Chapter Text
“Alright, Lorna, could you get the guy on the far right? Cool, thank you. Aerin and Dez, when you’re ready.”
Lorna stuns the ogre then leans back in her chair and drops her feet onto the desk next to her monitor. The Dweeb Team, properly known under the guild name ‘The Tuesday Group’, are busy doing a Highmaul run, which she is supposed to be participating in. The useful thing about playing a hunter is that barely anyone notices if you’re just auto-attacking.
“Alright guys, focus fire on Vul’gor please.”
She yawns and focuses back on the screen. Tess is right next to her, merrily healing away. She’s playing her druid, as per usual; Tess is very predictable. She’s a good healer, too, very conscientious of the individual, which is why she joins them for 10-mans. Lorna can practically hear her concerned concentration across their Skype call.
“Liam, please stop running right next to the mobs.”
She snickers. Liam is playing a hunter, but seems to keep forgetting that he’s got ranged attacks. Him and his pet wolf, Cuddles, are both right behind Vul’gor. No wonder Tess is concentrating.
Lorna and Liam both play hunters, but Lorna’s better at it. She’s got guns and explosives and all sorts of cool buffs. Liam’s marksmanship specced, and spends most of his time running straight into the fray, shooting anything that moves.
“Nice one guys, now get ready for Kargath. Anyone need healing? Aerin?”
Aerin is their main tank. She plays a tiny dwarf warrior, but she has a considerable knack for getting mobs pissed at her. Lorna respects her for that. It’s funny listening to her talk – she actually does have a Scottish accent, just like how Lorna, Liam and Tess all have a mild received pronunciation. (Lorna’s met her before, when she was down south for work or something. Aerin is also five foot nothing. It’s uncanny.)
“Dez?”
Dezco – no one else is allowed to call him Dez – is their off tank. He’s a sweetheart. Technically he’s Horde side, but he joins them on a draenei for raids. He’s quiet, doesn’t talk much, but he doesn’t need to. Lorna learnt the quick way that he’s probably better than all of them – somehow he’s both holy and protection specced, and has no trouble switching between.
She’s been saved by his bubbles more than once, so she likes him.
“Great. Remember to keep an eye on the stands this time, Baine.”
Baine is Dezco’s cousin, Lorna thinks, or some other extended relation. He’s their utility man, and zips around hammering adds and intercepting mobs. He’s a pretty funny guy when you get to know him, very dry sense of humour, and Lorna’s about 83% sure that Tess got him a #TeamDad mug at one point. She sees it out the corner of their video chat sometimes.
There’s radio silence for a few minutes while they whittle away at Kargath Bladefist, until he drops and Lorna swings her feet back to the floor. Please drop gear please drop gear please drop –
No gear. God damn it.
“Nice work guys! Nearly beat our record there! Now let’s – wait, what?”
[Medan has left the instance group.]
[Moira has left the instance group.]
[Vanessa has left the instance group.]
“Um. Okay. I… it looks like we’ll have to um, try this again another night. Maybe they’ll – ”
[Medan has left the guild.]
[Moira has left the guild.]
[Vanessa has left the guild.]
“Damn it.”
Then there’s Anduin.
Or, as Lorna fondly refers to him, Prince Anduin Sparkles-a-lot.
Anduin’s their GM and their raid leader most of the time. He’ll cheerfully defer to anyone who wants to lead, which is precisely why no one does. He’s literally a Disney prince; he’s got feasts, flasks and potions, augment runes, and to top it all off, he’s the best damn healer Lorna’s ever met. Next to Tess. But Lorna’s biased towards Tess, so she shouldn’t really be the judge.
There’s a sigh, and Anduin turns on his Skype camera. He doesn’t look annoyed, just a little tired. His blond hair is sticking up at the back.
“Does anyone know anyone who could come in and finish this with us?” he asks. “’Cause if not, we’re gonna have to call it off for tonight.”
There’s some faint background murmuring that Lorna doesn’t really pay attention to, instead checking if she’s got anything she could auction off. Just a bunch of augment runes she doesn’t use, but she’d feel bad if she sold them off.
“Lorna? You know a bunch of people.”
“Hmm?” She looks up, switching on her cam. “Uh… let me check.”
No one’s online. Oh wait, that’s not entirely true. Her schematics guy is here. “Does a combat rogue sound okay?”
“As long as they’re nicer than Vanessa,” Liam says.
Vanessa is a decent rogue, but she has a habit of getting annoyed at the littlest things. Lorna guesses she’s got family troubles, but she never asked. Vanessa always flicked off her mic whenever things got personal. She thinks that Vanessa could have been someone she got along well with, had they got the opportunity, but it seems like Vanessa beat her to the punch.
“He’s alright,” she replies. “Let me just check if he’s free.”
To [Wrathion]: hey you wanna come finish hm with us
[Wrathion] whispers: Which boss are you up to?
To [Wrathion]: just finished bladefist
[Wrathion] whispers: How many people do you need?
To [Wrathion]: three dps
[Wrathion] whispers: Perfect. We’ll be there in five minutes.
Lorna looks back to the camera and gives Anduin a nod. “Three DPS incoming. I don’t know who he’s bringing with him but I know he likes rogues. They’re probably all rogues.”
“Three rogues, okay.” Anduin frowns then smiles, and nods. “Thanks, Lorna.”
He really means it, too. That’s the thing with Anduin, the real reason why all of them raid together each week. He’s not the smartest (that’s Tess), he’s not the quickest (that’s Baine), but he’s so bloody nice that he can wrap them all around his pinkie finger and none of them will care.
Lorna doesn’t do much, but she likes being wanted. She smiles back.
Anduin disappears from his seat, and the rest of the group dissolve into mindless gossip. Baine and Tess start duelling, Lorna’s chatting with Aerin about their soon-to-arrive guests, and Liam is off doing whatever it is Liam does when he’s not throwing himself into melee combat or drinking beer. It’s cheerful and non-serious and above all, it’s practically routine.
Then Lorna gets a ping from Wrathion telling her that he’s just outside, and she invites him to the raid group.
The obligatory round of ‘hello’s passes through. Wrathion plays a human rogue, and with him he’s brought two more: a gnome and a human. They’re called Left and Right respectively. Lorna gives them points for cute.
“How did we end up with only two ranged DPS?” Aerin asks.
“Luck,” Baine says, and then, “Do we invite them to the Skype call too?”
“No, it’s alright,” Lorna says, already searching through her inventory for spare feasts. “Wrathion’s not a big fan of talking. He’ll be fine if we just type whatever needs to be said.”
Dezco, being the brave soul he is, immediately sets about having a conversation with Wrathion &co. Left and Right don’t respond. Wrathion gives brief, painfully grammatically correct, responses. Lorna almost feels bad for Dezco, except he’s better than her in all ways and therefore her empathy is wasted.
Anduin must have come back at sometime, as his camera has been disabled and he’s talking. Something about positioning and knockbacks. Lorna, admittedly, rarely listens. She’s got this.
They kill that weird boar at the drop point, and Lorna realises that Wrathion actually fits quite well in the team. There’s a lot of melee fighters, to be fair, but his DPS output is high enough that she figures it’s all good.
Anduin’s somehow finding the time to type in relatively detailed reminders into the raid chat. He must have introduced himself when Lorna was filing her nails; Wrathion’s actually deigning to speak with him as if he’s paying attention.
It’s when they get to the weird fungal boss that things start going to hell.
Lorna first notices when they’re killing the mobs with the flamethrowers. The orcs already run around randomly, which means both Aerin and Dezco are tanking full-on, but Wrathion doesn’t seem to have got the memo regarding appropriate threat ranges. He zips after one mob and just takes them down in a minute flat; by the time Aerin’s wailing away on them, they’re down to 19% health and Wrathion just flips targets.
He’s also got half a dozen trinkets or doodads or devices or something, because Lorna’s pretty sure rogues can’t cast that many spells. Or any at all, come to think of it.
[RaidLeader][Anduin]: wrathion pls stop pulling aggro
Lorna can tell Anduin’s finding it annoying. Having more people to heal always annoys him. Tess doesn’t put up with it when she’s healing; if someone other than the tank pulls aggro intentionally, she lets them die. Anduin never does. Apparently he feels bad and thinks that it’s his job as healer to keep everyone alive, even if they’re being stupid.
Lorna can feel it in her bones. Anduin and Wrathion are going to get along like a house on fire.
Wrathion doesn’t stop pulling aggro. He doesn’t even seem to realise that aggro is something to worry about, even when Tess pointedly stops healing him.
The weird fungal dude – Brackenspore, that’s the name – proves to be the clincher.
[RaidLeader][Anduin]: okay lorna and baine can you take the spores, aerin pls hold boss, dez can you take the fungal add? liam on flamethrower. everyone else focus on the boss. tess i’ll take the party if you watch the spores
There’s a chorus of aye-ayes, and then Aerin heads in.
It seems to be going okay. Lorna’s bouncing around, firing off explosives and whatnot. Wrathion’s mostly behaving himself. Left and Right seem to be scarily competent.
Then the adds start popping in.
Wrathion immediately goes after the spores, darting in and taking them down before Lorna even has time to fire a DoT. He doesn’t seem to care about the damage, he just runs through the heal-y mushrooms every so often. Anduin’s mumbling to himself in the Skype chat, and Lorna resists the urge to laugh.
Thankfully, Wrathion doesn’t try to solo the fungal add, whatever it’s called (Fungal Flesh-Easter – isn’t that creative). Dezco cheerfully wallops away at it, even when Wrathion makes a pass on his way to another Spore Shooter, and soon enough they’re sitting back with one more Brackenspore kill under their belt.
[RaidLeader][Anduin]: great job guys!! that was a minute faster than our old record!
Lorna does laugh at that.
The rest of the raid passes similarly; Anduin giving out instructions, Wrathion completely ignoring him, and their boss times dropping and dropping. The more adds there are, the more Wrathion seems to flip between them all, catching them in stuns and dealing out very fast bursts of damage. Thankfully, he doesn’t get hit so much, which means that Anduin gets a bit of a break. Lorna checks out his gear curiously, and realises that his versatility rating is crazy high, which makes sense. He deals a lot, and resists it in equal amounts, which makes him good at adds.
He and Baine end up banding together. Baine catches the adds in stunlocks and then Wrathion eviscerates them. Lorna spends most of her time watching them when she isn’t key smashing.
The good thing to playing survival hunters: ability rotations mean nothing.
Fighting the Imperator turns out to be quite something. Left and Right seem to move as one unit, rather than two players, and Lorna thinks for a moment that they might be bots. Until Left does /rude to the Imperator, which sends Lorna into fits of laughter that Anduin tries to talk her out of.
Seriously, though. Gnomes.
Tess decides that Wrathion is worth healing about halfway through the fight, so she and Anduin swap roles as her mana begins to wane. This means that Lorna’s now getting healed by Tess. Score.
She’s momentarily distracted, until she realises that they’re at that bit where they need to split up again. Wrathion, surprise surprise, is already pummelling away at one of the war mages. Tess is making concerned noises over Skype.
“He’s going to die,” she says worriedly. “He really is. And I actually like him. Bugger.”
“He’ll be fine.” Lorna shoots off a few CCs and goes back to her phone. “Wrathion’s slippery. Plus, you’re healing him, right? He can’t die.”
Tess makes some embarrassed noises, and Liam growls. Lorna gives him a little wave.
Wrathion ends up dealing the killing blow – of course he does, the little sod – and finally Lorna gets her loot. New boots, nice. ‘Face Kickers’, too. Clearly these were made for her.
“So,” she says, trying on the boots. Nah. She’ll have to transmog them. “What do we think of Wrathion?”
“Can we keep ‘im?” Aerin asks.
“Really?” Liam sounds pretty surprised. “But he made tanking really hard, didn’t he?”
Lorna can hear Aerin’s shrug. “Sure, but I like a challenge. Ye saw how fast he took down those adds. He and those twins are way better than Med’an, Vanessa, and Moira.”
“They were quite good,” Lorna admits. “Dezco, what do you think?”
Dezco hums thoughtfully. “He seems good, I wouldn’t mind him on the team,” he says slowly. “But only if everyone else agrees.”
“I think the same,” Baine says. “They shaved nearly forty seconds off our last record, and Wrathion seems to have plenty of tricks up his sleeve.”
“He’s very annoying, but I like him,” Tess says brightly. “I vote yes.”
Liam coughs. “Andy?”
“Hmm?” Anduin must have been daydreaming. “Sorry, what were we talking about?”
“Do we keep Wrathion, Left, and Right?”
There’s a brief moment of hesitation, unlike Anduin, and the entire group hold their breath.
“Yes,” he decides eventually. “Alright. Shall I ask them?”
They call out a resounding yes, which gets Anduin laughing, and shortly three names are added to the guild roster.
“Seriously, though, how is his damage done that high?” Lorna asks, scrolling back through the recount stats. Wrathion has headed off to do whatever it is he does when he’s not doing his weird trading business, and the rest of the group have relaxed into their little after-raid-party. “He basically came away with 25% of the total damage, like, what even is that.”
Skype cameras begin to get switched on, person by person, and the sound of bottles clinking and chip packets rustling echoes through her headphones. Thinking about chips makes her hungry. She’s probably still got something left in the fridge, but Liam hasn’t stopped over in a while, so it’s probably nothing edible.
Tess’ loads first, and Lorna shoots her a wide grin. She returns it. Tess looks nothing like her brother, and seems to have inherited all the good looks of the family. Lorna’s known her for ages.
Baine drops in next, and for once he has his ponytail undone. And yes, there’s the #TeamDad mug. “He’s impressive.”
“Someone’s going to have to tell him about aggro, though,” Liam grouses. His beard is doing something weird. Lorna sends him a message reminding him about the existence of razors.
Aerin and Tess both laugh at that, and Lorna lets out a snort of her own. “Liam, ye wouldn’t know the first thing about aggro even if ye invented the damn thing,” Aerin says. “Mr. I’m-gonna-run-straight-into-the-middle-of-combat.”
Lorna zones out temporarily as she finishes off the thing of Sprite she has sitting next to her, which of course manages to spill and get all over her headset cable. She’s beauty, she’s grace, and all that. Not Lorna Crowley. Lorna Crowley is clumsy and bad at focusing.
She glances back at the screen to see Tess laughing at her, and she pokes out her tongue.
“You’re being quiet, Anduin,” Dezco prods. “Do you not like Wrathion?”
“No, no, I do!” Anduin protests immediately, waving away the good natured ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’. “Stop it, you’re all terrible. No, I think he’s good.”
Baine raises an eyebrow, and Anduin gives him a roll of his eyes. “But…”
“But nothing. Just me being stupid. You guys did great today, Lorna even managed to stay on track for an entire boss fight!”
That derails the conversation successfully, but Lorna doesn’t miss the way Anduin slides back into his Contemplative mode. She glances at Baine; he’s seen it too.
A message pops up on her Skype.
Baine Bloodhoof: I’ll talk to him after this.
Lorna Crowley: is he upset?
Baine Bloodhoof: I don’t know. A little bit, I think. I’ll tell you once I know.
Lorna Crowley: tell tess
Lorna Crowley: she’ll go over and do all the cuddly stuff
Lorna Crowley: then she’ll tell me
Baine Bloodhoof: I will.
She glances back at Anduin’s little panel. He doesn’t seem upset. He’s laughing with Dezco and Aerin. But, she thinks idly, looking over at Liam, you can never really tell what someone’s thinking behind the mask they put up in front.
Yet, it’s Anduin. Whatever’s bothering him will be sorted out in no time. They just got a bunch of skilled new additions to their raid group and their guild. He has to be happy about that, right?
She waves goodbye and logs off for the night, sliding her feet back onto the floor and gathering up her glass and empty Sprite bottle. She’s got a shift tomorrow that she needs to be awake for, there’s no point staying up late just to sleep through her alarm.
Her phone pings with various Skype messages as she cleans her teeth and tugs a brush through her hair. Wrathion had been relatively well behaved. At least that hadn’t backfired on her – she doesn’t want to mess up again. It’d been on her recommendation that they bring in Vanessa, after all, and look how well that turned out. But no, Wrathion had done his job, and done it well.
Whatever, she thinks, dropping into bed. It’s just a game. Sure, it was the one thing that connected all of her friends, but a few bad apples didn’t spoil the basket and all that jazz.
Still. She does wonder what’s bothering Anduin.