Game:

Ultima IX: Ascension (1999)

Duration: 2:55

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In very old and somewhat old games, maybe as well as in the newest ones, NPC models aren't usually created or destroyed, just moved out of the player's sight.

The place where most NPCs are stored is the Well of Souls map. There is a huge green field behind the tavern and as you can see, there are many NPC models stored that are not needed where I am at in the game now (exploring Valoria and Trinsic, but visited Skara Brae without cheats and came here WITH cheats to see about some possible tidbits and secrets).
You can see that for example the party Raven model is here now, since after the party scene it shouldn't stay in her house. The skeletons are here, probably till I approach the graveyard house near Britain.
Models come and go from here, but this is definitely not the only deposit, since for example the gargoyle child and (interestingly) the ghost girl are at the Ambrosia map. Also, Samhayne and one of the many Raven models are at Samhayne's house from getting to Deceit till cleansing the Shrine of Honesty.

Some things to note:
- Most models stored here doesn't react to clicks.
- Some play their normal conversation and the journal is updated accordingly.
- The queen egg is always there, but Desbet is only till appearing in Yew. He has a proximity conversation trigger and if you try to initiate an attack, nothing happens.
- For some odd reason, if you come here with cheat VERY early, the Serpent Hold NPCs are here, too. If I fly to Serpent's Hold with cheats after using the debug room, they are indeed not there. Maybe in the original game they would have been at another specific place. Also, attacking the archmage in Serpent's Hold crashes the game for me (and as I read on forums, for most everybody else with various patch combinations and with the GOG version), but here in the Well of Souls not.
- Attacking most NPCs does nothing, but as you see, right when I attacked an otherwise friendly one, other "friendly" one (Julia) became agressive.
- Raven has multiple models. At least one of them is which keeps asking where to go. When interacted at such deposit places, she offers few options and after choosing, nothing happens.
- There are many NPCs here in the beginning, but they don't only vanish to other places. The "ghost brother" of Valoria is not here then, so he is surely somewhere else before reaching Valoria, when he is moved here and later to Valoria, itself. One only can speculate why the multiple movements for a "one scene" model.
- The Moonglow mage father also starts here, with an oversized lever next to him. Function of lever is so far unknown, might be related to the state of the house before/after the attack and might be like the floating levers under/above the shrines.
- I never found any Guardian models anywhere out of place.
- I never found stored objects, but they can be in NPCs (and than surely ca be assigned/attached to a map or anything without being visible).

One would think that this might could be used for something, since interacting with such a stored NPC earlier than legitimately meeting with them according to normal playthrough could start/move something earlier, but these NPCs, even if can be talked to, don't seem to give items and without cheats, even with many glitches, the deposits are VERY, very much far away.
Still, if it's possible to skip a big portion of FFVII by walking at VERY specific points of the world map and if it's possible there to get to the debug room without cheats by game overing at a certain fight and then winning a certain other (in the PC version), then as I see extremely many future things are possible in Ultima IX and many other pre-2007 games. The newer ones (with the latest and semi-latest Unreal and Unity engines) seem to be very stable, too stable to pick apart without designated discovery software. At least I don't see myself keep dashing into a corner in Thief (2014) and eventually falling through a wall to walk through a blackness and see an NPC model from another map.

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