One Giant Step For Sea Lion Kind...

The Journey Around The World To Collect Half Of Some Stupid Sea Lion Trinket Begins With A Single Step...

So I've been playing my druid in WoW. At level 10 you can begin the quest to learn how to turn into a bear, but part of the quest involves travelling to Darkshore and clearing a cave of level 10-12 Moonwalkkins or whatever they're called, and then fighting a level 13 Moonwalkin champion or something along those lines. Basically, not something a level 10 druid can accomplish by themselves. In the meantime I've gotten into tailoring and herbalism and I've been running around completing other quests, filling in my maps for the areas I've been to, and gathering herbs and selling them at the auction house. I've become moderately rich for a character of my level.

But I kept running into idiots who couldn't understand why I couldn't turn into a bear yet. "Turn into a bear!" another druid, level 10, already in bear form, says. "Why can't you do it yet? It's easy! Don't you know what you have to do?"

Yeah, whatever.

So at level 14 I finally went back and finished my quest -- not too hard at that level. Being a bear is kinda cool I suppose, but not too advantageous to me just yet, since I can't cast spells in that form and right now I rely heavily on my spells to do what I do.

By the way, I've become a very cynical druid. First, because every damned bear, wolf, spider or great cat in the entire world attacks me on sight, regardless of whether they stand any chance at all of so much as leaving a red mark on my hand. On one of my quests the druid goes on and on about how horrible it is that I have to destroy these diseased bears and how sad it is to kill forest life. Well I got news for you buddy, I destroy as much forest life as I can possibly manage to do. They all must die! I end up feeling especially uncharitable when I'm just trying to collect herbs and I have to stop what I'm doing and kill some stupid cat or bear who absolutely insists on impaling themselves on my staff. Never mind when I'm in more dangerous territory and two or three of these vile evil beasts gang up on me, knock me down when I'm trying to run away, and then kill me. As an elfin druid of the forest, I have a deep loathing for bears and great cats and spiders that is never going to go away.

They attack me even when I'm in bear form. What's up with that? What good is being a bear if every hostile animal in the wide world still recognizes you as a target? At least in Everquest, wolf form allowed druids to pass by some of their enemies unnoticed, because people who wanted to kill druids didn't always also want to kill every wolf they met.

But anyway... I've been doing quests, and one of my quests was to go to Shady Grove or whatever it's called and talk to the head druid honcho dude there. I had ignored it for a while, but when I finally went to talk to him, I learned that he wanted to teach me the next transformation form -- aquatic form, a sea lion. That sounded cool, and it seemed it would be really easy. The first part was to jump into the nearby lake, find a special item, and take it to a nearby shrine. You only had 25 minutes to do it, but it was absurdely easy to do.

The next step was to talk to two people within the Shady Grove (not its real name) area. I had to find two pieces of some sort of sea lion talisman and combine them, but first I had to find the people who would tell me where to look. So I started running around. Up to this point, Shady Grove had seemed like a very remote druid enclave with no enemies present at all, and with guards who are from a minotaur-like race that is part of the evil alliance, but these ones were obviously on the side of good and trees and fluffy bunnies. So when I found an orc-like guy, I just naturally assumed he was some sort of outcast who had turned his back on evil and hung out with wimpy tree-hugging elves now.

So I ran up to him and tried to say hi. I was dead inside two seconds.

I then realized he was a ridiculously high-level bad guy, who was hanging out in Shady Grove (not its real name) for no apparent reason. Well, that was stupid, but I managed to get my body back and went on my way.

Next I ran up a pathway into the mountains. Some ridiculously high-level creature appears and killed me with one swing.

Um, okay. Shady Grove is not quite the happy place I had assumed, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Whatever it was I'd run into, he hurt a great deal.

After this I decided to canvas the actual town where level 60 bad guys weren't waiting to ambush me at a moment's notice. The two people I was looking for were in the last place I looked. That's partly because I didn't keep looking after finding them, but also I managed to search the entire town more than once before I noticed them standing in a place I'd somehow overlooked the first two times through.

One of them told me to go to a place in Darkshore, deep in the ocean up North, and beware the thrashers. Okay, I knew where that was, and I knew about thrashers. I was surprised that the two pieces weren't right here in Shady Grove (not its real name) but I guess the quest wasn't quite as easy as I'd been expecting.

The other of them told me to go to some place called Westfall, and to swim out from the Goldcoast Quarry and look for an anchor.

Um... WTF? I'd never heard of a place called Westfall. I'd never been there. My gnome had never been there. My dwarf had never been there. My humans had never been there. I had no idea where it was or how I was supposed to find it.

This stumped me so much that I decided to take a break from the game and go watch a movie. But while lying on the couch, I picked up my guide book. Mostly it walks you through the newbie quests and doesn't really explain anything about later quests, but I was at least able to figure out where Westfall was. It was down on the Southwestern coast of the Eastern continent.

My little druid was on the Northwestern corner of the Western continent. In other words, it was a hella long ways away from me.

I still didn't know how to get there. I read some more, and realized that a boat would take me from Auberdine in Darkshore to some place on the other continent called Mentholated Harbor, something like that (not its real name). I had to check a map to see that this was a point way the hell North of where I wanted to go. Like, the other side of the continent away.

Hmmm. I studied the map. It looked like I could follow a road from Mentholated Harbor (not its real name) through the Evil Swampy Land to That Place Whose Name I Forget Where My Dwarf and Gnome Hang Out. Lake MoDean (not its real name). That's it.

From there it was just a very very long run up into the mountains, through the tunnels, and halfway across a vast land of newbie monster goodness to the giant dwarf city of Ironlag (technically not its real name, but frankly speaking, this is what it's called). From Ironlag I could take a deep underground tram thingy to Stormhovel, whatever the human city is called. This wasn't far from where I wanted to go.

In other words, I could make a humongously long and dangerous trip and I might actually get to the quest place I was supposed to get to.

It was late at night by this point but I was excited to start my quest, so off I went. I rode the boat to Mentholated Harbor, which might as well have been called "The Place Where Jack Sparrow Hangs Out". It was a pirate's cove if ever there was one.

But I didn't have a lot of time to waste. I spoke to flight control and was off. (In WoW, if you speak to the local guy who controls the flying gryphons or whatever they use to flap about the place, then later you can fly back to him from another such flight control dude).

I ran through Evil Swampy Land, which was full of nasty stuff wanting to kill me. I ran away from an evil croc monster that nearly killed me, and then up in the mountains I had to run betweeen two evil orcs that also wanted to kill me. These were things a bit above my level, not too bad but not stuff I could probably expect to kill if I hung around. So I ran.

Next stop was Lake Woebegon... er, Loch MoDean (not its real name either). Here I paused to gather some herbs, kill a few things, and talk to the flight master. Then it was off to the valley of kings, the various mountain tunnels, kill more stuff in the newbie area and collect more herbs, and then the long run up to Ironlag.

And boy, was it ever laggy. As per usual.

I placed some herbs for sale in the Auction house, spoke to the flight control dude, and then went off to Tinkertown to ride the tinkertoy subway train. Luckily for me, the goblins haven't yet figured out how to bomb the deep underground gnome tramway, but that may be something to watch out for in the future. Anyway, one tram ride later, I'm in the dwarven section of the human city in the South, Stormhovel.

After talking to the flight attendant here (which took a while for me to figure out where he was, I'd only met him once before and i hadn't been paying attention to where I was running at the time, I was just following skyoxford wherever he went), I found the gates out of town.

Here I saw some more familiar territory, as one of my humans had seen some of this land. But I followed the road as it curved South and then West and off into the evil badlands of Westfall, which were pretty scary. There were plenty of things here that could kill me, and I spent another long bit running scared across the land, not entirely sure where I was going. But I found the coast, and I found the quarry, and then I went looking in the water.

I couldn't find what I was looking for. There was a wrecked ship surrounded by evil chicken of the sea creatures from the black lagoon thingies. They were nasty. I fought one who was a hunter with a pet and he nearly killed me. But this ship had an anchor of some sort nearby so I thought it might be where I was supposed to go, which really sucked because there was no way I was going to be able to fight my way into it. It was thick with bad guys at or above my level.

I logged off for a bit, well aware that it was very late at night and I needed to sleep. But I couldn't let it go. I did a quick search and found a WoW quest/info site, and quickly located my quest. The good news was that I didn't have to fight my way into anything. I needed to swim straight out from the quarry and look for an anchor in deep water, and then dive down over the trench edge at that point.

There were no bad guys here. I found the trinket and teleported back to Darkshore. After a much shorter adventure, I had the other half of the trinket. I went back to Shady Grove, combined them, turned them in, talked to the boss druid, and he gave me the A-OKAY to become a sea lion any time I want. It allows me to breathe underwater and swim faster... and to look ugly... but that's about it. It's not a good form to fight in, and I can't cast spells in that form either. And you can't leave the water without turning back to your standard elf self.

And it doesn't help you kill bears or cats or spiders at all. But I killed a bunch of them anyway, and did some quest that resulted in grown male elves crying like little girls. You know, you just don't see dwarves crying like that just because their loved one is undead or there's no way to cure an infected bear.