As part of Navi’s Ten Days of Pet Battles:

Day 3:  Who is your favourite pet?  If you could bring it out into the real world, tell me what you imagine you would be doing.

Ethereals were abundant in BC. In fact, I loved working on my Consortium rep because it meant I could visit their little hub and give my Jewelcrafting a boost, thanks to my monthly salary in the form of gems at friendly reputation.

I’ll admit that Mana Tombs was a favourite hangout and getting exalted with The Consortium was a priority for the designs you could buy. I loved opening the prisons in Netherstorm whenever I farmed an Ethereum Prison Key and then later Purging the Chambers of Bash’ir.

I even had the key to summon up Yor in Mana Tombs. To me, I always thought ethereals moved in a cool way and liked the way they dressed. Even dying was cool… it seemed so dramatic. So when I found there was a pet in the game, I’d dreamt about owning it.

Soul-Trader Beacon

For a TCG card, I knew the Soul-Trader Beacon would be hard to come by. The Ethereal Plunderer card was only in 363 booster packs from the expansion “Hunt for Illidan.”

Soul-Trader Essence

As a vendor, he sells a rather unusual list of items but you’ll need to start collecting Ethereal Credits before you can purchase any of his unique inventory. To start earning credits, he has to be close when you get the killing blow on any green mob or higher. This also works for PVP as long as it’s an honourable kill.

Ethereal set

Ethereal Credits may be used to purchase:

I admit I was disappointed when I previewed the set since it doesn’t look very close to an actual Ethereal (especially when it costs 2200 credits to buy). Even so, I’m in the process of collecting them now since I always thought they’d be a cool race to play. I’ll just have to stockpile the credits since I don’t have the room to hold the set right now.

Note that if you mass kill the mobs you won’t get a credit for each kill since the trader takes a couple of seconds to harvest each soul.

Aki mutagens Ethereals & the Soul-Trader Beacon

Now here are Aki’s companions with the mutagen applied. I imagine they’ll be like this until next Tuesday – unless a restart happens beforehand.

Oh, and if you name your Soul-Trader, you’ll see this the next time he’s summoned:

<name> says: I have arrived. Shall we set to work, then?

In terms of bringing my pet out into the real world, I imagine it would act a bit like it does in-game, except for the soul-draining part. :P The only difference is, it acts like a regular vendor so I can throw away my trash in some sort of futuristic disposal unit as well as carry my bags, groceries, etc.

Hmm, sounds a bit like I, Robot.