15,000,000 Meters

Photo: Note the altitude on this landmark! Sim info is unavailable because Forsaken, which belonged to Ahsche Chung, is no more.


Written 10 July, 2010

15,000,000 Meters

Long ago, in 2006, when we were both new to Second Life and just getting to know one another, Sweetie and I embarked upon an epic adventure.

We determined to fly as high as we could.

Back in those days the ceiling for building was around 750 meters, and no one-- or hardly anyone-- ever went above that altitude. But we knew it was possible, for there were orbiters, and some of them would throw avatars millions of meters into the air.

By way of preparation, we took turns orbiting one another with our Mystitools (oh, for the days of the original Havok!). Then one day we were ready.

We turned our Mysittools on the faster than fast Plaid speed and donned other flight enhancement gadgets-- a then-rival of the Mysti had something called god speed, and ram horns made by our then friend, Aardvaark almost spelled backwards. He got close, with a name something like Kraavkara, but he rather missed his goal. Anyway, he had given me two pairs of ram horns with a flight enhancer. I gave my spare to Sweetie. She, of course, immediately retextured them, making them pretty. I just stuck my ugly horns on my head and turned them on.

We took off above Mordecai Skaggs' land in Caledon, flying high, pacing his humongous chain, which led upwards to nowwhere; then, when we got to 750 meters, we put the hammer down.



The Mystitool then had a push mode which would rapidly shoot you up several tens of thousands of meters. By using that and every other tool we had, we eventually passed one million meters.

We hadn't given any thought to what we should wear for a record-breaking (we hoped!) flight. I was wearing an Italian outfit with a short skirt and Sweetie was wearing a beautifully textured dress made by Angel Stormwind.


Photo: Sweetie flying in god mode. Her Mysitool fly particles couldn't keep up!

As we flew, Sweetie outpaced me, and I kept looking up at her. I realized her skirts were closed at the bottom. It seems Angel had made the dress before the introduction of flexible prims!


Photo: Sweetie looked like a big beautiful Christmas bell! (It was 12/28/06)

We ascended, expecting at any moment to bump into an absolute height limit. But we didn't. 50,000 meters! 100,000! 250,000!

When we reached great heights-- I seem to remember it starting to happen between 750,000 and 1,000,000 meters-- our avatars started to come apart.



Photo: This is me on a later flight, in 2008. Note how weird the horizon looks!

We looked progressively more distorted to one another, and to ourselves. Our limbs and bodies were weirdly twisted. Our eyes disappeared from their sockets and eventually emerged below out chins. Our hair disappeared. Our necks grew longer and longer and soon were flopping about whenever we moved.



We weren't at all sure we weren't permanently wrecking our avies.


Photo: Sweeetie always manages to look glamorous. Here her bell skirt had become detached from the high speed ascent.

We thought we might be doomed to spend our days in an avatar rest home, being waited on by newbies making $3L an hour.


Photo: It got worse as we flew higher.

But when we relogged, we were back to normal.

We flew twice more, going higher each time, until we finally reached 15,00,000 meters.

We took landmarks, of course. But although when we were high in the sky we could teleport avatars to us, the landmarks sent us to 20 meters.

With push killed by Havok4 and presumably by Havok7, there's little chance of going that high again-- so we've turned our attention in the other direction-- straight down.

See here and here for my original blogs about our high flight. And see here for a photo of Aardvaark-spelled-backward's infamous ram horns. And here for Mordecai's chain.