Post by Malka on Oct 11, 2006 7:10:35 GMT -5
Malka knelt down on the spongy grass of the crater and examined the tracks in front of her. They were recent, but they were pointing away from the area she wished to explore. The size of them did concern her; she had heard tales of gigantic lizard-ish creatures in the crater, and dire warnings to stay away from them. Truth be told, she had not actually believed the tales until she ran across the fresh foot prints, each one longer than her entire body.
Standing, she shrugged her cloak back into position on her back and carefully removed her new weapon from its traveling spot, also on her back. The replica of the orginal Lord Alex blade was very fine, and very beautiful, and she treasured it more than any weapon she had had since giving up Verigan's Fist some time ago. She wiped the blade now, to remove the moisture that had collected on it in this damp, misty place. Turning her back in the direction of the mysterious tracks, she headed back towards the tar pit she cold see -- and smell! -- ahead of her.
After an hour's easy walk, she found herself kneeling again, this time so she could watch the Tar Lords at play. Her job was going to be to engage a few of them and collect enough Sticky Tar to satisfy her employer in Gadgetzan. She sighed ruefully, wishing once again that it were not the case that a paladin is usually "poor but not penniless". Lately, she'd been hoarding all her coins to allow her to pay for her final training sessions, and to permit her to make the required donations to the various orders that would be required in order to allow her to quest for a Charger of her own. Not that Holy Slowpoke was not a very fine mount, but Malka yearned to have the ability also to summon a Charger when she needed to go faster than her Warhorse could carry her.
In order to meet her upcoming expenses, she had had to take on a few tasks that she would otherwise not have found interesting. Such as today's journey to harvest Sticky Tar.
With another soft sigh, Malka got to her feet. It was going to be necessary to separate the playing Tar Lords from one another to make the task manageable for a solitary dwarf. She thought she could do it, but it would require concentration and care. Ruefully, she smiled to herself, remembering the day so long ago when the Lady of Dalaran had told her to be careful, always. While other people often seemed to think she was impulsive, Malka was sure that she took great care at all times. For instance, that great example everyone used of her not being careful? The time she set off dynamite in the kitchen of the old Defender's Hall? She had been VERY careful -- no one was hurt, Celera was rescued from the ice block, and Malka had cleaned up the mess.
Still, as her activities involved her with ever more dangerous foes, she had learned to be even more careful. So today, methodically and slowly, she pulled the Tar Lords apart and engaged each one separately. After many hours of tedious, careful, fighting, she had collected all the required Sticky Tar, which now lay carefully wrapped in her pack for transport back to Gadgetzan.
Every muscle in her body ached, and Malka closed her eyes for a moment.
It was a moment she did not have. A split second after her lids dropped, she smelled a powerful reptilian odor. Spinning around, axe in hand, she found herself face to ankle with the creature who had made the tracks she had seen that morning. Well, a paladin never gave up, either, and Malka wasn't going to be the first one that did. So she sent a silent prayer to the Light and opened herself to let it in. Blessing herself, she prepared to judge the horrible creature who threatened her.
The fight was shorter than she would have liked, even though it seemed to take forever. A part of her mind stood aside and watched herself, overmatched, as she tried to salvage something from this encounter. The biggest surprise was how fast it moved. The thing was larger than many buildings, and yet it moved with the speed of a rogue.
She drew first blood, and was pleased about that. Carefully, she thwacked it, judged it, used all her spells and secret abilities, even though she knew from the start that it would not be enough. And all too soon, the wounded monster, frustrated by the way its small opponent kept managing to hurt it, finally picked up one of its enormous feet and stepped on her.
For a long time after that, there was nothing, but eventually, Malka came back to herself. She was tucked into a bunk bed in what could only be the cabin of a sailing ship, and her entire body was one giant bruise. She couldn't concentrate on questions of how she had gotten there, or how it was that she was still alive. She could only ask for water, and when it was handed to her, and she had swallowed a bit of it, darkness claimed her once more.
Her next moment of lucidity came much later. She awoke in a place she recognized. Earlier in her training, she had spent time in the infirmary used by her order in Ironforge. It had been her job to provide spot heals and triage until the more experienced and competent healers could find time for whoever she was assigned to. For now, she did not wonder how she had gotten there, she only felt grateful that she was in a place that felt like home. She rolled over, noticed vaguely that the bruising was mostly healed, and went back to sleep.
Eventually, she found herself awake more than she was asleep, and wanting to be up and about, long before the healers in charge of her case thought she should move at all. She was often tempted to defy them, but one of them had the good fortune to tell her to be careful, and she found that was enough. Her lack of care in the crater had gotten her into this mess, and the Lady of Dalaran's advice had been spot on. She would be careful. And patient.
And so another swathe of days passed, and eventually, she was allowed to wander the halls, visit her own trainer, and generally make a nuisance of herself. The day finally came when the healers said her body was itself again and there was no more danger.
A young trainee brought her armor, her axe, and her bags to the small room she had been occupying. Knowing she was still weak from her long recovery, she moved very slowly and very carefully in dressing herself. She eventually tightened the buckles on her gear, and stood up to don her weapon. As soon as she tried to stand up, she fell over, making an awful clatter as her plate-clad body hit the stone floor. Her comment was pithy, vulgar, and satisfying, but it did not distract her from the concern about why she could not move in her armor. It fit, she was strong enough to carry it, so what was wrong?
Despite several more efforts, Malka found that she could not actually move while wearing plate. However, as soon as she put on simple leathers, she was fine. She picked up her precious Lord Alex, and nicked a finger in the process. Like the armor, the weapon seemed unusable to her.
As she watched the blood well up in the cut in her finger, Malka tried to put a tiny little healing spell on the injury. To her dismay, she found that she could not recall how to do that. Panic constricted her breathing, and she sank back down on the bed, shivering a little.
One of the healers found her there sometime later, and rubbed her shoulders as she tried to explain what was wrong, an impossible task, since she did not know what was wrong, only that something was. Badly wrong.
For the next several days, she underwent a variety of examinations and tests, most of them inscrutable to her, and none of them the least bit amusing. In the end, they determined that her injuries had stolen from her all her abilities.
Oddly, she still possessed the potential to become a paladin. In fact, they said that if anything, her potential power was even stronger than it had been so long ago when she first embarked on her training. She had perfect memories of everything she had ever learned and done, but she simply could not do any of it anymore. She could not wear plate. She could not use the Lord Alex. She could not summon Holy Slowpoke, nor cast any but the most basic healing spell. She could not produce an aura, or bless anyone, nor did she have the ability any longer to pass judgement on another soul.
At first, this terrified her, but with great patience, they helped her understand that only the skills were gone, not her experiences, her memories, or her ability to learn the skills again. So they located some basic equipment and sent her back to Anvilmar, once again to learn to be a paladin. And once again, she found herself learning the old skills.
This time, it all went a bit faster, because this time, when a skill came back to her, as they all did in time, she already knew just how to use it. There were no issues of timing -- she knew when to use what skill and how long it would take and what it would do, exactly. She often found herself reaching for abilities she did not yet re-possess, but eventually she got used to it. It started to seem normal to know all about things, without being able to do them. And this time around, she seemed a bit more aware of the power she had so casually grown for herself the first time.
And she was considerably more careful.
Standing, she shrugged her cloak back into position on her back and carefully removed her new weapon from its traveling spot, also on her back. The replica of the orginal Lord Alex blade was very fine, and very beautiful, and she treasured it more than any weapon she had had since giving up Verigan's Fist some time ago. She wiped the blade now, to remove the moisture that had collected on it in this damp, misty place. Turning her back in the direction of the mysterious tracks, she headed back towards the tar pit she cold see -- and smell! -- ahead of her.
After an hour's easy walk, she found herself kneeling again, this time so she could watch the Tar Lords at play. Her job was going to be to engage a few of them and collect enough Sticky Tar to satisfy her employer in Gadgetzan. She sighed ruefully, wishing once again that it were not the case that a paladin is usually "poor but not penniless". Lately, she'd been hoarding all her coins to allow her to pay for her final training sessions, and to permit her to make the required donations to the various orders that would be required in order to allow her to quest for a Charger of her own. Not that Holy Slowpoke was not a very fine mount, but Malka yearned to have the ability also to summon a Charger when she needed to go faster than her Warhorse could carry her.
In order to meet her upcoming expenses, she had had to take on a few tasks that she would otherwise not have found interesting. Such as today's journey to harvest Sticky Tar.
With another soft sigh, Malka got to her feet. It was going to be necessary to separate the playing Tar Lords from one another to make the task manageable for a solitary dwarf. She thought she could do it, but it would require concentration and care. Ruefully, she smiled to herself, remembering the day so long ago when the Lady of Dalaran had told her to be careful, always. While other people often seemed to think she was impulsive, Malka was sure that she took great care at all times. For instance, that great example everyone used of her not being careful? The time she set off dynamite in the kitchen of the old Defender's Hall? She had been VERY careful -- no one was hurt, Celera was rescued from the ice block, and Malka had cleaned up the mess.
Still, as her activities involved her with ever more dangerous foes, she had learned to be even more careful. So today, methodically and slowly, she pulled the Tar Lords apart and engaged each one separately. After many hours of tedious, careful, fighting, she had collected all the required Sticky Tar, which now lay carefully wrapped in her pack for transport back to Gadgetzan.
Every muscle in her body ached, and Malka closed her eyes for a moment.
It was a moment she did not have. A split second after her lids dropped, she smelled a powerful reptilian odor. Spinning around, axe in hand, she found herself face to ankle with the creature who had made the tracks she had seen that morning. Well, a paladin never gave up, either, and Malka wasn't going to be the first one that did. So she sent a silent prayer to the Light and opened herself to let it in. Blessing herself, she prepared to judge the horrible creature who threatened her.
The fight was shorter than she would have liked, even though it seemed to take forever. A part of her mind stood aside and watched herself, overmatched, as she tried to salvage something from this encounter. The biggest surprise was how fast it moved. The thing was larger than many buildings, and yet it moved with the speed of a rogue.
She drew first blood, and was pleased about that. Carefully, she thwacked it, judged it, used all her spells and secret abilities, even though she knew from the start that it would not be enough. And all too soon, the wounded monster, frustrated by the way its small opponent kept managing to hurt it, finally picked up one of its enormous feet and stepped on her.
For a long time after that, there was nothing, but eventually, Malka came back to herself. She was tucked into a bunk bed in what could only be the cabin of a sailing ship, and her entire body was one giant bruise. She couldn't concentrate on questions of how she had gotten there, or how it was that she was still alive. She could only ask for water, and when it was handed to her, and she had swallowed a bit of it, darkness claimed her once more.
Her next moment of lucidity came much later. She awoke in a place she recognized. Earlier in her training, she had spent time in the infirmary used by her order in Ironforge. It had been her job to provide spot heals and triage until the more experienced and competent healers could find time for whoever she was assigned to. For now, she did not wonder how she had gotten there, she only felt grateful that she was in a place that felt like home. She rolled over, noticed vaguely that the bruising was mostly healed, and went back to sleep.
Eventually, she found herself awake more than she was asleep, and wanting to be up and about, long before the healers in charge of her case thought she should move at all. She was often tempted to defy them, but one of them had the good fortune to tell her to be careful, and she found that was enough. Her lack of care in the crater had gotten her into this mess, and the Lady of Dalaran's advice had been spot on. She would be careful. And patient.
And so another swathe of days passed, and eventually, she was allowed to wander the halls, visit her own trainer, and generally make a nuisance of herself. The day finally came when the healers said her body was itself again and there was no more danger.
A young trainee brought her armor, her axe, and her bags to the small room she had been occupying. Knowing she was still weak from her long recovery, she moved very slowly and very carefully in dressing herself. She eventually tightened the buckles on her gear, and stood up to don her weapon. As soon as she tried to stand up, she fell over, making an awful clatter as her plate-clad body hit the stone floor. Her comment was pithy, vulgar, and satisfying, but it did not distract her from the concern about why she could not move in her armor. It fit, she was strong enough to carry it, so what was wrong?
Despite several more efforts, Malka found that she could not actually move while wearing plate. However, as soon as she put on simple leathers, she was fine. She picked up her precious Lord Alex, and nicked a finger in the process. Like the armor, the weapon seemed unusable to her.
As she watched the blood well up in the cut in her finger, Malka tried to put a tiny little healing spell on the injury. To her dismay, she found that she could not recall how to do that. Panic constricted her breathing, and she sank back down on the bed, shivering a little.
One of the healers found her there sometime later, and rubbed her shoulders as she tried to explain what was wrong, an impossible task, since she did not know what was wrong, only that something was. Badly wrong.
For the next several days, she underwent a variety of examinations and tests, most of them inscrutable to her, and none of them the least bit amusing. In the end, they determined that her injuries had stolen from her all her abilities.
Oddly, she still possessed the potential to become a paladin. In fact, they said that if anything, her potential power was even stronger than it had been so long ago when she first embarked on her training. She had perfect memories of everything she had ever learned and done, but she simply could not do any of it anymore. She could not wear plate. She could not use the Lord Alex. She could not summon Holy Slowpoke, nor cast any but the most basic healing spell. She could not produce an aura, or bless anyone, nor did she have the ability any longer to pass judgement on another soul.
At first, this terrified her, but with great patience, they helped her understand that only the skills were gone, not her experiences, her memories, or her ability to learn the skills again. So they located some basic equipment and sent her back to Anvilmar, once again to learn to be a paladin. And once again, she found herself learning the old skills.
This time, it all went a bit faster, because this time, when a skill came back to her, as they all did in time, she already knew just how to use it. There were no issues of timing -- she knew when to use what skill and how long it would take and what it would do, exactly. She often found herself reaching for abilities she did not yet re-possess, but eventually she got used to it. It started to seem normal to know all about things, without being able to do them. And this time around, she seemed a bit more aware of the power she had so casually grown for herself the first time.
And she was considerably more careful.