to see if you could impress that troll girl with the long red hair. Perhaps you are a troll and are thus in the habit of eating the most bizarre and poisonous things you can find in the hopes of discovering a novel aphrodesiac. To a lot of us Hordies, elves excepted, rolling around in poisonous insects is more or less like a day at the beach, especially since the humans have built castles all over our beaches and we can’t get to them.

Maybe we could get them to take up poking silithids with sticks.

a-day-at-the-beach

Being stung by a silithid is novel and refreshing for half a second, producing a cold shocking pain like jumping into an icy lake, before you realize that the poison is causing parts to fall off of you that will ensure no one wants to dance close to you at the next drum circle, and that there are about fifty thousand of the silithid’s friends who have smelled the stuff on you and are lining up for their turn.

These things are nasty, and they are turning the hunting grounds of the southern barrens into a bit of a dump. You are paying good money for this trip and you didn’t pay it to tour incinerated, overrun outposts – oh look, honey, burnt wood! we never see burnt wood in Silvermoon! – and to watch Aunt Frieda be dragged feet first into a pile of sand and skeletonized.

You came to shoot things. I understand. Camp Taurajo is still an excellent place to start, though the heavy traffic that followed our incorporation into the Horde has made room for some hucksters. Ask the flight master for directions to a competent tauren or orcish skinning or leatherworking elder. Insist on the blood-sealing option for any contracts. Beware of trainers who overpromise, since they are usually hoping to take your deposit and have you go hunting something that will eat you.

There has also sprung up, in the carnival-ish atmosphere of this frontier town, an embarrassing market in faux-tauren culture. Someone who promises to initiate you into a secret order of Tauren hunters, to help you get in touch with your inner Tauren, to sell you “real Tauren wampum” or to paint you with sacred hunting paint that guarantees success, is probably having you on. It is true that we do use paint to camoflage our sight and smell before a hunt, but if you end up with a kitten face daubed over your orcish mug, you have been had. Everyone will be laughing at you. Be aware!

Getting a kodo and guide, at least, are a little easier here, and you will soon be wandering among gigantic lizards that spit lightning, insects that spit poison, and hyenas – to my limited knowledge, the hyenas don’t spit anything but harsh invective. Someone may also ask you to murder dwarves again. The scenery is spectacular, and the broad-limbed trees are spaced just closely enough that when the sun begins to cook you, you can take shelter and do a little fishing.

Just don’t poke the silithid.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Kalimdor, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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