And then we went drinking. There was a big room, “booths” were set up along the sides, yet it was reminiscent of an almost senior prom thing, kinda. All the people milling around the center of the room, getting into lines for raffle ticket turn ins, doing surveys, pictures for a SOE thing if you have an interesting story thing to post or something. Took about a half an hour to cruise around and then we were done. At least for the moment, and it was time for drinking. They had multiple bars set up around the fan faire, probably to enhance the buying power of their players that were attending, and the prices were astonishing. For a small tumbler of rum and coke, and it was clear Bacardi only at most of the places, was $8.50. Now being a struggling student and not a high dollar kinda guy with two kids I couldn’t afford the prices for consecutive drinking incursions, so what to do? Well, here’s the trick, when yer in Vegas and yer low on cashola, sit yerself down at the penny slots in whatever casino you happen to be in. Place a 5 dollar bill into the receptacle, bet every line you can on the screen, at the lowest bet per line possible, and begin to look thirsty. And really, ya wanna look REAL thirsty. As soon as the drink guy or girl comes by, ya ask for 2 of whatever ya want, because who knows how long it will be till they return to fill your thirsty order again. That’s the key for pretty much any casino, but at the RIO I definitely take my hat off to them. They know not only how to do a decent fan faire pool party (I promise ill get to that) they make sure that no matter how much money yer losing, I mean playing, they make damn sure you have a drink while your doing it. So after many rum and cokes, and I think my bruthah was goin the rum and cokes as well, but later on the next day he switched over to Newcastle brown ales for stomach reasons, we returned to the fan faire for a live event.
The entire fan faire had a slightly hectic feeling to me of almost but not quite falling completely into disarray and dissolution. There were almost a 4 to one ratio in “event staff” to attendees, though I suspect that the event staffers where not all SOE employees. Yet when asked questions you sometimes had to go to two or three people before you got a sufficient answer.
So, there we are, feeling pretty good, and we have to go around the area where the fan faire was and try to find people with feathers above their heads. That’s right all you EQers and EQ2ers, we were looking for NPC’s to hail. Now, when yer feeling slightly toasty and you say hail to like 8 people about 20 times each, one becomes much more inventive. “Hard precipitation!” was one of my favorites, and as my bruthah was is and always shall be Sleet, his was a name that was called not only for recognition, but also for NPC attention.
So the live event for EQ2 was fun, had to solve word search puzzles, had to talk to an ogre (who had a severe hatred of bandana’s) a slightly effeminate high elf, and a militant erudite (who was actually a long hair in this tortuous world of reality), among others. After the quest detritus was collected we headed back into the room where we originally got our group of ten and the instructions for the quest. I think we were trying to get into Nerriak. The group we (my bruthah and I) had was a good group a folks. A couple guys, one younger then the other but both fairly boisterous, and a girl and two other guys that knew each other, along with two other guys one tall one middling height. The two we met from blackburrow and the three from oasis were the ones that we (my bruthah and I) eventually hung out with for the rest of the fan faire, when we weren’t checkin the pulse of Vegas outside of the realm of SOE and the fan faire. So after the live event we decided, what the hell, lets go check out the star trek experience at the Hilton. Now for a couple of super freak geeks like us, there was no place so like a pilgrimage through the heat and toil of the Vegas afternoon and the congestion of traffic to be able to walk into the cool and technical beauty of that place. It was our Mecca, our Shangri-La, our pleasure dome.
