Chapter 76 – The Scarlet Enchantress of Zul'Farrak
The desert sun was setting over the ancient troll city of Zul'Farrak, heat shimmering off the sandstone in waves, dry wind carrying the distant sound of drums.
A five-man party pushed deeper into the instance.
Ethan — Human Priest (Healer) Sheldon — Night Elf Rogue (Self-appointed "Optimal Damage Dealer by Pure Theoretical Calculation") Leonard — Dwarf Warrior (Main Tank) Raj — Draenei Hunter (Pet: a great horned owl named Curry) Howard — Gnome Mage (Currently convinced he was carrying the group)
They'd cleared the outer courtyards without much trouble. Now, at the far end of the grand ceremonial hall, the final boss waited.
The party crept forward through the torchlight and stopped.
She was standing in the center of the chamber with her arms folded and a smile that the game's rendering engine had absolutely no business making that expressive. She wore the deep crimson and gold of someone who had decorated her dungeon specifically to be impressive.
Her nameplate floated above her in elegant script:
Scarlet Enchantress · Penny
"Welcome to my domain."
Her voice came through the speakers like warm smoke. Unhurried. Privately amused by all of them.
"The sands of Zul'Farrak won't remember your names."
A pause, perfectly timed.
"But I'll remember every face worth remembering."
Howard's gnome character leaned forward approximately six inches from his monitor. His actual physical body at the desk mirrored the movement.
"Okay, that character model is exceptional. Someone in Blizzard's art department is getting a raise." He pointed at his screen. "That chestpiece. I need that chestpiece. That transmog is going on my mage the second it drops."
Raj opened his mouth. Looked at the boss. Closed his mouth. Began quietly petting the owl beside him instead.
Sheldon's fingers paused on his keys long enough to deliver an assessment. "Note the gear configuration — her equipment is heavily weighted toward Spirit. That's the signature stat of charm and mind-control specializations. I'd recommend everyone mentally de-prioritize loot acquisition and recalibrate toward the more immediate concern of not dying. Particularly you, Howard. Your armor value at current gear score is functionally equivalent to a dress shirt."
"My armor value is fine—"
"It is not fine. It is a liability with a frost bolt attached to it."
Leonard raised his shield on screen. "Okay, enough! Pulling in three — two — one—"
The fight opened clean.
Leonard held aggro from the first second, positioning perfectly against the south wall. Ethan settled into his healing rhythm — Flash Heal, Renew, Prayer of Mending cycling through the group before anyone even needed it. Sheldon's rogue materialized behind the boss in a Shadow Step that, even in a video game, managed to look precisely calculated. Howard's Frostbolts landed in a steady chain. Raj kited from range, Curry the owl maintaining a harassing orbit.
The boss's health bar dropped in smooth increments.
"Okay, I'm going to say it," Howard announced, not taking his eyes off his cooldowns. "Mages are, statistically, the most comprehensively designed class in this game. Burst damage, crowd control, sustained output — all optimized. I don't make the rules. I just benefit from them."
"The fight isn't over," Sheldon said flatly.
"I'm acknowledging a fact—"
"She's at fifty-two percent. She hasn't used a single ability from her Phase Two kit. Your celebration is, at minimum, premature and, at maximum, going to jinx us."
Ethan watched the boss's cast bar without blinking. "He's right. She hasn't touched her crowd control yet. Something's coming."
At exactly 50% health, the music changed.
The boss tilted her head toward Leonard's character with an expression of specific interest.
"Little tank." Her voice dropped a register. "You're more interesting than the others."
A pink particle effect bloomed over Leonard's character model. Small floating hearts. His eyes went blank — literally, the game rendered his pupils as soft pink spirals.
Leonard's hands left his keyboard.
"I…" His voice came out dreamy and slightly confused. "I have to protect her. She needs me. She's—"
"LEONARD'S CHARMED," Ethan shouted.
"Dispel it!" Howard was already tabbing through targets.
"I can't," Sheldon said, with the tone of someone confirming a hypothesis they'd already run. "It's not a standard curse or magic debuff. The ability is classified as Mind Control — undispellable without a Priest's Mass Dispel, which is on cooldown because someone burned it on the trash pack before the boss."
"That trash pack needed it—"
"It demonstrably did not—"
Leonard's character turned around.
He raised his sword.
"For the Queen!"
He swung at Sheldon.
Sheldon's night elf — who had been mid-backstab cycle — took a full tank-geared melee hit directly to the face and went from 87% health to zero in one global cooldown.
His corpse settled peacefully on the sandstone floor.
Sheldon stared at his screen.
"As I predicted — charm abilities of this classification target the party member with the lowest Spirit stat, which in a standard composition defaults to the main tank. The damage output is amplified by the tank's own attack power, creating—" A pause. "I'm dead."
He said the last two words with the specific flatness of a man who had seen it coming and found the confirmation more annoying than the death itself.
Howard's gnome took a shield bash that launched him sideways across the chamber.
"WHY" — he watched his character ragdoll — "wasn't I the one who got charmed?! She looked RIGHT AT ME—"
Raj attempted to disengage to maximum range. Leonard's warrior charged across the entire room in two seconds, the way Warriors do, and cut through Curry before getting to Raj himself.
Raj's character sat down on the floor.
He didn't type anything.
He just sat there, holding the owl's body, and said nothing for a long moment.
Then, quietly: "...Curry."
Ethan was fully in crisis management mode now — emergency heals firing in sequence, trying to buy seconds, watching the health bars drain faster than he could fill them.
"Ethan—" Howard's voice, slightly resigned. "It's a wipe. I'm going to Frost Nova to give you a window. You run for the door."
Before he finished the sentence, Leonard's warrior turned, spotted the gnome mage, and hit him once.
Howard's character described a small arc through the air and landed on its back, tiny arms and legs pointing straight up at the ceiling.
A long silence.
"That," Howard said, from somewhere beneath his dignity, "is not balanced. A charmed tank should not be out-DPSing a mage. That is not a design philosophy I can support."
Everyone was down.
Except Ethan.
The boss walked toward his character across the empty hall, stepping over the scattered corpses of the party with an expression of serene satisfaction.
"What a resilient little priest." She stopped in front of him. The ambient music shifted to something quieter and more dangerous. "You're not the first group to make it this far. But you're the first one where the healer is still standing at the end."
She tilted her head.
"You're exactly my type."
Ethan's character — staff raised, mana at 12% — squared up. "I'm not surrendering."
She reached out and brushed his character's cheek with two fingers, the gesture accompanied by a soft golden particle effect that the art team had definitely spent more time on than was strictly necessary.
"You're the last one standing in a room full of your friends' corpses, running on empty, and you want to keep fighting." She almost sounded fond about it. "Defiance is charming. But sometimes life isn't about fighting." A pause. "Sometimes it's about making a better choice."
"What choice."
She leaned in close enough that the camera angle shifted automatically.
"Serve me."
The hall went quiet for exactly three seconds.
"I abso—"
[Forced Conscription] — The target is bound to the Enchantress's will. Movement control transferred. Mental awareness retained.
Ethan's character went limp. His running animation stopped. His hands dropped to his sides.
But his face — the game rendered it — was still fully awake. Aware of exactly what was happening.
Penny's character lifted his chin.
"My domain doesn't need another fighter. I have plenty of those." She walked him slowly toward the inner chamber. "What I need is someone worth talking to. And someone who knows how to take care of people."
She glanced back at him over her shoulder.
"You want to beat me and take my gear? Honestly — why would you bother? Come work for me instead. Purple velvet. Real food — not the dried meat rations you've been eating since Ironforge. A bed that doesn't spawn inside a raid instance."
A significant pause.
"And you can take my equipment off yourself. At your own pace."
Ethan's character stared at her with the expression of a man whose entire value system was being stress-tested.
"You're — this is — you're making me a kept man! I have teammates to resurrect! I have loot to distribute! I have responsibilities—"
"Here, your only responsibility is me." She opened a door he hadn't noticed before. Beyond it: a chamber decorated in deep red and gold, a fire in the hearth, the faint sound of music.
She walked him through.
The door closed.
From somewhere behind it — muffled, increasingly distant — Ethan's voice:
"I DON'T WANT TO BE A TROPHY PRIEST— I WANT TO CLEAR THE INSTANCE— I WANT TO RAID— LET ME OUT—"
The door was very solid.
The hall was very quiet.
"Ethan."
"—LET ME OUT I HAVE A HEALING ROTATION—"
"Ethan."
He sat up so fast he nearly rolled off the couch.
Hair everywhere. Collar of his shirt twisted sideways. Both arms still mid-gesture from whatever he'd been doing in the dream.
He blinked.
Living room. Morning light. The familiar layout of 4A. The smell of cereal.
Sheldon was standing directly in front of him with the expression of a man who had been patient for longer than was reasonable and was prepared to cite specific clauses.
"You are in my spot," Sheldon said. "This is the second time I've said it. Per the Roommate Agreement — which you cosigned as a witness, meaning you have working knowledge of its contents — repeated occupation of a designated spot constitutes a formal infraction requiring acknowledgment and immediate remediation."
Ethan looked at him for a moment.
"I was just—" He ran a hand through his hair. "Was I dreaming?"
"Based on the sounds you were making, yes, and I chose not to investigate further." Sheldon moved past him as Ethan shifted aside. "Also, my cereal."
He picked up the bowl from the coffee table and held it out.
The contents had achieved a consistency that was somewhere between porridge and spackling compound.
"The gelatinization threshold," Sheldon said, "has been crossed. The starch-to-milk bonding has progressed beyond the point of palatability. I now have cereal paste. This is a consequence of waiting for you to vacate my spot rather than displacing you by force, which the Roommate Agreement technically permits under Section Three, Subsection B."
"Make another bowl," Ethan said. "Make one for me too."
Sheldon looked at him with the expression of a man recalculating his morning.
"You understand that fulfilling your request requires me to re-measure the cereal-to-milk ratio from scratch, reset the soak timer, and absorb an additional three to four minute delay into my Tuesday routine."
"I do understand that."
A beat.
"Fine," Sheldon said, and went back to the kitchen, adding under his breath, "— still preferable to consuming gelatinized carbohydrate paste."
Leonard materialized from the hallway in pajama pants and a Pasadena Institute of Technology t-shirt, holding a coffee mug, assessing the living room situation.
"Why were you on the couch?" He looked at Ethan. "I offered Penny my room last night and she said no. She takes it for you?"
Ethan opened his mouth.
The dream was still fresh enough that looking at Leonard triggered a very specific feeling — the memory of watching this man's warrior turn around mid-fight and one-shot Sheldon with cheerful vacant-eyed enthusiasm.
"I don't know, Leonard," Ethan said. "Maybe it comes down to willpower."
"Willpower how?"
Ethan caught himself. Dream logic had bled into the sentence before he'd run it past his actual brain. "Nothing. Forget it. Early morning."
At which point, from the direction of his bedroom:
"Why is it six-thirty in the morning and everyone is already being loud—"
Penny appeared in the hallway.
Oversized t-shirt. The fuzzy slippers she kept at the apartment for emergencies. Hair in the specific magnificent chaos of someone who had slept hard and not yet done anything about it. Mid-yawn, hand over her mouth.
She dropped onto the arm of the couch and looked at the three of them.
"Morning. Why does everyone look like they're having a meeting about something?"
Sheldon emerged from the kitchen holding two cereal bowls with the precise grip of someone who had measured them identically.
He looked at Penny.
"Good morning, Penny. Leonard has a question he would like to ask you." He set the bowls down. "Specifically: why did you choose to sleep in Ethan's room last night instead of his, given that he extended the offer first, chronologically speaking."
Ethan and Leonard both turned.
Leonard's expression was the specific expression of a man who had not actually been planning to ask that question but now very much wanted the answer.
Penny looked at Sheldon.
Then at Leonard.
Then at Ethan.
Then back at Sheldon.
"You know what," she said, standing back up, "I need coffee before this conversation."
She walked to the kitchen.
"That's not a no," Leonard called after her.
"It's also not a yes, Leonard. It's a coffee first."
Sheldon sat down in his spot, picked up his cereal, and looked at the television with the satisfaction of a man who had successfully initiated a social dynamic he had no personal stake in and was prepared to observe it unfold.
Ethan looked at him.
"You did that on purpose."
Sheldon took a bite. "I answered Leonard's question preemptively to save time. It was efficient."
"It was absolutely not efficient."
"Results pending," Sheldon said.
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