Past Meets Present

posted by on 10th August 2008, at 4:01pm

Hello, this is Bluebrisingr presenting you with an article on the recent quest Meeting History, an epilogue to Making History.  The requirements for the quest are, to everyone’s surprise, Making History and Druidic Ritual.  Seeing as I hadn’t done either of those quests, I spent a good five minutes finishing Druidic Ritual and an agonizing two hours on Making History (going to Port Phasmatys without an Ectophial and then realizing you’ve forgotten the items needed to make a sapphire amulet is not fun).  Thanks to Rune Beast0 and Kevin for helping me finish Making History (helping meaning helping me take four times longer to finish the quest than I normally would have).

I apologize for the lack of pictures in this article.  I had taken screenshots and put them on Paint but I hadn’t saved them, and when I came back from playing the piano my computer had bsod-ed.  Life lesson learned: always save everything.

But without further ado:

Meeting History

I started the quest by taking a brisk walk to the outpost where I began Making History and talked with Jorral.  He informed me about a key that becomes hot or cold (sounds familiar?) and gave me notes about it.  I happened to have the key with me since I had finished Making History only 2 seconds ago, but if you don’t conveniently have it in your inventory Jorral will give you another one.  Jorral asked me to investigate around a bit to learn what the key does.  The key will not work unless you have no items on you, so Jorral asked me if I wanted him to put all my items in the bank.  I agreed, then set off to do some scouting around.

After going east and constantly checking the key temperature, I ended up nearly scorching my pixel-ball-of-a-hand when I felt the key as I crossed the bridge to the north of East Ardougne and went a little to the right.  I then rubbed the key, said the magic words that Jorral had written in his notes, and found myself being teleported away.  After a quick flash of darkness I was on my feet again, in a place that looked oddly familiar to where I was standing before I got teleported.  I saw there was a house to the north so on instinct I walked up to it and asked a kind looking woman named Laura how the freaking hell I managed to get to this place (in more appropriate words of course).  When I mentioned Ardougne she had no idea what that was, so I put the pieces together and realized the key could travel to the past.  With that enlightening thought in my head, I rubbed the key again and returned to the present.

I ran back to Jorral and told him the news and he replied by telling me even bigger news: depending on where I rubbed the key I would be able to travel to a different time in the past.  He then asked me to investigate more, as perhaps these people in the past could tell me a little something about Runescape’s history.  I grudgingly agreed and ran back to the place near the bridge, wondering why on earth the guy couldn’t tell me this before so I could save some running energy.

When I went to rub the key again, I found that I could rub the key on the very tip to go to “Past-A”, in the middle to go to “Past-B”, and at the end to go to the present.  Feeling adventurous, I rubbed the tip to go to “Past-A” and went vanishing back to the past – the same past that I had been in when I spoke to Laura.

Instead of speaking to Laura again, I went to talk with a boy playing around with a fire who was named Jack.  I found that he was trying to light the fire with magic.  I talked with him a bit more and found that he had rather interesting thoughts, including his dream to create chocolate cakes with magic.  Shaking my head incredulously, I rubbed the key again, this time traveling to Past-B.   I realized that Past-B was a few decades after the time in Past-A, and now Jack was a full grown mage.  I talked with the older Jack and offered to read his mind.  After impressing him with my wonderful knowledge and my even more wonderful one-minute-span-memory, Jack believed me, somehow or another, to be a visitor from the past.  He then asked me to find out why his mother’s trees never grew in the backyard.

Mumbling about how people always made me do everything in quests (but then again, isn’t that what quests are?), I went back to Past-A and investigated the saplings in the backyard.  After gathering a spade and some pots from the backyard, I dug up all the saplings and replanted them in alphabetical order, starting from the bottom patch to the top patch.  Then I hurried back to Past-B, and when I asked Jack about the tree problem he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.  However, he did tell me a good tidbit about the past in a nice little cutscene about how Guthix created all the runes, and since he created so many runes the world was named Runescape.  It was a nice piece of info that I was sure to remember so that I could go back and tell Jorral.

On impulse I went back to Past-A, just to check out how things were going.  I saw text implying a crying baby and a frustrated father coming from inside the house, so I went in to see how things were going.  I talked with the baby’s father, Roger, and found that he wished he had something that could make his baby, named Sarah, stop crying.  I sighed and went back to Past-B, knowing the answer had to be here somewhere.  I was right – Sarah was in the backyard (which was now blooming with some lively colored trees; I wonder who made that happen?) so I talked with her.  I discovered that her father created a medicine made with honey, guam, and milk that would help with her sickness.  As I was about to go back to Past-A, I saw Laura (now an old lady) in the front of the house and decided to talk to her again.  I found out that she always wished she could travel the world, but she lacked a map.  Knowing the two tasks I needed to complete, I went back to Past-A.

After arriving in Past-A again, I went inside the house and searched around a bit.  I found a bucket of milk, guam leaves, and a pestle/mortar on a table.  On a shelf I found a bowl, and on yet another shelf I found some papyrus and charcoal (thank god these people conveniently leave these things lying around that I just so happen to need).  I used the charcoal on the papyrus to make a map and used the guam leaves on the pestle/mortar to get some ground up guam.  I then took the bowl and went out to the backyard to gather some honey.  After mixing the bowl of honey, bucket of milk, and ground guam together, I got a nice bowl of medicine that I used on the baby Sarah.  Her father Roger thanked me for calming her down and gave me some information on how they arrived in Runescape.  Apparently they were in a world like our current world (as in real life world, not Runescape) and were on a plane when a portal sent them to Runescape.  I thanked him for this information and went to the front of the house to give the map to Laura.  After I gave her my atrocious drawing I went back to Past-B.

After I got to Past-B I spoke with Laura again and asked her how her travels went.  She was thrilled at being able to travel around the world but she said that she really regretted losing her brooch.  Moaning and groaning about old rusty brooches that didn’t deserve to be found, I went back to Past-A and found her brooch on a table.  I then retrieved the spade again from the backyard and buried the brooch in a pile of soil near Laura.  I again traveled to Past-B, got a spade from a shed, and dug up the brooch from the same pile of soil (funny, it didn’t get weathered by wind or rain, like normal piles of soil do).  I gave the strangely perfectly clean brooch to Laura.  She graciously accepted the artifact and told me a story about how Guthix had taught the first Runescape-ians to keep balance with nature and some other things that I don’t remember (I was desperate to finish the quest by now and was frantically clicking “click here to continue!”).  I felt like my time in the past was done now, so I rubbed the key one last time and returned to the present.

I ran back to Jorral and told him all that I had learned.  He was ecstatic at the news and then proclaimed the quest complete, awarding me with the key and an experience tome that gave me two batches of 1000 experience and one batch of 500 experience in any three skills I chose.

And with that, I successfully “met history” (horrible pun intended).


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One Comment

  • Rune Beast0 Says:
    11th August 2008, at 10:48am

    I was more helpful than that article states. 🙁

    I provided moral and faith support.

    I sort of skimmed the article because I haven’t done the quest and I didn’t want to spoil the sensitive parts, but the parts I did read were good@@@