General rehearsal game, hours 18..22

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SPOILER INFO
This story follows closely my actions in an actual game, so it's inevitably a spoiler.
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About the locks. I found out with TES5Edit   that the "Harder Locks" esp which I'm using works by decreasing all lock types' "sweet spot" (the area which you have to locate in order to get the lock to open) by the factor 2. As I said, it still feels unrealistically easy. So I increased it further by the factor 2.5. I opened an Adept lock and a Novice lock in Dånstar and they seemed to be just as hard as they were supposed to be. In other words: locks' sweet spot 5 times smaller than vanilla feels exactly right.
[Subsequently, I made the sweet spots 2 times smaller still. Meaning, in my actual game, all locks are 10 times harder than in vanilla game. It's awesome. I can't emphasize enough how I love it when lockpicking feels the way it should.]
As to that failure-rewarding feature (breaking lockpicks increases Lockpicking skill), I just couldn't find a way to correct it. On second thought, maybe it's not that bad. It actually makes some sense that by failing to open locks you gain some experience.

Walking around in Dånstar, I went to a ship in the harbor and had sex with a sailor named Alday. Then I forgot to get dressed again and walked to the inn stark naked. Dammit!

I had some sleep. After that, I wanted to go to Morthal, but as it was still pitch dark, I went to try and steal some stuff from houses in which people were sleeping. I was successful. After a bath and some training, we traveled to Morthal. I ordered Stenvar to wait at the inn and went to search for my boyfriend – one of the guards, remember? I found he had been respawned, but he had the same baseID, meaning the same face and body. We made love and he gave me 12 arrows as a small token of his affection. I had been rather short of arrows.

Then I went to The Naked Dragon Morthal. I wasn't actually all that keen on whoring, but I had made some changes to my sex rules, above all to the algorithm that selects the animation which the customer chooses. (I mean, for prostitution to be realistic, the choice of position must not be mine.) It had been flawed before, but now I was pleased to find out it was fine.
I worked hard and made excellent money thanks to my ever-increasing popularity among the regular customers.

I had a most amazing experience in the brothel: while I was (in the imaginary reality) a prostitute and had a customer's dick in my mouth, then in spite of not liking that man, I still felt the desire to give him the best service I could. It wasn't even about getting money, and it was certainly not about getting sexual pleasure. The only pleasure I craved was the pleasure of leaving him pleased with the service he had ordered. Although fully aware that I wouldn't consider that man even worthy of a conversation if I met him outside of the brothel, at that moment all that mattered to me was making him satisfied, simply because that was the job I was supposed to do.

As a man in the real world, I knew intellectually that women can totally have such sensations, but the experience I just described surprised me (again) about my ability to actually feel what a woman would feel, in the sense that I don't even have to think how a woman would plausibly feel in such a situation – I just feel it, without any conscious effort on my part.
I know that actors are supposed to be able to get into another person's shoes like that. Maybe I should have become an actor? At any rate, it's astonishing how this brief trial game as a woman in Skyrim has increased my ability to feel like a woman would feel.
First and foremost, I think I can now comprehend for the first time in my life how (European) prostitutes feel in a completely different way about men who pay them for sex and about men who interact with them in the conventional way – I mean, how those two are truly worlds apart. From the point of male logic, it seems utterly crazy how a woman can be sincerely friendly with a guy as a hooker while viewing him as a complete nothingness outside of her working environment. It makes sense to me now. (Of course, it's completely different in Thailand, but that's another story.)

After leaving the brothel, I just explored the countryside with Stenvar. I discovered a village named Dragonbridge, apparently named after this bridge:

I had sex with a nice guard (that is, a member of that Penis Occultus or what's it called). After that, I encountered an adorable woman Bothilda. I just fell in love with her. Seeing that she had small titties, I increased them with my spell and in her profound gratitude she agreed to have sex with me. It was my first lesbian sex. Felt good, although the animation was badly made – aligning the bodies was hell of a work.
(Only now as I'm writing this, I realize Bothilda had me so confused I forgot to visit the shop next door!)

I headed southwest with Stenvar. We discovered an unopenable door with two dead storks in front of it – but not a note or anything indicating what had happened. Then we just wandered around, killing a mudcrab and a sabercat, and avoiding people and structures. Stenvar warned me it's forn country, and I've heard they're fierce fighters. We'll try to keep southeast, pass somewhere south of Roriksted and head towards Falkert, where I'll pay my bounty, so I can explore southwestern Skyrim during the final hours of this rehearsal game. (I have heard rumors that you can remove the "stolen" flag from things by giving them to your follower. I'm not going to try if it's true, because it seems dishonest to me.)



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