Come In! Make Yourself At Home. Oh, I see You Already Have.

I just spent the best part of two hours writing a post and when I read it back it was complete gibberish. It's too late to start over so I'm just going to use the screenshots I'd already selected, add some captions and pretend it's what I meant to do all along...

That gorgeous scene at the top is the nightly meteor shower that lights up the sky over my house in Chimeraland, by the way. And that's my house being lit up by it.

I say "my house" but of course it's really Floradyne's house, although you wouldn't always know it. Here she is, relaxing on the sundeck with a... I'd love to say friend but she'd never seen him before she came home that evening after a hard day's gathering. Chimeraland is the only mmorpg I've ever played where you never know who you're going to find hanging out in your house, acting as though they own the place.

It's the strangest of mechanics. I mean, it's disturbing enough to come home and find some stranger stretched out on a sunlounger on your patio but when they're fast asleep in your bed... It's just not right!

It's getting worse, too. That spiky woman behind Flora, the one who looks like she's on her way to the  Chimeraland comicon cosplaying Hela isn't an NPC at all. She's a player. She was standing around outside Flora's house for a couple of days, not doing anything, just standing. It was creepy as hell.

There's a lot of that going on right now. I think it started after the last patch. Those two guys have been running up and down the beach just up the river from Flora's house since last week. They're both flagged "Invulnerable" and they each have a short speech they keep declaiming. "How I envy the gods for living an otherworldly life!". That's one of them.

Then there's this guy. He only appeared today. He's about twenty feet tall and wrapped in some kind of oscillating forcefield. Again, I think he's a player character. He has a name and a level and weapons on his back. I'm not absolutely sure what he is. I saw someone else stuck halfway up a hill, riding what looked like a squirrel on top of a hamster ball. She was there for a couple of days but then she vanished. I have no idea what's going on...

Maybe she fell down this hole. I found it tonight, not far from where I saw her. I swear it wasn't there before. It glows and it looks like something one of the worms from Tremors might leave behind. So obviously I jumped down.

It was a long drop. At the bottom was a cave half-filled with water. There were paintings all over the walls. In an alcove there was a chest that I couldn't open. I was wondering how Flora was going to get out (Other than teleporting, of course.) when I saw a ramp leading up.

The walls were covered with paintings all the way. The slope was much more gentle than the vertical shaft I'd come in by. It emerged onto the surface in a large, shallow pit you'd find it hard to miss unless you had your eyes shut tight. Bear in mind, this is just along the edge of the hillside from where Flora lives. She's passed that way a dozen times. I swear it wasn't there before...

That's Flora's house from the air. The one with the tower. As you can see, she only has one neighbor and they've done a beautiful job on their place. There's a castle a little further in the other direction and a bunch of half-built, abandoned shacks. It's a bit of a bad neighborhood upriver, if I'm honest. It's nice where I live, though.

This cannon's on a mountain a few miles away. I had to do some fancy flying to get there. It turns on the turntable and I think it can be fired although how and at what I have no idea. 

Having a bird to fly, like having a fish to take you to the bottom of the sea, opens up a whole set of possibilities. This red tree I found near the cannon is fantastically profitable. It gives eight times the Lumbering skill of a regular tree and huge amounts of a special kind of log used in advanced crafting. You need a special axe to chop it down and mine broke before the tree fell. I meant to go back when I got a new axe, which you have to buy from your Home Shop, but I got distracted and forgot where it was.

It's all too easy to get distracted when you come home to find something like this in your garden. I tried to recruit him but he wants some food I've never heard of and don't know how to get.

This fellow in the extremely sharp leathers joined the team with barely any persuasion at all. I think he might have a bit of a thing for Flora. I hope so. They'd make a very impressive couple. When it comes to posing for photographs, Chimeraland has the best pet/mount/companion positioning I've ever seen. They're always just in the right place, never too close or in the way. I haven't been photo-bombed once!

Other aspects aren't quite as subtle. Whoever did the graphics for this entry in the Chimeraland Chronicles didn't exactly knock themselves out. Then again, neither did whoever wrote the text.

Things like that are very much the exception, I'm happy to say. Mostly it all looks like this. Delightful. Still so much to see. I'm not done with Chimeraland yet.