Mystere, a male player on the Brell Serilis server in EverQuest who roleplayed and posted both as the female dark elf "Mystere" and, less frequently, a male Iksar character "Vhasst", wrote a fan fiction story which depicted the rape of a dark elf girl of "barely 14 seasons".
This story was posted under the name "Vhasst" on July 11, 2000 to third-party Brell Serilis server boards not affiliated with Verant or Sony.
On October 4, 2000, Mystere was abruptly kicked out of EverQuest, and the story was soon after removed from the IGN message board where it was originally posted.
The second, on October 10,[3] was a Q&A with Sony / Verant's John Smedley to get the publisher's perspective on what had occurred[4] and inspired a Penny Arcade cartoon[5] as well as a week-long story arc in the PvP webcomic.
[7] In his post, he claims that Verant took the heat silently over the debacle because the full story could not be disclosed to the public, and involved allegations of criminal behavior: ...we couldn't tell the real story, which involved one player accusing this banned player of something that, if true, would have crossed major real-life moral and legal lines.