Booty Bay, On hold

Miakoma
Orc Shaman
Currently level 40
Herbalism, Alchemy, and all available secondary skills

I am holed up in the Booty Bay Inn, unable to move for the time being. A strange lassitude has overcome me. After many consecutive days of adventuring, I have suddenly lost all desire to move from my location. I have been in this room for nearly a week now, and I have taken the reservation for another two days.

In this lull, however, I find myself ruminating over some of the events that have occurred since I arrived on this new continent.

One of the greatest frustrations for me has been the frequency with which commerce and travel is disrupted by the bands of ruffians who periodically sweep through Booty Bay and the northern outpost, killing everyone in their paths. It doesn’t seem to take long for either location to recover from these devastations — apparently they are quite accustomed to being slaughtered at whim — but for the traveller who wishes for a quick visit to a vendor or a ready flight to another city, the frustration is ever-present.

Despite these frustrations, however, my travels in this new land have yielded some interesting rewards.

While fishing idly off the northern coast of Stranglethorn Vale, I fished up an old book which taught me to find fish. I have found the ability to be largely useless — why would I need a special ability to find schools of fish that my own eyes can see perfectly well in the water? But my friend the paladin has informed me that the ability is a rare one, and that I should consider myself lucky to have acquired it. She understands these things better than I do, of course, so I will take her word on the rarity of the skill, but that still doesn’t mean I find it useful.

I abandoned my quests in Desolace after a fruitless attempt to canvass that land before taking ship — clearly my quest log misled me in indicating that I was prepared for that challenge — and upon arriving in Stranglethorn Vale, there were immediately so many new people and organizations in need of aid that the Desolace tasks were squeezed out. Who knows when I shall return there? The space is more needed for other things in my current location. I have been perpetually at the limit for the number of quests I am permitted to accept since my arrival.

I have passed through many of the countries on this continent — I have slain yeti in the Arathi Highlands and muckdwellers in the swamp. I traveled the whole lower half of the continent, completing various tasks, and even discovered how to reach the northern half of the continent — where, to my devout relief, I finally found the town of Tarren Mills and was able to complete the tasks required to receive my Water Totem.

What I could not find was the path that led to the Badlands. I had several quests instructing me to go there, and they were low-level quests even at that time — obviously there must be a path that a lower level person such as myself could follow to get there — but I could not find it.

On one notable occasion, I braved the Burning Steppes, a country where every single creature is of the instant-death-to-me variety, running the northern border with frequent deaths incurred, trying to find the way through. It was not there. (My friend the paladin had a hearty laugh at my expense when I told her the story, but I noticed she did not offer an alternative route.)

Eventually I was forced to abandon those quests through my own ignorance, which was frustrating — only to be summoned there the next day to join a group who wished a healer to accompany them into the ruins of someone’s manor house. I had not even realized those ruins were in the Badlands. That was even more frustrating.

Having once reached the Badlands, I of course made contact with the local Flight Master, and now travel there is as easy as forming the desire to go there — but I am still ignorant of the land route by which they are accessible.

In any event — I returned to Booty Bay with more experience to take on the trolls and pirates that infest the area.

And there again, luck favored me far more than one could possibly imagine — on the corpse of one troll, no different than the dozens of others I had killed in the area, I found an axe. And not just any axe — an epic war axe, with a vast cutting blade and additional elemental damage — in short, a Fiery War Axe.

!!!

My excitement was so great that it took several deaths to remind me that my axe did not actually render me invincible.

It does, however, render me Very Dangerous to the beasts and ruffians who prowl this land.

And yet, despite all this — despite achieving my 40th level of experience, despite the purchase of a new and faster mount, despite learning to wear mail armor and donning at last the mail gloves I had found so long ago in one of the dungeons and had been saving in my bank vault for just this occasion, despite the gift of a superior quality chest piece from my friend the paladin before she was obliged to depart these lands to attend to family obligations for some months — even despite my eagerness to locate the Scarlet Monastery and accomplish the several tasks I have there (assuming that I can find a group who wishes to do the same) — here I sit, at the Booty Bay inn.

And here I shall sit for another two days yet.

Vacations are very nice, I suppose, but I wish they did not enforce such a dull inactivity.

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