Leviathan!

What with vacations and connection issues and what-not, Kasul and I haven’t been able to get together for a decent story night for quite awhile. But we moved Heaven and Earth and got Skype going and hey, there we were, ready to save the world… again…
But only after having to do a bunch of trivial tasks… again. Us world-savers were asked to play hide-and-seek with some children, move a crate which had had its contents settling after packing, and gag some old dude with a perfume-soaked rag so he could be bundled off to Mos Eisley. Leastways, that’s how I remember it.
Kasul are in a free company, Valiant Exiles. They’re an okay bunch. I was randomly invited, but the guy who sent the random invitation was right in front of me. I said hello, he said hello, and, satisfied he was an actual player, I accepted. That stopped the random free company invites — my main goal. Since then, though, they’ve gotten a guild hall, in which I have a room which I THOUGHT WAS PRIVATE, but apparently I was wrong about that. I discovered just how wrong I was when a guildie followed me into my room. The guildmaster had warned me when I rented the room that no dogs or cats were allowed, and my little coeurl minion was begging for food…
Anyway. Occasionally the guild leaders gather everyone up for a quick extreme-level trial or a raid or something. I did Garuda (Extreme) with them once, which was a whole bunch of fun. I went as a Dragoon because a) dragoons look cool, and b) DPS jobs usually don’t require much finesse. Do as much damage as possible and stay out of the fire. The traditional job of the MMO damage class. They often get together for Leviathan (Extreme), but to go with the guild on this, Kasul and I would first have to unlock Leviathan (Hard). Just a few more quests into the story, where the Sahagin fish people, having seen the wild success the goblins, Ixali and Amal’jin had summoning their primals, decide to enforce their own claims to the sea by summoning the serpent Leviathan.

Some words about Admiral Merlwyb (pronounced Merl-wyeb, FYI). She’s always been pretty intense, but… I reached level 50 armorsmith a few days ago. The final test was to create some mythral armor to decide if the best armorer in the guild was me, or this other guy who was carrying along some really serious hate toward adventurer-crafters. So for this final test, she dressed some guards in the armor we made and shot them both. My entry won, which was a blow struck for whichever adventurer had actually crafted the armor, since I’d just bought it off the market board. I could have made it myself, but I was flunking the sub-combines left and right. I eventually decided to just skip to the thrilling conclusion. Go, Adventurers!
Adventurers in FFXIV, you see, are seen as a totally separate form of life as compared to NPCs who actually come from somewhere and are connected with the real world, as it exists in game. Just one of the meta-game elements that run through the game, Log Horizon-style. Anyway, many NPCs resist having adventurers encroach upon their personal little fiefdoms. Generally the faction leaders look to adventurers to shore up their own failings, re: the NPCs themselves being so entirely incompetent that seemingly every challenge, no matter how trivial (moving, for instance, a crate from one side of a plaza to the other) is beyond them.
Fighting a godlike primal is well past their capabilities. Previous times, they had to rely upon the fabled Company of Heroes (last seen running a restaurant in Costa del Sol. They were the ones who had to clean up the mess that resulted when FFXIV didn’t have enough subscribers the first time around. (Yes, FFXIV’s lack of subs resulted in an in-game Calamity.) But they are only able to make buffets for tourists now, and are more or less useless.

After we’d smuggled the refugee Domans (Garlean humans lead by a masked Au Ra rogue, for some reason) to Mos Eisley, we were summoned to meet the Admiral, who suggested we might want to check out suspicious Sahagin activity. Kasul and I took along useless Miquo’te conjurer Y’shtola (pronounced Yashutola, not Eeshtola, as I’d thought) to investigate. The useless (seeing a pattern, here?) scouts sent ahead of us were mostly dead to Sahagin patrols in league with officially unsanctioned pirates, both living and otherwise. We (Kasul and I, not Y’shtola, who largely hid behind rocks and stuff, doing nothing) fought our way to the docks, where the Sahagin leader was summoning Leviathan. Well, Admiral Merl came right up and shot him. Turned out that death was no longer the end for the Sahagin, as he just possessed one of his minions.
So the Admiral shot all of them. Not so fast! yelled the disembodied soul of the Sahagin, What is dead can never die! … is what I imagine the soul would have continued to shout (somehow), except that Leviathan ate him just then.
Turns out that some Ascian (bad guys) had gifted the Sahagin with immortality via the Echo, the exact same mechanism that adventurers use to recover from sudden extreme disembodiment (ie, death). Yes — the Ascians gave the Sahagin the in-game mechanism of resurrection only available to players. Another meta-game moment. If you die during a trial in game, for instance, your Echo power has you revive with additional strength. This implies that when we die, in game, our disembodied soul takes over the closest nameless NPC, who is immediately transformed into our clone.
You can see why rank-and-file NPCs are nervous about associating with adventurers.

The Admiral was advised that the only possible way to defeat Leviathan at this point was to lash together two ships, cover them with a single deck, and tow that out to where Leviathan sat, working up a tidal wave with which to wipe Limsa Lominsa off the map. The captains of the two ships chosen objected, until the Admiral offered to let them come along for the ride. Minds were quickly changed.
Nope, this was going to have to be an adventurer deal. And thus Kasul and I set sail on this makeshift barge at full speed, because the Admiral wanted to water ski. Err, wanted us to save her city.
The other tank and I chose sides, and I tanked the tail. That was pretty much my involvement with the fight. I’m going to have to do it again as dragoon (or bard, I am close to 50 on bard) so I can actually experience the fight. There are fights that are exciting for tanks, but this was not one of them. Garuda is pretty fun for tanks. Last time I did Garuda (Hard), someone accused both us tanks of being incompetent because he had aggro. Which IS a tank failure, but it’s the kind of thing that happens. You get next to the tank and they taunt it off. Tanks can’t be running to save you in Garuda. My job that day was to offtank the two adds and keep them away from Garuda while somehow not dying. Little busy here. Though I DID have good aggro, so probably I was just guilty by association since I didn’t drop my offtanking duties and go save some random deeps from their overnuking.
So, that was Leviathan. We headed back to Creepy the Elf in Waking Sands to get the news that all had been for nothing as Leviathan had instantly come back, even more dangerous than before, certainly because of the immortal Sahagin Echo she had swallowed. And that was Leviathan (Extreme) unlocked.
Long-time readers may have noticed that my character is no longer a Hyur Highlander. I swear I thought I was drinking an X-Potion… but it’s okay, everything’s okay, just as long as nobody drags some yarn in front of me.
The Leviathan encounter ended Patch 2.2. Three more patches to go until Heavensward.
Oh, by the way — seems the NPCs themselves are beginning to wonder if maybe the beastmen have a point about needing primals to fight back against human encroachment of their lands from all sides. (And, I was surprised to find out that, in game, all the different player races are considered to be subraces of humanity). Y’shtola made this argument unsuccessfully to the Admiral, with Yugiri listening from hiding. I’m unsure if Yugiri feels that her Au Ra people would be considered to be beastmen by the Admiral, and this is perhaps why she remains masked. Though the horns and scaled tail would seem to give her away nonetheless.
I don’t really have any idea what happens to the story past this point. I thought we would have opened up the Bahamut Coil dungeons by now. Maybe that’s coming soon, or maybe that’s some extra thing we have to do, just as opening the Crystal Tower seemed to be. I haven’t yet raided that, but I did unlock at least one level of it. I guess we’ll find out Monday.