- The Arrival of Virtupets was the first plot ever released on Neopets and took place in Year 2 (2000).
It
started with the Space Faerie announcing that she had recieved an encoded transmission from deep space. She asked all neopians to prepare to help her face whatever the new evil may be, and during this time, a new character set up shop on Mystery Island-- the Island Mystic. For a fee of 1,000 codestones pooled by all the Neopets users, the mystic decoded the messages. A new enemy, Dr. Sloth, had kidnapped grundos from their home planet of Doran and mutated them into buff warriors. Sloth created the Virtupets Space Station as a base and, from there, planned to take over Neopia.
Sloth demanded that users abandon their Neopets to prepare for the planet to become "Virtupets", and claimed that all pets would be replaced with a new race. It turned out that Sloth planned to mutate current Neopets to do his evil bidding using a ray gun of his own creation. The space faerie was captured, and, using the last of her strength, sent out a distress signal telling Neopets to defeat Sloth and liberate the grundos.
Neopians then searched Neopia for materials to build a space fleet to face Dr. Sloth. They brought these items to a launch pad maintained by a mad scientist. Sloth ignored this though and positioned his ray gun in orbit around Neopia. Just as it was fired, the Space Faerie broke free and diverted the beam back at the gun, causing it to explode.
The Virtupets Space Station was left to the grundos, and in its basement, a second new species was discovered-- the Moehog. Nobody knows why the moehogs were there, and it's assumed that TNT forgot to include them in the plot but wanted to introduce them anyway.