[Taiku]

My first character on live was a wood elf druid before Velious was out, I was pretty hardcore in the sense that I played alllllllll the time, more than was good for my grades in middle school.

I finally had gotten high enough level to start peeking my head into lavastorm and the cave zones off of that, sol a-b? I'm not sure, anyway this was quite a while after I had started playing, and I had bought this THICK prima guide to the game filled with all kinds of cool info and pictures, I read through that when I wasn't playing the game, so I knew about the dragon under lavastorm, Nagafen.

I was actually pretty intimidated about the prospect of being in the same zone as a dragon, I didn't know about spawn timers and all of that so I just figured he was somewhere down there ready for me to make a mistake and fall through a pit into his lair or something like that, I never ventured far from the entrance of the zone.

One day I was there killing kobolds when a friend of mine said he was going to be dropping group with me to join his friends on a raid on Nagafen, I was really impressed and I wanted to see it first hand but again, I was afraid of the zone and didn't want to go too deep. So eventually the raid of people came through the entrance, my group mate on his main messaged me and asked me if I wanted to come watch, so of course I followed this huge mass of people through the unknown zone.

I got down pretty far into it and realized I was in an empty room, people were still running past me but I thought it a good idea to bind there so that if I did die, I would still have a chance to see the dragon for the first time, the one I had been reading so much about.

So I bound there and soon after, died, when I respawned I was in a room full of very red con and very unfriendly beetles, who proceeded to kill me about 20 times before I pulled the plug on my internet and forced myself offline, I was in a state of panic, all that work, all my gear, my chance at seeing the dragon, all gone.

I got on an alt after I composed myself a bit and petitioned for help, within 30 minutes I got a response from a guide who said he could help me, but only if I sent him a tell, from my druid, my thinking was that he didn't want to teleport someone who wasn't me by accident or something like that, the bad part was his name was VERY random and long, I remember it being at least 10 characters long and the same composure of a pet's name, just kind of random and hard to spell right the first time.

I was very young at the time and I didn't know about copy/paste at all, Ctrl+C Ctrl+V could of saved me here, I tried in vain at least 10 times to type the name out before the beetles killed me, but I must have broken some kind of typing record with how fast I typed his name out eventually, and got teleported up to him instantly. Sadly he said he couldn't refund my XP, because it really was my mistake. I was just glad I got my body back, even if I was at least 3 levels lower than what I was when I woke up that morning.

So that was my sad story of my first dragon encounter, I couldn't even get past the beetles! I never saw a dragon in that game even after playing from Kunark all the way to the LDoN expansion. So much time was invested into the game, thousands of hours with a goal of being able to kill a dragon, or a god, and I never made it. Which is why I'm here on this server to hopefully see one finally and fulfill that long standing goal of mine!