A Pocket Full of Mounts

Talk about biopower. My druid is up to 101 vanity pets and 107 mounts. She keeps them in a secret compartment in her pocketbook, like a tiny Noah's Ark, whence she can easily and quickly summon one to do her bidding. Most of them never see the light of day, and are just there for posterity. The flying mounts are even functionally obsolete, since she can instantly transform herself into an agile bird as fast as any phoenix. Some (Lil Argent Squire and poor oft-abandoned Gnimo come to mind) are frequently sent to do the more tedious gruntwork.

Predatory cats are any Night Elf's birthright, and my druid has a fine collection of them. She eventually coaxed her friends in Winterspring to train a Frostsaber for her. She still regularly attempts to kidnap one of the gloriously orange tigers from Zul'Gurub, but the High Priest consistently clings to the Zulian feline right to the grave.

Her campaigns in Outland have resulted in a series of Netherwing drakes, talbuks, nether rays, and a hippogryph. A small caravan of mammoths are cramped into her pocket. All of them were purchased from reputable breeders like Mei Francis—assuming, of course, that those vendors aren't supplied by thieves lurking in Archavon's lair.

My druid spent many moons aiding the Humans, and in return they have bestowed a largish herd of equine steeds upon her. The horses are apparently imported from Northrend, where Squire Percy enlists volunteers to pick off stragglers from the local wild mustang herds. The once-free beasts who delighted in unbridled galloping now spend their days untended, unneeded, and forgotten as their powerful galloping-muscles deteriorate.

A handful of my druid's mounts are more novel than the rest, marking her complete control over vanquished enemies. She has bent both Anzu and Midnight to her will. Baron Rivendare's lean and hungry warhorse now serves its previous master's (serial)slayer, as do Mr Sunstrider's strider and Skadi's frosty drake. Her valor in ToGC earned her the prestigious Alliance award of excellence, and Ulduar's humbled denizens bequeathed an airborne memento to her.

In her effort to dominate the world of animal mounts, my druid was obliged to enter the domain of dominating humanoids. The Black War mounts—largely obtained under the older, token-based PvP reward system—are testament to her power over the lives and deaths of enemy players.

The only recalcitrant mounts are those summoned by the Qiraji Resonating Crystals. My toon doesn't have much power over them at all, and that power is useless everywhere in the world except for the remote yet beautiful Temple of Ahn'Qiraj—and one rarely has occasion to go there. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that there's one bug in particular that responds to the summons; she just bangs on a coloured crystal and hopes some silithid will surface.

A few specimens bridge the gap between the animal and mechanical. Cyborgs like the Gnomish mechanostriders were my druid's first non-living vehicles. Later, her snazzy chopper didn't even bother to make a pretense of mimicking living animals.