HomunculAI Systems

THE BEFORE · FOREVER · 2 OCTOBER

Built from what came through the pipe: the screenshots, the captions Percy typed, and the quest log.

◆ line from the known list · ◇ new line in the same pattern

The Tower Over the Trees

Percy Spamchop was dead, and still he gasped when the pines parted.

There it stood, a violet-roofed spire above the green dark of Silverpine Forest, close enough that he could have counted the windows. Dalaran. Whole and proud and a good deal nearer than any map had let on.

“Mezzlos,” he whispered, “are you seeing this?”

The voidwalker turned its blank face toward the tower. “I don’t like this place.”^◆ A pause, and then, lower: “Towers. Mages. They’ll want to bind me.”^◇

Percy took this for agreement.

[Screenshot to come] Percy’s caption: wow! Dalaran! From Silverpine Forest

He typed it into the little stone he carried and meant every word. Then he did what any sensible warlock of the thirteenth level does on seeing a city of mages. He decided to walk there.

Lake and Wolf

Lordamere Lake was where the plan went wrong.

A single Vilefin murloc stood at the water’s edge. Percy walked into it, as one does. It shrieked and fled, which Percy took for victory right up to the moment its friends arrived.

Percy had paused to scheme at the shoreline. “Why do you call?”^◆ asked Mezzlos, and then, looking at the water: “Water. There is no void in water.”^◇

Sent at the camp, he said “I must feed.”^◆ As the shore filled with murlocs he said, flat as slate, “I obey.”^◆ When Percy fell, his minion went with him, with a last “I go.”^◆

Percy rose as a ghost, swam for his body through the mist, and died again.

[Screenshot to come] Percy’s caption: ganked and murdered by a load of vilefin murlocs whils exploring whether i can get to Dalaran City. The murloc I ran into fled and called his friends.

The forest was no kinder on land. Werewolves howled in the pines, and something big had torn the bark from an old tree, which Percy photographed with the air of a man documenting a crime scene. “Something hungrier than me did this,”^◇ said Mezzlos, and it did not sound like a compliment to the tree.

Then the Son of Arugal came out of the red leaves and ran straight at them.

“It will be done,”^◆ said Mezzlos, and stepped between them. “Fur. Teeth. Fine.”^◇

[Screenshot to come] Percy’s caption: GULP! Son of Arugal chased me.

“Gulp,” said Percy, and for once he did not stop to take a screenshot first. He took the screenshot first.

The Bat Handler

He outran the wolf, or the wolf lost interest, and either way Percy came out of the trees at The Sepulcher with his heart, such as it was, still going.

A gibbet of chains and spikes loomed over the path. Beside it stood a bat handler named Karos Razok in a pair of remarkably good glasses, and Percy, who had been looking for a way to Dalaran all afternoon, found a different kind of door instead.

[Screenshot to come] Percy’s caption: the bats at The Sepulcher. i found a new travel guy here called Karos Razok, very cool glasses!

“I do not fly,”^◇ said Mezzlos, as the bat took off. “I will remember this.”^◇

By the time the bat set them down in the Undercity canals Percy had delivered a crate, collected another, and gained nearly three thousand experience for the day’s trouble. His purse held ninety-five silver. He had died twice in a lake.

Dalaran would keep. It had waited this long behind the trees, and it would be there when he was fourteenth and braver. Percy tucked the crate under one arm, and Mezzlos trailed him through the dark sewers, not admiring anything.