The Swindler and the Scholar

[Roade]

“I think I can make it.”

“You can't make that jump.”

“Yes, yes, in fact I'm sure I can make it.”

“You will fall and die.”

The undead looked cheerful, rubbing the side of her face. “Done that once before. Neat trick! Easy to replicate.” She turned to the sin'dorei who flopped down next to her, “You tried this before?”

Roade rolled her eyes, watching the insects swarm with a putrid ardor that could shake even the mightiest of Qiraji. “No, I haven't Meret. I don't try and kill myself on a regular basis.”

“Should try it. Will get rid of some of that cowardice you have.”

“Common sense is cowardice?”

“In it's basest form,” Meret confirmed, squinting her eyes against the dying light of day. “Insidious, disgusting common sense. Peugh. Never cared for it myself.”

The sin'dorei had long gotten used to the vocal meanderings of the Forsaken which called herself Meret Oppenheim. They had met, quite unconventionally, at the Moonglade Lunar Festival; both had been three sheets to the wind, cavorting about with various groups of seedy individuals. Eventually, two of the more salacious parties had intersected and gotten into a bit of a row. Meret had been on the side of some undead drug dealers while Roade had allied herself with a group of five or so sin'dorei men who had offered wine, company and the most important satchel of gold for her time. One of the stupider denizens of her party, a dark-haired gorgeous creature, had trod on Meret's dress and had not apologized for the offense.

Why should he? Meret was, for all accounts and purposes, the tiniest Undead she had seen since the Sin'dorei had enlisted the aid of the Horde. She was easily a head shorter than everyone at the Festival; the only thing that made her stand out was her ghoulish power and type of dress. Her fashion was all but ancient, purple and green and diabolic, employing both fel cloth and bits of a demonic skeleton to create some sort of macabre fashion statement. Roade had heard the word 'Nemesis Raiment' mentioned, then something about an old caste of warlock which would often travel with large adventuring parties into the veritable underbelly of the Blackrock Mountain to battle the Black Dragonflight.

Roade didn't believe a word of it. She had never heard of any sect of Black Dragons, powerful or no, within the Mountain itself. Admittedly no one with half a brain even stopped within the Burning Steppes these days; who was there still around who knew of the Black Wing Lair or whatever it was referred to as?

And so, the blood elf man had snubbed the diminutive undead, continuing on his way to more alcoholic pastures. Meret had stood for a moment, head tilted as if she were a dog intrigued by a soup-bone, the fel fire present in the skull of the thing she wore flaring into an angry orange.

She had never seen water become fire before. The man had been striding over a bridge and the water below it had swelled as if called by a tempest. It split below, swarmed above his head like so many angry bees and hovered there, waiting for some kind of quiet command. Roade looked back at Meret in alarm; the warlock seemed rooted in place, hands calmly at her sides. She wasn't appearing to conjure anything or act out in any way. All she appeared to be doing was standing, head still at the alarming tilt.

The eye-sockets of the skull let out a small 'pouf' of flame. Promptly the two bodies of water erupted into an ugly emerald fire, descending upon the man. There had been a lot of screaming, Roade recalled, and a lot of running after that. In the ensuing pandemonium she had been shoved together with the Undead's group, an amalgam of misery cackling Scourge if she had ever seen any, and ousted out of Moonglade and into Felwood.

[Roade]

“Well!” Meret had said, clapping her hands together. “Wasn't that fun?” Then, she had turned to Roade with something akin to curiosity in those large glowing golden orbs which constituted eyes. “Hello, who are you then?”

And that, as it were, was that. While the other undead had been completely frosty, Meret was welcoming, friendly and completely unlike what her display of power had suggested.

She had been in life a scholar, having a small contingent of mages under her tutelage within the sacred halls of one of Dalaran's many universities. They were not the Kirin Tor, Meret had never been that skilled with the three proper magisterial tenets, but it was a good group of promising students nonetheless. She and two of her apprentices had been out of the area when Dalaran had been attacked; while they thought themselves lucky, survival turned out to be one of the trickier aspects for the trio to grasp. For three weeks they wandered from the wreckage of their home to other settlements which were either deserted or closed off. When they had knocked at the gates of one village, the denizens had called an alarm and nearly sent burning pitch raining down on their heads, screaming that they would not let the Plague take them.

Somehow, one of the apprentices had pilfered a loaf of bread from a settlement they had been barred from. It was a meager victory but they made the most of it, cutting the meal into meticulous portions, not knowing when their next meal would come from.

To their misfortune, it had been made with the ill-fated grain contaminated with the Plague of Undeath. The two students, malnourished to the point of not being able to walk, were finished off quickly by the handiwork of the Scourge.

“Probably the only thing that was lucky about that month was the fact that when those two little slips of humans died, they didn't raise like I did.” Meret had smiled, as if remembering the fondest of memories. “I was glad for that, they were very lucky. Talented to the very end at cheating the rules which magic-users often undermine. Yes, I'm very glad they avoided this curse. Clever of them.”

Roade wasn't callous enough to ask how Meret had switched from her typical fare of Arcane mastery to the demonic. It just didn't seem...proper, what with her gazing to the fire all winsome-like, clearly remembering her dead apprentices.

They wandered together through Azeroth after that, the blood elf courtesan and the tiny undead warlock. It was a mismatched pair, more out of convenience than anything (after the party none of the men were so inclined to call upon Roade again; Meret was simply antisocial) but it worked.

Such a friendship of convenience had brought the sin'dorei where she was today, gazing over the Silithus desert, arguing with her comrade whether or not she could make the sizable jump over Hive'Ashi.

Hive'Ashi had been chosen both for its locale and the wide assortment of silithid it happened to offer. Made up of mostly Drones and Swarmers, Meret was able to clear such rabble away without a thought, both for convenience and for the gold their chitin offered. The two had come up with a plan to bring tourists out to the Hive to collect carapaces and see the sights; Silithus was, after all, completely backwater compared to the new and interesting Outlands. There was still money to be made in tourist traps, however, and it was such a venture which Meret had pitched to her priestess friend. Her first plan was simple: Roade would offer tourists the chance of a lifetime, showing them the dangers of the Hive with all of the protection of a Holy priest at their side. Somehow Roade would lose them among the twitching monoliths and Meret would swoop in to save them – for a small fee of course, what with the scratches her beloved olive raptor would obtain in the ensuing flight, the mana she would have to consume, the tears in her outfit which would have to be repaired...

It was all in all a fairly solid scam. The various denizens of the Cenarion Hold had frowned on it. But then again they frowned at anything the two did, Roade for her affiliation with the warlock, Meret for her existence. Ironically, their first batch of customers had been a contingent of druids, newly recruited from Desolace by the Cenarion Circle to aid in the fight against the insects.

And then Meret had been distracted by a Large Gaping Hole on the side of the Hive. To say she was obsessed with it was putting it lightly; it had encompassed all of her being, her head peering delicately over the side. Which had brought Roade to her current conundrum of how to work this into the entire idea. “Meret, Neesh isn't exactly aerodynamic, he'll flounder in open air.” The raptor in question raised his head from the dust to regard the sin'dorei. Seeing he wasn't either being pet or being fed, he snorted politely and curled back into a ball. “You're going to fall into the big pit of bugs and die.”

“Interjection: I am already dead, there is nothing to lose.” The undead grinned as if she had won a long-standing argument. “You go grab the druids, I will prepare. Set up the tarp. Nice sitting place, yes? This will work famously.”

Roade sighed and obeyed. At the very least they would earn more gold this way; charge for some outlandish fee for Meret putting herself in danger.

[Roade]

The set up went nicely; true to her word, Meret had nailed the tarp down with primitive stakes and created a picturesque place for their customers to watch her sail into the horizon, and likely to her doom. Poised on Neesh, she waved at the group as they crested the hill. Roade herself was lagging behind; ordered by one of the druids to grab some blankets to provide further comfort for the affair. Once the druids had situated themselves on the tarp, elves in the front with tauren in the back, the warlock had called out to them to say when would be a good time to start. They answered with a wave of their hands and she trotted outwards from the crevasse, getting enough running distance for the olive raptor to propel himself successfully to the other side. She peered over the raptor's headdress before nodding, kicking Neesh into a swift run.

Halfway, as if hearing a small cadence of beeps in her head, Meret looked up at the small conclave of druids on the hill. Her raptor skidded to a stop as the warlock yanked hard on the reins; some distance away Roade raised an eyebrow. What was the undead on about now? Sensing something not quite right about the situation, the sin'dorei slowed her descent from the Hold to a slow crawl. Perhaps Meret had realized the jump was impossible; more likely she didn't want to put her raptor in danger. Roade's mouth drifted into a thin flat line borne of impatience and money-lending. It was hard enough to cajole the druids into watching their dare-devil activity. Harder still to get them to bet against her on the warlock's survival rate. Even without the added bonus of gold to line both their pockets, Meret had thrown herself into the idea with gusto. There was no feasible explanation of this.

The druids also appeared confused. They mumbled amongst each other for several moments, wondering if this was part of the act. Two more minutes passed before one, a little white-haired chit, spoke up that the warlock had experienced a sudden loss of bravado. This in itself was unsurprising, she continued.

“Isn't it true that they had learned those who couldn't hide within their Shadow and Fel immediately lost most of their bark?”

Two of the tauren nodded. “

“Isn't Oppenheim considered a failure by the Cenarion Circle? And isn't that the only reason they allow the scholar to linger within the Hold?””

A particularly spiteful druid let out more of a barking cough than a laugh and nodded.

“Well then,” said the white-haired one, “we're wasting our time with a has-been warlock, who's lead around by a slatternly, drug-addicted waste of an elf. I don't even know why we were talked into this; at least we aren't losing any gold. We'll tell the sin'dorei we aren't about to pay for entertainment which wasn't delivered. We can scout the Hives on our own.” It was quite a speech, born of self-assurance and egoism.

As a unit they looked about before deciding to leave, to return to their studies and the protection of the Cenarion Hold. Roade kept her eyes on the white-haired girl. She and the kal'dorei had, in the passing months, become increasingly antagonistic towards one another; Roade often spoke to the warlock about it, the venom more than obvious in her tone. She was sure the warlock ignored it: if the topic of the conversation didn't refer directly to her person, Meret drifted in and out of it as one did white-water rapids on the Southfury River. She looked at the blankets in her hands and sighed, turning to leave about the same time as two of the druids stepped off the tarp which Meret had painstakingly anchored down into the sand.

[Roade]

Several things happened at once.

Meret immediately spurred her raptor into running towards the group. As she sped towards them, several runes intoned a cadence of bells and flared into life, their ugly green pallor casting a faint glow beneath the tarp. They began to rotate as the druids, suddenly sensitive to the corruption of Fel in the air, broke into a blind panic; several chanted themselves into travel form in an attempt to get away. The runes seemed to lock into place after rotating once. There was a final bell, making three in total, and without any sort of ceremony the ground within the confines of the runes appeared to fall away, as sand often does within an hour-glass. The wind was wet with screams as the druids realized they were making no ground, in fact they were moving backwards towards the circle. They dug at the dirt, trying in vain to grasp a rock, an outcropping, anything that could work as an anchor. Their folly, then, that they had chosen the softest area of sand on which to sit.

Two or three had the bright idea to try and root their fellow druids, but when they tried to concentrate on conjuring the entwining nature spell, they were swept off their feet and towards the vortex. As if they were wriggling worms, the void sucked them up one by one. The last to go was the white-haired ringleader, the grooves of where she had scrabbled at the sand in terror remaining only for a second before being swept away by the devastatingly-constant weather.

Right as the void closed in on itself Meret jabbed her raptor hard in the sides. It let out a horrible screech and catapulted itself into the air, up and over the rune-site. It landed neatly on the other side and continued on its way.

Roade, frozen in place, dropped the blankets. They went wooshing into the night, borne on the constant wind. As Meret trotted up on Neesh she was clapping as if mimicking a giddy school-girl. “Worked out nicely! Knew I could make the jump.”

Roade looked up at her, her face frozen in a grimace of disgust.

Perched as a vulture, the warlock canted her head. “I made it did I not? I told you I could. Wrong hole but I still made it.”

“You...they...” The priestess sputtered. “I thought you were a scholar!”

“I am.” Meret and Neesh dipped their heads in unison. “I am very much a scholar. Was that not a good jump? Was an experiment, needed to see if I could do it.” She raised both hands high in the air, one a fist as it grasped her riding reins. “Science!”

“A literature scholar, you...there's no science in that! You killed them!” Her voice raised in pitch, “You killed them because they were making fun of us! You can't just go around and make people not... not exist because they antagonize you!”

Meret shook her head in reply. “Silly girl, they aren't dead.”

“You sucked them out into the Nether!”

“Aren't dead,” she confirmed. “The rune is set to open in three bells. They will all come tumbling out. Instant zoo!” She threw her hands up again. “Science. Such an application gives us enough time to head to the inn,” she pointed at it through the dust with a fetid claw, grinning under her mask, “go to their rooms and rifle through their drawers for loose change. Good plan, yes?”

Once again, Roade was rendered speechless. She stared at the warlock who giggled to herself and directed her raptor towards the Hold. It was only after a local scorpid hissed at her that she put herself into action, scampering after the warlock for the promise of gold and shinies.

[Mahre]

My, my. Meret turned out to be quite a schemer! I am really enjoying this =)

[A L I V E]

A joy to read. I shall commission a full library. *snaps fingers*

[Roade]

(( ::blush:: Thank you both.))