Quests: Promotion - Superior Private

After completing a bunch of Private First Class Assault Missions, I headed to talk to Naja Salaheem to see if she was ready to promote me to the next rank yet. Sure enough, she thought I was ready, and told me to go out and find some evidence of the Dark Rider who's been recently menacing the Empire. The Dark Rider has been known to be in Wajaom Woodlands, Bhaflau Thickets, Mount Zhayolm, and Caedarva Mire. Grymalkyn and I had seen the Warhorse Hoofprint that we needed to find in the Thickets several weeks back, when we went on our first chocobo exploration of the area, so we were hopeful that we'd quickly find another one, now that we needed it.


Having chocobos available does make the searching a lot quicker, but we searched and searched through the Thickets and Woodlands, spending hours of time fruitlessly, spread out over several days. Saturday morning, the chocobo trainer was being held prisoner, and I even went out searching as my RDM/BLM, to no avail. When the chocobo trainer came back, I made a couple loops, then decided I'd try the possible spots in Mount Zhayolm.

I ducked into a Halvung entrance and used escape to get to Mt Zhayolm. I checked and few spots and worked my way though the Gates of Halvung and over to the Vozold Island, passing through Halvung again along the way. I had no luck finding the Warhorse Hoofprint, but I did see some new sights: the dragons called Dahaks, and the giant moth-like Wamoura. I've heard they can aggro through sneak and invisible in certain circumstances, but fortunately they didn't notice me.

We decided the hoofprint must be in the Mire, which is an area I don't much care for, because of the true-sight Imps. We reasoned that the Dark Rider might move after the conquest tally on Sunday morning, and gave it up for the day. Soon after the tally, we logged in and Itera sent a tell that he'd spotted the Dark Rider in the Woodlands, and followed him around until he got the hoofprint. We quickly warped to Al Zahbi, grabbed chocobos, and found the Warhorse Hoofprint as well. We then headed back to town to switch to our BSTs for widescan and hopped back on a chocobo to see if we could spot the Dark Rider as well, but we couldn't find him.

We took our evidence back to Naja, and she was a bit reluctant to accept it as proof, but decided to promote us anyway. Now we have another set of 5 new Assault missions to try out!

New Title: Superior Private