Hooray for May! It's been warmer than usual here most of the time since our last post, frequently feeling more like summer than spring. We're not complaining, though! Mom performed the biannual closet swap today: goodbye, sweaters and hello, summer clothes!
We've been slowly bringing short-sleeved shirts back into Clara's rotation on Star Stable too, as you'll see in some of our screenshots to come.
Brighty squeaked out a win at the Fort Pinta championship on the final day of the Equestrian Festival! That brought our championship ribbon collection to an even 10. Thank you, Brighty! Way to go!
Here are Magic and Clara saying goodbye to the Moorland festival grounds. Until next year!
We've gained enough confidence to occasionally participate in championships now without being super stressed out. It will never be our favorite thing, but the shillings payouts make it worth it! We've noticed the pools of competitors tend to be smaller now that the festival is over. Once it was just us and one other player! (Other player won. Shocker. It was weird, though, because they were invisible to us the entire race.) Artie has earned two ribbons now, which just leaves Magic without any. Sorry, girl! We'll make sure you get more chances!
Things have been relatively quiet on the game since the festival ended. One small addition is that you can perform 3 varying chores a day from inside your home stable to earn a few shillings. These include the expected things like feeding, watering, and mucking stalls, but also new things like tack cleaning, chicken chasing, and showering a horse. (Why we are getting paid and who is paying us remains to be seen, but we'll take it!)
Since we have 12 stalls and only 8 horses, frequently random stall selection for these chores goes awry. It's especially amusing when we have to clean up manure piles from unoccupied stalls. I guess the horses sometimes leave their own stalls when Clara's not there to go unload in a different stall, ha ha.
The end of the festival was a little sad, but we feel like 4 weeks was an appropriate length of time. We're enjoying the slower pace and being able to focus more on questing.
Here's Clara searching for a needle in not one but multiple haystacks. She did actually find it! (Only in Star Stable!)
In another, we teamed up with Bonnie to retrieve a councilman's pants from top of the clock tower. Long story.
Unfortunately, this involved Clara "distracting" some angry wasps while Bonnie retrieved the pants.
Clara headed back to the Valley of the Hidden Dinosaur on Artie and got to help out Nic Stoneground with various scientific pursuits, including taking small samples from the giant "dinosaur" skeleton. They also rescued this woman, Professor Einstein, who miraculously survived a helicopter crash without suffering any bodily harm.
Oops. Clara's hair and this coat are not compatible. XD
In another more extended quest, we ran into Maya out at her family's sad, mostly abandoned family farm in the Forgotten Fields. Maya still goes out there to tend some animals. A rouge horse scared and scattered her sheep, so Snowy and Clara helped her round them back up. Unlike the sheep during special events or at Starshine Ranch, these ones nicely follow behind rather than having to be herded.
They found and calmed down the loose palomino horse.
She was injured enough that they wanted to take her to the rescue ranch on South Hoof, yet not so injured that she needed a trailer. Off they all went.
While the horse was being cared for, Clara had to figure out who she belonged to. Turns out she was from Paddock Island and frequently escaped her paddock. The owner seemed nice enough but hadn't even noticed the horse, Elli, was missing yet.
Once recovered, Clara, Frosty, and Maya brought Elli back home.
Elli's owner could see that she'd bonded with Maya and thought she'd be happier on the grassy expanses of the Forgotten Fields, so she generously gave Elli to her! Aw, totally saw that one coming. <3
On a more ominous note, she did not have anything good to say about the farm's future prospects. Poison from GED? Curse? Both? We shall see!
The most lengthy quest we've been on recently is a continuation of "save Nightdust and his companions." Mr. Anwir had taken some wild ponies from South Hoof to perform mysterious sinister experiments on. Madison, the girl NPC who has bonded with Nightdust, will never learn and once again snuck off to try to save him single-handedly. Her dad and Clara needed a distraction to get into the sketchy warehouse/lab after her, as the area was crawling with guards.
Madison's dad was not impressed with Clara's idea for a distraction, so he did the distracting instead while Clara snuck in.
Reunited with Madison, it was then a long, involved process to sneak past security cameras, figure out the code to get into the control room, and then get the cameras to loop yesterday's footage so that they could continue their mission undetected.
Madison's dad arrived in time to help them free the horses. Nothing fancy this time: they just took crowbars to the cages.
I'm guessing the noise alerted Mr. Anwir, because he showed up despite the disabled security cameras. Why everybody waited to free Nightdust last, I don't know, but Madison's dad left with the other horses while Madison and Clara hung back to free him.
Clearly, Nightdust was not himself.
Freaky stuff, right? Nightdust and Clara had a moment, and after that Nightdust seemed to start fighting what'd been done to him with all he's worth.
It made him very erratic to ride but also very effective at destroying the lab.
Mr. Anwir then had the bright idea to inject himself with the same stuff he'd injected Nightdust with.
Once transformed, he immediately left the lab to rampage through Jorvik City and ended up on top of the ice cream parlor.
He's still there. After luring him down and getting him to chase us - while on flat, solid ground, I might add - we randomly started falling into nothingness on loop. The game then booted us and had the audacity to tell us we were suspected of cheating! No, no cheating here, we promise. Just a weird bug!
Fortunately, we could log back on. When we did, we were safe on solid ground at the bus stop outside Fort Pinta. All has been well since. We haven't had the time or desire to go back to face the monster or risk falling limbo again. Sorry, Jorvik City!
