Hard drive failure made this the last character...
Epic, epic story, but sad too.
I have a monitor sitting in the corner of my room, hooked up to an old DOS laptop from the 90s. Recently, my saved files have been getting corrupted by bad sectors, causing the character to be forever lost. I began copying save files to try to protect characters, but sometimes the original would be corrupted before I could even make a backup copy. The situation was dire as a running of Scandisk showed the harddrive was failing fast. The next reboot, the computer struggled to finish loading DOS drivers. After it was done, I tried getting around in DOS. The 'dir' command would make the computer stall and say "Error Reading Drive C, [A]bort, [R]etry, [I]gnore?" I did manage to crawl into the ADOM directory and load ADOM. To my surprise, though it took a little longer, ADOM loaded. Expecting to have the game fail at any moment, I started up a character combo I rarely play and chose on a whim: a Human Fighter. I named him LastHeroEver, fully expecting him to live up to his name on this dilapidated laptop.
I couldn't quit and save for fear of the save file becoming corrupted immediatly or perchance not even being able to finish writing the save file. So I left the computer running through 3 thunderstorms over the period of the next 4 weeks.
LastHeroEver went on to save the cute puppy, get doomed, get undoomed, kill Rehetep in an epic, tactical brawl, get a Amulet of Life Saving from a Ring of Djinni summoning, save Khelavaster, take out the Dwarfen Graveyard, Darkforge, the ToEF, find amazing equipment including FOUR MORE rings of Djinni Summoning, summon a bunch of Greater Molochs to fight, and reach lvl 36.
At long last, ADOM finally crashed taking LastHeroEver, his accomplishments, and his wonderful potential with it. I would have been more broken up if I would have gotten my hero killed by my own stupidity, rather than a crash, but good golly he progressed as far as only a handful of my characters have ever gotten. An epic run for the last hero that my laptop, that beloved ADOM-gaming machine, will ever see.
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