Yoo-hoo?

  Cal? Calindrava hon? Are you here? It's me, Melindrava. Where are you?!

  ...

  ......

  .........*sigh*

Not again!

  Why does my sister keep doing this to me?

  She's sent me a bird. What the heck does she think I'm going to do with a bird? Cockatiels don't even taste good, so there's no point in cooking it, and the damn thing LIKES me! I opened the package - in hindsight, the airholes should have been a warning - stupid bird flies out and tries to perch on my head.

  And Zhar'grave says it's "cute".

  *sigh*

They're Not Overalls

  Took long enough, but I've got some new gear. I no longer look like some human hick standing knee-deep in cow effluent, talking about the weather.

  I don't look cool and scary, either.  I need to work on this a bit more.

There are SOME limits.

  So, I think we've established that I'm nasty. I am Forsaken by choice, I'm a warlock by trade, I have no qualms about killing the living and ripping their souls out, whatever, it doesn't bother me. Even so, there are some things that you just don't do.

  I got a bit annoyed when I found out that Thule Ravenclaw (you've probably heard of him, he had this nice little setup on Fenris Isle with undead gnolls and so on) made his servant Alaric into an undead against his will. That's Lich King stuff, okay? Bad. And then he went and chopped the poor guy's head off and gave it to his gnolls to play with! Sheesh!

  (Admittedly, I probably wouldn't have reacted so badly if finding a talking head in a gnoll's goodie sack hadn't given me the heebies. Us warlocks don't like being given heebies. It looks bad.)

  Anyway, I felt bad for the poor guy, so I found the rest of his body and then got him into a nice quiet niche where he could rest. Then I went and killed Thule, because like I said, there are some things you just don't do. Or if you do 'em, you get consequences. I felt like being the consequences.

  Oh yeah... Sis got us into a guild. Apparently it's run by a friend of hers, some blood elf she met in Silvermoon. The friend is filthy rich, too, so this is pretty good! I'd be more cheerful about the whole thing if I wasn't starting to wonder about Zhar'grave, though. First he acts like a little kid going for a pretend ride in a boat, and now he's making jokes! "I... am void... where prohibited"?!? What the heck does that mean, anyway?!

No, Zhar.

You can't have a ride in the boat.

...Because the corpses are using it right now, OK?

*facepalm*

I swear, sometimes being a warlock is like babysitting.

Good grief, not again!

  I swear, my sister likes dressing me up like a kid with her dolls. And now she's learned from the whole tuxedo incident - she's started sending me clothes with decent buffs on them, better than the stuff I had before, so I kinda have to wear them...

  Sheesh. I look like I should be the clueless human hick in the field growing the pumpkins, not the scary undead warlock poisoning them.

Sheesh!

  Everyone's determined to piss me off lately!

  First there's my sister. I do something that's guaranteed to tick her off, and do I get yelled at? Do I get noogied? Do I get chased? Do I get things thrown at me? Do I, in fact, get normal big-sisterly behaviour? No! I get the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger routine! Since when did she turn into our mother?! It's no fun if she won't play along!

  Then there's all these apothecaries and whatnot who're using me as a glorified errand boy. "Go fetch this." "Go kill that." "Hmmmm, very interesting, I can learn a lot from this... take a sample to him." How about telling me why it's so damned interesting, huh? I'm an alchemist! I want to know these things! But nooooo, I just get to be the lab assistant and gofer. Pah!

  At least I get to kill things.

Hahaha!

  Hey Sis! I didn't ruin the tuxedo - I SOLD it!

  *raspberry*

Names

  Us warlocks tend to think about names more than other people. Names are important to us. You know a demon's name, you can summon that demon. That's why we always get the same ones, not like mages with their generic nameless elementals. (That's 'cause of the difference between demons and elementals, y'see, where demons are individuals and elementals are just sort of facets of one big natural force... anyway.)

  Names of places are important too. Revealing. Well, some of them anyway. A lot of places got 'named' when the person making the map pointed at something and asked a local "what's that?" ...and since they were usually talking to someone who didn't know their language well if at all, a lot of places are called something like "I don't know, what?" or "Your finger, you fool!" It could even be something like "Piss off and stop bothering me, you weirdo!"

  And then there are the places which so obviously deserve a particular name that the mapmaker doesn't bother asking a local, and just writes down the first word that comes into their head. Like... Winterspring is frikkin' cold. Desolace is frikkin' desolate. I'd be willing to guess that Hillsbrad has some hills somewhere. And the Barrens might as well be called the Borings.

  You guessed it. I got sent to the Barrens. Damn apothecary couldn't walk the stupid worg heart here by himself... eh, he's paying me. There is frikkin' well NOTHING HERE! Dead grass and flat land and the sun beating down on you and that's IT. Can't even take a break under a tree 'cause every bit of shade here is already inhabited by things with big teeth. Oh sure, there's an oasis or two, but you gotta fight centaurs and hyenas and so on to get to the water, and then you gotta strain the huge snapping turtles out of it before you can drink any. Sheesh.

  Whatever. I'm gonna make my delivery, get the heck outta here back to somewhere with some green in the scenery, and keep a lookout for anywhere called LockLootLode.

I don't believe this.

  Look what I found in the mail this morning.  My da-- blo-- lovely big sister opened ninety-three friggin' Easter eggs to get me this outfit.  "Now you can't say you don't have anything nice to wear when I ask you to escort me somewhere," she says.

  Relatives.  You can't live with 'em, and you can't sacrifice them to nameless eldritch gods... not when they're your big sister you can't, at least.

Fine

  I'm gonna punt that imp.

  Anyway... forgot to mention that I ran into Mel's friend Mel. (My sister Melindrava's friend Melissa, that is.) She's not dead yet, and I don't reckon she'll be with the Scarlet Crusade for much longer - I was puttering around Tirisfal Glades killing the annoyances and I overheard her captain yelling at her for not "pursuing her duties with sufficient enthusiasm". Translation, she wasn't killing undead enough.

  Heh. Guess running into Sis kinda upset her...

Wokka wokka wokka wokka!

Boss is mean.  He makes me firebolt the bad guys and then get hit while he stands there and picks flowers.  But he likes Zhar'grave better now so I get to nap, hahahahahahaaaa!

- Jaknam

Busy, busy...

  I'm not a diary addict the way my sister is.  She blows her nose, she writes about it in her diary.  Me, I'm probably going to ignore this unless something BIG happens.

  I figure becoming undead and discovering I can be a warlock counts as big.  Heh.  This is fun.

  So anyway, my sister goes undead, our parents die, and I decided stuff this.  Life as an orphan sucks.  I coulda wormed my way into another family no problem, but with everyone in our village terrified of the Undead Plague and the Scourge what sorta life would that've been?  Poor and hungry and hiding all the time, that's what.  I figured, if you can't have a good life where you are, switch sides... so that's what I did.  Broke into a house where a family had been boarded up to die and stayed with them until I knew I'd caught the Plague.  Purely selfish motives.  Sure, I brought them water and stuff, but that was just to maximise my contact with them.  I ain't soft.

  Definitely ain't soft now.  Forget the blond curls and big blue eyes (they were useful but oh well), now it's kinda greenish hair and no eyes.  Beats me how I can still see, but if it works don't knock it.  Who cares... I'm working on getting my own way through intimidation and dark powers now, and the whole no-eyes look works for that.  Had to kinda strap the back of my head back on when I woke up undead, too.

  'Course, I didn't know I'd wake up Forsaken instead of Scourge.  Didn't know the Forsaken existed.  Good thing I ended up where I did, though, 'cause being Scourge would be even more of a pain than being alive and poor.  AND I get to be a warlock!  Now I'm feared instead of fearful (not that I was ever the scared type) and I've got my minions Jaknam and Zhar'grave to put the fear on anyone who doesn't wanna play.

  Zhar'GRAVE.  Heh.  Great name for an undead's minion.  I like that, and he whines less than Jaknam anyway.  "Is this REALLY necessary?"  Yes, now shut up and fry that guy, I want his loot.  "This was not in my contract!"  Oh yes it was, I made sure.  It's your job to take one for the team, i.e. me.  Zhar'grave just says things like "It will be done."  Much better.

  Well, gotta go kill werewolf thingies now.  A warlock's work is never done.

Heh.

Ha!  It worked.  I knew it would.