Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

I want a pet.

Not any pet mind you, but a Norrathian pet.

See, in game I have dozens of pets divvied nicely between my characters. Monkeys play nicely with cats and roam around my living space happily, almost carefree as they refrain from breaking items and throwing their own feces at each other. They never bite strangers who visit my room - although I would probably pay extra for a pet that would because that's pretty amusing. They co-exist peacefully and most importantly, the room doesn't reek of ammonia and no one poops on my pillow.

In general, there is only one "pet" in EverQuest that sucks.

The "scare" crow.

Yeah. That's right. I said it. I've had enough of that oily black reject from an Edgar Allen Poe poem making me afraid to enter my own room. Now, while I am *partially* to blame for the fear, lemme fully explain the situation to those of you who might not be familiar with the "SCARE" CROW.

The "Scare" Crow was a reward for finishing one of the lovely and fun instances you could enter during Halloween. It was a "haunted house" that was full of giant spiders, rats, zombies, and a lazy ghostly servant who couldn't cross over to the "other side" until you cleaned the house for him. (Side note - Vengeance is a good reason for not crossing over. Hatred is also a good reason. A messy frelling house? How boring was this guy in LIFE that his one task left unfulfilled so that he could rest peacefully was dusting a god damn bookshelf?)

Once you cleared the house of pests, tidied up a bit, and oh yeah - took care of the GRAVEYARD IN THE ATTIC, (basement people, BASEMENT. Bodies go in the BASEMENT.) you were rewarded with a "Scare" crow that you could place in your room as a pet.

What people didn't realize at first was the fact that scare crow would randomly generated a "Pop up" on your scream in which a rotting corpse would lunge at you while you were checking your sell board and sipping peacefully from a glass of Pepsi with your head phones on.

Many a pair of pants were ruined by the..um..pepsi. Yeah. The soda.

Now, once I found out that OTHER people could see the horrible rotting zombie slap it's self against their monitor when they visited my room, I smiled like the grinch when he got HIS evil plan and quickly ran out and got a "scare" crow with every one of my characters.

Giving everyone of my characters "trustee" access to my room, I ran about the apartment "clip dropping" them. Basically, where the walls were buggy I would place a crow. The room would swallow it so that it couldn't be seen and I would have a five times greater chance at having a visitor scream like a girl when they came into my room.

And it worked. Oh mama did it work. I'd invite people up, and they'd nosily root through my room comparing my possessions to their own and BOO! They'd start spinning, or back peddling, or trying to cast spells on the zombie that only they could see.

And I'd laaaaugh. Oh gods how I would laugh. Then they'd leave and I'd look for a new victim.

Lemme tell ya. That well ran dry quickly. Soon no one would visit my room and the fact that I would FORGET about the zombies myself quickly took the novelty out of my prank.

So I gathered up the crows, all four of them, and sold them on my trader.

That's right. All four. There was one that the room swallowed completely. I tried all of the tricks, claimed all my items several times, but I never got that last crow back. Figuring it was a glitch I wrote it off as a loss and completely forgot about him.

Until the other day when he popped.

It was late and I was TIRED. I ran up to my room to drop a few things into the house vault when out of the blue a rotting corpse cackled as it tried to reach through the monitor at me.

Normally, I'm not the jumpy type at all. But let me tell you brother - When a rotting zombie cackles madly into your headset when you are half awake and leaning in REALLY close to the monitor out of exhaustion?

I spilled Pepsi all over the front of my pants....even though I wasn't drinking Pepsi, if you get my drift.

I think I'm selling my apartment today and moving to a less haunted locale.

If anyone wants to find me, I've just purchased that old place in Amityville. Maybe now I can get some rest.

-Coyote