The Hysteria Project: Hystory

Edhadeya

Part I: The Accidental Fate

        Waaaaaay back in early 1997 I had run to wizard on a very unique MUD called Purgatory. That was my first Aber, after spending some time on Mercs, ROMs, Dikus and one or two Circles. If you've run a Merc, you know going from Merc to Aber is quite a dramatic transition. Anyway...

        Having run to wiz on Purg, I was looking around at other places to run, and was exploring several new concepts (for me) in running. I had begun spending some time on a place called Elven (yeah, yeah, I know.. Legolas and all...) which was hosted at elven.net port 9000. 9000 is an unusual port for an Aber, which usually listens on 6715 (although Purg was on 2112, those Rush loving freaks).

        I'd been testing out a bunch of different MUDs, Excalibur, Infinity, Something Sun (which was a personal fave, even though I can't remember the first word in the name [much later: "Virtual Sun"]), etc... and I had gotten used to typing in 6715 for the port number (as I used a VM based telnet client on my Uni's mainframe), and, one day, as I was attempting to log in to Elven, I mistakenly typed in Elven.net 6715, thereby connecting me to Elven.net on 6715 instead of 9000!

        Now, normally you'd think this would do nothing, since Elven didn't listen on 6715. But it turned out that Elven.net was alaised to elven.mudsrus.com, which was, in turn, pretty much aliased to mudsrus.com. As it happened, this game, Hysteria, was hosted at hysteria.mudsrus.com 6715, which was actually aliased as just mudsrus.com 6715. So, as a result, when I typed elven.net 6715 into my telnet client, I actually ended up connecting to Hysteria instead of Elven!

        Coincidentally, this particular day I had decided to create a new character on Elven, and for this particular character, I was planning to experiment with a female character, to see how it went. This being an idea put in my head ah-via a conversation via "tell " on my University's mainframe at 3am one Saturday morning. So, having connected accidentally to a MUD I had never logged in to, I was still not surprised when I went through standard character creation to make a new character: Edhadeya, the daughter of the primary ruler in Orson Scott Card's "Earthborn", book five of the "Homecoming" saga (pronounced Eth-ha-DEYA, for those of you who have always mispronounced it).

        (Side note: I'm not that observant. I'd logged in to Elven enough times to know what the screens looked like and therefore ignore them. I didn't realize I wasn't where I intended to be until I actually got on the game and began to look around. I mean, c'mon, seriously, I'm a Creator, I know most of you never even read the MOTD, so this really isn't that uncommon.)

        So there I was, logged in to this game, completely disoriented since I wasn't where I expected to be. But I decided to look around. And who was that on the Who list? Mitize! A DemiGod on Hysteria, I knew her from Purgatory. So I talked to her a bit. Since I wasn't using a name she recognized, she politely asked, and I quote: "Do I know you??" (Always tactful, that one.) When I told her I was Mephie from Purg, she frobbed me for my wiz on Purg. Woohoo!

        Months go by.. Then this dude on Purg called Oberon told me about this other MUD he'd been running on, Hysteria. It sounded familiar, and I realized that, hey! I have a decent leveled character on Hysteria! I'll go check it out! So early September of 1997 I logged in to Hysteria intentionally. And since I had a character with some points already, and I'd never completed my female-character experiment, I figured "What the hell?" and ran with points.