A/N: Thank you all for reading and reviewing!

…-…

So, it's been a month since we took the base. Our progress has slowed, but we've decided not to abandon the base to the demons and just work on pushing them back from one of the other fronts.

Why?

Because word is spreading about our little haven and people from as far away as Winnipeg, Canada have been heading our way. There's been talk of setting up a few bases like this in Europe to help the survivors there, but it's a hard call. Yes, they deserve to be saved, but do we have the man power?

Really, we should focus on one front, probably, but I'm not huge on all that military strategizing, so I don't know how thin we're really stretched out.

We're still only keeping about nine blocks secure, but we have regular patrols throughout other parts of the city and some have formed search parties to travel to neighboring towns in search of survivors.

And, well, not to bask in attention or anything, but people know me.

I'd been back about a week and the fel magic was almost out of my system—finally—when I was patrolling with Senta'ri and Eric. Brath had been going to cover us aerially, but, oh my god.

So we're heading out and Senta'ri and Cat were waiting for us when suddenly I see something in the corner of my eye and I turn to see an Arabic version of the kid from the Omen standing not ten feet from me, his glowy red eyes trained on me and Brath. Well, I figured this was demonic possession at its finest, so I started looking for someone who might be able to expel it form the poor boy—I didn't want to kill the kid if he wasn't a willing host or whatever—when suddenly Nicolas was there, bowing and calling someone a Black Prince.

That's what they call the devil, isn't it? Well, I'm freaking out that this is some pit lord like what Michel had said would scare the shit out of me, when Brath stepped forward and was like, "Little brother, what brings you here?"

Seriously? That's who Nicolas was working for? First, he's like nine. At best. Second, he's from the freakin' Omen, I swear. So creepy looking.

I know, I know. I should be used to weird things by now. I mean, I can see draenei and night elves and all that without panicking—blood elves and warlocks still freak me out, but only because of the fel magic and honestly I'm getting better and differentiating between them and real demons—but this guy was just…scary.

Well, he did this flourished bow, and then looked at me and nodded, polite like. "I am sorry if you had plans, Miss Ford, but I need my brother." When I gripped Brath's arm and looked ready to argue, he smiled at me and for a minute, I could see past those freaky eyes and to the familial resemblance. "I promise we will return him to you alive and well."

Brath snorted. "In my right mind, I could easily take you, little whelp."

The kid just looked up at him calmly, though Nicolas looked pissed off. However, he merely shrugged and motioned for Brath to follow him. "Come, we've much to speak about."

And to my surprise, Brath sighed, nodded to me, and then headed off after the little kid with Nicolas.

It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen.

Even as I stared after him, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Senta'ri was standing there, a curious stare on the receding trio. "Wat dat be about, mon?"

When I shrugged, he sighed. We considered waiting for Brath, but then, it had seemed like they were going to take a while and we were restless. Worse, we didn't really want to wander off into the city just the two of us, since even though I'm getting better with my daggers every day, I'm still not great for back up. So we figured we would need someone else.

All of the other dragons were busy—technically, Brath was supposed to be guarding the base like them, but he just gave them the bird whenever they tried to talk to him about responsibility and stuff, so they sort of gave up on him—and most of our friends were coming back from their own scouting missions or already passed out. We found that tauren shaman, I can never remember his name, but when I started to call out to him to get his attention since he was just resting beneath a tree or something, Senta'ri stopped me. Apparently he was less resting and more meditating.

While warlocks have it pretty easy here in my world, the rest of the casters are still struggling. Neesera and a few other shamans seem to think that they can figure it out, but all that line of thinking has done is make them really reclusive. And they get cranky if you disturb them, so once I knew he was meditating, you couldn't have paid me to go talk to him.

Well, we were about to hit up some strangers to help fill out our group, when we saw good, old Eric, sitting beneath one of the trees the elves grew—it does not matter that there'd never been a tree there before. In fact, the night elves have reinforced all of our buildings with trees and so now the safe part of New York looks like something out of a fantasy story. Which I guess sort of fits, what with all the elves and draenei and everything walking around.

I was concerned that the demons might just send those giant fire guys, but apparently there are flame retardant spells that Azerothians use on stuff to protect against attacks or just drunken mages trying to show off with fire balls. Or against warlocks being warlocks.

They take a lot of energy for the casters to do, but we've all agreed that it's sort of worth it.

Oh, completely off the wall, but the flame retardant reminded me. Do you remember Sprig and Drizzle from Booty Bay? Well. Small worlds. Sprig's cousin, Crachette, is running an auction house out of one of the building's basements and Drizzle's little sister's best friend, Vev—that's gotta be a nickname—is running her own bar. I guess Fizz wrote home about the potential to make money in the brave new world and now the goblins are coming in to capitalize.

A lot of people from my world have had to barter to get stuff from either establishment, though, since we don't carry around gold coins.

Anyway, so off topic. We saw Eric and he was practicing making fire dance over his palm—to make it easier to cast in general—and for another minute, he so reminded me of Greg. But even as I started to get sad and wonder where my brother was and if he was really one of the bad guys, Eric saw us and perked up.

So we wandered over and it turned out that he'd just missed a few others heading out, so he was more than happy to tag along with us. At first, we weren't sure if we'd be good, the three of us, but Eric can just turn into a werewolf and kick butt, even if his spells are a little weak right now.

Since I found out he was a werewolf I've been kind of uneasy, since you know, I didn't really know if that was something you just openly talked about or if it was like an unspoken thing or what. And I wanted to apologize to him for thinking he was some sort of creeper, but then I'd have to tell him I'd thought he was one to begin with, so I'd kind of been avoiding him.

But, well, Senta'ri wasn't concerned with any possible drama or worries bouncing around in my head so he just waved Eric over and asked how soon he could be ready to go. Eric knows Fizz's translation spell, by the way, and he's cast it on himself and a few others so that they can cheat and speak Orcish and Zandali and those other Azerothian languages they wouldn't normally know. Senta'ri loves it because he can speak in his native tongue and leave most people in the dark, but we'll still get his jokes.

And, get this, the Horde/Alliance tensions don't seem as bad in my world. Maybe it's different in other places. Or maybe it's because only those willing to put aside their differences have really come to my world, since the portals are all on Alliance territory.

I think people were worried the Horde might try an attack on the Exodar, claiming to be coming to aid my world, but they take the Legion really seriously. Someone said they'd trust the Horde when some guy called Hellscream comes out here, but I don't know. From what I hear—from Alliance and Horde, too—he's kind of dick. But apparently a really good fighter, so maybe he could fit in the same way Mr. Blackheart and Brath and Nicolas do.

Who knows?

If he shows up, cool. If not, fine by me.

Apparently he did sign off on allowing some of his guard to come 'evaluate' this world's problems, though. So he can't be all bad. I think they went to Brazil? I don't know. They aren't here.

Aaaanyway.

Getting back to the introduction of my celebrity…

So the three of us headed off into the city. Senta'ri and Eric have things called ground mounts. Trolls ride raptors—like real living, breathing, prehistoric dinosaurs—and Eric has a regular horse. He let me ride with him since the raptor looked like it wanted to snack on me.

One of the skyscrapers is being used as a stable, by the way. A lot of adventurers have both flying and ground mounts and so they leave one in the care of the stablekeepers while they travel around on the other. And a lot of people are using ground mounts if they're staying in the city, because it's easier to find demons hiding or survivors if you're not up in the air. You might think it'd be the other way around, but there's still so much debris that fly overs are really only useful for spotting large pockets of people or enemies, not a group of say five who've spent the last few months hiding beneath broken cars and in shattered doorframes.

So anyway, we were on ground mounts, traveling through the city and we reached the end of the cleared area—they've been working on picking up the streets so that it's easier for mounts and people to walk on, and as a sort of sign to people coming that they're headed in the right direction.

We'd been traveling for almost five hours and were debating whether we wanted to keep going and camp out in the city or just head back and maybe get a bigger group—healers were still kind of useless because it took so much to cast even a single healing spell, but that didn't mean we couldn't hit up some melee guys to help us out…or maybe an alchemist to keep plenty of potions on hand—when we heard something scuffling nearby.

Well, Eric tensed, ready to wolf out on them, and Senta'ri's pet went stealth mode—Cat is like a kitty rogue—and I slipped into the shadows when this guy came stumbling out of a building we'd just passed, looking all desperate and dirty and waving his hands.

He stopped short when he saw Senta'ri, like he was afraid he'd made a huge mistake. At first, none of us moved, because we weren't sure who was on what side. But then Eric waved to him and asked if he was looking for sanctuary.

That guy just about broke down crying he was so happy to have found us. His name was Isaiah and he'd been leading a group of about twelve people from Maryland.

So, I should sort of point something out. The good guys, the loyalists, have been sending coded messages using the internet, from different Legion bases—and in case I forgot to mention, the Legion is keeping the internet up, because they use it to track down pockets of survivors who try to reach out to others…I don't think they've quite figured out that part though, because it seems like a lot of survivors have figured out how to bounce signals so that they can't be pinpointed.

Anyway, one of the guys from our base thought to risk sending out a message to the other bases and anyone else who understood the encryption that things were happening where we are.

That's how some people knew to start heading for New York.

And Isaiah's group? They pretty much packed up and ran away from their base the night they got the message. Unfortunately, they'd been attacked by demons a few days before and there were only four of them left. They'd figured that they were going to be killed in the next day or so, but had been hopeful when they'd come to the cleared part of the streets, though they'd been resting to wait for nightfall to go further, since they didn't want to leave themselves in the open as they pressed on—we hadn't considered how that might make refugees feel defenseless and I considered going back to the base to tell them to put back some of the debris, but Isaiah said that it wasn't that important.

None of his group played WoW, so they were all all sorts of surprised to see a troll. It did take a while to convince them he wasn't some new type of demon they hadn't seen before, but after they were certain he was friendly, they were all super curious about him. Senta'ri loved it. He kept posing for them and stuff.

Well, of course we headed back with them to get them to safety, and we let some of them ride on the mounts—a little girl with them got to ride on Cat's back, though I'm not so sure the panther liked it. Well, as we're going along, almost back to the base, we realized that we hadn't introduced ourselves yet. Isaiah and the others were quick to apologize for having been so distracted by our trollish friend, but Eric and I didn't mind. After all, I remember the first time I met a creature that wasn't human. I'd taken a while to get used to it, too.

…I miss Fizz.

Anyway, they introduced themselves with first and last names—not gonna lie, I've been meeting so many people, I can't remember everyone's names—and so we did, too. Senta'ri's last name is Bonegrinder, by the way. Sounds kind of ominous. Eric's last name is Fieldson. Never realized that before.

When I introduced myself, the four rescuees all stared at me strange like. So, I kind of tried to ignore it for a minute before eyeing them and asking what was up?

And the little girl goes, "You're Amy Ford? The one who went to the other world to save ours?"

Awkward.

Not because of the question, but because of the way they were looking at me and I was so scared that I'd say something and they'd look as disappointed as Michel had when he first met me. Before I could say anything, Senta'ri was talking.

"Ya be hearin' about lila Ameh, huh?"

Well.

That killed his spotlight. Suddenly they wanted to know everything about me and it was so weird. I did my best to fill them in on stuff and it was kind of fun because unlike Michel, they didn't seem deterred by my appearance and the fact that I didn't know everything about everything.

By the time we parted ways, I was feeling like I'd really done some good, you know? I mean, I knew I had before, but…I guess I wasn't expecting thanks or gratitude? Like, I'd always felt like I was yards behind where I should be? They changed that. Yes, I'm still guilt-riddled in regards to a lot of the people who died, but…it's more bearable now.

Like I said, that was the first week after I'd been back and now it's been a month. And it still surprises me that people know me. And they're always like, "Wait, you're Amy?" Like they can't believe they're in front of the real Amy Ford.

It's a good thing I have Brath around, or I might get a little conceited.

Oh, if you're wondering, Brath's little brother—who I have been directed to call Wrath because of my inability to pronounce dragon names—is planning on funding adventures in Azeroth to find other black dragons and ship them to my world, since coming here seems to break the hold the old gods have on things.

While that means that the old gods' minions are likely to start coming after us and maybe even team up with the Legion, my bigger concern is that introducing dragons as a permanent fixture in my world might not…end well. But, who am I to argue with giant magical reptiles? Though I get the impression Wrath is a lot smaller than Brath—rhyming names—when he's a dragon.

And anyway, if it saves them from having to be killed, I suppose I should be glad that they can even come to my world.

You might think that Brath has changed into some upstanding citizen since he stopped hearing voices whisper in his head, but…no. Not really. He still threatens to eat people—and means it—and hisses and breathes fire and such when he's in his dragon form. Another thing he does is dig at the ground with his claws and then sniff it. And then he glares at me like I've done something horribly wrong and flies off to sulk.

I haven't figured out all of his problems yet, but maybe it has to do with pollution? Maybe he thinks my world's humans are even worse than his world's humans? Or maybe he just thinks we could use an earthwarder—a non crazy one, no offense to Brath's dead dad—to keep us in line. Or maybe he thinks the demons are the ones who messed up our world and doesn't realize we kinda helped with screwing things over.

I say maybe it's pollution related because the shamans and druids kind of act the same way and I'm pretty sure they can tell that not all of the nature damage is demon related.

I'm so never telling Neesera about the garbage island in the Pacific.

Speaking of. She's been like all the other shamans lately, and kind of off to herself. Now, I know I said before that they've been meditating a lot. I don't really know what they're doing it for, but I think they're making progress because they—as a whole—have been in better moods lately. And they've been messing with their totems, which is spell related.

Well, I got a message from Neesera's squirrel—we're still using them, too, to patrol the city and keep watch for any demonic portals opening nearby; we're also keeping a lot of detect invisibility potions on hand—that she wanted to hang out with me because it'd been forever and she needed to clear her head.

As I shouldered the squirrel and started to grab a few things—you always want to keep weapons and healing potions on you, in case of a surprise attack—I just happened a glance out my window.

And who should I see standing in the middle of the street?

Greg.