# 5 - Rachelsunday - Born 9 January 2000 - 2 days 5 hours

This is going to be a short one. There's not much to say about Rachelsunday. I guess we should start with why she has such a peculiar name.

I wanted to call her Rachel Sunday. At the time I started playing EverQuest, I was still hoping to finish one of the two long-form fiction pieces I'd been working on for a couple of years. I hesitate to call either of them novels because they never achieved either the structure not the word count to justify it but I had managed forty or fifty thousand words or so for each of them and their characters were fresh in my mind as I sat staring at character select.

Rachel Sunday was one of the main characters in a somewhat formless narrative focusing on a quasi-familial group of individuals with ill-defined paranormal abilities. I was very much all about obscurity in those days and the very idea of explaining anything clearly was an anaethema to me.

EverQuest characters back in the year 2000 were allowed two names. Unfortunately, to get the second you had to be at least Level 20. Later the process was automated to a slash command but at the time you had to petition a GM with a request to add the surname of your choice.

A lot of people either didn't know that was how it worked or were too impatient to wait twenty levels to get the name they wanted. You'd frequently see people running around with forename and surname jammed together. I always thought it looked embarrassing so I never did it. Except with Rachelsunday.

I'm not sure why I was so desperate to have the name that I was willing to break my own self-imposed aesthetic rule. It's hard to remember after all these years but I'm fairly sure it was because the character was going to be a Wizard and Rachel in the story was one, kind of, inasmuch as she could do things that seemed like magic in ways even her strange friends couldn't explain. 

Then again, that could apply to any of them, so maybe they were all wizards. Don't ask me. I only wrote about them.

Whatever the reason, I pressed the button and I was stuck with it. I came to like it a lot in the end. I still feel affectionate towards Rachelsunday even now although I can't say the same about the class which, yet again, I'd picked because of blindingly bad online advice about how to solo in EQ.

Wizards in EverQuest back then came with a bundle of contrary expectations and promises. They were potentially the most powerful, explosive, dramatic of damage dealers. A high level wizard parsed right at the top of the table for single-target burst damage. They were also among the most capable of long-distance travellers by dint of a wide selection of teleport spells, not to mention they enjoyed a very handy ability to make themselves invisible. 

Everything about the class suggested it would suit someone with a short attention span and an appetite for destruction. A well-played, high-level wizard was indeed a very capable soloist. A pity, then, that at anything much below the level cap a Wizard was one of the feeblest, most vulnerable and slowest-levelling solo classes in the game.

At any level, wizards did fine in groups, provided people didn't mind carrying them until they grew into their power. And a lot of people were fine with that because it was extremely useful to have a Wizard on your Friends list, just like it was a Cleric. Wizards made bank selling ports to strangers so it really helped with the finances if you knew one who'd do it for free.

My problem was that I wasn't planning on doing much grouping with Rachelsunday. After less than a couple of months in the game I was still well into my anti-social, loner phase. I was going to solo her. And I so did. All the way to about Level 9.

God, it was boring. And slow. And risky. I gave it my best for a couple of weeks but it was hopeless. Worse even than the Cleric. 

It didn't help that I'd made Rachelsunday on yet another server so I couldn't even give myself a minimal leg up with a handout from someone else. She was my fifth character and I was already on my third server. 

There was a reason for that other than my perennial desire to see the other side of the hill. It was around that time that EverQuest began to explode in population. New servers were starting up seemingly every month. Since I was making new characters even faster than that, it made sense, at least to me, to make them on each new server as it began. 

And that was pretty much what I did for the next few years. It's hard to beat the rush of a new server on launch day and I always got drawn in by that new server smell. I made quite a few characters I knew were never going to get played. And then I played most of them anyway.

Rachelsunday was my first character to begin on a brand new server right as it started. The server was Lanys T`Vyl. My head-cannon tells me Lanys started one the same day as Luclin, the server that eventually became one of my several "home" servers and which is where I play now, when I play at all. When I check the record, though, the character creation dates suggest either I missed the opening of one of them or they actually opened at different times.

However it fell out, the next character I made, number six, was indeed on Luclin but that wasn't until two weeks later. That character did, however, turn out to be the first that would really stick. 

I'd finally found a class that really could solo: the Druid and I played her for a long time. On and off, that is, and she became my first Level 50. Of course, by then the cap had moved to 60 but who's counting? We'll meet her next time. Her name is Rachel, too.