That was also from the merc captain, but the version of her that waited at the Astral Academy. She offered the *most* awesome option: sign up for an astral allod run, claim one of three roles (tank, dps, heal), and on the hour or the half hour if you were still in the zone you would be grouped up into a party that had one heal, one tank, and the rest dps. Mercs to fill out the party were *FREE*, and you would be teleported to one of a list of allods.
With a decent sized bag, you could easily gather enough drops to sell for over 300 gold, and some of the drops would be gear upgraders.
And in 5.0 they deleted it.