10kpp Giveaway, all welcome to participate

[LordSterben]

I might have been down there for sixty days or sixty weeks. It's easy to lose touch with time in an underground North Korean dungeon. Each time an officer took one of my fingers, or an ear, I felt my sanity drain out in equal parts with my lifeblood. I was slowly losing sight of reality. But I never lost sight of the mission...or of her...

My unit had been running yellow ops in NK when we were taken. We had gone over the wall with the task of determining if Lil' Kim Jong's new ICBM platforms were constructed of red-blooded American Lego bricks or the half-assed Chinese equivalent, Mega-Blox. The former would mean treachery by the beloved toy company, and the swift retalitory invasion of Legoland.

We didn't make it to the LZ for pickup. We were overrun enroute and after the bloodbath I woke up in this brick and steel coffin. Buried, but not dead.

"Arise, brave knight," the woman's voice was like a song.

My vision blurred, but through the haze I could make out the soft elven features and flowing hair. It was Firiona (not Fiona) Vie crooning me back to the living world. Her face reminded me of simpler days...playing EQ before my enlistment. A carefree time when hearing "Man down! Man down!" only meant that there was a ranger in the group and the only man in a turban I'd ever killed was Cazel. When the memories flooded in, I knew that I'd make it through.

Shortly after waking, the torture began. A Korean officer would work me over with his bloody tools and ask questions in broken English. My answer was always the same:

"Fuck you, you plat-farming bastard!"

As the days grew long and it seemed like I would forget my own name under the stress, I wrote my EQ username and password on my own severed ear and hid it deep in my ass. They could take my memories and my humanity, but they wouldn't take my level 19 druid.

Through the hardship and torment to come, thoughts of Norrath and Firiona's sweet words kept me alive. After the North Koreans released me in exchance for a few Happy Meals, and after a painful and unorthydox password recovery, I returned to Norrath.

And now I play from this field hospital in Laos. The dank smells of that cell still come back to me every time I zone into KC and I hear the cackle of laughing Koreans every time I strike a decaying skeleton.