Do you believe in ghosts? Phantoms? Spooky scary skeletons? What about haunted airships? After this particular event, Baelfire Ender, myself, and those who participated in our match that day can attest that there IS such a thing as supernatural activity on airships. Or you could attest it all to server issues, if you're BORING.
During an achievement lobby match, everyone aboard the aforementioned junker disconnected. As such, it was manned completely by AI, who are, we found out, excellent for farming achievements. They rebuild broken components so fast that you can burn through those frustrating objectives very quickly. I was required to destroy some insane amount of components with heavy clip, so I was more than happy to just pop their balloon over and over.
Now it gets weird. The ship had been completely stationary before, as the AI cannot pilot. But for reasons unknown, it began to move forward when it was about 100 meters above the water. The engines fired up, and away she went. At first I thought that a pilot had connected and was trying to escape our repeated balloon pops, but a quick check of the scoreboard showed that this was clearly not the case.
We followed closely behind, still farming achievements and watching our AI ship make a futile effort to escape in a straight line. Once they reached the water, we were sure they would be finished. Only, they seemed to stubbornly resist impacting the water, and somehow went UNDER it. They stayed submerged, not dying and out of reach of our carronades for a long two minutes, then resurfaced and continued their linear voyage. Fearing witchcraft, we popped their balloon again, then attempted the coup-de-gras by sitting on them. Our ships collided, they sank, we did not. Once we pulled ourselves off the surface of the water, we watched in amazement as our stalwart adversary yet again did an outstanding impression of a poorly designed submersible.
After an agonizingly long battle, the ghost ship finally gave in to our constant barrage of flechettes and went to the airship equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker. Upon respawning, they remained inert and apparently oblivious to our attempts to destroy them, which we did quickly.
Truly this is a tale to chill the bones of even the most hardened aeronauts. Stay spoopy, my friends.
