Speaking to Nagafen

Five hours. Multiple trips into the pre-expansion EQ2’s end game zone. And more kindness and generosity than I had any right to expect.
And yet I encounter that time and time again in EQ2. I belong to a no-name guild, driftwood they acquired when Eternal Carnage merged with them, and everyone but me left again. I don’t have a base of guildies from which to draw to do quests and raids and stuff, so I rely on the pickup raiders.
In fact I was harvesting (which, since my push into tradeskills post-Live Update 24, has become as compulsive as foraging was when I was an EQ1 druid) – I was harvesting when someone called a raid on Maiden’s Gulch in Lavastorm to start the “Speaks as a Dragon” quest – the first in a quest line that leads to prismatic weapons. I joined, but there were only three of us. It seemed people who had done this before had no desire to do it again…
You zone in, kill a drakota or two, talk to this guy, done! Right? Laughs. Oh yes, that’s all there is to it…
Eventually enough people offered to help out to make a raid, and we zoned in, killed a drakota or two, talked to this guy and then…
And then… the next five hours. Fighting down to talk to Lord Nagafen; but (we were informed by a giant servant) he will not talk to mere mortals in anything but the Ancient Draconic tongue, a language long lost and even the fragments found, hidden away and themselves relost.
26 runes to gather – one for each letter. Half in easy zones. The other half…
We lost people as the night wore on, and we ran from zone to zone, gathering runes. Snuck into Qeynos for that one, danced in the streets of Freeport as the Qeynosians snuck in for the one there. Runnyeye and Rivervale, Befallen (er, Stormhold) and Fallen Gate, Permafrost and Cazic-Thule, Freeport… and the Obelisk of Lost Souls…
A year and a half ago, I’d lucked into a wonderful guild called Paradox. Pacific time and Freeport-based. I had a real incentive to level, and got a few good levels outside the Obelisk. I never did finish the access quest… last night, I did. But two of the three runes we needed to gather were hidden behind a locked door that needed a seperate access quest. We were stopped… but a friend of one of the team (we were down to three by then, me (59 troubador), a 70 swashbuckler and a 70 fury) had access and let us in.
The Obelisk is a pretty amazing zone. Most of it was gray. Except for the part I fell into and was instantly swarmed. Just happened to be the room with the last rune we needed. The others saved me. It wouldn’t be the last time.
I wish I’d taken some screenies of the deepest interior of the Obelisk. The place is bizarre. Odd flying things; scampering bits of animate night; a dungeon taken from the more twisted creatures of an early Final Fantasy game.
The last two runes were deep within Solusek’s Eye. Now, a level 70 character can stroll where they like throughout this amazingly large, astoundingly deep zone. Nothing will aggro them. Everything aggros a level 59. And everything sees through invisibility.
I expected them to ask me to hire a mage to summon me to the proper areas; but no, the others, who could have done this in five minutes without me, fought and killed all the hundred creatures in the way to get the final two runes. Back to Antonica to have the runes translated and learn the language. And then fight all the way to Nagafen once more – this time, just me and the swashbuckler. Ten minutes and he would have been done! And yet he babysat me the entire way.
I felt incredibly guilty that I had been doing crafting and the new betrayal quest instead of leveling up and saving them all this bother. They never said a word about my level aside from noting they’d have to fight down.
I am still shocked and forever grateful. Naggy wants me to summon his dead partner Lady Vox’s spirit back from the netherworld. How could I refuse?
Laolthias, I owe you a big one. And Amberstone. And Nalas. I never met any of you before, you didn’t know me, and yet you took a good chunk of time to show kindness. Never saw that in WoW – everyone was so focused on themselves.

And that’s not even the only example. I was harvesting (again; still) with LFG up. A level 70 mystic asks if I want to go to the Roost and farm some nameds. Okay! We go in there, we do this – he doing the bulk of the work – and he lets me have the best stuff. What is wrong with these people?

And Dorah found Buddy again. She thought Buddy was dead at her hand when she betrayed, but the Tanglewood clan nursed him back to health. Matthias Siegemaker is no fool, and Dorah knows he knows… but the leaders of Freeport like having a little something to use against you if they need to, and so they are satisfied with this leverage. Dorah is just glad to see Buddy alive, even if he has to be confined to the apartment.

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