/vr/ - Retro Games

Not even kidding, took me five+ years of play to ascend

It took me about three to four years to ascend the first time, and I was playing a monk so wanted a bunch of conducts like weaponless / vegetarian / polyless / artifact-wishless / etc. before ascending.
That was just about ten years ago so I don't remember all the particular details.
The most I can advise is to look through the spoilers, and often, and keep playing regularly. I prefer Sokoban first, some people prefer mines first, rely on pets heavily until you complete both, don't advance dlvls or exp levels too quickly, conserve food, don't do stupid shit like quaff from fountains, kick sinks or any of that, don't bother with a protection racket (rely on pet to steal items from shops, sell them back, descend to Minetown on Xp 1 and gain a huge amount of -AC by donating) until you've ascended at least once because they're unbelievably hard to pull off. Also don't kill Izchak.

This is nethack.
This scene takes place in basically the only town in the entire game, which is several levels deep into the Gnomish Mines.
In the center there's a weaponless vegetarian genoless wishless human male monk (@) standing outside the doorway to altar in the center of town (_) accompanied by his four badass pet dragons (D), two black, one blue and one white. The blue dragon has ice breath, the black dragons fire off a disintegration beam and I don't remember what the white dragon does but they're all about to wreck some shit up.
The monk is a bare-handed martial arts master who is really fast, really strong, exceptionally wise and is glowing with divine blessing armor, but lacks charisma.
The acolytes inside the altar room are of a chaotic East-Asian god. I'm about to let loose my dragons on them and convert their altar to my neutral god.
There are a bunch of ravaged stores and presumably a bunch of long-decayed gnomish, orc and fire ant corpses everywhere along with various piles of rations, weapons, spellbooks, orc armor and other goods.
There's a human merchant called Izchak in the candleshop to the upper-right. It's considered good form to spare him or lock him in a room or something while slaughtering the rest of the town, out of respect for the late Prof. Izchak Miller, one of the developers of this game.