Also known as 'the search for Qpdaj, the corpseless wonder', coming soon to a theatre near you...

Not knowing exactly how this was going to work, I logged in early (before 6pm) to try and line up a bard to help us with our quest. There were of course, no bards in the Butcherblock Mountain, so I went to Greater Faydark where they tend to hang out on the continent of Faydwer. As soon as I zoned in, I sent an auction message 'WTB services of a bard with locate corspe song for search in Timorous Deep - send tells to discuss terms'. I immediately got a response from a pair of players who were good friends (one was a bard) and were willing to travel to the dangerous oceans of Timorous Deep with us. After discussing things over when them, I found out that we had to wait for Qpdaj to login (he has to be in the group with us in order for the bard's locate corpse song to work), so I made arrangements to pay them 10pp each upon recovery and said that I'd send a tell when we were ready to leave. Unfortunately, both of them had to log off by 8pm, so by the time Qpdaj finally logged in, it was too late to enlist their help last night. (Pity, it would have made things easier.)

So I wandered around Greater Faydark, killing orcs, wandered into Crushbone and had some fun there while waiting for Qpdaj to show up. While in Crushbone, I ran into a bard named Foladil (Human, lvl 9, Hand of the Shadows guild) up on the orc trainer hill and I ended up enlisting his help. I should have screened him more closely (as you'll see in a bit), but it was time to start the run now that Qpdaj had logged in and Foladil seemed willing enough.

We left Crushbone a little after 8pm to head for Timorous Deep to try and locate the corpse (or find out the general area where the GMs had moved it too). After about 30 minutes, we arrived in Firiona Vie which is in the center of Timorous Deep. There we got off to bind ourselves before getting back on the boat. While we were waiting for the boat to come back around, we kept trying to get more information out of Foladil on how to go about the location and recovery effort (it seemed like we were having communication difficulties with him). Finally, about the point I was ready to disband him from the group and go find another bard, he suddenly said 'gotta go' and left. We're pretty sure he didn't speak very good english (which was causing all sorts of issues when you're on a technical task such as a corpse location quest).

There we were in Firiona Vie, getting 'lagged' to death (I don't know what it is about the zone, but my machine started swapping to the hard drive like mad and my frame rate went way down). Then Qpdaj plays trickster and casts a blindness spell on me and on top of all of the machine issues, I had to logout, reboot and come back in (so did he). It was looking like we'd have to either find a bard in the Firiona Vie or Timorous Deep zone or go all the way back to Greater Faydark to find one. (I was planning on traveling to the elven outpost in southeast Timorous Deep and trying to locate bards anywhere in the Timorous Deep zone.)

Suddenly, out of the blue, Qpdaj gets a tell from a high level player saying that he's found Qpdaj's corpse on the island by the chessboard. Apparently, the custom in the sea zones is to send tells to anyone who's body you find, on the off chance that they don't know where they died (not many landmarks out there). So now we knew where the GMs had moved the body to, and we quickly got an exact location from Mangea (Halfling, lvl 56 Templar). Quite a stroke of luck to get the information right when we needed it.

We arrived at the island with the elven outpost (loc -5000,-3900) around 10pm. After briefly discussing plans, Qpdaj decided to just swim for it (there are no small controllable boats like in the Ocean of Tears). I bid him farewell, warned him that anything he saw would likely eat him for a snack, and settled in to fish off of the dock. In fact, he's such a good swimmer he was to the island and back by 10:30pm. No problems, didn't see any creatures, we figured we'd be back in Kaladim by 11pm or so. A fairly quick, painless corpse recovery.

After a bit of a wait, the Maidens Voyage arrived, we boarded and then we were at the spot where the Butcherblock shuttles come out to meet the ship (just a touch before 11pm). I got turned around on the big ship, stepped off of the ramp in the wrong direction, and both of us fell into the ocean! We tried everything to either get back on board the big ship, or onto the little shuttles, but watched in horror as all of the ships sailed away without us!

I'm thinking, okay, now we're going to end up doing a double-corpse locate and recovery. I'm going to drown out here or get eaten and it's going to be a very difficult thing to petition the guides for the 2nd night in a row to get them to move our bodies to somewhere 'safe' again. I started swimming back to the elven outpost (from 4000,-6300 to -5000,-3900), while Qpdaj decided to swim towards the island in the northeast corner of the zone. His reasoning was that we couldn't swim forever so he wanted to get to dry land, mine was that the only place that I knew to get back on the ship was back at the elven outpost.

It took me about 25 minutes to swim back to the elven outpost (so we've proved that you can indeed swim forever), but I almost drowned along the way (hit the wrong key) so when I hit dry land at the outpost I was a very wet and annoyed elf (who was hoping to not have to swim at all that evening). On the funny side, my swimming skill got up to 66. Once I arrived, Qpdaj started swimming from the island in the northeast corner down to the elven outpost. He has a better swimming skill and made it in about 15 minutes.

We were a lot more careful on the trip back to Butcherblock (although I thought Qpdaj was going to fall in again with the running around he was doing). I bound myself to the dock area as soon as we landed, then went up to Kaladim to bind Qpdaj there around midnight. A very long 4 hour corpse run. After that we went our separate ways, I went back to Greater Faydark and Crushbone for a bit to do some shopping and hunting.

Once I got back into Crushbone, I walked around, ran into Felweniel and chatted with her for a bit. I also talked to a young level 9 mage who was frustrated with his character. I gave him the standard pep talk, pointed him at some web sites, expounded upon the advantages of being a mage (yes you can solo 2 blues and 2 greens at the same time), and hopefully either convinced him to stick with it or to give up and become a ranger. Another young player, Poizenivyy (lvl 9 ranger Wood Elf) came up and chatted with me as I was walking around doing the 'tourist mage' thing (I always have to explain that). She'd only been playing for a week and was nice enough to ask before inspecting my equipment. If she looks me up in a few days, I'll have some nice armor to give her (looted a set of AC4 gloves off of the orc trainer later on, plus I can make AC3 patchwork armor). I also camped the orc trainer hill long enough to get the Shiny Brass Shield to drop (AC10 +10 vs magic 8 lbs LORE lightsource) so I can give it to Qpdaj.

Vorish of Morell-Thule, High Elf Mage lvl 17