11 Uses for your Newly Acquired Pile of Soot

You’ve slogged and toiled and played ALL the games. You’ve sold your furniture and played the lottery in order to scrape together enough to buy that Secret Laboratory lab map! You've been getting your pet zapped and prodded and experimented on in the hope that they’ll be transformed in to something wonderful. Just when you think your work is over, news of a new kind of Secret Laboratory leaks in to Neopia. Yes, whispers of a new laboratory, run by none other than the lab scientist’s slighly strange kookith petpet, reach your ears. Naturally, try as you might to resist it, curiosity wins out and you take off in search of the map pieces. You sell all your belongings and make grand pilgrimages to Mystery Island to take advantage of their wonderful Trading Post just to get your mitts on that elusive map. Perhaps if you were lucky enough, you even found some pieces along the way (what careless person dropped those, I wonder?). However, you finally achieved your goal! You've just collected all the pieces to the petpet laboratory map and rushed over to zap your poor unsuspecting, cherished petpet. But... argh, what's this!?

The smoke clears and there's nothing left but a pile of soot! Scooping up the remains of your beautiful petpet you high-tail it out of that laboratory as quick as you can. Your poor pet still claims to love their dusty little pile of petpet but trying to speak or interact with them yields no result. That’s no fun, is it? How are you supposed to try and wake Turmaculus now? Send him psychic alarm clock noises? What’s that? Not good enough. Sigh. Then let me, Snokiobe, help you out with this handy dandy top eleven list of things to do with your newly acquired soot petpet! Just don't tell the Petpet Protection League, ok? *shifty eyes*

#11: In the petpet battledome battles he’s a fearsome opponent. A small breeze and your opponent will be completely stumped on how they’re supposed to fight all those different soot particles. You’re bound to win especially when Sooty pulls out his secret weapon – a vicious sneezing fit!

#10: Scoop up poor Sooty and pour him carefully in to a small jar. Proceed to Mystery Island and sell him as a bottle of that rare, black sand! Yay for neopoints! One way to start getting your money back for all the neopoints you put in to buying the map pieces in the first place.

#9: Simply add water and... bingo - you've got yourself your own modelling clay. Just shape in to a nifty faerie moltenore design, whip out your negg painting kit from Easter and decorate. In no time everyone will gasp at your luck with the petpet ray, wondering how they got stuck with nothing but a pile of soot.

#8: Take him on your Snowager trips to Terror Mountain... and use him to grit the slippery path.

#7: Construct yourself a mini-egg timer. Use your pile of soot as the sand inside to time out the wait until you can zap him back in to something cool. Warning: can cause extreme petpet dizziness!

#6: Mix with a little water and smear him over your face. Instant war paint to scare even the most daunting of battledome opponents. It even has eyes! Don’t worry, he’ll dry out eventually.

#5: Switch your owner/friend's talcum powder with a bottle of your Soot pet. Laugh. Repeat next week. Just remember to collect him up afterwards.

#4: When that slightly creepy kookith at the ray finally manages to blow the place up, you can be on hand with your trusty pile of soot to help smother the flames! He might even make a whole "pile" of sooty friends at the same time. This will also ensure the Petpet laboratory is not completely destroyed, giving you the chance to zap your petpet once again! Everyone’s a winner.

#3: Play the ultimate prank on your friends! Simply coax little Sooty to position himself in the grate of the fireplace inside your neohome. Invite your friends over and as the evening draws on, dim the lights and pull out the book of ghost stories. Delight everyone by telling the story of the infamous Flesh-Eating Fireplace Ghoul and... muhahaha!

#2: You wake up early in the morning craving a delicious fried negg on toast. You stumble, bleary-eyed to the fridge... but what's this! Your neggs are all missing! Who could have performed such a crime? Well, now you can find out. Simply summon your little pile of soot and you can dust extensively for fingerprints! Perhaps the Defenders of Neopia should enroll a team of sooty piles just for this occasion.

#1: Number one already, eh? Well, you could... nah... or you could just... no, he’s too small... Well, hmm. Actually, the little fella's kinda cute really, don’t you think? With all these fabulous uses too, perhaps for #1 on the list you could just keep him as a petpet. After all, should you get covered in sand at the Temple of 1000 Tombs, he makes a wonderfully stylish matching accessory.

Well, that's all the uses I can think of at the moment. I hope you'll think twice before continuing to zap your petpet now. I know I certainly will. He may not talk back to me and he may be a pile of smoking ash with no ears, mouth or limbs, but really he might come in quite handy after all. If you decide to keep your little soot pile, a word of warning: exercise extreme caution when holidaying in the Lost Desert or your little petpet can become lost too. And stay away from broom cupboards! So, it would seem that this season, black’s the new black in Neopia. C'mon Sooty... Snowager time...