Porthannius, the night-elf NPC who has a package of herbs that you must deliver to Dolanaar immediately, dreams of one day quitting his job as a non-player character and becoming a player character. Though he is incapable of saying anything beyond what he has been programmed to say, his late-night blog posts reveal his most secret hopes and desires.

“i suppose i shuld be happy to even have a job,” he writes in one recent posting, “but i dont know how much moer of this i can take. i see so many adventurers every day and i give them my herbs and they don’t even give me the time of day. its like im a piece of garbage to them. im only hear to give them experience and 2 pieces of silver. what about me? dont i deserve something more than this?”

Porthannius’s argument has stirred up a mix of emotions all across the PC and NPC community. Nelson Gantry, a lawyer who specializes in NPC rights, claims that this is by no means an isolated case.

“We’ve seen this before, you know, and it does not often end well. I represented Agartumen the Spoiler, if you remember that case. He was a quest giver in the Blasted Lands, had been moved around a couple times, finally ended up in the middle-of-nowhere with a quest about killing boars or something and he just lost it completely, started attacking players who were trying to turn in their quests. Killed a lot of people. And when we looked back over his history while prepping his trial, we saw he was writing a lot of the same things this night-elf NPC writes. The powers-that-be ended up deleting him. That’s just the way it goes.”

A protest by “Stand Still and Deliver”, a group of NPC sympathizers, is scheduled for tomorrow morning at the gates of Stormwind.