No Dialling Tone

Since SirDarth was running low on quality stones, I hadn't bothered to get him started on pet-levelling before breakfast, which was just as well, as while I was working my way through a bowl of Sugar Puffs, the burglar alarm went off... well, not a klaxon or a fire-alarm type bell, but just the beeping that the system makes when something is wrong.  Once I'd keyed the correct code into the touchpad, the reason came up - the telephone line wasn't working.

Lifting the phone receiver confirmed this, as there was no dialling tone.  This did happen once a while back, and again it was a matter of using a mobile phone to ring my phone and internet provider's dedicated line for such things, and tap in the affected phone number - to receive a recorded message that there was a fault in the network, and that engineers were even then working their woolly socks off, and hoped to have things working again within four hours.

So, there was no internet, and no Last Chaos, this morning until just before lunch.  At that point SirDarth was at last able to get to work.  The horse had actually just managed to reach level 27 last night, and reached level 28 at around my usual early evening food break time.

As I was busy in the real world, there wasn't much to report about here in the afternoon either.  Stavanic had managed to find 33 tool aids to contribute towards the effort needed to get his horse up to mount level, and came out to Darth to hand them over - it was a bit lazy of him not to do the actual mining himself, but still!   With 33 hammers or pickaxes, 33 tool aids would get us 891 quality stones, so more than half the full number needed, enough to get us to around level 32.  Steve actually forgot to bring the tool aids with him on his first visit, they are after all a bit heavy to carry around all the time, but came back a few minutes later and traded them across.

As she is one of my characters with her mining skills maximised, Rage did some mining, using 22 tool aids, and then, after transferring a suitably large number of quality, imperfect, and flawed stones over to Darth, went back and did some ordinary mining, ten minutes at a time, to replenish her own stocks.  So, while I wasn't actually playing, I was seldom away from the computer for more than ten minutes all afternoon.

The first thing I did when I came on to play was let Rage take a turn at the Ajaka Canyon personal dungeon mission.  Most of the monsters in there are white to her at level 33, but the one Beast Crawler is level 36, so still, with its magical attack, hit Rage pretty hard, and some strategic running was called for, with the use of some health pots.  Still, it was safely despatched, and I continued on to the final tower... though had to backtrack when the door there wouldn't open, apparently some Beast Flyers had been a bit late in spawning, and the door wouldn't open until everything was dead.

Blood Mistress Kamira herself is level 38, and again her magic attack was quite effective - but on the third attempt Rage's Snare skill worked, and the mission was safely concluded.  I put the "end of dungeon" window to one side, though, and cleaned out all the Blood Leeches and Flying Blood Leeches that were in the tower too, which left me with a lot of assorted gold drops to pick up.  Kamira herself hadn't dropped anything at all, in fact the only item other than gold anything dropped was a level 31 pants production manual.  The reward for successfully completing the personal dungeon is 10,000 gold and a single moonstone, again.

BasheR had been Kamira-hunting again, though I'd been unable to do any luring unfortunately; as he was asking me what sort of prices Stone of Shadow and Chain of Tiger rare accessories go for on Auzura now, I quickly surmised that he'd had some successes today.  Judging by the prices people are asking in the Merchant House system, he may be able to get around 60 million for the "SoS", at least.  He already uses two of them himself, and a hit rate-boosting accessory.

The main evening session belonged to MrChuckNorris, who, not surprisingly, went skill point farming in our favourite Prokion Temple back room, using a couple of super skill pills.  For both hours, it was a good ten minutes before the skill exp-boosting blessed reward was picked up, but Chuck did manage to get 488 sp in hour one, followed immediately by 473 sp in hour two.  I did stay on long enough afterwards to get the total gain up to 1016, so Chuck doubled his stash of unused skill points, which is good.  His drake added 2144 pet points, though as usual there he did take a lot of damage.  It's lucky that Chuck has a supply of the 30-point pet healing potions, as otherwise a considerable number of green herb leaves would be needed.

SirDarth continued with the pet-levelling, and SirPerivale took the opportunity finally to come online for half an hour or so too, getting the horse that, in theory, SirDarth should one day ride off on up to level 25.  SirDarth's horse was getting towards the top of level 28 by the time he had to log out.  At the moment it takes two hours and five minutes to get through the whole 100 of the starvation bar, but that will go down to half as long before we are finished.