Tuesday, March 4, 2008

My Coveted Earth Totem Quest...

Here is a picture with my very first spellcasted totem known as a Stoneskin Totem that conjures forth the Earth elementals.

Here is a picture of our Guild's newest Tauren Shaman, Shacow.... Shacow was distilled out of the pixellated ether by Ars Virtua's founder, Suffragist. In this picture, I ensured that credits for both ourselves and our created Totems were revealed where credits were due...

GREETINGS MEMBERS OF THE HORDE'S SHAMANIC ELITE!

I finally have earned my very first Totem as of last Sunday!
I can hardly contain my excitement!!!

I will not waste any more time with this idle banter! I ask that you now scroll down this blog-scroll and read all about my epic Call of Earth Quest...

History of this Epic Quest for the First Totem...

Here is a random portrait at the very beginning of my Totem Quest with a passer-by named Chone and some Lillith archetype with a hellbent taste for bondage and corrosive cackling...At this time, I was waiting for Sliz to join me by the fire pyre...

Sliz finally arrived and our first contact since the previous Sunday took the appearance of a spectral summit. It is true that our most fundamental bonds as a Guild actually do revolve around the spiritual nature of our being but usually, our natures are never this publically revealed to anyone outside our Guild? Perhaps this was a Near-Death experience of sorts and a foreshadowing of more corpse-releasing that was looming just yonder over the mountainous horizon.

Here is a portrait with another passer-by named Beaste...At first he looked like my new Shamanic colleague, Shacow but I guess all Taurens look somewhat alike at first glance.

Here I am with Sliz about to walk through a pool of water for the first time. We had to backtread through this pool at least once since I realized half-way (and half-witted) through the scorpion hunting quest that I was also supposed to loot them in order to acquire their tails as a pre-required bounty...

At last! Shacow arrives at the den to help me with my first Call of Earth Quest...I did not rejoin him until a bit later though since I still had to fulfill my Questing rites as a pre-initiate with with Sliz...

My personal Shaman Trainer named Shikrik offers me Totem training as soon as I can get ahold of my very own Earth Totem... However, she wants to charge me 95 gold so I had to sell off some of my leather at a Merchant in the den of the Valley of Trials... After amassing the sufficient funds, I further realized that I could not train anyway until I was at a slightly higher level... Therefore, I had to kill and loot some more to acquire the necessary Savings Account and Level up my prestige in order to be worthy to receive the most sacred of Shamanic training...

Here I am with Sliz attacking a Felstalker in the Burning Blade Coven. The Felstalkers had many things to offer us including lootable gold, prestige building experience and one of them even contained a tiny Gold Medallion but I did not find this item with Sliz...in fact, we had no idea a lowly Felstalker would even carry a medallion... It was just a matter of time before both of us became disoriented and lost and we felt that we had to return to homebase and wait for Shacow who remarkably was more experienced than both of us (probably due to the fact that Shacow was directly channeling his mighty guru, Suffragist).

Once again, I resorted to swimming aimlessly in pools of water as a last ditch effort to find endarkenment.... In this case, the pool that I am wading in here is inside the Burning Blade Coven...if only I had the Medallion at this time! ARRRGH!

As a kind of "Trophy Portrait", I have decided to show you one of my fresh Felstalker victims... I must clarify that although the Felstalker is conventionally classified as a "demon", this base creature should not be confused with the far more intelligent and divine elementals and entities that are known to our Magickal Elite as daemons. My Sigil Ritual Metaquest represents the highest form of arcane Daemonolatry and my tribute entity that I will invoke/evoke at the endgame point (the addicted peons tell me there never ever really is an "endgame") of this Metaquest will be treated with the utmost of respect and veneration!

MY TIME HAS COME! My first Totem related quest known as the Call of Earth was dicatated to me literally ("literally" as in via text-scroll transmission) from Canaga Earthcaller. Not only did Canaga create this wonderfully articulated scroll for me to read and absorb, he also made the visionary (hallucinagenic) Sapta brew for me to drink once my first Rite of Passage had been completed...

In this portrait, I had scrolled down the scroll to read more about the side effects of the Earth Sapta Brew that I was about to drink in a matter of an hour...

Once I had returned to the Burning Blade Coven with Shacow, I had my first taste of virtual mortality... The Felstalkers had the better of me...sigh! This portrait is historic as it depicts me "dying" for the first time. By "dying", it is merely a rather painless process where my immortal spirit is forcibly evacuated from my corpse and moved to the nearby Cemetary....All I have to do once I am dead, is to roam the Medieval Metaverse as a Hungry Ghost in search of my resurrectable body.

Fortunately for me, Shacow also fell Six feet Under and so he knew where our old bodies (corpses) were located. So, we were lucky in that no depraved individuals stuck around for some good old corpse camping while we were gone...phew!

Well, there was one beastly cretin who attempted to camp by my corpse so I took my rightful revenge on my killer and leveled the karmic playing field somewhat...

As soon as we finally located the Medallion, Shacow and I made haste and departed from the Coven...it looks like Dorehynia and her consort (no nametag was revealed)were hoping to find a reasonable reproduction of the original Medallion that we had just scored...heheheheh!

BEHOLD! I HAVE EVOKED THE MINOR MANIFESTATION OF EARTH!

Once we had returned the Medallion to its rightful owner, we found a secret passage to the hidden region reserved for Shamans (I think) known as Spirit Rock. Eager for contact, I guzzled several gulps of this foul-tasting Sapta Brew and almost immediately afterwards, my first of many psychedlic trance visions were beginning to enfold...This portrait I think captures the exact moment when my sense of reality was on the verge of being alchemically transmuted towards the sublime visage of an Earthly Elemental that I was to come to know later as the Minor Manifestation of Earth.

Finally, the Minor Manifestation of Earth appears before me...


Here is a portrait of Shacow and myself having direct communion with the Minor Manifestation of Earth...

I must say I was awe-struck by my first conventional elemental visitation since I took a few portraits of this encounter.

This portrait shows the scroll that was passed to us by the Minor Manifestation of Earth. In order to fulfill our Call of Earth Quest, we accepted some rough quartz from the MMofE (as I now affectionately call him) and was instructed to return this quartz to Canaga so he could use it as the heart that would power the first Earthly Totems. These two Totems would be given to us as soon as Canaga had the quartz so we rushed back to The Den in the Valley of Trials...

Here is the moment when the Minor Manifestation of Earth offered us our own shards of rough quartz...

THE SECOND CALL OF EARTH QUEST HAS BEEN COMPLETED! Canaga Earthcaller accepts our tokens of quartz for our newly acquired Stoneskin Totems. Canaga must be a Master-Mason since it took virtually no time at all for us to receive our customized gifts. Perhaps, Canaga is directly related to the Totem Ancestor!

This portrait shows more of the scroll offered by Canaga...Shacow is also visible in this portrait... The time had come for us to test out the placement and configuration of these Totems...

In this portrait, you can see the Totem listed in my inventory...

Here is another historic portrait for the archives. Here I am casting my first Totem with Shacow. We both noticed that the placement of an Earth Totem such as this Stoneskin one seems to appear right in front of us but to the....er...front and right of us.... I think Shacow is right when he said that each Totem element (Earth, Fire, Water and Air) will have a different default placement in relation to the spellcasting avatar Shaman. Once we make it to level 30 and have all the token Totems from each corresponding element, it will take us at least one full rehearsal to figure out how to configure these Totems in conformity with the Sigil's basic skeletal pattern.

Here is another pic of Shacow and myself proudly displaying our first Totems.

Here is an informative portrait of Shacow inspecting my first Totem in order to test its eventual placement/configuration in the Metaquest's first major Sigil charging ritual.

Is it not yet evident that we are proud of our accomplishment on this sublime Sunday? Here is yet another angle of us with the Totems.

As mentioned earlier, we are testing ways to destroy and re-cast Totems in order to determine configuration possibilities...

Here is one last portrait of our Totems...Somehow, we managed to make cryptic icons appear over our Totems. Mine has a crescent moon, and Shacow's Totem has a skull...hopefully this is not some bad omen for him!!!

PHASE ONE OF THE METAQUEST IS COMPLETE...FOR THE HORDE!

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