A/N: This may have started out with a purpose in mind, but now it's more of a series of cathartic exercises to divert me from the serious, the angsty, the painful, etc. in my other fics. So don't expect philosophical insights or life lessons - except that sometimes, women can be just as unapologetically wanton as men, and it's often funnier not to see the forest for the trees. :)

I do play World of Warcraft, and I do play Horde almost exclusively, but of course I have played Alliance [ew]. Some of the folks our narrator meets along the way are characters on my account, like a certain bad-ass Tauren hunter you may run across occasionally if you hang out on Blackhand.

So if you like fluffy distractions, I hope you enjoy these drabbles of weirdness from the fertile (so to speak) mind of Zoop. I'm in this one for laughs, because few of my fics let you do that. Well, not continuously, anyway. :D

UPDATE: Oh, how the plans and schemes of the mighty go all wonky when they're not looking... Things in this fic ended up going into serious-land along with the general upheaval within the Horde. Fluff sort of takes a runner somewhere along the line, and our trusty reporter will adjust accordingly. Prepare yourself. Eventually, things are going to change...

Day 1, I guess

I'm totally not a diary-writer or anything, so this is going to suck big time. It was so weird, though, I had to start writing things down, just to keep my sanity. Or get it back. I don't know.

Yesterday I woke up in Stormwind City. Since this is probably never going to make it back home, let me just point out that, from my perspective, Stormwind City doesn't exist. Okay, it sort of exists, in a digital way. It's in a game I was playing. I fell asleep at the computer, and all of a sudden, it wasn't a game anymore. I was actually in Stormwind City. Like, rubbing elbows with dwarves and gnomes and draenei, oh my.

Here's the thing: I don't know much of anything about Stormwind. Yeah, I've been playing the game for years, but I never played any of the Alliance races. About the only times I've ever been in Stormwind were for holiday achievements and to earn that fabulous bear mount for axing the king.

Okay, take a deep breath. When I opened my eyes, I was on this bridge with three big-ass statues. I figured out pretty quick that I was at the entrance to the city. I'm not that much of a n00b, for crying out loud. Some people were heading in, some heading out. Some gnome clanked past me on one of their mechanical bird mounts. I just stood there looking retarded for several minutes, I think, until I finally started walking.

God dammit, what a wake-up call that was. I thought it was annoying in game. Think of Stormwind with real people in it. It's like a medieval city, complete with shit-covered streets, beggars on every corner, pick-pocketing ragamuffins, trigger-happy guards, snooty nobility holding kerchiefs over their noses against the stench, vermin of all kinds scuttling around (including gnomes)... I actually longed for the game version. And yet still the streets were crowded to the max with adventurers of all races (Alliance races, anyway), crafting, buying, selling, jostling for attention, bragging, and offering their services.

I decided it didn't matter how I managed it, I was getting the frik out of that city. Of course, I had no idea how to go about it. Oh, right, laugh it up. I could just turn my ass around and walk out. Sure. Heads up, people, no weapons. Even if I had any, I wouldn't know what to do with them. Even guns would have been a challenge.

So what does a classless n00b do to earn a bit of coin in a strange city? What do you think? I went door-to-door, talking to people, and got a few odd jobs. Thankfully, none involved running outside the city to kill anyone.

That's been my day today. I've gotten really good with the layout of the city, where to find the banks, the stockade, and the castle. I actually have a bank vault. In my name. Every copper I earned today went straight in. I swear, I was seeing Artful Dodgers all over the place.

My recollection of Stormwind isn't great, but I don't think it was quite this big in the game. I'm sitting in some combination orchard and graveyard that I'm pretty sure wasn't there last time I joined a raid to off the miraculously respawning king. Must be a post-Cataclysm addition. Great. Explains the bipedal dogs with impeccable dress sense I've also seen galloping awkwardly on all fours. I thought that looked ridiculous in the game; even worse in real life. I personally wouldn't go running around with my ass in the air, but hey, I'm human. Like, totally 100% human with no feral canine tendencies.

Oh, did I mention? It's almost like I got ported into the game straight out of my chair. Except that, heh, I now have the body of one of the svelte, perfectly-proportioned human women you see in character creation. Not the pear-shaped, thirty-something woman I was on the other side of the screen. I could get to like this place.