The First Gaian Annual Ball: This was hosted by Misao, and the thread can be found here. It is well known that the Admins suprised the users here, giving out the Black Bow Tie and Rose Corsage (dependent on whether your avatar was male or female) to those who attended. There was no NPC involvement as far as we know.
The First Easter Egg Hunt: A miscellaneous event by the Administrators, one could find a floating egg which would grant you either Bunny or Chickie slippers. Again, no NPC involvement.Hallowe'en 2k3: Collecting Candy from the masked Storekeeps was the focus of this event. Jack, pictured right, would give the Users Grab Bags in exchange for Candy. There was also a forum just for the event.
Christmas 2k3: The Barton Charities. All Users were granted Santa's Gifts which contained Jolly Hats, and could donate 500g+ worth items to get Jolly Slippers (in a wrapped box) from the Barton Tree. Rina and Leon were involved in this, but not to the point of NPC interaction with Users.
The charity tree served also as some sort of slot machine, creating a frenzy among users. Most of the time one received Jolly slippers when donating an item worth 500 gold, but sometimes the tree gave out other items as well; some of the more common ones were the red-nosed reindeer masks and the rare ones were the Fairy Wings. This caused a pretty big uproar among users as everyone started to mass-throw away their gold in order to gain a pair of Wings. x3 Complaints were everywhere. x3 There were also a lot of very generous users that would sell their Wings for half the price. smile (credit to SSJ Girl; although not plot related, we think Users should remember this with fondness wink )
Enter 2004.
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2004 - 1
The First Gaian Anniversary Ball: Here, we were first introduced to the Gaian story-telling system, and an actual area designed purely as a forum for the event. Gambino's Mansion, owned by Johnny K. Gambino, the declared 'most powerful man in Gaia', was opened up for the Anniversary Festivities. Upon arrival, he graced Users with Party Favours, a Hat and a Noise Maka. Subsequently, we began to meet some of the Shopkeeps, finally in avatar form, along with another, younger, character: Gino.
Indeed, Ian, Ruby and Sasha were invited to the party to enjoy themselves and hand out Gaia T-Shirts, much to our pleasure. Gino, Gambino's neglected and/or abused son also made a few appearances, much to the hysteria of the Users, who spent a long time crying out for justice against Gambino, for his malignant attitude towards Gino. The Ball ended eventually, and a few days later, Users were gifted with a "Thanks for coming" picture from Gambino, pictured right. This was the first event to feature the speech bubbles from NPC avatars that appears in the Gaia header, and occasionally Gambino would drop by and give gold to users, generally in multiples of 1000 per time.The Second Gaian Annual Ball: A team of regular Gaians, headed by Setzer, basically did most of the themework for this Ball. The Administrators, gracious as always, provided a forum for the event to occur in. There was one small bit of NPC intervention here: Gino appeared and would give out G-Pins to Users at random, hinting that he wasn't supposed to be doing so, and suggesting they keep quiet about the matter.
The Second Easter Egg Hunt: This was hosted by the Administrators, and can be found here. We had to click 8 little Easter Eggs, shaped like Rabbits, and then the Easter Bunny would appear. The Easter Bunny? He and his Helper are pictured left! And when Users had all 8, they were given an Easter basket, which contained either a Bunny or Chickie Hat. As with all the previous Events, there was very little plot to this.The second half of 2004, however, was different. smile
