Road Warrior

November 30 – December 2, 2007

Pretty much all of this three-day gamefest was directed towards securing an Aht Urhgan Boarding Pass. I didn’t know I even needed one! Friday Night I had flagged up and was messing around with my MH and a new RDB recruit when I hopped on the Al Zahbi ferry from Buburimu. I got thrown off for not having a boarding pass.

So off to the interweb to find out how to get one. The quest is started in Jeuno, at the Tenshodo and offers a few choices of item fetches to earn the pass. Since I didn’t have any of the coffer keys for the Advanced path, and didn’t want to farm chips from a dangerous zone I’ve never been to, Intermediate was out. 500k gil? {No thanks} So the only path I had was Easy, which meant collecting all 6 subjob items at one time.

/sigh. Friday night ended with me in Valk and two items, the Damselfly Worm and Crab Apron. Saturday was better – I got the other 4 items pretty quickly (Magicked Skull, Bloody Robe, Wild Rabbit Tail and Dhalmel Saliva). I turned these in but was told I’d have to wait one day. I didn’t realize I had made the trade after midnight…

Fhox and I chatted a bit while I was running around Qufim raising people and working on the SJ items. He warned me that Lust may have been banned from his first account for GS activities or assisting them. I assured him I had no interest in risking my investment in Aer to do anything stupid.

Sunday I logged in around 10pm expecting to pick that pass up but was told I had to wait a day. Oh yeah, midnight… Chucho asked me to PL his party in the Crawler’s Nest and after thinking about it I decided to go help.

Maybe I shouldn’t have… I got to the Nest via OP warp and while looking for his crew ran into a Doom Scorpion nest. Since I hadn’t bothered cloaking they aggroed. I slept them both and ran out, around the corner to the other tunnel, and into Chucho. I let him know there might be company coming. He thought that would be cool.

On reaching camp I start buffing up and resting and sure enough, one of the scorps walks in. The party engages and eventually put it down. While all this was happening, the other one waltzed in and I slept it since the first wasn’t dead enough. Turns out that this was a really bad move because Repose must pack a lot of hate. I never engaged or did anything else to that scorpion but it wouldn’t let me go. I eventually had to call for help and then we all proceeded to beat it down.

On the next pull (or next to next) their puller returned with a pair of Soldier Crawlers that were beating the party down hard. Chucho posited escaping but I went ahead and slept one while they finished the other and rested.

Once the crawler awoke, it came after me and wouldn’t let go. I suggested having their WHM cure me to voke but all that happened was a two-hit death on Tgunz, their Taru WHM. Crap. CRAP! Eventually it’s clear nothing is going to get this thing off me and at Galiba’s order, I leave, looking for a quiet spot far from camp that won’t pull links.

I re-sleep the crawler, run to the party and raise Tgunz with my last MP. I return to the crawler and try unsuccessfully to rest and formulate an attack strategy. I can’t get a second sleep off (only 39 MP recovered ><) and die. So does Chucho, for some reason. Apparently he got whacked by an Exoray, but got a raise someplace.

During all this confusion, Galiba says “MPK GM {Call Beast}”, implying he’s reporting me for the MPK on Tgunz, even though I didn’t pull the link and died trying to fix things. Nothing seemed to come of it and once we recovered from weakness (and I re-raised Tgunz from a second death during weakness while I was still out of the room) we got rolling. Once Galiba started endraining, the mobs fell pretty fast. I kept their 4 melees hasted and cured and the rhythm built up.

I had originally only planned to stay for about 20 minutes in order to pick up my pass at midnight but out of guilt, stayed to about 12:45. Chucho DCed and then others started leaving. On his return it was clear the rest were done. I offered teles to anyone but had no takers, and so Chucho and I warped out.

I did, however, pick up my pass! I also popped one of the 3 new OP runs that opened after the Conquest Tally.

Now that I have AU access, I need to hurry up and figure out how to make it work. I need to be able to move quickly between Jeuno and the regular locations and AU, its portals and any OPs it has, especially once I start partying on WHM again.

And that new member? Tieryn, a PLD70, BLU40 who originally mistook RDB to be a Mithra-only shell. We chatted for about half an hour and eventually she asked to join. After more group chat I bolted, to begin the subjob item farming. I’ve seen her on but not in our shell so I don’t know if she’s going to stay…