So what happened was,
Bearing in mind that not only is my computer unbelievably slow and that I've been getting worse lag than usual all afternoon, I logged on into my house at Gondolin, came out and checked the murder scent from when the farmer died the other day, and thought 'yay, offline, can try and feed the livestock without dieing immediately'. That murderer still has a hf at Sweet Home. So I managed to lag over and eventually pick up a spare feed trough and replace the empty one. And then I see the gate's open, which seemed a bit odd, but I'd been in there earlier and it didn't seem totally impossible that I might have left the gate open or something. Lots of lag. And utterly stupid of me. So, still having a rope in my hand, I grabbed the wandering calf and attempted (in between lagging into chests and things) to return it ... and promptly found myself in combat with an as-yet invisible dhelmer. So I tried to run indoors, whereupon I promptly lagged on entering the door, and spent some time sitting swearing at a black screen while my computer proudly spun a little rainbow pizza at me.
(I had the mouse over the screencap program at this point, honestly)
*sniffle*
Umm, so, you who actually know what you're doing with the combat side of things can say what actually happened once I woke up a bit, but I ... don't think I got knocked out straight away? And in between freezing in terror (partly me, partly my computer being scared of so much shiny), I attempted to punch the heavily armoured, sword-wielding person (I know the key combination for punch, ok? As I have mentioned elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge I can't run anything but the default client, so have no fancy bars and generally just avoid fighting things...) Anyway, Mr or Ms Dhelmer knocked me out, stole my bear cape and [edit: left my crappy armour], and proceeded to kill me
The end. My screencap program opened to see my newly-smaller character list.
[Edited to remove some details of what we had: they stole the q30-40 silk, about 10 pearls, 3 bars of steel, some foraged curios and idk what else].