Friday, June 27, 2008

What do they do with them?

Goodness, it's been a while.  I do apologise - my trainer insisted I had to pass an exam before he would teach me any more spells.  *sigh*

I'm back to helping out in Tranquillien again, and just today I went looking for Ranger Valanna.  She seems to be a very sweet girl, but... well... do try not to get on her bad side, hmm?  Before she would accept any help getting home (dragging her slightly-kooky Lieutenant by the scruff of the neck, no doubt), she insisted that I get her something.

Ears.  Troll ears, to be precise.  I believe she said something about making a necklace.  Far be it from me to criticise her taste in personal adornment, but I don't think it's going to go with her complexion.  Still, you could say that we Forsaken know a little bit about obsession and revenge, so I was happy to comply with her request.

That is, until I found out how long it was going to take.

I thought it was going to be easy!  She wanted six ears.  It seemed quite obvious that all I would need to do would be to kill three trolls, take two ears from each, and voila!  One rather icky necklace.  Perhaps four trolls, if one of them turned out to have suffered a tragic childhood accident and only had one.  But no!  Do those Zeb'Sora trolls chew each others' ears off as a game?  Do they practice strange ear-mutilation rituals as part of their religion?  About one in three had ONE ear.  And then there were the ones where I smote their ears off.  I wasn't aware Smite had the power to destroy ears.  I think I fried a couple off with my wand, too.  To add insult to injury, there were at least two perfectly good ears that I accidentally ruined when I tried to cut them off.  I'm a tailor, not a skinner, and scissors just don't do as good a job as a knife...

By the end of it I was tempted to sneak across westwards to An'telas, where I know there are plenty of night elves, all of which have two perfectly good ears.  Troll ears and night elf ears are very similar, as you may have noticed, and I thought it would be easier to harvest ears if everything I was killing started out with ears - the smiting and wanding and oops-chopped-that-one-in-half accidents couldn't slow things down too far then.  I decided not to in the end, because Valanna might have been able to tell (by the smell, if nothing else), and I didn't want her to decide that a couple of Forsaken ears would make a nice addition to her jewellery...