Wednesday, April 14 2004 6:38 PM PDT

Genkai Blues

Well, I just went on yet another outing for genkai 1 (the first level cap quest). It's basically the subjob quest all over again. I happened upon the exoray mold back when I was level 46 or so. Our party in crawlers' nest got bored at how easy Horn Flies were, so we tried out an Exoray. Well, the very first exoray dropped the mold. Not knowing what exactly it was (or what it was for), I only lotted once I saw everyone else lot. :) I won the mold with a lot number in the high 900's. We chained quite a number of exorays afterwards, but none other dropped the mold before the party broke up.

When I was 47, I saw someone shouting for a genkai party into Garlaige, to grab the bomb coal. I expressed interest and joined the party. It ended up being 4 Japanese players and 2 English. To make a long story short, I died twice during that outing (first time was when the Explosure exploded, second time was when we were ambushed by Funnel Bats while the white mage and the dragoon were on their way back to our position). We ended up allying with two high level Japanese players (I believe a ninja and a bard). We ate through the remaining explosures rather quickly and got bomb coals for everyone. (They always drop at least 1, usually multiple bomb coals.)

Well, today was my 2nd outing to get the remaining piece, the Ancient Papyrus. The first one was rather disasterous, but luckily for me, I left before disaster struck. :) I just wanted to gain xp that day, not hunt for the papyrus. Anyway, I heard many members of that party died.

Today, I went with 2 members of my last leveling party, a friend, as well as two random people. We decided to take the other entrance into The Eldieme Necropolis — through Beacedine Glacier. Since quite a few of us didn't have the Vazhl telepoint crystal, we took the long way... teleporting to Holla, riding chocobo to Ranguemont Pass, and walking through the glacier all the way back to Batallia.

Once there, we set up camp... and what we didn't realize at first was that casting Cure turned off Sneak. So one of our paladins (we had 3) accidently aggro'ed a Mummy as well as a Lich the first time. We all survived the battle (despite the red mage being MIA), but with our lives in the red/yellow. :) Afterwards, it was decided that I should pull with Carbuncle... and we did that for 2-3 more Lichs. When we killed the Lichs in our general vicinity, the white mage offered to pull next (she knew the area better). She casted Sneak and Cure pulled a Lich... but unfortunately her Sneak switched off because of that action. She aggroed like 3-4 other undead and pulled them back to camp.

The paladins quickly engaged the undead, but they couldn't hold them all off. The white mage eventually died. I began casting Escape, saw that the group wasn't wholly together, cancelled... then I was dumbfounded that I couldn't cast Escape for quite a number of seconds. Finally, I was able cast Escape on myself and the paladins and bring us to safety. (Note that the cowardly red mage actually logged off while the whole mob was killing us. He never returned afterwards.)

Later, we just went back to Beacedine Glacier and traveled to Xarcabard... to pick up the Vazhl telepoint crystal. I logged off shortly afterwards to eat dinner. They'll probably try again tonight, but I will unfortunately miss it.