I never thought I'd say this...

     But I miss Heroic Halls of Origination.

     I don't really miss any of the other heroic dungeons from Cataclysm and if I had to start queueing for them again as often as I did back then I'd probably get over missing Halls very quickly. But today I miss it. Not so much for running the instance because running it was very very long, even when you skipped all the optional bosses it still felt long.
     But because I remember queueing into it so many times with guildies and wiping occasionally over stupid things and laughing because Ret's* warrior alt would always die to the purple circles on Anraphet. It happened so often that it became an inside guild joke that the warrior in question just liked purple so much she couldn't not stand in it. As you can imagine Setesh wasn't really fun for her either.
     But it's things like that I miss, chatting with each other in guild chat as we ran the instances, laughing over really silly things. I had a lot more guildies that played back then, so I could usually get one or two any time Rim needed to go back to farming chaos orbs.
     On top of that Halls of Origination is a really neat dungeon. I've always had a thing for Ancient Egypt since I was a wee one, so one of the first things I did when I got to Uldum was fly around taking so many screenshots. And Halls of Origination has that amazing lost pyramid feel to it. The instance itself is gorgeous, even if it is really long and the optional bosses were neat to look at.
     One of the things Tai has been doing a lot of lately is running a friends' alts through instances to help them level. I actually really enjoy doing this because it gives me a chance to really look at the instances, take them in the way I couldn't if I were running them at level and needed to be more focused on doing my job. Well, there hasn't been an alt run through Halls yet, so today Rim went, just by himself to have a look around.

     Well, not entirely by himself because of course Speckles went. Where would a paladin be without his loyal cat?  The nice thing about wandering into instances solo is I can do things like go through the doorways I never got to go through when running the instance at level. Doorways that don't go anywhere... except when they lead into what looks like a service hallway down to a large Titan engine under the elevator!

     Wow, I never knew this was here! It doesn't do anything, there aren't any mobs or bosses or shiny loot. But you can wander on down here and just look around and finding out that it was here made me feel like I'd discovered something. Makes me want to go around and poke a bit more thoroughly into some of the older instances. And maybe sometime I will. In the meantime, though, Rim has had his little trip down memory lane and now he can go back to dealing with the more pressing problems in Pandaria. (Or just sitting around on his cozy farm in the Valley of Four Winds.)