"Must you take it so rough?" inquired the night elf, her usual prickly, pompous self.
"Perhaps ya'd like to drive, doll," squawked back the squat dwarvess holding the reins of the four oxen driving the covered wagon. Squat, but cute, by dwarven standards if not any - long reddish-orange braids dangling halfway down her shapely form, a pair of strong but smooth pinkish legs and forearms peeking out from her cutoff reinforced leather trousers and jacket.
"I would. I could do it better than you. I have. For years. I got paid to do it better than you're doing it."
"Ah, the humans, they were just flatterin' ya, doll. I know well those types, they say anything to get down the panties of a fine night elf like ya."
"They didn't get anything from me, except my excellent driving skills." The night elf shifted in the less-comfortable passenger's seat. She was more interested in butting heads with her companion. For all their contentiousness, the two women, Meowth and she who was at the reins, Weena, were the best of friends. Their petty arguments were a love-wrestle of sorts, as the two could not bring themselves to physically consummate their mutual attraction.
The night elf turned up her nose and flexed her long jade eyebrows, her long face a careful study in affected arrogance. Her dwarven companion practiced not noticing. The covered wagon - empty, as it happened - plodded along to the rendezvous at the tavern in one of the new "Wrynn Villages" - tacky, tasteless, mostly recovered plaguewood little settlements springing up in the reclaimed land of what everyone still called Eastern Plaguelands.
Why their buyer had insisted on such a tasteless, out-of-the-way rendezvous was a mystery. Weena sensed trouble. Actually, she hoped for it. Really wanted a chance to try out her new trillium boomstick, complete with self-cleaning feature and a samophlange attachment. The former, of course, was developed by someone who wasn't a dwarf, for boomstick enthusiasts who weren't dwarves.
"Blast!" cursed Weena.
Here the road narrowed to a one-way pass between high outcroppings, with high ridges on either side, and dense plague-petrified foliage all about. And in the middle of a pass, lay a fallen crate, its contents strewn all about. A first-edition of the "Compendium of Dragon Slaying", piles of neatly folded clothes and armor, obviously not worn, jewelry boxes, piles of correspondence, bottles of strange fluids, all cluttering the narrow pass. A lone female draenei, dressed casually in a low-cut swashbuckler's short doublet and shorts fiddled with the gear, patiently packing it back into the box. Despite the draenei's dressed-down state, Weena noticed a golden signet ring of a paladin's order on her left middle finger.
"Move ye arse!" screeched the dwarvess.
The draenei rose slowly from the crate, making a point of putting extra weight on her wide hips and generous, toned tush. "I am, friend ally. My cargo fell as I was taking this bend. It is important to me. I apologize for the inconvenience." There was a simple, self-confident honesty to the draenei's words that enraged the dwarvess. She really wished the paladin had been a blood elf. Mah boomstick wants using!
"Ya, well...move ye big arse faster! Ye big arse blue space-goat-person-paladin-thing!"
The draenei smiled slightly, unperturbed, and continued her work. About the same speed. Maybe slower. Or not. A moment. "Friend, there is a tavern not far from here. Perhaps you'd care to get drinks while I clean my things up? The tavern was newly built, I believe. I am curious if it's any good. Could you let me know?" So saying, the paladin chucked a small leather purse at the dwarvess. She threw them overhand; owing to her alien stature and double-joined legs, draenei's movements seemed strange to the usually acute dwarvess, but it wasn't for that reason the dwarvess allowed the purse to land uncaught between herself and her companion, who looked on blankly, vaguely amused if jaded at the show.
"Ye move your gitiness, spacegoat! I gots a ways to go today, ya hear? And yer in the way!"
"It cannot be helped, friend. But you will have to take your rest anyway, no?"
The night elf decided to chime in. "Weena...perhaps you didn't hear. This goat person is offering us free beer. FREE. BEER. Free beer. I mean it's gonna suck but at least it can get us smashed, right?" Meowth had been away from Teldrassil a long time. Still maintained the outward calm common to her people, at least. Well, at least when she was sober.
"Eye don't be carin' about...free beer? FREE BEER?" The dwarvess was suddenly enthusiastic. "Well, ah, let's be goin'! And ye there, ye goat thing, move yer arse while we gone!" The dwarvess cussed at the oxen - actually, her unique command for "back up", and the covered wagon eased up ponderously back down the road, off a byway to the tavern, a little hovel hewn from whole logs of petrified plaguewood. The draenei placidly went back to fiddling with her box.
The inside of the tavern was every bit as much a grotesque sight as one would expect. It hadn't taken long at all for the ichor and plague fungus stench from the plaguewood to drip down the walls and suffuse the dimly-lit tavern in its muggy odor. There were only a few guests - mostly plaguewood lumberjacks and oddball adventurers, those sorts who were drawn to marginal areas, like the Eastern Plaguelands settlements.
One of the adventurers - a jungle troll in black leather armor - turned lasciviously to Meowth. "Eye dere, lovely lady, know wat time of year dis' be? It be what the Humans call de love-day! 'Course for us trolls, evr'y day be da love-day, ya not have the fine looks of a troll lady, but aye take ya anyway, for a troll-ride!" The troll laughed and caterwauled, chaining backflips. "Ey, ya night elves, ya can backflip too, ya? Wanna contest? Winner gets the back!"
Meowth nursed her beer - a dubious, off-brown beverage, touched by the extinguished fungal growth like everything else in the twice-dead wood. She didn't look up. "Here in this bar, pathetic troll says anything he thinks will get him some action for once in his life."
"Ey' lady, dat not be nice, ya gotta be nice on love-day! Or ya seein' someboday?" Gesturing grotesquely at Weena. "That lady friend of yours, more than a friend, ya?"
Weena was engrossed in a game of arm-wrestling with a human. She wasn't sure if he was alive or not. "Mister Troll, don't flatter yerself that yer on Meowth's level, or even mine. Even me, got more stones than you, done something yer not troll-man enough to ever do!"
"'En wat might dat be, 'shorts'?"
"I've seen that dainty night elf lady naked!"
Everyone except Meowth and the troll roared with laughter. Meowth blushed a bit. "But, troll, if I can't be ravishin' Meowth, ye can't either."
"Oh, I see how it is, ya roly-poly. Ya after mah mojo! But dis 'Meowth' here, she not be worth it, I bet she used to be a man!" The troll laughed riotously. He knew what buttons to press. For some reason, this remark got the night elf quite a bit more peeved than would be expected. Rose her hand to strike the troll-