I have recently started a blacksmith. I can't stand mining and I have a good amount of money in the bank, so I buy the ingots for my smith. I have been buying ingots from this one guy for a couple of weeks. Every time I give him money (in the bank), he always says "balance" and shows off how much money he had.

Well, I was starting to get tired of this, but he'd ICQ me every day with another 2-4k ingots to sell. That kept my patience up because I needed a steady flow of ingots. (I hate picking on miners)

One day, I meet him in his chosen meeting spot - the large Trinsic bank. Silly Bastard (my partner in crime) also needed ingots so we both met him inside the bank.

Enough damn background. Here's where the story picks up.

He says his "balance" and it's well over 570k. Silly gets disgusted and says, "How do you make so many ingots so fast?"

Hettar replies, "Let me show you." Awww yeah.

Hettar takes us to his mining houses. Plural. He claims to have 18 small houses. He gates from area to area showing us large smithys, a tower, and tons of small mining houses. He has runes and keys to all of them because he's not only gating us from house to house, but also walking us inside to show us that he owns them. Needless to say, this guy was as good as dead.

He was low on mana after all of these gates and had us recall to whatever our next destination was. Silly and I were waiting for him with a Magic Arrow and an Explosion. I hit him with two more ebolts and he was suddenly face down on the ground. Silly fizzled what would have been the kill ebolt - I still rib him about that to this day. :)

Sure enough, he has all the runes and a keyring on him. He'd also claimed to have 2 keeps and a castle that we didn't have runes to, but we are still looking for.

Later during the lootings, a mule character of his logged into a house that we were just getting to (a large smithy). I stole his root and key while Silly Bastard put him to bed. I spoke with his ghost for a few minutes.

"Are you Hettar?" "No, I'm not"

"Ok, then you don't have enough money to buy us off."

"How much to leave this house alone?" "100K"

"I can buy another for just 40k more" "Yeah, but not the stuff inside"

"You can't get to the stuff in the back, there's a guildstone blocking the patio door"

Sure enough, a guildstone was on the patio in front of the door - not in the doorway though!

"Give us 50k and we'll just take what's here and give the key to this one house back"

"No, you can't loot anything, my stuff is safe"

"Ok ghost. You watch professionals at work."

With that, Silly Bastard and I blocked ourselves off and started Summoning Creatures to try to get a horse to pop up behind the guild stone. "awww damn" was all the ghost had to say when we finally got a horse...

I mounted my horse, transferred it to SB and we both enjoyed our final looting of Hettar's houses. He had tons of magic weapons and over 11k ingots! Yay! We needed ingots for our smiths - hell, that's why we first started talking to this tool.

As it turns out, Hettar is the guy who looted one of my RL friend's keeps 6 months ago. I remembered the looting and I was MORE than happy to fuck him over. I guess it was just fate that the opportunity was dropped in my lap.

Nighthawk/Crum