The strangest thing happened to me recently, and it seems like it’s not all that uncommon. I could tell I was disconnected, but I was still able to move. Fairly normal so far. But then when I jumped my character just started swimming through the air. This happened in the middle of Hyjal, so I decided to “swim” west over Darkshore.
I flew over the eerie Night Elf territory and proceeded to continue flying/swimming over the ocean before deciding to drop straight down. Because I didn’t have a breath status bar, I wanted to see the seafloor. For some reason, I hit some invisible floor or something. I know there are upper limits and edge limits, but I wasn’t expecting a lower limit. I swam out of the water, flew back to the shore, and then tried again. This time, I stayed near the seafloor the entire time. When I got to the edge where you’d normally enter the sea, I have to say, I was kind of creeped out.
It’s a dark zone to begin with, but I’m deep in the ocean, swimming along the seafloor, knowing that I am the only person in existence in this virtual world at the moment. While I knew I’d most likely find nothing, there’s always a chance I’ll stumble across something that I wasn’t supposed to see. Hidden areas are a lot less common in Cataclysm than they were before the Shattering, but there are still things to see off the normal path. Oh, and it was dark in my room while I was playing.
Eventually I swam so far out that the world map showed me under Azuremyst Island, which I know is on a different server. I swam into the wall, which wasn’t invisible as I was suspecting. It was rather pretty actually! Swimming up, I popped out of the water and flew into the invisible barrier above me. At this point I accidentally right clicked on my unit frame causing me to attempt to cast Penance. Now it looked like my character was desperately swimming through the air with a stolen manifestation of the Holy Light. I began to fly north until the zone widened when it became Teldrassil. I decided to explore Darnassus, curious if the NPCs would be there, but they were not. And then I promptly got bored.
I didn’t shut down the computer though. I went to bed. In the morning, I was greeted with a message in my chat about being inactive and getting disconnected. It was from six and a half hours earlier. I had to leave for work, so I aimed by character southeast, set him flying/swimming, and left for work. We’ll see what happens.