(Written immediately before reading Mr. Kim's post outlining the very
experience I had had, causing me to once again ask myself, Does this man
have all the answers? ;)

I have yet to explore much of Befallen, but like many of us I have a hard
time turning down requests to help find corpses (seeing the hardships many
newbies go through in East Commons and it being so easy to lend a hand..).
A dwarven cleric had died to the necro at the bottom of the stone spiral
staircase (just past the first lock), and I offered to play bloodhound.

After taking a few bearings, I found myself pointed straight into the wall
toward the entrance of the dungeon. This being early in my spelunking
career, I jogged off around the corner, thinking it could be in the next
room over. I opened the door to lots of big nasty thing running straight
at me, and promptly hightailed it to the zone (one lesson I had learned
sooner).

I returned to the landing and continued pointing at this wall. I couldn't
figure it out, how could the corpse be that way when there's nothing
directly over that way? Then Quellious whispered in my ear, and I
recalled seeing a dwarven corpse half in the wall up next to the zone. I
told him to follow me, and he did (rather hesitatingly) back to the zone.
I selected the corpse, and sure enough it belonged to him. Mystery one
solved, enter mysteries two and three.

'What do you mean, my corpse isn't here.' Yes it is, I respond, I'm
selecting it right now. Try typing /corpse. Nothing. Try looting it.
Nothing. I'd been working on him with this for at least half an hour, and
felt I'd proven myself honest enough to offer a /consent Athren. He
considers for a few minutes, then decides to take the chance, and I
restore his much-missed bronze exoskeleton to him.

[Before someone mentions targeting and /corpse'ing it further out, I
didn't know about that at the time.]

The third came about in a more mysterious fashion (as is the way of all
good enigmas). I noticed another corpse nearby, also half stuck in the
wall, and had seen the person who belonged to it nakedly camping the
locked door. She had died in a similar location as the above dwarf, and
her corpse 'washed up' (the term I coined for this phenomenon) in nearly
the same place.

One more piece of evidence to submit before drawing conclusions. During a
fishing spell in South Qeynos, I picked up a request for help in locating
a corpse on the Feline Island in Erud's Crossing. With little else to do
for entertainment, I gladly sent in my resume, as this not only gave me a
chance to help someone in a pinch, but also served as a much sought after
excuse to head further west into uncharted (speaking personally)
territory. The two of us hopped the next boat (gosh this boat seems much
faster than Stormbreaker) to conduct our business.

Gaining the shoreline, my compatriot warned me of the sharks infesting the
waters nearby (a far cry from the safety of the Ocean of Tears, where I
threw myself to the waters ON PURPOSE in the name of exploration and ended
up with an extremely boring three hour tour, but that's another story).
Lyssa's initial pulse told me the corpse was off the beach to the right of
the dock, and a few more pulses down the sand (three cheers for geometry)
had it at not too far off shore. I exploited the "almost underwater but
not quite" bug which allows you to see under the surface the distance you
could above it clearly for a split second (shame on me, walk into water
slowly to see what I mean), and spotted the body directly beneath two
extremely disgruntled sharks.

Now I had been a good little jack of all trades and was proficient enough
at swimming to offer, for the cost of a /consent Athren, to drag his
corpse above sea level for easy reaquisition. He graciously declined,
turned invisible, and got it for himself. As reward, he had offered plat
in his initial shout, but like any good samaritan I turned it down.
Surprise Athren, you just helped some guild's blacksmith, how would you
like a banded tunic and arms?

The point of the story (beyond entertainment) is contained in a passing
statement he made as we continued on to the bank in Erudin. He said he
had died while lagging out, and that this wasn't the first time. In fact,
the time before it he had found his corpse in the very same spot.

The insight I gleaned from these separate incidents: Zones have a 'washing
up' point, a sort of shoreline for corpses that are somehow lost in places
that don't exist, by which I mean somewhere outside the current zone map
(swim under the bridge from North Karana to East Karana and you'll
experience what it's like to fall outside the world; an excrutiatingly
unpleasant feeling, to be sure). Is this helpful in everyday happenings?
Not especially, but I enjoy discovering the proverbial laws of physics as
they apply to this world.

Athren, still waiting to hit bottom