Siren and Bixie

This weekend I finally decided that I would spend some money on Everquest, which I've been playing for more than two weeks now.  I bought a three month subscription, and I bough some extremely frivolous items from their online store.

Friday night and Saturday morning I did more tradeskill stuff.  I spent another couple of hours in Permafrost, and this time I scoured the whole keep (aside from the area where Lady Vox the dragon dwells) and located many of the permafrost crystal ground spawn locations.  I wound up with about 25 permafrost crystals, more than enough to keep me busy for a good while.  The next day I hunted animate scarecrows in West Karana for the Jack-O-Lantern fungus they drop, but they only dropped one so that was a bust.  I came up with some pumpkin flesh and seeds for baking though.

I've killed Hadden at least twice more, still no underwater breathing earring.  I'm taking quite a few faction hits from killing him, but I don't ever need to visit Qyenos anyway, and in any case I can slaughter knolls and bandits until the cows come home to fix faction later.

I visited Lesser Faydark again and picked up more Jack-O-Latern fungus and Sarcosypha Fungus.  I visited Meras Seru again, but only scrounged up one charcoal (and some iron oxide and russet oxide).  Later I was able to buy more iron oxide and charcoal from a vendor that someone had sold to, so I'm now really set for more dyes.  Not that I actually need more bags at this point, and I don't think they're very marketable, but I want to make more purple and dark blue bags.  Also, the dyes can be used on the higher-level bags that I'll make later on.

The frivolous items that I bought were two polymorph wands that turn me into a small flying fairy or a siren.  These are, in my opinion, two of the best-looking polymorph options available.  I also bought a "petamorph" wand that turns my pet into a bixie -- a small bee girl.  (Actually, it turns my pet into a LARGE bee girl, but I can shrink her down afterwards.)  I like this -- she looks better and doesn't bark and howl all the time.  I also bought a potion of "pet amnesia" that allowed me to rename my pet permanently.  I wanted something that worked for a bixie/fairy sort, so I thought about calling her Honey and then settled on Clover instead.

The biggest thing that buying a subscription offered me, though, was the chance to set myself up at the market as a seller.  So strangely enough, no sooner had I paid for a subscription than I got my character all set up and walked away from the computer.  Over the course of Saturday I sold quite a few things and made some money -- I'd been saving up drops for a while, mostly various flavors of the defiant armor and weapons that really are good equipment at whatever level they're intended.  And that's mostly what I was able to sell, too.

Sunday I spent more time foraging for trade skills.  I decided to work on baking, and to use up some of the various meats and baking materials I'd collected so far.  My skill was 70, and I had drake and wurm meat that can only be used in pickling, which was a 75 trivial, and that required me to travel all the way to Cobalt Scar in Velious to get the ingredients needed to do the pickling.  This was a tricky journey into the unknown. I used a shortcut through the Plane of Mischief, and found myself by the shores of a big lake in a zone that tops out at level 50, so it wasn't very dangerous to me.  The water is filled with creatures that attack on site -- cold water barracuda, sharks, possessed treasure chests, and sirens that looked very much like I currently looked.  And they all dropped valuables or meat that I could use in baking, so I spent a good amount of time swimming underwater (I got to use my enduring breath spell) and killing everything except the friendly otter folk, who sold me their spices and bought all the junk I dredged up.

I have to say, the siren polymorph looks good but has limited movement -- it's not designed to sit down or kneel, for example, so when I sit to meditate I can't see myself sitting.  But it's very much designed to swim underwater, and to look good doing that, so I enjoyed swimming underwater and looking like I actually belonged there.  ^_^

When I was finally done I gated back to Crescent Reach and spent a lot of time baking.  I made pickled wurm, pickled drake, siren pickles, candied spiders, lemon pie, and finally animal and barbarian-shaped cookies, which required a detour to Freeport to buy the cookie patterns.  Freeport was kind of sad -- it's been fully updated and looks much better than it used to (although it still looks like a muddy, crummily-built outpost city, which it's meant to be), but there was no one around.  Many, many of the zones in EQ (on Firiona Vie anyway, but likely on many servers) are empty, while the "hot zone" servers and high end servers see action (and Plane of Knowledge and the Bazaar are always busy).

Anyway I got my baking skill up from 70 to 106, so I did some good.  ^_^

Then I set myself up to try and sell more junk!  ^_^