QOTW Four: Suction Cups.

Salutations and greetings on this fair day, Bloggians. It seems it's that time again! A couple of you responded to my last post, in which I asked what sort of subject matter you're interested in hearing about, which I do very much appreciate. For those of you who missed it, it's here. I'd love to hear from a few more people as well. Those of you who answered, I will see what I can do! I may not be able to go very far into the reasoning behind things, but I will try.

It's been an interesting week in Pirate Land. Folks have been kind enough to not be irredeemable miscreants while I was on my shift, and there were some petitions about game mechanics which made me do research, and that makes me happy. I'll save some of the interesting tidbits I discovered for a later blog post, but so far the "how do I do this? Why is this doing this?" petitions are my favorites.

Oddly enough, I had this week's blog post all planned out, and then I actually had a spate of petitions asking about it. Yohoho Psychic Pirates are a little unnerving. The question of the week is "Where did you get your octopus? Is it true OMs get free familiars? Can I have it? Oh. In that case, can I buy it?" The answer, briefly, is that I created him myself using magic, yes, OMs get free familiars, and no, you can't have him, because octopi have suction cups all over their tentacles and he's stuck to my shoulder with all the force of a zillion little suckers.

Less briefly, I created him using a chat command. We've got quite a lot of chat commands, to the point where /help doesn't have room to list them all. I've gotten very good with ctrl-F and copy-pasting from my reference document! It is true that OMs can have familiars, aye, but I think I am/would be prouder of any I earned before becoming an OM. Somehow a chat command doesn't have the same panache and build up as a long tournament, or hours spent drawing, or sixteen revisions of a short story, or months of pillaging to save up the pieces of eight or months of collecting obscure items, or a Vegas which gave a sloop that extra oomph to get to port first in a race. Don't get me wrong - I'm very pleased with being able to use that chat command in the first place, because I like my job very much and was thrilled when I learned I'd been hired. It's just that familiar-wise, I admire any won by players much more.

What I, and many of the other OMs, use the familiars we have for is to create a bit more story and myth with the characters we've chosen. Castor's companion is his twin brother, Pollux. Hera's is Zeus, colored like the cuckoo Zeus once pretended to be in order to woo her. Mine is an octopus, chosen because octopi can change colors, just like nature does! I named him Karpoi; a reference to the four spirits of the seasons, often depicted in mosaics with Gaea (or, in some references, Ge. Still me.) I considered a lot of names, and one of the Karpoi almost became an OM until I realised that it would be cruel to ask people to spell Phthinoporon, and that I was incapable of pronouncing it aloud without sounding like Daffy Duck.

Next week on QOTW: Hello, Dolly!