With a name like Jason, how could he not return for a sequel?

Yep, I definitely cursed myself to eat my words when I said that Kalliope's stable was looking more fluid than Kallimon's.  Jason is back.  And how.

Jason's had a bit of a checkered past.  He was with me before in a red hyena skin, though he was mostly my planned hydra.  I was never really sold on the idea of Jason being a hydra anyway, as evidenced by the previous stint in red.

The problems weren't really his, though.  They were mine.  Kalliope couldn't have a purple hyena, but that's my favorite color hyena.  Orange, the second favorite, was too jarring when summoned; I kept expecting to see the purple.  I have a soft spot for hyenas, which made the whole thing worse.

It's a good thing MoP has hyenas set up to be one of the families with the windfury buff.  Knowing this, I took the excuse to look at hyenas again in the name of "filling out stable buffs," which of course was clearly untrue, since I'm completely ignoring other buffs.  Sigh.  Whatever self-deception works, right?  I knew I wanted Jason back, but I didn't know what color to make him.  I figured I'd try orange again, since orange was Linus last time (and Orpheus's brother or not, I just had no bond with him).  So I ported to Uldum to go grab Skarf.  But I decided to check on Madexx first.

You can tell where this is going.

Madexx wasn't up last night (he always knows!), but as I approached the northern spawn point (my favorite), I got that familiar pang as I flew over a yellow hyena.  The this-is-your-pet-go-tame-it pang.  I landed and immediately hit tame.  Then I quickly smashed dismiss, since Leo was still with me.  Whoops.  Then I hit tame again without missing a beat.  The bond was instant.  I completely blame Leo for this; thanks to him, I'm now used to a warm golden pet by my side.  Honorable mention goes to GrilledCheez (Sandwiches's), the first yellow hyena I'd tamed.

So, Jason is home, thank goodness.  Unfortunately, it's not as simple as all that.  He's a color changer.  I never tame color changers because they drive me batty.  If I want a pet in a particular color, then I tame that color.  None of this funny business with swapping.  Jason, however, isn't a fan of this philosophy.  He opts to appear in white more often than not, apparently just to needle me (he's appeared as yellow in clutch, serious business moments during which I didn't have time to chastise him for showing up as the wrong color).  Not only that, but he's showing up on the login screen as orange.  This is driving me crazy.  One of the reasons Perseus changed bodies was because he appeared as a green warp stalker on the login screen instead of blue.  The worst of it is....I can't change him.  I flew out to the Barrens to find a yellow hyena who didn't change colors and even settled down above one, knowing full well that I couldn't do it.  I checked on how those hyenas were color-changing on the beta.  Without character copies activated, I can't confirm that he'll stabilize as yellow, but I did confirm that even if he doesn't, I'll be able to retame the real him.  Still, I'm amused greatly by Jason's color changing antics, even though they drive me crazy.  At least he has personality!

Happy trails, Kallisto; welcome, new blood

A couple of days ago, I realized that Kallisto and I weren't clicking anymore.  We hadn't been since she returned in Cataclysm; I just hadn't seen it because I really like her.  The initial problem, which I realized in early July, was that I twitched every time I saw Kallisto in orange, subconsciously expecting the purple she used to be.  So I figured the problem would be solved once she returned to her natural coloration.

Sadly, I was wrong.

I instead had trouble seeing Kallisto as herself; I kept thinking of Praline.  Part of the problem is that I didn't know what to call her.  She couldn't be Kalli; Kalliope is Kalli.  That was always a roadblock, but one that had been cheated around, simply by just using her full name.  The nail in the coffin was that I finally understood that Kallisto had already been reborn a long time ago as Praline.  I had always kind of been aware of the rebirth, but didn't see that it truly meant there was no going back until now.

So I stabled Kallisto and went hyena scouting.  I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for.  The purple was my favorite skin, and my second favorite choice, the orange hyena outside the Caverns of Time, had been moved.  Somehow, I sensed that tracking down a new orange hyena wasn't going to work; it was that one or nothing.  At Caelan's suggestion, I checked on Slaverjaw, but he wasn't up.  I'm not a fan of the white hyena skin and Sandwiches has GrilledCheez, who is an attractive yellow, so those were out.  I flew aimlessly into Uldum, just to check out a few of my options in the wild.

I tamed a mangy gray hyena on a whim, but was surprised that I didn't like the look of the skin once tamed, at least not with Kalli.  Not knowing what else to do and still having Caelan's suggestion in my head, I flew around to try and find the red hyenas, just so I could see them in person.  I'd never really considered the skin before; too many other hunters had a soft spot for it for me to ever even try getting to know it.  So really, I wasn't sure what to expect.

I finally spotted a red hyena fighting a camel, but it lost the battle before I could dismount and get involved.  I flew around the area a bit longer and discovered one on a ledge.  And suddenly, I understood why I was having so much trouble finding them.

I was phased.

Every time I flew close to my target hyena, he disappeared.  I tried blindly throwing some traps into his patrol path, but none of them triggered.

This was when things got interesting.

I landed on the side of the cliff, on a very tiny ledge.  I could target him from here, but he was out of range.

I tried firing some traps up to him to pull him, but he didn't trigger any of them.  It was difficult to see how far off he was from hitting them, so I flew up (ironically, on Hephaestus the red proto-drake) to get a better idea of what the situation was.  He looked pretty far off from the traps, so I tried dismounting and using my engineering cloak to slowfall down to the ledge.  This actually worked like a charm, except the little hyena decided that now would be a great time to hit my freeze trap.  Not wanting to wait 40 seconds for him to break out and run to me, I summoned Atalanta to go poke him.  Yes, I could have gone pet fishing in the first place, but I hadn't wanted to accidentally kill the little guy.  This was a last resort.

I dismissed Atalanta and retrapped the little scamp, just to be certain that he wasn't going to knock me off the ledge, since I couldn't recall offhand what abilities these hyenas had.

At that point, the tame was easy.

You may have noticed that I took screenshots of this process, even though I hadn't committed to keeping this guy yet.  I had done so on the grounds that this was a lot of effort just to try on the skin.  Of course, once he was at my side, I realized that I'd been in denial.  I had already started to get attached.  The skin turned out to be rather attractive as well, though it really only matches the Firelands tier of gear; after this, he is unlikely to match Kalliope again.  But that's never been a priority for me.  I just like pets that fit by my side, regardless of their color scheme.

The name Jason kept wanting to attach itself to him, though I rejected it.  The yellow hyena would fit better, I reasoned, due to the Golden Fleece.  But then, something clicked.  Jason Voorhees was no stranger to blood.  The double reference did it.  Once he had a name, Jason's personality started falling into place.  He's fiercer than Praline, which is saying something, since she was Kallimon's battleground companion back when she had a snare.

He's a keeper.

There and back again

This one was my own fault.

Back in the day, on the 3.0 PTR, I tamed a purple hyena from Thousand Needles and named her Kallisto.  I had always wanted one and I rather liked her.  Unfortunately, this was long before the days of expanded stables, so I didn't get a chance to tame her until 4.0.  By that time, Kallimon had tamed Snort the Heckler as his Praline and the purple hyenas from Thousand Needles were gone anyway, so Kallisto got a shiny new orange look from the little hyena who spawns outside of the Caverns of Time in Tanaris.  I liked the color and she seemed to as well.

There was just one little nagging problem.  Whenever I summoned her, I'd blink in surprise, expecting her to be purple.  I shook it off repeatedly, writing it off as force of habit.

Today, I realized that this feeling wasn't going to go away.  We flew to Thousand Needles to trace the path that Kallisto's wild form had followed to escape the flood.

Kallisto got a good whiff of the trail, despite it being months old.  It seemed to jog her memory.

We paused as Gadgetzan came into view, forcing away any temptation to refer to it as a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  Only kidding.  I asked Kallisto if she went left or right from here.  She pointed right.  We rode on.

We rode south, somewhat blindly.  I wasn't exactly sure where we were going, but I had a feeling that Kallisto did.  She remembered.  I trusted her to lead the way.

Suddenly, there she was.  She was the only hyena in the area.  Kallisto had led us straight and true.

We sat quietly for a few minutes before making the shift.  I wanted to remember her as she was.  Also, I missed getting a screenshot of the moment we first saw her; she had loomed larger than life on the sand dunes, larger than I expected.  I couldn't capture it, sadly.  But that moment...I knew.

I began the transition, knowing in my heart that this was the right thing to do.  Kallisto, for her part, was so excited that she pounced on me, interrupting the tame!

While this was endearing, I had to put her on ice briefly to get her to settle down long enough to come home.  She bounded happily back to my side, looking just like her old self.  I couldn't believe she was really back.  I've been mounting and dismounting often and haven't been getting that familiar pang of "wrongness."  This really is Kallisto.  Oh well, so I have two purple hyenas - so what?  It's not like I don't have five brown tarantulas. x_x