I warn you: this post is long. Like, epic long, Task Force long… long. So grab a drink, maybe some popcorn, sit back, relax… and hear the tale of the 2008 Omega Sektor MiniCon, Day Two: Saturday.

Wake up, Rockjaw

Saturday started bleary-eyed in bed, where I woke up at about 6AM with half a hangover and not enough sleep. Both were my own fault, so I couldn’t complain.

I remember lying there in bed savouring the quiet time before I knew I had to get up, when out of the blue, some part of my semi-awake consciousness asked me a question:

“Hey Stephen; can you remember the PIN number for the credit card machine?”

Instantaneous reply: no.

“But if you don’t know the PIN, how are people going to pay for stock, merchandise and/or make charity donations with their credit (and debit) cards, hmmm?”

My eyes snapped open. A cold sweat broke out. Great start to the day.

I hopped out of bed and sent a text to Chris, who replied immediately – a mistake, because now I knew he was up. After a quick phone call, we agreed that neither of us knew the PIN for certain. I had a feeling I knew. But I wasn’t sure.

Mostly to stop an early morning freakout, I convinced myself that I knew what the PIN was… or that it would come back to me. Probably. I kept telling myself that as I showered, dressed, and headed down to breakfast with the rest of the crew.

Everyone was a little tired, but ready to rock. I’d asked everyone to be over at the centre by 9AM so we could do the rest of our setup, although I knew that was going to be ‘interesting’, as unlike most events we attend, our customers would be right there with us… as opposed to outside, behind locked doors. Hmm.

One ‘full English’ later (you gotta get a good breakfast on a show day) we headed off in a clump, striding into the centre to find everything as we’d left it, thankfully. There were a large amount of players up and around, most of them looking distinctly sleep-deprived, which shouldn’t have surprised me really… but did a little. I thought some would take it easy early on, but as I discovered through the whole weekend, ‘taking it easy’ wasn’t really on the agenda for most of them.

The caffeine fiend

Needing to get my game on, I summoned a Sidekick and made the first coffee order of the weekend, throwing cash at them and demanding the finest Costa known to man. What I didn’t really think about was that I’d sunk a cup of coffee at breakfast. This would become pertinent later.

With Sidekicks dispatched, I turned to the order of business; setup. Officially we had an hour until the centre was open, so I knew we had to hustle. Team members scattered all over the centre as we sorted out our demonstration PC, moved the PA system, set up the Draw the World Together area, and got stock moved into position and ready to sell. More than once, roving groups of players came close to the stock area, attracted by the wares… and more than once I told them to get lost, as we were nowhere near ready.

Coffee came, and I started to chug it down, not really thinking about it. Then someone pulled out the credit card machine and waved it in my direction. “Do you know the PIN?”

I muttered something about maybe knowing it, perhaps, laughed nervously and snatched it away from them.

The setup screen stared at me. Enter PIN number. I lifted my finger over a key – it started with a ’2′, I’m almost sure of it – and then stopped. Out of the corner of my eye I could see something written on an innocuous piece of paper, stuck in the box… four numbers. Not the numbers I was expecting. Four different numbers from the ones I was about to type. But the second I saw them, I knew it was -

“The PIN!” I typed it in, the machine accepted it. I literally whooped for joy, knowing that now we could use the credit card machine all weekend – and that, thanks to my total panic, this number was now going to be burned on my brain forever. “Let’s get rid of that piece of paper, shall we?”

Time compressed. I looked at my phone; it was 10:15am, and we were surrounded by people. David Nakayama had arrived earlier than we needed him, and that sparked a queue for sketches that had to be immediately contained. Chris and two Sidekicks (Iain and Pete) were enlisted to keep the masses in line, literally. I kept wondering where Andrew and Neil were, especially as Andrew was just around the corner in our hotel – and then he appeared, with his apologetic other half Lesley in tow, who explained she’d delayed them both in a shop.

My phone rang; Ms. Liberty on the line, who was ready to make an appearance with Ghost Widow. Some radio orders later and I was sending Sidekick Hazel and a crew member back to our hotel to retrieve our star guests from Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. I checked my phone again; how the hell was it only 10:30AM when I’d done fifteen million things since the last time I looked?

By this point coffee was sending my system into overload. I can’t take too much coffee in quick succession, basically; one cup is enough to get me jazzed, but the two-and-a-half servings that I’d consumed that morning were rapidly turning me into Mr Hyde. I remember barking orders at a couple of people and then suddenly realised what was wrong. After one person leaned in close to me and said “Just take a break for a second” I decided to do just that.

I slumped into a nearby soft chair, half in the dark, and closed my eyes for a couple of minutes. It helped. A lot.

Then I literally sprung up, yelled “Right, let’s go!” and got back to work.

Missing my shine

“Where the hell is my DVD and why isn’t it playing on those walls?” I yelled. I’d asked nicely a couple of times before, but now I was getting pissed off.

Sidekicks looked at each other nervously. Said DVD had apparently been given to Omega Sektor staff, and then disappeared. It wasn’t that the DVD itself was vital… that wasn’t what was making me mad. It was the late nights, the sweat, blood and tears that had gone into the damn thing. This was our polish. I wanted us to shine.

I found myself in Omega Sektor’s back room, pawing through discarded DVDs and CDs to try and find the one copy of the DVD we’d burned. Just as I was about to consider re-burning another DVD from scratch – a process that took two hours the first time – the DVD was handed to me out of the blue. Crisis averted. Sidekicks saved. Think happy thoughts.

The rest of the morning is kind of a blur now, with flashes of things still sticking in my mind:

I remember poring over our mammoth staffing schedule, trying to tell the Sidekicks where they needed to be at any given time, and knowing that it was probably a waste of time.

I remember someone put a box of Krispy Kreme donuts in front of me, one of which I started to eat without thinking. Half-way through I wondered why the hell I was putting this much sugar in my body when I was already hyper-accelerated, thanks to the coffee.

As I then had sticky fingers and was unable to touch much without leaving a trail, when someone said to me “Is there anything I can do for you?” I replied “Yeah, you can take my hands away, wash them and bring them back to me”.

Sadly there are limits to what even Sidekicks can do.

Draw the World Together… live

Somewhere around midday my phone rang, and Andie Tong was on the other end of it; he had just arrived. I wanted to meet him as he came in, but was in the middle of something else. Thankfully I had my radio, which was now becoming an extension of my brain, I was using it so often; people were ordered to intercept.

With Andie on-site, we could try and start Draw the World Together Live… my less-than-inspired name for our live sketch-off, which we’d pioneered at Memorabilia 2007. Then, we had a stage, a PA system, video cameras and big screens… now we just had the PA system. But we also had two secret weapons. One: Ms. Liberty and Ghost Widow. Two: four (count ‘em) artists to sketch.

I sat down in the VIP Lounge with the four of them in front of me, utterly exhausted. We were waiting on our good and bad girls, who understandably wanted to look their best in front of the artists’ pencils. I joked to the artists that they could sketch me if they liked, and Andrew’s pencil started to move… in a couple of minutes I was looking at this, which I found enormously flattering to be honest…

A couple of minutes passed, the girls arrived, and I grabbed the microphone to start things off for the small crowd. Unlike at Memorabilia, where the audience were some distance from the artists, here they could get up close – in fact they could literally look over their shoulders, which might have unnerved them a bit but hey… I knew they’d still do great work.

I summoned Ghost Widow to the front, and she promptly, well… slunk into position on the chaise lounge, looking every inch the evil seductress.

With an image like that before them, how could the artists fail to be inspired? Their pencils started to scratch away rapidly, as I did my usual schtick; asking them about their careers, and so on, stopping occasionally to take questions from the audience.

On balance, I have to say I think this was one of the highlights of the weekend for me. Seeing these four guys work is an absolute pleasure, but seeing them all interpret what’s right there in front of them is something else. Every one had a subtly different take, from the more realistic at one end with Neil and Andrew, to the more cartoon-like at the other with David and Andie. They all did incredible work – Andie in particular, who I kept saying was trying to make the others look bad – and after about 15 or 20 minutes, we swapped and allowed Ms. Liberty to pose.

Four more sketches, four different styles, but all excellent again… Andrew in particular impressed me on the second sketch, as he was creating a wholly different ‘look’ to what I’d normally expect from him. (Entirely different from his previous sketch of Ms. Liberty ‘live’ at Memorabilia, too.) Mat told me afterwards that the sketch was what he’d call ‘old school Wildman’ and he should know, having been a fan of his since his 1980s Transformers work.

Eight sketches, all excellent, and all ready to be auctioned off later that night. Nine if you count Andrew’s quick caricature of me, and believe me – I was counting it.

Officially, it’s lunchtime

It was something like 2pm or so when we finished DTWT Live, and somehow I ended up in the cool, calm staff room of the centre, munching on a baguette along with Andrew, Neil, David and Lesley (Andrew’s wife). Andie was downstairs still sketching, which was extremely generous of him but it turned out, vital – I later discovered that we built up a backlog because of DTWT Live and the break afterwards.

Chilling out, we talked about a whole lot of nothing as I caught my second wind. I couldn’t believe the day was only half-way done, with miles to go… but it was going okay so far.

Eventually we had to venture back into the fray. By this time I knew the centre was busy, but I wasn’t exactly sure how busy. Then I found out: a player approached me and expressed concern that the rest of his Task Force: Omega team, which was turning up later in the afternoon, might not be able to start playing… because according to the Omega Sektor staff, there were no PCs available. Anywhere.

(I couldn’t quite believe this at the time, but I checked later in the weekend and found out it was true; at one point there wasn’t a free PC in the entire centre, and that was confirmed by headcount. Admittedly we had about 40 or so cordoned off in our ‘staff room’, which would have been no good for playing in anyway as the air-con was bust… but still, that meant 300+ PCs were occupied.)

I had to send the player packing with instructions to talk to the Omega Sektor staff, as I had more fish to fry. Via Sidekicks and staff, we started to pass the word about Melissa’s Q&A session at 4PM. We’d brought her all the way from California, I was damned if we weren’t going to have at least some sort of a crowd for her. Before the Q&A even happened though, I needed to get my MacBook – which was in my bag, in my hotel room. Thankfully a Sidekick quickly retrieved it, and I could hook up to the big screen and get the presentation ready.

War Witch speaks

If I’d stopped to think about it, I might have been slightly nervous about Melissa’s Q&A, but to be honest… the die was cast a couple of weeks’ previous.

Melissa and I both knew trying to do an exhaustive Q&A regarding (the still upcoming, at time of writing) Issue 12: Midnight Hour was going to be a waste of time. Melissa hadn’t created a new zone for the issue, she wasn’t heavily involved with some of the big new features, and more importantly she’d been told she couldn’t talk about it. So we decided fairly early on that we’d look back, at the re-creation of Faultline which Melissa was heavily involved in.

Having created the presentation myself and talked with Melissa about it, I knew it was pretty interesting, but I also knew some players might be disappointed that we weren’t talking Issue 12. That’s why I opened the Q&A by saying “This presentation is not about Issue 12… I’ll give you time to leave if you want to,” or something similar. To their credit, no-one did… but then they were mostly English and polite.

With that, Melissa started to talk, with me interjecting here and there, guiding things along. The presentation ran for about forty minutes, I think, possibly longer, and then we segued straight into Q&A.

What I find interesting about Q&A sessions with developers that I’ve done is that the audience is remarkably tame, at least at first. The questions and opinions that get thrown about on forums can be remarkably vociferous, but when it comes to real life, it can be like getting blood out of a stone. In addition, all the really tricky questions that we expect to get often either don’t come up at all, or come up really, really late into the Q&A, when everyone’s loosened up.

That’s exactly how it went for this Q&A, with barely any ‘tough’ questions being asked until late on – and then those being easily answered, because we were prepared for them. I think most of the players were really happy with the announcement of Issue 12, so didn’t have a particular axe to grind; that, and Melissa can charm most people, so they weren’t off for blood. Made my job easier, at least.

Under the hammer

The Q&A wrapped up close to 6PM, as I remember, which was fine as we’d expected it to run long. I don’t recall much of the period immediately after that, but I do remember realising that the artists were officially finished on sketches, and that we really needed to get our auction lots sorted out.

Our intention was never more than to raise a few hundred quid for Draw the World Together/EveryChild by auctioning off a few original pieces of art, maybe some nice swag that Melissa had brought with her. The last time we’d done an auction – at the player meet we held in late 2006, which Melissa also attended – we raised close to £200 as I recall, maybe over that. So we were hoping to break that number.

Just how was another question. I knew at 6PM – an hour before the auction was supposed to start – that we had Andie Tong’s original artwork for his Draw the World Together pinup, seen here (well, the cleaned-up version is here). I knew we had a piece from Jon Hayward, an original of Scirocco that was going into the sketchbook. I also knew Andrew was going to throw in a few things. But beyond that….

We grabbed David Nakayama and his wife, who’d turned up after (I hope) a scintillating day in Birmingham, and camped out in the Omega Sektor offices with his art portfolio, hoping to choose a few original pieces of City of Heroes interior art. Before we even got to that, David reminded myself and Spaff (who were there) that we needed to each choose a piece of art for ourselves, which was hugely generous of him, but was his own way of thanking us for bringing him over.

Eventually I chose the very last page of issue 10, featuring Manticore looking fairly bad-ass. Then we picked four other pieces of art including two really nice pieces which had been used in the City of Heroes Collectible Card Game, and we were done.

Just left the small issue of what else we wanted to auction.

Spaff of course was throwing out ideas left and right, with one which we’d discussed back in the office making it onto my clipboard early; the chance for a player to get a shower in one of our hotel rooms. Another couple of things were added (Lunch with the EU community team, lunch with.. er.. my team) and then we started talking about swag.

“How about this?” Spaff asked, picking up some white fluff from the floor. I wondered what it was. “Ghost Widow’s hair!” In fact, it was just that – some errant locks that had fallen out during brushing. It’s so hard to keep yourself looking good when you’re a ghost. We duly attached the hair to the clipboard, then went looking for other stuff.

Time was ticking away and I wanted to make sure we started as close to the advertised start time as possible, as there were other evening activities we needed to get to after the auction was done. With that in mind we very quickly rounded up as much stuff as we could from our ‘stock room’ including a lot of signed and occasionally unique NCNorCal swag. Melissa had been so helpful in rounding this stuff up, and everyone else around me (Spaff, Gangrel, Tia, Melissa and maybe others I think) got everything together in record quick time. With some help to move everything downstairs, we trooped to the VIP Lounge and I got ready to act as auctioneer again.

The auction

Auctioning off stuff is kind of a weird experience. I know it sounds silly, but the one thing I have a problem with is keeping the bids flowing; I can’t tell you how many times I’d ask people to ‘match’ a bid, forgetting that it doesn’t really work like that.

The rest of it, though – blabbering on like a madman – is all cake. So with armloads of various bits, I just launched into the usual stream of consciousness, alternating between auctioning off ‘serious’ stuff and ‘silly’ stuff. I thought we were off to a slightly shaky start when the opportunity to have a shower just went for a few quid – but then the opportunity to have that shower not take place in a particular room got bid even higher, and I knew we were actually off and running.

As always, the generosity of our players just bowled me over during the auction. People consistently would bid up to £50 for pieces of art, and usually paid at least £10 or £20 for anything at all (I think Ghost Widow’s hair went for at least £20…). I was particularly pleased when Andie Tong’s two donated pieces of original art (the pin-up seen above, and a lovely colour piece of Ms. Liberty that will be seen in the upcoming sketchbook) went for £80 and £70 respectively, I think.

Even more amazing, the bidder for the pin-up, who’d also paid something like £50 for some lovely Dave Gibbons sketchcards, actually came up to us afterwards and added on another £20, gratis, so totalling a £100 donation for the pin-up. I mean, what can you say? These guys are amazing. (By the way, I know just who bid on the pin-up, but I won’t assume he wants to take credit for his goodwill. He knows we appreciated it.)

Eventually we got around to auctioning off the final few items, but with all that done we still had two surprises up our sleeves.

The first was simple; we’d ordered pizza. I let that slip when I asked the Omega Sektorian “Hey, where’s our pizza?” and then confirmed to the crowd that yes, we’d ordered pizza for everyone. (I got a lot of praise for that, but honestly, it seemed the least we could do. Having said that, I haven’t gotten a receipt for said pizza yet, and if that doesn’t turn up… you all owe me a fiver.)

The second surprise was for just one person.

Before the event I got the idea to give a little something to Andrew Wildman, who’s worked tirelessly since 2005 to raise money for EveryChild via his Draw the World Together project. While we do a lot to help Andrew raise cash, he’s the guy sitting there at every show sketching for 16 hours or so, and he’s the one twisting the arm of all the artists to get them to sketch for us. Literally everyone who’s ever had a sketch from Draw the World Together has Andrew to thank, so we thought it was high time we showed that.

To that end, I had Mat put together a suitable card (It had to be a Transformers image, didn’t it?) which we got signed by as many players as we could, and we presented it to Andrew after the auction. I said a few words, and Andrew said thank you, generously saying it couldn’t have been done without NCsoft. He told me afterwards he almost shed a tear… but instead we all stayed manly and macho for the duration.

Thanks Andrew. You deserve a lot more, but that’ll do for now.

The evening continues…

I realised, post-auction, that I had one more duty that night – and that I was never going to get to it.

We’d announced really late in the day that Saturday night was supposed to be ‘Community Task Force Night’, and for some reason that I will never fathom… a few people wanted to do a Task Force with me. Why people? WHY??

Regardless, despite my good intentions I knew that if I sat down at a PC for two hours I’d never get back up. This was very much on my mind as I left the auction and headed straight to the bar, needing pizza, beer and a sit down – preferably all at once.

Just about all of CrewNC were in the corner already, huddled around quiz sheets. Titan Gaming Radio had ‘volunteered’ (Well, they were sort of forced into it by me) to host a gaming quiz, and they’d put out the first round of questions already, which was a visual round. We all tore into pizza like we’d never seen food before, drank plenty of beer and started answering questions.

Now, I have to say two things here. One: the guys at TGR did a pretty damn good job with their quiz, even if they did seem to forget that paper would be a good idea. Two: I did get drunk and I did heckle. A bit. But it was good natured. (Just don’t ask me about the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.) TGR talk a lot more about this in their recent video blog, if you really want to hear about it.

Somewhere in the middle of the quiz though, probably after some question that rubbed someone the wrong way, Spaff started goading me into doing our own quiz. I agreed with him that sure, we should do something next year… but then he started yelling out possible questions, and before long I was scribbling a bunch down on some random scrap of paper.

Being tired and kind of drunk, these were less than serious questions, and I can’t recall that many of them. I know most of them were silly, and included things like “What does the ‘NC’ in NCsoft stand for” (Answer: officially, nothing) and “What colour are Rockjaw’s underpants?” (Answer for that night: navy blue).

Hence after TGR’s quiz was done, I got up myself, commandeered the microphone, and ran drunkenly through my questions. They seemed to go down pretty well. What seemed to go down a lot better was the two years (!!) of free game time I gave out as a prize… which in the end was split just two ways. Yikes. Lesson to self; figure out prizes before the alcohol kicks in.

And that’s Saturday

With the quiz over, any chance of me being able to do a Task Force had vanished. I was too drunk, too full of pizza, and too damn tired for anything like that to happen. We fired up Rock Band once more and I sang again (no idea what, mind you) while tearing wax strips off of Gangrel for charity in-between songs.

It was that kind of night.

The evening slipped imperceptibly from ‘late’ to ‘later’, and at some point I do remember wandering back to the hotel, getting into my room and getting into bed. I wasn’t nearly as drunk as you might think, and in fact was pretty damn happy with the way the day had gone.

Now I just had to do it all over again the next day.