A/N: hello, readers! Welcome to volume two, where a half night elf, half troll from Ratchet learns a bout the world one mistake at a time. All three volumes have been finished for over a year, were edited and have been sitting around on my hard drive and online file storage. I hope you enjoy reading.

As I've stated before, you DO NOT have to read the other stories for this one to make sense. Each volume is a self contained thread in and of itself, and I don't assume the reader knows any of the back stories coming in. Personally, I would be thrilled if you read all my stories, but I won't force you to. If you just want to read this one and be finished, you can do that.

Oh, one more thing...this takes place in the year 67. Assuming that the Warlords of Draenor expansion took place in the year 31 of the Warcraft timeline...well, the first chapter here establishes some changes to Azeroth and its people as I imagine things would unfold. Read on!

All along the fields, the military column marched on. Trudging through the tall grass, made vibrant by reclamation efforts, the column of at least thirty people, some riding, some flying and some walking, pressed on. Women and even a handful of men wearing the armor of the Sentinel Army led the group composed overwhelmingly of night elves, leaving a few draenei and Tauren to trail behind. Most of those at the back were irregulars, conscripted temporarily in order to support the ongoing reclamation efforts in an isolated, remote area.

A few women from the Sentinel Air Force sat almost lazily on their hippogriff a overhead. Usually quite stoic and taciturn, the riders merely shouldered their lances and bows settled in to a slow glide on the thermals rising up from below, keeping watch over nothing and looking as weary as everyone else. There were sparse trees on the northern peninsula of Azshara, not so much a result of the goblin logging operations as the general pollution that had only recently begun to recede.

At one time, the night elves had been members of the Alliance, if only temporarily. They had initially fought both the Alliance and the Horde during the Third War, picking one foreign faction over the other only due to the shock and weakness that initially accompanied the end of their immortality over forty years prior. Once the factional wars died down, the faction once known as the Sentinels withdrew from the Alliance as quickly as the Forsaken had withdrawn from the Horde, leaving a world with four factions as it had once been up until a few years after the Third War. As much as many of the Kaldorei valued the wonders and knowledge brought to them by the outside world - a society that had been immortal for so long had little knowledge of medical science, motherhood and prenatal care - there had always been boiling resentment. Joining the Alliance had led to the introduction of new germs and diseases, regulations on their traditional hunting grounds, the introduction of missionaries proselytizing on behalf of the Light and the general subordination of the needs of their people to the will of Stormwind. A few viewed the Alliance as a convenient faction to join at a time when the night elves were faced with an outside world that was new, confusing and even frightening. Others embraced the outside world fully, reveling in mortality and loving the return of the emotions that had been buried in their hearts for so many millennia. And a few reacted the opposite way, incensed that their eons-old priestesses of the moon and archdruids accepted the leadership of human kings across the ocean who generally died at an age where many Kaldorei would barely be considered old enough to drink.

All of that was in the past, though. The current serving High Priestess in Darnassus had been the one to decree the withdrawal of their people from the Alliance decades ago, and for all the criticisms against her - considered blasphemous by conservatives but always present - the reality was that her decision had borne proverbial fruit. Their fate in their own hands, the Sentinels negotiated much more aggressively with the Horde, not only pushing them to live up to the verbal promises of one of their former Warchiefs to their previous High Priestess to pull out of Ashenvale but also to return the northern peninsula of Azshara to its original owners. The southern peninsula, largely deforested and defiled, was left to the Horde both as a symbolic gesture and due to the fact that it was largely beyond saving.

It hadn't been too difficult to convince them. Their logging operations that had desecrated the Kaldorei's holy land for so long were simply moved from Nightsong Forest to southern Azshara, and their outpost on the Zoram Strand was dismantled and the materials used to storm every Alliance outpost in the Barrens, knowing that the Sentinels wouldn't lift a finger to help. Former Horde outposts north of the Barrens and southern Azshara were blessed, cleansed and grown into night elven groves one by one and although Stonetalon was still a point of contention, the Sentinels had largely cut off from the outside world save trade relations at their port cities. On the one hand, it meant that they could take what they'd learned from the outside world, adapt their society to it at their own pace and only accept further developments if they so chose. On the other hand, it also meant that the peoples of northern Kalimdor were largely left on their own when facing recurring threats from the brave new world, relying only on a scant few allies from neutral factions to supplement their ranks.

The current renewed invasion of silithids - all the way on the polar opposite end of the continent from Silithus - was a prime example of that.

The rebuilding of Nendis wasn't how it had started, but it was perhaps the most serious flash point. Once an ancient night elf port city that had survived the Sundering and the entire Long Vigil, Nendis had been burned down by one of their own. A heretical demon hunter (though weren't they all heretics?) whose name was no longer spoken had razed the city to the ground just to steal its fleet of ships, leaving ash and blood in the wake. Only now, roughly forty five years later, were the night elves in the completion process of the rebuilding of New Nendis. The harassment of the silithids, however, had become to intense that the night elven government - a theocracy backed up by a military dictatorship - finally made the decision to garrison troops there before the reconstruction had even been finished.

The population of night elves was still lower than that of other races, even after the baby boom that occurred within a few years of losing immortality. While they tended to rely on skill rather than numbers and prided themselves on the fact that a night elven huntress was roughly equal to an entire unit of Orc grunts or human footmen, they also had to face the fact that many of those older, more experienced Kaldorei were dead or dying of old age. They continued refilling their ranks with the young, as brash and unfocused as youth of any other race, and had to resort to supplemental irregulars from mercenary camps or enlistment booths.

Which was how the biracial young man radiating voodoo found himself and his paladin companion walking among the other irregulars in the first place.

"So your mom is the second type of night elf, I take it?"

"Huh?"

So enamored had the young man been in their rehashing of the state of world affairs that he hadn't even realized he'd been engaged in an outer dialogue rather than an inner monologue. His long, indigo mane, most often teased up into a Mohawk, had been tied back into a very loose ponytail; when among his mother's people, he always tried his best not to stand out considering how much they valued conformity. The fact that he had tusks already made him stand out enough; they were smaller than those of his father's people, but still enough to make him look different enough. But as he turned to look down at the draenei female walking by his side, the rubber band he'd used became even looser and the indigo wave spilled out over his shoulders. Long hair was the norm in night elven society, but it had to be tied back during war. They hadn't encountered any silithids since they'd left the Darnassian Base Camp a day ago, but one of the sentinels riding on her sabre next to them sent him a sharp look signaling for him to keep up appearances anyway.

Redoing the ponytail helped the mixed man to focus a little more on the world outside his head than inside. He wasn't given to daydreaming the way his parents did, but the long talks Zhenya would often thrust upon him had a tendency to make him feel a little light headed.

"So your mom is the second type of night elf, I take it?" she repeated, an odd habit of hers that she didn't seem to realize seemed odd.

"The second type?" Navarion asked, experiencing difficulty remembering all they had said.

"She's the type that embraced the outer world and all it offered, I take it?"

It clicked, and Navarion shook the stars from his eyes while nodding. His silver eyes glowed as brightly as those of any pureblooded night elf, and the light of the sun interfered with his vision. Zhenya's gold eyes evolved in an entirely different solar system; she never complained about the sun and didn't seem to have difficulty seeing at all. Though it was hard to tell considering the construction of her helmet: her ears, hair and even her neck tendrils were completely encased in the gold colored metal; all he could see were her horns and, vaguely, her eyes.

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. I mean, mom never talked about how she left the army that much. Just bits and pieces about how she and auntie Irien-"

"Irien isn't your aunt. She's your legal godmother."

"I know what she is; she's my godmother. Can I continue to answer your question?" When she didn't reply, he started to talk again. "Mom never talks much about how she left. She and Irien met at Booty Bay and worked security on goblin ships. They had to deal with all different kinds of people, so they both learned to value other cultures fast."

"Plus she married your dad."

For a second, he almost reached up and fingered the end of one of his tusks, a habit he'd inherited from his father. "Yes, obviously, their marriage wasn't conventional. Though they did meet each other under...unique circumstances," he hummed quietly, deep in thought about his own origins. "Come to think of it, they never have told us the full story. Just that they went to hell and back to find each other."

"They're probably overdramatizing things," she replied, snorting at his indignant reaction to her words.

"You're free to whatever sort of delusions you want regarding people you don't even know. But my mom is a free spirit and one who lives in the moment seeing as how, as auntie Irien always says, the moment that we're born, we start dying. My mom really believes in that."

"She sounds a lot like me, then."

He bristled, ironically just as they stepped over some actual bristles growing from a short bush. "Eew. Seriously, don't talk like that."

"What, you don't notice the similarities?" she asked, completely oblivious to how much the comment disturbed him.

"I kind of don't want to."

"Your mother is twelve thousand years old, from the third generation of night elves," she explained, raising a dainty, limp wrist and ticking imaginary check marks in the air as they marched. "I'm twenty thousand years old which is almost like the same thing."

"Except your ID card from the Exodar says you're only three hundred and something. And I kind of just don't believe you."

She waved her hand at him dismissively without even glancing at him. "Denial is the first step to recovery. Anyway, she seems to have embraced the world outside what she once knew, and so have I."

"Your people crash landed in a space boat...thing. You kind of didn't have a choice."

"You're racist."

At that comment, he laughed out loud, sincerely finding her reactions as comical as the day he'd met her. She continued to stare at him through the two eyeholes of her mask-like helmet, her expression unreadable.

"Space goat is an extremely offensive term."

"I said space boat, not space G-word," he reassured her. When he tried to put his arm around her shoulder, she pulled away, more from her general habits than actually giving a damn about the sabre rider glaring at them.

They marched on for a few more moments before she started at it again. "Your mom is the riding trainer in Ratchet. I'm an excellent rider."

"You fell off your elekk when we helped to finally cleanse Blackfathom Deeps," he reminded her.

"I don't remember that."

Laughing once more at both her own denial and her moving away again when he tried to hold her close, he tried to figure out of she was intentionally trying to be funny or not. She was a very difficult person to figure out, even after a few months performing mercenary work for the Sentinel Army in the same unit. "I remember it quite well," he joked, marveling at how she tried to march faster only to find that the glaive thrower being towed in front of them prevented her escape. "It trampled a puddle that turned out to be one of those little underwater sinkhole things where the mud and water shoots up out of the ground, and when it tripped you fell in it."

"No."

"And the mud somehow managed to get into your helmet and you claimed you didn't notice, and it soaked in your hair."

An angry look in her eyes, she turned to him for a moment and showed that she considered the exchange to me more than him simply poking fun at her. "You sulk alone for hours when people don't remember your name."

And just like that, she stung him again, catching him by surprise as always. Her temper always flared up when he least expected it, and rather than shout or curse, Zhenya had a tendency to say much more hurtful things - often when somebody was only trying to have fun with her. They stared at each other for a few seconds before they continued marching. The silence settled in between them, the night elf disciplinarian spurred her sabre forward and began glaring at a few enlisted recruits who had undone their ponytails and started to compare nail polish colors.

"I'm sorry. It was uncalled for."

Navarion craned his neck over surreptitiously to get a good look at her, remembering once he did that her expression remained hidden from him. Her voice sounded sincere enough, but she was a master of concealed intentions. He'd served alongside her long enough to know that. Regardless, he patted her on the shoulder to acknowledge his acceptance of her apology, and this time she didn't pull away.

Not too far ahead, the hills just before the coastline popped up over the horizon. The outer stone walls of New Nendis lined the tops, very near to completion. They'd heard that reconstruction inside the city proper had a ways to go; if they pushed so hard for fortifications first, then the silithids attacks truly must have been bad. As was the case with most night elven settlements, forests had begun to sprout up in the area. All along the bottom of the foothills, huge trees smaller than Ashenvale purplewoods but growing more closely together formed a sort of natural barrier against the pollution blowing up from the southern peninsula. Natural grown footpaths paved with cobblestones conjured out from the soil via non arcane nature magic provided a way for the glaive throwers they accompanied, and wisps patrolled the roads lest any of the insectoid antagonists be foolish enough to penetrate wooded areas inhabited by the fabled children of the stars.

The entire column quieted down as they entered the forests forming a protective ring around the port city. Navarion had spent quite a bit of time in the historical homeland of his mother, but trips through woodlands marked as theirs never grew old. The entire aura of the place was serene, and the air pressure increased once they passed beneath the canopy. A darkness that contrasted to the sunlight outside bathed the entire place, accentuated by the wisps floating around like effervescent dust motes. Even the shuffling of the heavy armor of the infantrywomen leading the column decreased in volume, creating no echoes as the column marched on.

At the sight of a moonwell between the trees, Zhenya buried forward to pester the sabre rider.

"Captain Soraya, permission to stop for a blessing from the well?" the paladin asked politely.

Soraya continued to keep her sabre's pace at a slow trot, staring straight ahead and not showing any reaction to the request at first. Being the master of staring contests, however, Zhenya kept in step and continued to stare at the stoic squad captain. After some time, Soraya answered. "Hearthglen, go keep an eye on her," Soraya barked at Navarion, using his last name. "Neither of you let the other dawdle too long."

"Thank you," Zhenya droned in a tone as flat as that of most of the sentinels. She promptly took a diagonal curve off the paved road, grabbing Navarion by the arm when she was sure nobody was looking.

The properly enlisted soldiers in the night elf military bore a general resentment toward the irregulars, viewing them as underpaid mercenaries holding no true loyalties. No opportunities were missed to make them feel they were being monitored, even if that meant turning them against each other, and Navarion and Zhenya had both ratted each other out enough times such that Soraya knew they could not so much be trusted to uphold the law as to race to tattle on one another.

Navarion followed Zhenya off the main road and between the dense trees, squeezing his big half troll body through where necessary. The clopping of Zhenya's hooves ceased once they were no longer walking on moonstones, and the general silence overtook them again until they had reached the moonwell itself. The column continued to march until all twenty eight or twenty nine of the others dropped out of sight, leaving the pair under the watch of the wisps.

Tired from the trip, she set her large war hammer against a tree. Before even telling him how long she would take, she already removed her helmet, letting her long, neon yellow hair with hot pink streaks loose from its bun. She'd been dyeing her hair since they'd met and he actually wondered what her real hair color was; asking her, of course, would only yield answers that were probably lies, just like half of everything else she told him. She'd once actually told him she could warp like a warp stalker and became heated when he refused to believe she was being serious. When he offered to pay her five hundred gold pieces of she proved her claim, she went back to the tent for female recruits and didn't speak to him for half a day.

She seemed almost irreverent this time, however. Not even paying attention to where her gear fell, she removed her shoulder pauldrons and let them fall to the soft underbrush next to her helmet. Not wanting to behave like a creeper, he turned around and gave his back to her, keeping watch in case anybody else happened to be spying upon them blessing themselves in the holy water, having a drink and stretching out of their armor for a few minutes.

"This is supposed to be a big assignment," he marveled out loud, not finding anything else better to do. "This new port is supposed to really-"

"It's a good plan," she replied, interrupting him. And then she fell silent, sounding as if she were fiddling with her armlets.

Not knowing if she just didn't want to talk, he continued. "You know, I handled a job just like this one for the private sector, about eleven years ago."

"Interesting."

"It was way over in Lordaeron, on the other side of the ocea-"

"I don't believe you, but please go on."

For a split second, he grit his teeth. As loyal a companion as she had been to him, there was a reason why they had difficulties getting along. As immature as it might sound, he blamed most of that on her. The fact that she was taking so long washing up and refreshing herself at the moonwell was something he knew was not only intentional, but also intended to bother him. It came almost as second nature to her, and yet they functioned so perfectly as a team.

But he wouldn't let her know she had succeeded in annoying him.

"Well anyway, it was at Raventusk City, way out on the east coast of the Hinterlands."

"Never heard of it."

"Anyway, excuse me, I was with the Steamwheedle Cartel at the time. We were hired to help construct a port and track down some bandits who were stealing the construction materials."

"That isn't like this at all," she replied while fiddling around with an article of clothing.

He loosened up while staring out into the woods, amazed at how the woman managed to simultaneously both infuriate and intrigue him merely be being herself, or at least the closest thing to her real self that might exist. "How so?"

"You were working for a private organization before, and now you're serving in a military." He could almost see her striking at the air while talking. "Also last time you were involved in protecting the operation itself, and now you're just here to supplement the barracks at the city garrison."

"I'm still working for a fixed period."

"But you're not on a contract basis where you can buy your way out if you want to," she retorted.

"It's still a fixed period."

"Don't copy me. Also, you're working among night elves this time. Your job at Raventusk was among forest trolls."

His eyes grew wide when he realized he'd caught her in another lie. "You claimed that you've never heard of Raventusk-"

"That didn't happen."

"Beg your pardon?"

"What you're claiming I said. That never happened."

Just as he was about to lay into her only half seriously, he heard the familiar click of her chastity belt. Many of the paladin orders began doling them out to recruits of both genders in order to enforce many of the vows their members broke while on tours of duty, but as someone like Zhenya would be expected to do, she had found a way to pick the lock using only her fingernails. Navarion could hear her heavier breathing behind him and nothing else as she sounded like she was holding still.

He turned around, seeing her light azure skin shimmer and reflect the light of the moonwell, as naked as the day she was born.

"Are you coming or what?" she asked expectantly. She almost appeared surprised that he was just standing there ogling her.

Sighing heavily, he removed his gauntlets and bracers, the two armor pieces attached to one another. She took that as her answer, and almost in celebration of the blasphemy she enjoyed waving up in his face, she slid into the moonwell. Nervous excitement mixed with fear that Soraya might catch them and report them, but they'd gone through the motions enough times to know when they were being watched.

If she'd continue her erratic behavior, he thought as he removed his armor, then it would be a long few months indeed.