Some reputations are enduring. Some of my friends have characteristics that invite teasings for years, long after the initial joke is gone.
(When I say “my friends”, I always mean Club Morte, the bunch of friends I met in EverQuest II four years ago.)
Unker Kell is our mobile Wikipedia because he knows everything about everything and he doesn’t seem to ever forget a fact.
We call him Kellpedia, sometimes, but that’s not very funny, so we also tease him about his “uncle-ness” (hence his nick Unker Kell – the mispelling due to his not technically being an uncle).
We often give him grief over his sometimes eccentric dress sense, excessive sensibility and choice of music and cars.
He was shopping for a car the other day and kept waxing lyrical over the Volkswagen Passat CC, vehemently disagreeing that it looks “uncle”.
Fortunately, we (mostly the Goonfather) put so much pressure on him that he agreed to give the Mazda RX-8 a try, which resulted in him buying it because it’s one of those “love-at-first-drive” cars.
In EverQuest II, Unker Kell has a reputation for spending hours and hours sorting inventory.
In the game, we have personal and bank inventory slots to keep all our treasures, and in each slot we can place bags or boxes, each of which open up to more slots to keep all our treausres.
This is how mine looks like, with all my bags and boxes open up. Each tiny square can hold one item:
As you can see, this has the potential of providing many hours of sorting entertainment, especially when you have several alternate characters (like Unker Kell has) and you want to share items with them.
In the past, whenever we agreed to meet for an adventure, he would be the last to arrive because he’s always busy sorting inventory at the bank.
He’s also often late for real world outings so the joke carries over into real life as well. Unker Kell is his name and “inventory sorting” is his thing.
He’s better now. I think maybe now he spends his lunch hour sorting inventory so that he doesn’t have to sort it when he’s playing with us. (But we still tease him about it.)
Now we come to Morte, our group’s namesake.
Our group bears his name because he is our class clown. And also because he always irks everyone so much we all want to club him. (But he’s very good for laughs so we keep him.)
In EverQuest II four years ago, we used to call him the paper tank.
In MMORPGs, a tank is the group’s warrior assigned to absorb all the enemy hits (because he has strong defence but weak offence) while everyone else concentrates on actually killing the enemy.
Tanks have special abilities to keep enemies’ attentions on them.
This was our tank in my old guild.
Morte is a mage in game and has powerful nukes that can severely pulverize an enemy. Unfortunately, it angers the enemy so much it will turn its attention on Morte. Unfortunately, also, mages can only wear cloth armor so they’re especially fragile.
The mage’s job is to nuke a mob just enough so that the combat can end quicker but not so much that he gets its attention. When a mage overnukes, he will override the tank as the punching bag. And Morte loves to overnuke.
Calling someone a paper tank is like saying, “You paper-wearing nuker, you think you can be a tank? Hur hur…”
Here’s a picture of Morte being a paper tank. He’s in the middle of the screen being surrounded by angry mobs:
A few months back, Morte was all excited over buying 120 rolls of toilet paper for like $12, and his nickname became Toilet Paper. And when we returned to EQ2 last month, he became Toilet Paper Tank.
His most-uttered words ingame now are “Save me~~~.”
Next…
The Goonfather has a reputation for being a chiongster because he enjoys rushing the enemy and has no patience for tactics. As a result, he has like the highest death count among our group (next to Morte).
But he has no nickname for that because I’m probably the only person who gets annoyed by it since he always drags me along to his doom with his impulsive habits. To the others, he’s probably just a source of amusement.
There was this time in the past when two of us needed to kill some gnolls and, out of impatience, he went to aggro all the gnolls in the immediate area all at once.
He really enjoys flirting with death in games.
Nanny Wen (aka Davienne) is the bimbo of the group (ingame) because she’s always getting lost and making silly mistakes due to being blur.
She’s also a bimbo because she enjoys comparing clothes and appearances and laughing at people for being short. She plays a high-elf, which is a very tall race, and she enjoys saying, “I am looking down on you.”
Unfortunately for her, she can’t do the same in real life.
The other day, she was teasing Unker Kell about his looks (he plays a cat-like humanoid and was wearing a stupid Santa hat). She asked him to shapeshift into Billy the moppet because he looks better that way.
(In EQ2, we have abilities to turn ourselves or other people into all kinds of funny things, which is fun.)
And this was Unker Kell’s reply:
This is Billy the moppet:
Billy is actually a mob we had to kill several times in the past for a very tough quest. I guess the game developers thought it would be funny to allow players to shapeshift into Billy.
EQ2 is more fun than ever because there is now a built-in voice chat feature. It makes it feel like we’re physically together, enjoying a fun activity together.
The downside is that now I can’t take screenshots of people saying funny things anymore, since people hardly type anymore.
No more such screens. :(
In another post, I’ll share with you some of the funny adventures we shared together. I can’t wait to tell you about the one where the Goonfather and Unker Kell voluntarily did a “You jump, I jump” and fell to their deaths amidst much laughter from the guild.
Another time!
Right now, I’m having so much fun reliving the good old days with the same bunch of friends. Isn’t it such a rare thing being able to actually relive fond memories for real?
I’m making the most of it by playing the game obsessively. So don’t think I’m a nerd. It’s for the sake of friendship! =P
