Saturday, June 16, 2007

The Intruder Despite Herself

I was minding my own business, chatting with friends and acquaintances, when the world grayed out and I saw the dreaded popup saying that the sim is going down and I was being forcibly logged off.

I grumbled to myself, fired up the client once again, and without thinking left the "last location" choice enabled. I have no idea how long it takes Linden Labs to reset a server for a sim, and no doubt it varies, but I am sure I did not wait anywhere near long enough, and sure enough, I was told my last location was unavailable, so it was putting me somewhere else...

...and I rezzed in darkness. What ambient light there was showed an expanse of tiles in a checkered black and white pattern that I recalled seeing once. I zoomed out and found that I was inside the Rakehell, a truly impressive dirigible with glass windows essentially over its entire skin. That modification to the original dirigible construction, as well as the lovely interior decoration, were done by Mordecai Scaggs and his talented and lovely lady, Kacy Despres, and if you haven't had the pleasure of reading about it,. I hope you will do so now, at least to read the story of the making of its elegant nameplate and see a photograph thereof.

Zooming back, I saw my erstwhile conversational companions standing beside me, wondering what on earth (or perhaps I should say on the grid) had happened. Under these extraordinary (I hope!) conditions, put here by who knows what logic of the SL server, I felt extremely embarrassed, so I departed as quickly as I could gather my wits, and offered my fellow unwilling intruders a teleport following me to the first scenic location that came to my mind.

I have no idea what put it into SL's head to put me high into the air, much less why it should do so for the folks I'd been chatting with. I am just glad we did not pop into the middle of a gathering, and hope that such a thing never happens to me again.

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