Post by torqi on Feb 17, 2008 18:42:01 GMT -5
((This story picks up immediately after Torqi had materialized in the guild hall while Kotaiso was trying to learn to play chess.))
The guild hall faded from view as everything turned a fuzzy white around the the edges of Torqi's perception, creating a tunnel-vision of the den of the guild hall frozen in time for just a second. The chess board, and several chess pieces were hanging eerily in the air, having just been smashed and thrown by a very frustrated Kotaiso. "I guess chess isn't his game..."
The tunnel vision quickly reduced to a point of black in a field of fuzzy white. Almost immediately thereafter, the little black point that was the guild hall grew very quickly to encompass all of the fuzzy white nothingness that had just consumed the confused Gnome. It was the guild hall again. But it was dark. It was after 2 am, by the look of it. But, there was no way to tell what day it was. Or what year, for that matter.
Torqi put her hands out to regain her lost sense of orientation, and took a step forward. Everything seemed stable enough. So far, this temporal sequence had happened 8 times. Each time, she rematerialized in the same physical location where she dematerialized. But, there was no apparent pattern to the frequency of the event, nor to the amount of time that passed, with each occurrence. One time, it was only a matter of an hour and a bit, another time, it was over a week. But, no pattern. Or at least, none that she could recognize.
Fortunately, the temporal anomalies Torqi had been experiencing had left her mental faculties intact. But the rage-potion addiction she had fed so vigorously seemed to have permanently damaged her brain. She paused at that last thought, and reconsidered her negativity. Indeed, the twitching had subsided, so perhaps all of the long-term effects of her rage-potion addiction would wear off with more time. Perhaps there was no need to be so grim about the matter. Still it bothered her. Torqi had noticed some very specific functions of her mental capacity that simply could not be relied upon for rational answers, anymore. These are areas which were powerhouses of intellectual prowess at one time.
But Torqi had more reasons to be bitter. The whole rage-potion thing played a direct part in creating this sequence of unfortunate temporal incidents. Torqi was mad. In the few days that had passed in her existence since she had stopped drinking the vile things, she had spent much of her time in an unfocused rage about it. She couldn't focus her anger into any kind of solution. Well, that was part of the problem. She couldn't focus her anger on anything. There was nobody to blame. The whole thing was stupid. But it wasn't stupid. No... It was an experiment that yielded data... at least that's how she would approach it later. For now, it was stupid.
It wasn't Kotaiso's fault... It was merely his suggestion. She alone had devised the plan to use a rage potion in conjunction with a swift bump on the head from her guilded friend in an effort to quantify a warriors methodology by means of first person analysis of a reasonable facsimile of the environment of said warriors mind. That part had been very enlightening, and had allowed her to tap into a part of her consciousness that she had previously been unaware of. The part that gave explosive energy as a by-product. The part that got her addicted to the alchemical agents of violent outbursts.
As with all addictions, it came at a cost. She lost some of her patience. And a lack of patience was the kingpin that opened Torqi's portal to hell. But in order to get there, I need to explain what Torqi was doing when she wasn't practicing rage-potion induced target-dummy bashing. You see, when Marixa disappeared, some concerned friends decided to go on an expedition into Marixa's lab in order to learn the truth of what had happened. This venture included Torqi, who was assigned to the team reviewing Marixa's journals and notes, looking for clues of her last actions. The search yielded no indicators of the absent engineer's whereabouts, but in the process of searching, Torqi had come across a document giving an account of a future civilization which had developed scientific progress to an amazing level. They had produced a method of copying sentient life that they had dubbed cloning. They had performed this process successfully on several sheep by the time of the accounting. And though no humanoids had been cloned there was no doubt it could be done. It was only a matter of ethics that had prevented testing on humanoids.
Torqi was enthralled with this idea. Unfortunately, there were not enough details of the process contained in the document to recreate it. Moreover, it appeared there would need to be advances in a host of areas, beyond the scope of any individual, or even any well organized institution for these methods to be recreated in the next 50 years in Azeroth. But just because those methods could not be utilized, didn't mean other methods couldn't be applied. Torqi had ideas to test, and she had plenty of sheep to work with.
I'll spare you the technical details of most of the inner workings of the Temporal Displacement Enveloper (TDE), but it is important to tell you just what it does, and describe at least one internal subsection. The TDE creates a small wormhole in time. At a point in time, as we would observe from outside the wormhole, the shape is that of a bubble that is fixed in its physical location relative to the surface of the planet (...or to the surface of the Outlands, or any major land mass, according to the field manual). This is all a fancy way of saying it only affects objects in one location. It doesn't send objects through space, only time. The aperture of the bubble could be adjusted down to the size of a medium sized pebble, and up to the size of a medium sized object or creature. A human might be too large, but a sheep, or perhaps a humanoid the size of a Gnome would fit nicely inside the largest producible bubble. Anything works, sentient or inanimate. This bubble is agitated in a temporal fashion - that is to say, in the dimension of time - to send the subject hurtling forward or backward a brief distance in time, proportional to the powers and frequencies dialed into the controls.
The maximum distance in time that the device's fail-safes would allow a subject to be displaced was about a week, forward or back. But the fail-safes were based on an analog technology... which is to say that it consisted of a variable length wire that carried a voltage. There was a fixed contact point on a sliding arm, and a floating contact point that the wire slid through. A spool of wire on a spring-loaded mechanism sat behind the sliding contact and maintained the tension in the wire. The longer the distance of the wire between the two contact points, the larger the time displacement. There was enough wire in the spool to facilitate a temporal jump of more than a month, but the tests on the machine had yielded frequent catastrophic failures of the device at ranges above 10 days. Therefore, a stopper had been placed on the spring-loaded mechanism to keep the maximum length of the wire available to the slider mechanism to only allow jumps of a week, or less. The length of time that was to be traversed was then fine-tuned by adjusting the frequency of the voltage on that line and by other changes in other subsections of the device. But I promised to keep it light, so this is where our technical discussion ends. Suffice it to say that the spool of wire on the spring-loaded mechanism had been the part that had been the cause of the malfunction when Torqi had lost her patience with the jumpy sheep she had been working with.
The reason Torqi was working with the Temporal Displacement Enveloper (TDE) hinged upon her Theory of Simple Matter Replication by Means of Temporal and Simultaneous Physical Displacement. The idea was to send an object back in time a few seconds, or even less than a second, thereby causing it to physically displace it's past self, as well as it's present self out of the vicinity of the TDE's bubble. Effectively this would send the subject back in time at the same time it prevented it from ever being captured by the bubble to that caused it to be sent back in time. Both the present and past subjects would theoretically remain in the time-line simultaneously. An instant clone! It had worked famously with the half-dozen stones the industrious engineer had replicated in early tests. It even worked with the rabbit... though both rabbits ended up with a nasty bump on their heads from the physical collision of bodies. Torqi only performed the act on one rabbit, because she now knew it worked, she already had enough bunnies, and the sheep would have natural provisions for a more cushioned impact.
The day Torqi had planned to test the device on sheep, she had been worn out from a long session of sword training, and she had no business operating such a finicky device while still in the after-effects of the major rage potion she had taken to "augment" her physical prowess. But she just had to run her latest test. As she stood on a mesa overlooking the Barrens fine-tuning the TDE, the sheep was getting restless. The local marmots were unhappy about the intruders, and were gathering closely enough to the sheep that it had been nudging up around and behind Torqi for security. Torqi, knowing the delicate work she was doing, should have realized that a frost nova was not the best choice to settle the situation for long. When the spell broke, the sheep jumped and knocked Torqi forward, into the TDE, knocking over the tripod it had been mounted to, jamming her micro-adjuster in the spring-loaded mechanism in the process. Picking herself up, and seeing the damage to the failsafe, she flew into a predictable rage (considering her recent diet), igniting the sheep into a ball of fire, and then decimating the marmots who agitated it with arcane prejudice.
Without giving much time for rational thought to ensue, Torqi leaned over the front of the device, snapped her hand out to retrieve her micro-adjuster, heard a crackle, saw a spark, and in about the time it to for the micro-humanoid to gasp, the machine cycled, and she was caught up in a temporal bubble. This was the first time her world turned to a fuzzy white. When the world rematerialized around her, the device was gone. Had she gone forward, or back? How much time? She could not tell. But, it didn't matter. It happened again almost immediately.
This time, the weather was noticeably different. It was now dark, cold and breezy. There were humanoid constructed fires burning at several locations across the land. She lit a fire of her own and took a little time to ponder what had just happened. She reasoned that even with a short circuit across a quarter of the spool of wire, she would be looking at a maximum of a week in time jump. She had been operating in the one-second range, which means the entire spool was wrapped up. But having a floating contact on a tensioned length of wire with an operating length in the tenths of a millimeter, makes for some delicate work. Had she had the patience of a clear mind, she would have pulled the whole subsection, and replaced it with a short length of wire across two fixed contacts as it was appropriate for the application. But the machine had not been of her design, or her building, so her confidence in making modifications to it were in doubt. Torqi justified it by saying, "... one would have to consider that one of the contacts was a floating contact, and that produces different micro-frequencies in the voltages on the line than a fixed contact would, so I can't replace the subsection without the original design specifications. ... Besides, the whole spool may act as a delay modifier since it carries an ambient resistance, even if it is not in the active loop. I couldn't be sure that further counter balances would not be necessary, thereby requiring several days of further testing and adjusting before returning to testing on live stock." She would have made the modifications anyway, and done the prerequisite testing that corresponded to it, had she not been all wound up from the potions. But she hadn't done it, so the failsafe that had been built into this model of TDE had effectively became a design flaw.
There was one question that continued to nag at her... a question she had no answer for. Why had it happened a second time? The device was not even present on the bluff when the second temporal event occurred. "The wormhole effect should fully dissipate upon rematerialization of the subject". That's what the field manual said. In this case, the subject was her, and the effect HAD recurred. In all of her reading on the operation of the device, there was no mention of any exception that would explain this anomaly. She had only conjecture and experience to draw upon. She would be even more at a loss when the anomaly recurred in different physical locations with no predictable end on the event horizon.
Torqi had taken the rage potions against Kotaiso's better judgment, and it had led through this unfortunate sequence of events. That was ironic: that a mere warrior had yielded a superior insight than her own into the potential negative results of a foolish experiment. She was angry at Kotaiso nonetheless. But, she intellectually understood that her ire toward this old comrade was simply a function of the long-term effects of the rage potion overages. So, rather than focus on the one other player involved in her unconventional experiment, she turned her anger upon herself.
These hours of violent introspection could very well be a contributing factor in her reduced mental function. When you have that much anger focused inward, something is bound to crack. Something did. For a time, Torqi couldn't continue. She was consumed with a rage that knew no bounds. She hated herself, and in doing so, came to hate everything that touched her life... which was the whole of her universe. She hated the wars, the famine, the death... all those thing worthy of hatred. But equally, she hated the struggle to live, to make things better, to love, to have passion. None of it mattered. All was for naught. In the end, everything was death. Everything was bitter.
Now, those hours had passed. They had lifted like a fog that had settled in her head. It was gradual. From moment to moment, she could not tell that there was any difference. But she could tell it was getting better from day to day. Well, that is, relative to the passing of her days, which were actually segments of days interspersed across a span of a month, by the night after the chess board incident. This brings us back, after a fashion, to where we are now.
As Torqi had pondered what had happened over the last ... uh, however much time had passed, her eyes adjusted to the dark. She took a moment to survey the den of the guild hall, where she had rematerialized. There was no sign of Kotaiso's chess board. Things didn't look like they had changed all that much. A few chairs had moved a few feet, or turned in place, but she didn't notice any new furniture. It wasn't quite silent in the place. There was a light snoring coming from the far end of the den, and the embers from the mostly dead fire still crackled occasionally. Torqi glided across the room toward the snoring. A shape in an easy chair came into view in the dim moon-light shining through the window. It was Coriander. She was wearing a familiar dress, so Torqi supposed that not too much time had passed.
A voice could now be heard from behind a closed door down the hall someplace. Sylaurn? Torqi wasn't sure. But it didn't matter. This was good. Torqi needed time to think. Now that she was free of the grip of her madness, she wanted some quality intellectualism.
Torqi turned and walked to the front doors. Normally, she would have teleported home, but she didn't want to do anything to trigger another temporal sequence. Opening a portal might agitate the temporal bubble that is repeatedly antagonizing her. Torqi eased the front doors open to keep from alarming anyone, and stepped out into the cool morning breeze. Gaining her mount, she paused make sure she still had it. She reached into her breast pocket and withdrew an envelope. On the front of it, were the crests of the kingdoms of the Dwarves and Gnomes as well as those of the Thorium Brotherhood, the Explorers League, and several other respected expeditions. It was addressed to her in her full name, Torqi Anjeane Togglesprocket. The rear of the envelope bore the Seal of the Joint Kingdoms, which certified it had been produced in a meeting of the highest importance involving every one of these organizations.
Perhaps this task would give her the mental focus she needed to rebuild her confidence whilst giving her a break from the headache that has plagued her existence. But could she accept this assignment, knowing her predicament could lead to the deaths of the entire crew she is to be in charge of? She would accept the assignment, of course, regardless of the risk. She HAD to move, to do SOMETHING. If nothing else, she could serve in a mental capacity for planning, and not take part in the execution. She had made her mind up. She returned the envelope to her pocket, and pointed her ram in the direction of IronForge.
[...To Be Continued...]
The guild hall faded from view as everything turned a fuzzy white around the the edges of Torqi's perception, creating a tunnel-vision of the den of the guild hall frozen in time for just a second. The chess board, and several chess pieces were hanging eerily in the air, having just been smashed and thrown by a very frustrated Kotaiso. "I guess chess isn't his game..."
The tunnel vision quickly reduced to a point of black in a field of fuzzy white. Almost immediately thereafter, the little black point that was the guild hall grew very quickly to encompass all of the fuzzy white nothingness that had just consumed the confused Gnome. It was the guild hall again. But it was dark. It was after 2 am, by the look of it. But, there was no way to tell what day it was. Or what year, for that matter.
Torqi put her hands out to regain her lost sense of orientation, and took a step forward. Everything seemed stable enough. So far, this temporal sequence had happened 8 times. Each time, she rematerialized in the same physical location where she dematerialized. But, there was no apparent pattern to the frequency of the event, nor to the amount of time that passed, with each occurrence. One time, it was only a matter of an hour and a bit, another time, it was over a week. But, no pattern. Or at least, none that she could recognize.
Fortunately, the temporal anomalies Torqi had been experiencing had left her mental faculties intact. But the rage-potion addiction she had fed so vigorously seemed to have permanently damaged her brain. She paused at that last thought, and reconsidered her negativity. Indeed, the twitching had subsided, so perhaps all of the long-term effects of her rage-potion addiction would wear off with more time. Perhaps there was no need to be so grim about the matter. Still it bothered her. Torqi had noticed some very specific functions of her mental capacity that simply could not be relied upon for rational answers, anymore. These are areas which were powerhouses of intellectual prowess at one time.
But Torqi had more reasons to be bitter. The whole rage-potion thing played a direct part in creating this sequence of unfortunate temporal incidents. Torqi was mad. In the few days that had passed in her existence since she had stopped drinking the vile things, she had spent much of her time in an unfocused rage about it. She couldn't focus her anger into any kind of solution. Well, that was part of the problem. She couldn't focus her anger on anything. There was nobody to blame. The whole thing was stupid. But it wasn't stupid. No... It was an experiment that yielded data... at least that's how she would approach it later. For now, it was stupid.
It wasn't Kotaiso's fault... It was merely his suggestion. She alone had devised the plan to use a rage potion in conjunction with a swift bump on the head from her guilded friend in an effort to quantify a warriors methodology by means of first person analysis of a reasonable facsimile of the environment of said warriors mind. That part had been very enlightening, and had allowed her to tap into a part of her consciousness that she had previously been unaware of. The part that gave explosive energy as a by-product. The part that got her addicted to the alchemical agents of violent outbursts.
As with all addictions, it came at a cost. She lost some of her patience. And a lack of patience was the kingpin that opened Torqi's portal to hell. But in order to get there, I need to explain what Torqi was doing when she wasn't practicing rage-potion induced target-dummy bashing. You see, when Marixa disappeared, some concerned friends decided to go on an expedition into Marixa's lab in order to learn the truth of what had happened. This venture included Torqi, who was assigned to the team reviewing Marixa's journals and notes, looking for clues of her last actions. The search yielded no indicators of the absent engineer's whereabouts, but in the process of searching, Torqi had come across a document giving an account of a future civilization which had developed scientific progress to an amazing level. They had produced a method of copying sentient life that they had dubbed cloning. They had performed this process successfully on several sheep by the time of the accounting. And though no humanoids had been cloned there was no doubt it could be done. It was only a matter of ethics that had prevented testing on humanoids.
Torqi was enthralled with this idea. Unfortunately, there were not enough details of the process contained in the document to recreate it. Moreover, it appeared there would need to be advances in a host of areas, beyond the scope of any individual, or even any well organized institution for these methods to be recreated in the next 50 years in Azeroth. But just because those methods could not be utilized, didn't mean other methods couldn't be applied. Torqi had ideas to test, and she had plenty of sheep to work with.
I'll spare you the technical details of most of the inner workings of the Temporal Displacement Enveloper (TDE), but it is important to tell you just what it does, and describe at least one internal subsection. The TDE creates a small wormhole in time. At a point in time, as we would observe from outside the wormhole, the shape is that of a bubble that is fixed in its physical location relative to the surface of the planet (...or to the surface of the Outlands, or any major land mass, according to the field manual). This is all a fancy way of saying it only affects objects in one location. It doesn't send objects through space, only time. The aperture of the bubble could be adjusted down to the size of a medium sized pebble, and up to the size of a medium sized object or creature. A human might be too large, but a sheep, or perhaps a humanoid the size of a Gnome would fit nicely inside the largest producible bubble. Anything works, sentient or inanimate. This bubble is agitated in a temporal fashion - that is to say, in the dimension of time - to send the subject hurtling forward or backward a brief distance in time, proportional to the powers and frequencies dialed into the controls.
The maximum distance in time that the device's fail-safes would allow a subject to be displaced was about a week, forward or back. But the fail-safes were based on an analog technology... which is to say that it consisted of a variable length wire that carried a voltage. There was a fixed contact point on a sliding arm, and a floating contact point that the wire slid through. A spool of wire on a spring-loaded mechanism sat behind the sliding contact and maintained the tension in the wire. The longer the distance of the wire between the two contact points, the larger the time displacement. There was enough wire in the spool to facilitate a temporal jump of more than a month, but the tests on the machine had yielded frequent catastrophic failures of the device at ranges above 10 days. Therefore, a stopper had been placed on the spring-loaded mechanism to keep the maximum length of the wire available to the slider mechanism to only allow jumps of a week, or less. The length of time that was to be traversed was then fine-tuned by adjusting the frequency of the voltage on that line and by other changes in other subsections of the device. But I promised to keep it light, so this is where our technical discussion ends. Suffice it to say that the spool of wire on the spring-loaded mechanism had been the part that had been the cause of the malfunction when Torqi had lost her patience with the jumpy sheep she had been working with.
The reason Torqi was working with the Temporal Displacement Enveloper (TDE) hinged upon her Theory of Simple Matter Replication by Means of Temporal and Simultaneous Physical Displacement. The idea was to send an object back in time a few seconds, or even less than a second, thereby causing it to physically displace it's past self, as well as it's present self out of the vicinity of the TDE's bubble. Effectively this would send the subject back in time at the same time it prevented it from ever being captured by the bubble to that caused it to be sent back in time. Both the present and past subjects would theoretically remain in the time-line simultaneously. An instant clone! It had worked famously with the half-dozen stones the industrious engineer had replicated in early tests. It even worked with the rabbit... though both rabbits ended up with a nasty bump on their heads from the physical collision of bodies. Torqi only performed the act on one rabbit, because she now knew it worked, she already had enough bunnies, and the sheep would have natural provisions for a more cushioned impact.
The day Torqi had planned to test the device on sheep, she had been worn out from a long session of sword training, and she had no business operating such a finicky device while still in the after-effects of the major rage potion she had taken to "augment" her physical prowess. But she just had to run her latest test. As she stood on a mesa overlooking the Barrens fine-tuning the TDE, the sheep was getting restless. The local marmots were unhappy about the intruders, and were gathering closely enough to the sheep that it had been nudging up around and behind Torqi for security. Torqi, knowing the delicate work she was doing, should have realized that a frost nova was not the best choice to settle the situation for long. When the spell broke, the sheep jumped and knocked Torqi forward, into the TDE, knocking over the tripod it had been mounted to, jamming her micro-adjuster in the spring-loaded mechanism in the process. Picking herself up, and seeing the damage to the failsafe, she flew into a predictable rage (considering her recent diet), igniting the sheep into a ball of fire, and then decimating the marmots who agitated it with arcane prejudice.
Without giving much time for rational thought to ensue, Torqi leaned over the front of the device, snapped her hand out to retrieve her micro-adjuster, heard a crackle, saw a spark, and in about the time it to for the micro-humanoid to gasp, the machine cycled, and she was caught up in a temporal bubble. This was the first time her world turned to a fuzzy white. When the world rematerialized around her, the device was gone. Had she gone forward, or back? How much time? She could not tell. But, it didn't matter. It happened again almost immediately.
This time, the weather was noticeably different. It was now dark, cold and breezy. There were humanoid constructed fires burning at several locations across the land. She lit a fire of her own and took a little time to ponder what had just happened. She reasoned that even with a short circuit across a quarter of the spool of wire, she would be looking at a maximum of a week in time jump. She had been operating in the one-second range, which means the entire spool was wrapped up. But having a floating contact on a tensioned length of wire with an operating length in the tenths of a millimeter, makes for some delicate work. Had she had the patience of a clear mind, she would have pulled the whole subsection, and replaced it with a short length of wire across two fixed contacts as it was appropriate for the application. But the machine had not been of her design, or her building, so her confidence in making modifications to it were in doubt. Torqi justified it by saying, "... one would have to consider that one of the contacts was a floating contact, and that produces different micro-frequencies in the voltages on the line than a fixed contact would, so I can't replace the subsection without the original design specifications. ... Besides, the whole spool may act as a delay modifier since it carries an ambient resistance, even if it is not in the active loop. I couldn't be sure that further counter balances would not be necessary, thereby requiring several days of further testing and adjusting before returning to testing on live stock." She would have made the modifications anyway, and done the prerequisite testing that corresponded to it, had she not been all wound up from the potions. But she hadn't done it, so the failsafe that had been built into this model of TDE had effectively became a design flaw.
There was one question that continued to nag at her... a question she had no answer for. Why had it happened a second time? The device was not even present on the bluff when the second temporal event occurred. "The wormhole effect should fully dissipate upon rematerialization of the subject". That's what the field manual said. In this case, the subject was her, and the effect HAD recurred. In all of her reading on the operation of the device, there was no mention of any exception that would explain this anomaly. She had only conjecture and experience to draw upon. She would be even more at a loss when the anomaly recurred in different physical locations with no predictable end on the event horizon.
Torqi had taken the rage potions against Kotaiso's better judgment, and it had led through this unfortunate sequence of events. That was ironic: that a mere warrior had yielded a superior insight than her own into the potential negative results of a foolish experiment. She was angry at Kotaiso nonetheless. But, she intellectually understood that her ire toward this old comrade was simply a function of the long-term effects of the rage potion overages. So, rather than focus on the one other player involved in her unconventional experiment, she turned her anger upon herself.
These hours of violent introspection could very well be a contributing factor in her reduced mental function. When you have that much anger focused inward, something is bound to crack. Something did. For a time, Torqi couldn't continue. She was consumed with a rage that knew no bounds. She hated herself, and in doing so, came to hate everything that touched her life... which was the whole of her universe. She hated the wars, the famine, the death... all those thing worthy of hatred. But equally, she hated the struggle to live, to make things better, to love, to have passion. None of it mattered. All was for naught. In the end, everything was death. Everything was bitter.
Now, those hours had passed. They had lifted like a fog that had settled in her head. It was gradual. From moment to moment, she could not tell that there was any difference. But she could tell it was getting better from day to day. Well, that is, relative to the passing of her days, which were actually segments of days interspersed across a span of a month, by the night after the chess board incident. This brings us back, after a fashion, to where we are now.
As Torqi had pondered what had happened over the last ... uh, however much time had passed, her eyes adjusted to the dark. She took a moment to survey the den of the guild hall, where she had rematerialized. There was no sign of Kotaiso's chess board. Things didn't look like they had changed all that much. A few chairs had moved a few feet, or turned in place, but she didn't notice any new furniture. It wasn't quite silent in the place. There was a light snoring coming from the far end of the den, and the embers from the mostly dead fire still crackled occasionally. Torqi glided across the room toward the snoring. A shape in an easy chair came into view in the dim moon-light shining through the window. It was Coriander. She was wearing a familiar dress, so Torqi supposed that not too much time had passed.
A voice could now be heard from behind a closed door down the hall someplace. Sylaurn? Torqi wasn't sure. But it didn't matter. This was good. Torqi needed time to think. Now that she was free of the grip of her madness, she wanted some quality intellectualism.
Torqi turned and walked to the front doors. Normally, she would have teleported home, but she didn't want to do anything to trigger another temporal sequence. Opening a portal might agitate the temporal bubble that is repeatedly antagonizing her. Torqi eased the front doors open to keep from alarming anyone, and stepped out into the cool morning breeze. Gaining her mount, she paused make sure she still had it. She reached into her breast pocket and withdrew an envelope. On the front of it, were the crests of the kingdoms of the Dwarves and Gnomes as well as those of the Thorium Brotherhood, the Explorers League, and several other respected expeditions. It was addressed to her in her full name, Torqi Anjeane Togglesprocket. The rear of the envelope bore the Seal of the Joint Kingdoms, which certified it had been produced in a meeting of the highest importance involving every one of these organizations.
Perhaps this task would give her the mental focus she needed to rebuild her confidence whilst giving her a break from the headache that has plagued her existence. But could she accept this assignment, knowing her predicament could lead to the deaths of the entire crew she is to be in charge of? She would accept the assignment, of course, regardless of the risk. She HAD to move, to do SOMETHING. If nothing else, she could serve in a mental capacity for planning, and not take part in the execution. She had made her mind up. She returned the envelope to her pocket, and pointed her ram in the direction of IronForge.
[...To Be Continued...]