The Return of the Balrog

by Taniko

Somewhere along the line, I’d created a character, due to my diligence watching over the Lord of the Rings trilogy, both movie and book, named The Balrog. I didn’t ever do much in roleplay with him, but he existed before The Crash and he existed, however briefly, after The Crash.

The Crash was sad, for many reasons. I lost nearly all my posts, except for the posts I was considering to enter into the Pan Historian sample book which was published earlier that year. I also lost all the posts from a good friend who passed away later that summer. This hurts worse, believe me. She was creative, inventive, and a true soul, and her loss (her presence, even more so than her writing) still cuts to the quick. Also, most everyone lost posts and storylines (some people were smart enough to save all their work prior to posting, not me!).

However, one day in May I logged into Pan Historia… and it just wasn’t there. Okay, sites go down, sites go up. Be patient.

It wasn’t there for the next few days, or weeks, either. This got alarming. Fortunately there was some sort of offsite space – Pan’s Den – and I went there to hibernate. Someone there or somewhere mentioned that if you hit Google you could sometimes retrieve old HTML pages, and someone else mentioned if you went to something called The WayBackMachine you could hit even older HTML pages.

I got obsessed. By hitting one or another of these sources, I finally found a linkage page lying there in limbo that listed the novels of Pan Historia. I went and collected every DJ I could. I tried to remember names of every Reference Book, and collected those that I could, as well. I think over a two or three night span, I was up until 2 AM, collecting. I wasn’t the only one collecting, but I do know I got obsessed with doing it. (Pages you can't access without logging in were of course beyond the pale of accessibility, but at least this was something.)

I tried to collect characters, too, but with this I met with near-resounding failure. Maybe I collected three or four names, that was all.

A month or such later, PanHistoria was back up. The Balrog was my character who offered DJ’s back to novel MoB’s and a few Reference Book MoB’s, along with others who had pages to offer. People without backups were glad to collect even this much.

I eventually deleted the character, realizing I didn’t really have a need to play him on PanHistoria, and perhaps someone else some day would like to breathe fire, lasso wizards with loathsome whips, and be The Balrog. Meanwhile, it turns out that this fire-breathing nasty was actually reasonably useful!