I arrived to Sosaria on the Europa shard in October 1998, almost exactly a year after I arrived to Chesapeake. I came alone and with mixed feelings after having lost contact with mostly everyone of my old friends. I had no idea about who might have moved also and if so, where to find any of them. The idea of starting all over didn't quite appeal but the performance on the Europa shard I had to say.. was promising.

 

Starting over wasn't a thought I wanted to dwell on, so I had decided that when I arrived I would just start working instead. I had tested a character on the Japanese Yamato Shard a short while before the Europa shard was opening, so I had a good recipe. For starters I was going to mine and smith to get maximum strength before training any fighting skills. Minoc seemed like a good place starting out doing that. Along with training strength I could also make my first armor and weapons myself. I was far from alone as alot of people seemed to arrive here to the mining town for what seemed the same reason as I. There was no time to dwell over that either, so I headed straight to the bank to sort my start gear and then I stopped by the local provisioner to buy mining equipment.

 

It looked like this place was going to be crowded in the next couple of days, so in spite of my first arrival to Chesapeake about a year earlier I was off to work about 15 minutes after my arrival to Europa. There wasn't a minute to loose. When I approached the mines outside Minoc I seemed to be the first person there. I was going to mine, run back to town and smelt the ore into ingots, smith items to sell to the vendors to raise money for a packhorse. A packhorse could carry much more than I in my backpack. After getting a first packhorse things would go a little quicker as I headed on and eventually got a second and third packhorse and so on. I calculated that I had a fair chance to do this the first days and even have enough to afford a ship before the mines were going to be overcrowded with people. I went over the plans in my head as I was mining my first ores and walked the first turn to the smithy to smelt. When I arrived to the Minoc Smithy, it was as good as empty. People were still arriving and were too busy dwelling at the bank and at the local vendors.

I met Thrym at the bank in Minoc one of my first days. He was Swedish and was coming from another shard just like I. Thrym told me about his vision to start a Viking guild. He seemed to be a very determined man and of course I was somewhat fascinated about his vision. After all, I was Swedish with the same heritage as most other Swedes which is the Vikings. I told him to look for a Norwegian that I had met the other day - Erik Bloodaxe.

Thrym told me that his real name was Hagbard and that this was his working character. He hinted me about maybe starting a carpenter character and make wooden shields to sell, as it seemed as a quicker and easier way to make money than mining the way I was doing it. When I told him that I was mining for strength and that this was my main character, he did of course think that I was crazy. Anyway, Hagbard as I came to call him was a nice fellow to speak to and we decided to stay in touch. We would most likely meet again at the bank in Minoc.