Ned Clevesun's Incredible Journey

Armor

Clothing

Designer Wear

Formal Wear

The Runway

Where Are They Now?

The Background

Maggie – Here is a report on my AC activities. Where to begin? I will start at the end, at the result.

I have no armor at all, not a stitch. Except some crummy utility stuff I bought over the counter in Holtburg, to clothe my nakedness and protect me for the remainder of the run down to Cragstone. I lost almost everything else as well; my heals, my lovely Ivory Yumi with the cool Blood Drinker III magic on it, my arrows, my cool magic sleeves, my wonderful AL 90 leather shirt that you gave me, my magic gloves that cast 15 points of coordination on me, my heume, my Yoroi leggings that you gave me, my solerettes. Sigh.

I retained my Armor III silk shirt, which was good, and all 4 jewelry items, which was good. I converted most of the money I had to mana stones, because there was no way to carry it and the vendor did not sell trade notes. So I do have the equivalent of about 30,000 or so in mana stones, maybe less or more.

The good news? Well, I didn’t die, ever! Not on the run up, through unfamiliar territory, not on the run down, virtually naked! Now, THAT was hair-raising; 33 clicks to the first lifestone! A VERY long run, 86.6N/21.6E to the lifestone at 53.6N/24.2E. On the way up I hit two intermediary lifestones, but chose the straighter, faster shot for the naked return.

Here is the gist of the debacle. I arrived at the vendor without incident. All was quiet, no monsters or interference. He had the robes. They were, I think, 50109 py, or somesuch. But, then, I encountered a problem I COULD have anticipated but hadn’t thought of. The vendor, like all other vendors in the game, will not take trade notes as direct payment. You can’t buy anything with trade notes. You must CONVERT them to money and THEN make your purchase.

The vendor was happy to buy my trade notes, at the normal conversion rate. But 50,000 py is far to much for me to carry, even standing still. I can tell you that 300% burden is the maximum allowed. Beyond that you can’t pick up or create additional burden.

So I couldn’t convert more than about 30,000 in notes. What to do? What to do? On obvious work-around occurred to me. The robe I wanted to buy didn’t weigh much at all. If I could drop my possessions on the ground, I might be able to free up enough burden-carrying capacity to convert the trade notes to cash and complete the purchase of the robe. Then I could simply pick up my stuff and be none the worse off.

So I proceeded. But I was only able to convert 40,000 by dropping my spell components and arrows and so forth. I removed my armor, piece by piece. I dropped my precious Ivory Yumi. Finally, I dropped every single stitch I had on, all the wands and jewelry and nearly everything. At that point I was able to convert 48,xxx py, and it looked as though I wasn’t going to be able to do it. But I took off the remaining very few things, curious about exactly how close I’d come. I was thinking ahead, you see, to the telling of the tale. I was coming to see that I’d have to return when I had more strength and wanted to know just how much more I’d need.

Can you guess what happened then? A system announcement flashed up, saying that the servers were all going down for installation of an update. To be fair, I had been notified of this when I logged in. They used one of those windows button thingies, so it was unmistakable – they even gave the exact time and, looking with awful understanding at my watch, I realized that the time had arrived.

I scrambled to recover what I could, but my Ivory Yumi was BURIED under mounds of other items. I could see it, sticking out beneath sacks of stuff, I highlighted it, but couldn’t pick it up. I had to first get rid of MONEY to create room. I had a brief chuckle, thinking of the monkey trap, which grasps a monkey’s fist within a container, holding the monkey because it is too greedy to let go of the food it holds in its fist, the fist too large to withdraw from the opening.

But I was a quick thinker, I didn’t panic. The vendor, as I said earlier, did not sell trade notes at all. Curious, but that’s the fact of it. I needed two things: 1) A fast way to drop money. This was not trivial; I was surrounded by stuff, and I knew from the experience of having dropped it that the game makes it tough once the free area is filled. Dropping the money would be very hard. It would also be nice, not essential to 2) Be able to keep as much of the cash as I could.

So I started buying mana stones. That worked very well; bang, bang, bang. They had some HUGE mana stones, so I was dropping 7500 at a crack. That got the burden down. I started trying to pick things up, but it was just not working. Lag or something. I got my magic shirt, my rings, and ….gurgle, glug – the server disconnect sound came up. It was NOT two minutes, it was hardly one minute, closer to 30 seconds. Fuck.

When I went back on, after the update, there I was, safe and sound. But everything that had been on the floor was gone, all of it.

I put on my magic silk shirt and mounted my rings and started running. Hit the lifestone in 33 clicks, then on to Holtsburg for some crummy store-bought armor, the run to Cragstone and a portal to Zaikhal. I logged out on the roof. Whew.

I am sad about my nice stuff. Sigh. My beautiful Yumi. My cool lower sleeve things and gloves and all the rest. What a ridiculous experience! Really, it was too stupid. The only interesting thing was 1) that the run up itself was not all that dangerous; you could have accompanied me with near-perfect safety. 2) there was an neat castle up there, Castle Ninneva, or somesuch; kinda cool. Full town services, nearly.

That’s the report. I am chastened but unkilled!

 - N

LOCATION OF MASTER ROBES:

ALUVIAN
Celdiseth
86.6N, 21.6E

GHARU'NDIM
Fadsahil al-Tashbi 
40.8S, 11.8E

SHO
Shoyanen Kenchu  63.4S, 85.9E