An unusual evening, for all sort of of reasons - the good ones being a redecorated arena with a Halloween theme and the 'staff' in silly costumes, and a new visitor with a champion pet all the way from Chesapeake to see how our league works. Less good, we also had a huge server crash, revert, and loss of one of the strongest regular fighters.....
PeckyBalboa vs Tea :
Both exceptional birds, Pecky by far the stronger (even though Tea is well above the usual range for battle chickens!), whereas a slight advantage to tea with intelligence and dexterity. Tea got some early hits in that seemed to slow Pecky slightly, but she wasn't giving up and powered her way back int the fight with some heavy hits . Things remained in the balance right to the final hit - which went to Tea!
TwoTimeChampion vs Sky :
Our new visitor from Chesapeake versus one of our 'veterans', closely matched in stats (after a slight bit of confusion by me... Merlock, TwoTimeChampion's owner, was used to the rules over on Chessy and fed a pet treat fo his fighter, so we have a couple of seconds searching for one to feed Sky - I'll try remember to remind folks we use 'unaugmented' pets, silly
of me to forget to mention that ). In paper they looked close - but Champion showed very quickly why she has her title, and thoroughly demolished Sky with some very hard hitting!
Trinsic Rose vs Lightning :
Two established fighters, almost identical skills and stats, and a close fight looked to be on the cards - and unlike the previous fight, the prediction of a tight match came true, Lightning dashed in for a quick lead, Rose fought back hard and swung the fight her way, Lightning regained the lead, but Rose hung in and turned it around again, a very close victory in an extremely tough fight.
Sapphie vs TwoTimeChampion :
An unusual 'second appearance' for our newcomer, we usually try let birds have only one fight each since it makes the 'league points' system balance better, but since this was a newcomer without any victories to her name before tonight, and Sapphie is another exceptional bird who is hard to find a match for, we gave this one a go.... and the result was an extremely close bout indeed. unusually, both birds leapt off the mark and met in the centre of the arena, and swapped blows in an incredibly close fight all the way to the wire... both health bars red, it was all down to the last hit to win - and Champion again lived up to her name, just pipping Sapphie to the victory.
Old Blue Eyes vs Spot :
Another close looking match on paper, Blue has been incredibly unlucky in her past fights, always looking good but not quite having that ' killer instinct' that lets here get the wins. These two remained very closely matched all the way through the fight, neither holding on to a lead and both swapping heavy attacks until, yet again this evening, we had a nail biting ending ... but sadly for Blue, her run of bad luck remained unbroken and the winning hit went to Spot.
Trinsic Steel vs Goldy Feathers :
Two more almost perfectly matched, Steel more experienced in the arena but nothing to choose between these two. And in an evening that specialised in very close fights, these two contributed another very tight battle, Steel piling in fast for an early lead that Goldy took back, and both traded hits until a very close fight ended in Goldy's favour.
For the 'novelty' fight, in keeping with the general 'halloween' creepiness, we had two wolf spiders - Alf and Malcolm - who their owner thought would use their pack instinct, natural speed and general viciousness to tear apart a normal dragon, since in the Abyss they had been giving even greaters trouble at times. In a test run earlier in the day, they'd done a lot of damage but narrowly lost out, so with a few hours training there was confidence they could get the job done. Sadly, it seemed that their hard day of training had worn them out.... they certainly got in a few good hits, but maybe the dragon had also learned from the dry run and made sure he concentrated on putting one of the spiders down quickly, and a set of spells and heavy bites soon sorted that out. A slightly chewed on dragon came out of the match a clear winner!
Merlock also had a trained boura named Bantha available that he thought would be an interesting opponent for the dragon, so as a second 'novelty' we let those two have a battle - and the boura was playing mean, starting off with his 'special attack' that left the dragon looking confused, he tore into it and won the match in pretty short order!
That was the evening pretty much done, we said goodnights and people headed back home, we began clearing up the arena deco - and then the world exploded ....
Server crashed, and after a worrying pause when we finally got back in, the final bout between Bantha and the dragon was being repeated and it took some pretty fast healing to keep them alive, we had a steady flow of people reappearing in the arena and heading back home for the second time, and we thought after an hour or so we had tracked down most folks, got them back with their pets and all safely home - but there was one very sad casualty of the evening. It seems PeckyBalboa and Alyx were thrown back to an earlier point where they were training in a dungeon, and when Alyx logged he found himself in the dungeon - but no sign of Pecky.. we got people to go through the dungeon in case we could spot a ghost, checked all Alyx's coops, and everywhere we could think hat Alyx and Pecky had been that day, but without any luck, it seems Pecky is forever lost somewhere in the time warp that hit Europa....
League status following meeting six of the season :
5 : PeckyBalboa
3 : Lightning, Quicksilver, Sky, Tea, Trinsic Rose
2 : Trinsic Steel, TwoTimeChampion
1 : Old Blue Eyes, Sapphie, Cerulean, Bernie, Nari, Roadrunner Two, Dryad, Frosty, Goldy Feathers, Spot
Next match due Monday, 8 November, 8PM UK time at the O*T Zento arena!
. I really hope Quick and Bernie can be there for the next match.