Quests: Escort for Hire (Bastok)

Having recently spent some time in Crawlers Nest helping with coffer key hunts, and seeing that everything was easy prey or lower, we decided it was finally time to try the Escort for Hire (Bastok) quest, and see if we could safely get Olavia to her destination. With the reward being a page from Miratete's Memoirs, and the possibility of 1000 to 2000 experience points, this would be one way to help us try to catch up to Itera (as long as we make him read the pages on any job besides his monk).

We agreed to try it on Monday night, but Itera couldn't pick up the quest Sunday night. He had the San d'Orian escort quest active, and headed back to San d'Oria to cancel it, but when he returned to Bastok, he still couldn't get the quest. Apparently it was a fame issue, so he took some time on Monday to take stacks and stacks of La Thiene Cabbage to Selbina. It wasn't quite enough, and rather the put off the quest, we went ahead with him helping for no reward.

We met at the entrance to Crawlers Nest, Kiki PLD67/WAR33, Itera MNK67/WAR33, Grym THF66/BST33, Elbo BRD66/WHM33. We put Elboron in charge of controlling Olavia (you can get her to start and stop by talking to her), and headed in. Olavia was happy to see her escort crew, and took off running. From the ball room, she headed northwest, into a room I'd never been in, where there were 4 Doom Scorpions. Grym charmed one into being her pet, and we killed the others. Olavia then headed back out, and headed down to the "racetrack" room, and through the area where we normally fight helm beetles for coffer keys. We had to kill crawlers, scorpions, and beetles along the way, but it went smoothly, and we had plenty of time. Grym's thought behind subbing BST and charming a monster was to have it take care of some of the monsters we'd run into and we wouldn't have to fight ourselves, but we ended up just fighting and killing everything anyway.

Olavia came to a stop in a room at the end of the helm beetle tunnel, and thanked us for her help. She gave us a completion certificate for our assistance, and vanished. We were wondering if we just had to leave her to die there with the crawlers and scorpions, but apparently she had a safe way out.

Instead of leaving Crawlers Nest right away, we decided to stay for some weapon skillups. Grym and Elboron both ended up leveling to 67 on the same easy prey kill, which was a bit of a surprise. We had no idea they were within 20 points of each other. Kiki got to 200 on her staff - only 15 more to Spirit Taker!

When it was time to think about turning in for the night, Elboron and Kiki headed back to Bastok to get their reward (Grym had an errand to run and didn't join us). The first time you complete the quest, you get 10,000 gil in addition to the experience scroll, but it's definitely worth doing just for the scroll. We can repeat the quest every week, and I think we would all like that. It was a lot of fun! Kiki ended up getting 1404 exp from her scroll, which puts her at 5.5k into level 67.