My name's Marnix and I'm broken

If you're a friend on plurk and you read my verbose outpourings there as well as here you might remember a few days ago I mentioned a small bug I was experiencing in SL. For some reason I could no longer run, I could not fly, I walked as if through treacle and I fell at an alarmingly slow rate. Added to that was the issue where I would tp to some sims, and I stress some, and land in a spot that wasn't where I tp-ed to and would then promptly not be able to move. I would just moonwalk on the spot. It was, to understate it, immensely frustrating.

The other day I fell off a sky platform 700 metres up. In the end I got bored and logged off. As a result this is what I logged in to. I was still falling. That's a plane in front of me there, by the way, just hovering at about 650m.


I decided I'd wait and see how long it took me to reach ground level. I changed clothes. I chatted with a friend for a little bit. And I continued falling. I measured that I fell 73m in 8 minutes.

Eventually a random stranger on the ground below me IMed me and asked if I was alright up there. He even flew up from the ground to meet me and just hovered a bit. He was as perplexed as I was about the issue but he suggested TPing me to somewhere with less lag to see if that helped. I'm a trusting sort of a guy so I agreed to give it a go. The issue couldn't get any worse. And by now I was down to about 500m anyway. Another hour and I'd be at ground level.


He TPed me somewhere and we landed on a quayside outside of a built-up city. The sim was named Kowloon. The first thing he said when I landed was "take off all your clothes except your pants". For a minute I thought I'd been kidnapped for the Hong Kong sex-slave industry, but then he qualified it by adding something about making sure I was wearing absolutely nothing containing a script.


I did as instructed and tried flying. And running. And falling. And wahey! Success. It worked. I was mended. Next up was to slowly, one item at a time, add all my stuff back on again - the AO, the Pandora HUD, the mini-radar, the flight feather, the type-blocker thingy - to see at what point the bug returned. Because then, of course, I'd have found the offending item.

One by one I added stuff back, tried flying and falling. Each time I found everything was good. Until eventually I was back, exactly as I had started, fully-dressed and fully-HUDed up. And yet I still worked. I was not broken any more. Now is it me, or is that some weird-ass shit?

I went to thank my unlikely fairy godmother but he'd vanished. As suddenly as he appeared, he was gone. Just who was that mystery stranger who came to my aid? Perhaps we'll never know.