My second life's second life

For those who don't know, I've been trying to get involved with roleplay in the Midian City sim for almost a month now. When I first visited there, I immediately fell in love with the place. Stylistically, it's very heavily influenced by the Los Angeles as portrayed in Blade Runner but with the barely-holding-on-to-civility personality of Mad Max. In a word: awesome. Then as I wandered around and visited some more, I got a feel for the type of roleplay that's done here and how it's played...and that made it even more attractive to me. I then found out that there was the "Midian City Roleplay Academy" that had just started up, for people like me, and so I decided to give it a shot.

As a bit of background, I have not done any rp (roleplay) in SL at all up until now, and although I do have some rp experience (D&D, Cthulu), it's been well over 10 years since I've dusted off the 20-sided die, so to speak. So, obviously, I have not done any computer-based rp either. I don't play WoW or um...any of those other games...which I don't know the names of. However, I am a big fan of the Silent Hill games, and I also like Fatal Frame and The Thing, which are almost like rp because you do put yourself in the shoes of the character and (hopefully) empathise with them. However, those games are very scripted and have limited outcome possibilites as well as freedom of choice. Now, picture those games, combined with virtually unlimited freedom of choice and you've more or less got the idea of what rp in Midian is like.

On Friday, after some begging and pleading to the mentors by myself and another fellow student who had also been waiting to take a class, I was finally able to take my first and only rp class with the Academy. Our mentor just happened to be a member of the Catwalkers, which is a gang of Nekos in Midian. The class went well and afterwards she spent at least another hour talking to me and introduced me to another member of the Catwalkers as well. It was a very warm welcome, to say the least. The very next day I would be brought to the city to start roleplaying for real.

The way students are being introduced to the city is through a shipwreck scenario, in which a cruise ship which we are either passengers or staff on, becomes stranded off the shores of Midian and we have no choice but to go to the island on a lifeboat in order to survive. My character was one of the ship's maids. We started off the night by being immediately mugged by Catwalkers (they let me go because I'm feline, but I accidentally left my belongings at the landing site and didn't recover them), which was followed by being chased around by another Catwalker, witnessing several assaults and other fun stuff. I spent some of my time on my own and some of it with a fellow student, Reinhardt. He ended up getting in a lot of trouble with the catwalkers due to some things he said to them.

In the photo above, I'm high above the ground and somewhat close to the Catwalkers' lair. Shortly after this photo was taken I was ordered down by gunpoint by a member of the gang.

Overall it was a lot of fun, and I think I've found a second addiction in SL aside from shopping!