I remember. Sometimes I visit the east wing of the chathouse, like Marius walking through the ruins of Carthage. The rooms no longer even work, the who's in the east wing page is like the skeleton of a mammoth creature that few remain that remember it and they mourn it's extinction. Even the chathouse forums... dead, channel 1 appears to be finished. Eleven years ago... that is when I first put my imagination into the chathouse's east wing. Some swam accross the internet sea to www.chatalot.com and continue doing the things that made chathouse a home once, but even there it is only a few who remain.. fewer who remember chathouse. I remember, I mourn, I leave a small shard of hope.
Allow and old man to tell a little story of how, as far as I'm concerned, the hand of fate delivered me to this place. This was a little more then a decade ago, during an espescially blessed summer. I was 17 at the time, still young, frivilous, and full of life... and life, in those days was, indeed, good. I was at Pennsic, one of the largest medieval enactments in the world(if not -the- largest), and it was there that I met the litteral girl of my dreams. I'd had a rather repetitive dream since the age of 12 that involved me, on a horse decked out in gray, getting into a swordfight with a man over this girl in a mountain pass. He came to me to beseach me to not go with her, that she would be the end of me, and that, as my brother, he was there to see her dead so she couldn't destroy me. In a way, she did do exactly that, but that's another tale for another day.
At any rate, so there was the spitting image of this maiden from my dreams. Beautiful, slightly older then myself, and when she saw me, her reaction was identicle to my own... stark disbelief. We stood there for a rather long moment, simply standing there, amazed we were actually seeing each other, and then she came up and embraced me. This was how I came to be acquainted with Sandy. So, during the subsequent bulk of Pennsic we spent a considderable ammount of time together, and during this time we discovered that we were both Gamers. So she asked after a session of Freestyle RP if I played at Chathouse. I told her I'd never heard of the place, and so she wrote the addy down for the east wing and told me to meet her at the castle at a specific date and time. Thus it was that in August of the year 1998, I came to the EW.
I'm not proud of everything I've done here, but beyond any shadow of a doubt the friendships I forged and the things I learned here I would never give up willingly. Chathouse helped me become the man that I am today, for better and for worse. As such, I'm glad there are those that still come here to remember, as it makes me feel less like a ghost.