Who are you, little Gnome?

The family was back from Gencon and I was busy with new books and games and organizing them into the older books and games. There were new autographed books and nearby were all those Mercedes Lackey books still sitting on a shelf that I didn't take to Indianapolis because I didn't know she was going to be there!

The time came that I once would get online and play WoW and it occurred to me that I didn't mind being offline. For certain I missed the people, but not necessarily the game. I decided I might try turning off one subscription, but didn't get around to it yet. Still, there had been a tentative decision made.

Then my daughter proudly showed me her pet team she had leveled to 25. It was apparent she'd paid some attention to my suggestions months earlier, but it also was more revealing about what she liked when playing Pokémon! She and her brothers and, well the whole family really, started playing on a pre-color Gameboy. Her team consisted of:

Do you remember how hard it was to level up your first team to 25? She wasn't discouraged, exactly, but certainly wasn't enjoying it like I had. As I tried to explain how it would get better and what her next pets should be... She challenged me to use Martuska, my character on her account, and we would share the team.

Now I still felt guilty about abandoning Martuska for Kallixta and Aldonza. She was my first to level 85, but she was still sitting at 85! When I played Warcraft with my son, Kallixta and Aldonza were on the same account as his favorite character, so he could play with his sister. He would prefer if I could brush the dust off Marty so we'd have a better match.

Martuska and Aldonza are both Mages. Aldonza had overcome much of her cowardice, but I was the one avoiding Marty. Hm.

I concluded that before I stopped entirely, I owed Martuska some attention. With that miniscule commitment, I decided to send Martuska to Pandaria. Someone had mentioned levelling a low level in Pandaria, battling those wild pets. I could at least do that for Syylia's team. Martuska ran like a little child, or more accurately a small gnome, all the way to Half-Hill, set her hearthstone and started battling.

And I've been playing World of Warcraft ever since. I remembered the fun I had with my little gnome!

Marty needed to discard those Cataclysm blues and purples and her shiny new Zen Tailoring gave her a set of Windwool greens. That led to visits of the Silk Fields and confirming that playing a level 85 Gnome Mage really isn't that different from a level 90 Human Mage, provided you bother to set up the GUI! And the Macros! Oh, and choose your talents and glyphs. Good grief!

Marty's first new level since a month after Cataclysm came out!

Martuska is already level 87, almost all from Pet Battles, but she's reminded me of things that should have been apparent on Aldonza. Can you guess what I learned?

How often do you apply lessons learned on one character to another? Apparently I haven't been liberal enough in that reapplication!