Fan-fiction #2

This was for the second writing prompt in the fan-fiction forum.

As much as I hate the desert of Hellfire Peninsula, the awful mushroom infestations you find in your luggage after a couple weeks in the Zangarmarsh, and fel stench of Shadowmoon Valley, Outland does have one thing going for it.

No, no, besides the ethereals with their dreamboat voices.

Outland has no murlocs.

See, I grew up in Westfall, and, Light save you, you can't go fishing in Westfall without running into a crowd of them.  Those ichthyoid tribes are more or less why I left in the first place.

I've always been a tinkerer.  Harvest reapers don't fix themselves, after all, and when they go haywire, well, you've really got to be quick on your feet.  Better yet, you knock 'em over from a distance, and you don't get shredded while you're trying to turn them off.  Sometimes it's faster just to lob a stick of dynamite at them; you're going to have to tear them apart to fix them anyway.

Yeah, so if the hazards of daily farm mechanics weren't bad enough, then the murlocs got into my ma's chickens.  Normally they just eat fish, or turtles, or whatever random sea creature has washed up out of the depths, but the settlement closest to our farm somehow got a taste for chicken.  Ma is pretty proud of her chickens - she swears up and down Saldean's have got nothing on hers - so she was incensed when half a dozen of hers went missing, with a trail of blood and feathers leading down towards the murloc huts on the beach below the bluff.

The beach had been off limits forever because of the murlocs, which meant my friend Elaine and I snuck down there every time my ma turned her back.  We avoided the murlocs, though, because if you catch one's attention, you have the attention of all of them, and Ma would have heard them a mile away if we'd had to run back home with a pack of them coming after.  We just picked up shells and made sand forts and pretended like we knew how to swim.

But hey, I was seventeen now, and I'd gotten not bad at knocking over harvest reapers with my cobbled-together shotgun, so I figured if they came back, maybe I could at least scare them off.  This would, of course, require a stake out.

I set up just inside the barn, where I could see the chicken coop clearly in the moonlight, with my shotgun and a harvest reaper "heart" to work on while I was waiting.  I sat there all night, got the heart fixed, and had just decided that the murlocs weren't showing up, when an absolutely riotous clatter broke out across the farm, behind the house.  I could hear my ma yelling up a storm by the time I got disentangled from the blanket I'd been dozing in, and she was throwing stones after a critter disappearing into the brush at the edge of the yard.

"Not a murloc, I take it," I said, and she turned to glare at me.

"No, it's that stupid coyote you've been feeding," she said, then gestured to the scattered buckets around the kitchen yard.  "Look at it.  He's been into scraps now.  Those are supposed to feed the hogs."

"Maybe tomorrow night, then," I said.  Ma pursed her lips, looking me up and down once.

"You know, I haven't made Westfall stew since your father left for the war," she said.  "I think you'd just about fit my old armor now..."

I'm not sure just how incredulously my brow had knitted as she disappeared back into the house, but she rolled her eyes at me when she came back out with a bundle.

"Murlocs really aren't that dangerous," she said.  "Not if you're armed and you're bigger than they are.  Besides, they really won't chase you beyond sight of their huts if you do get in over your head."

"What do murlocs have to do with Westfall stew?" I asked.

"Don't you remember?  The little round bits that just sort of... pop when you bite into them?" she said, gesturing vaguely with one hand.  "Those are murloc eyes."

"Eyes?" I gasped.  "But those were the best part!"

"And that's why the murlocs normally stay down on the beach rather than coming up and harassing our chickens, too," Ma said firmly.  "So why don't we see if this armor fits, and you can go get us a dozen or so eyes, and we'll have stew for supper."

I was speechless as she helped me into the armor - a bit horrified, really.  Sure, they were basically walking fish, and they'd definitely kill you if you got too close - but eating their eyes?

"There," Ma said when the last buckle had been adjusted.  The armor was mostly leather, with a few metal accents, and by the smell, it had been in a chest with mothballs for quite some time.  There was going to be absolutely no surprising the murlocs dressed in that.

Once my ma was satisfied with the armor, I headed back over to the barn to retrieve my shotgun and some shells, then stopped in the shed where I had my workbench to collect a half dozen of the little copper bombs I'd been making to pick off haywire reapers.  I hadn't really gotten over the squickiness of eating eyes yet, but I had heard of occasional forays against the coastal murlocs to keep their numbers down.  I'd been maybe six or seven the last time I'd heard of one happening, though.  No wonder they were going after the chickens.

Once I'd gathered up my supplies, I headed for the bluff.  Presumably if Ma wanted the eyes, I was going to have to kill some murlocs, but I really had no idea how to do that without having a dozen of them in my face.  Once at the bottom of the bluff, I stopped in its shadow to scope out the murloc settlement.  Elaine had gone off to Northshire Abbey a while back to study for the priesthood, and I hadn't been down there in a while.

It had grown, pretty substantially really.  Where once there were three little huts, now there were almost a dozen.  Some of the murlocs were armed with bows or spears, and these were generally patrolling further out from the huts.  I figured these were probably the best bet for getting some eyes for Ma's stew, since they'd be further from the huts - and the other murlocs - so running was more feasible if it came down to it.

Once I'd picked out one of the patrolling murlocs to start with, I got a bead on it through the scope on my gun, taking my time with the shot in order to hit a vital spot and hopefully drop it cleanly.  After a few seconds to get a bead on the murloc's chest, I pulled the trigger.

It actually wasn't that bad a shot; the murloc was bleeding profusely as it ran.  Unfortunately, it wasn't running towards me, as I'd expected, but back towards all its buddies, yelling all the way.

Honestly, my first instinct was to just book it back up the bluff.  I'd just provoked an entire village of murlocs, and I really wasn't that bad a runner.  Besides, they were a good forty to sixty yards from me.  I could probably be back up the bluff...

I hadn't expected the howl.  Despite living my whole life in Westfall, a coyote howl still gave me goosebumps.  It is, quite possibly, the eeriest sound I've ever heard, high-pitched and lonely.

There up the bluff was the coyote my ma had been chasing away from the scraps that morning.  He sprinted down the slope at the murloc I'd wounded, distracting them, and I quickly fixed my sights back on it as it was turning towards the coyote.

The second shot did drop it, and I took aim at another as the coyote moved towards the group that was now running towards it.  With the coyote's help, I was quickly able to drop half a dozen - I didn't even have to resort to the copper bombs I'd brought with me.  He sat, madly wagging his tail, and watched me while I gingerly removed the dead murlocs' eyes from the sockets.  And to think I had liked Westfall stew when I was little...

Ma wasn't really happy to see the coyote following me back, so I just handed her the sack full of eyes and headed over to the pump to clean off all the ick.

"Elaine's mother said she's just about finished her studies at the abbey," Ma said, still watching the coyote.

"Yeah.  And?"

"You didn't want to go see her?"

"Who's going to get the reapers working?" I asked.

"I can fix a harvest reaper, you know," she said, raising a brow at me.  "Although now that you can handle the murlocs yourself, we could have stew probably every week--"

"Fine, fine, I'll go see Elaine," I said.

I didn't really mind that idea, but my dad had left for the war twelve years before, and that was the last I had seen him.  I didn't like the idea of Ma being alone on the farm.  But if it meant I wasn't going to be picking murloc eyes out of their sockets anytime soon...


Outland did have some things going for it, for sure.