Kitty, Kitty, Please Come Here

Following on from yesterday's post, here are some more pictures of cats. This is the Internet, right? It's not like there's a quota.

As I added in an edit late in the afternoon, I was wrong about the big cat only appearing in Lion's Arch. There was one in every starting city. It took me a while but I found them all.

First I went to Hoelbrak, simply because that was where the cat was in a screenshot someone posted on the forums. The moment I waypointed in I could see the creature looming over the mountain tops from half a city away.

Finding the exact location in most of the cities turned out to be a case of looking for players hanging in the air on their flapdoodle mounts like a bunch of rubbernecking tourists on hang-gliders. It made for a number of amusing screenshots, where the giant cats looked like they were about to swat the pesky players out of the sky. Sadly, they never did.

Someone on the forums had posted a list of directions on how to find each cat. The format was just like what ArenaNet uses for "quests":

LA = Seek for the Lighthouse.
Hoelbrak = A good view from the mountains.
Rata Sum = Do I see a shiny box?
Divinity Reach = Attack of the Titans Cats.
The Grove = I can see the whole tree here!
Black citadel = The witch cat is present where the blood prince appeared.

The poster later clarified that they'd made them up themselves, which is going above and beyond, I'd say.

Most of them were very obvious and easy to find. The one in Rata Sum was right next to the Super Adventure Box zone-in. It was also the only cat that was on all fours and moving. It seemed to be doing some kind of slow dog-paddle (cat-paddle is not a thing, more's the pity) in mid-air. It was also a total pig to get a decent screnshot of due to the annoying tree on the right.

I had some trouble finding the cat in Sylvari starting area The Grove but that was mostly because the place is a pain to navigate at the best of times, with lifts and spiral stairways and a peculiar looped layout. It turned out to be right next to the zone to Caledon Forest so I could have saved myself a lot of running about if I'd come in that way.

By far the toughest to spot was the cat in Charr stronghold, the Black Citadel. Of course, that was the city I went to first of all yesterday, which is why I originally thought the rumors of cats in the starting city were false.

The Black Citadel cat is way back in the Nolani Ruins, a place no-one goes outside of their Charr personal story or Halloween, when there's an instanced event there. You can't see it from any other part of the city, either, except for one of the viewing gantries.

It was worth the effort. It's a witch's cat in a witch's hat. The same one that rides the broomstick most of my characters use as a glider.

And that was that for cats. Or so I thought, until I logged into EverQuest to set my Overseer quests and saw...

That's the wallpaper from the (in)famous Cat Room as applied to the Character Select screen in honor of Bristlebane's high holy day, April the first. The Cat Room was a place GMs used to use to summon recalcitrant players for a dressing down. According to this thread the cat in the picture belonged to one of the devs and was called Mitty. You could also break into the room from various locations as evidenced in this video:

I did that once but not in Befallen. Somewhere in Kunark, I think it was. And now I'm rambling. Enough with the cats.

Aren't you glad this only happens once a year?