Always Lost, Always Hopeful (41) Could I Dance Instead?

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SPOILER INFO
This fanfic novel is largely based on the events that occurred in an actual game of Skyrim I played. Therefore, it's inevitably a spoiler.
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previous day






4-201-09-26 04:17
Vernim Wood Inn, Vernim Wood, Eastmarch, Skyrim


I wake up before sunrise. This gives me an opportunity to work on our gear without the blacksmith getting in my way and people distracting me with their chatter.

Yesterday we saw a dead man on the main thoroughfare, and now I'm seeing one on the street near the smithy. What's been going on here? There's no one to ask, as the guards don't want to say anything and in fact eye me rather suspiciously. Which may be precisely because of those unknown events that have produced the aforementioned dead bodies.

So I start working. Suddenly two cutthroats appear as if out of nowhere and attack me. With my followers still sleeping peacefully in our room at the inn, I have to rely on the help of the guards only.

Well, earlier, the town seemed full of them, but now there's not a guard in sight. So I'm on my own. I land a lucky death blow on one attacker, but the second one is really tough and I survive only thanks to health potions. It was a really close shave.

On one of the dead bandits, I find a note which reveals that they were sent by the people of Outcast Valley to hunt me down. Evidently, some of them didn't appreciate my killing their tyrant. Fine, now we can say we're even.

I have just a little time to wait until the shops open. After I've sold everything superfluous, we're off to the west again in cheerful sunny weather. The road is at great elevation and the views to that hot springs area where we were yesterday are marvelous. Even more scenic are the waterfalls in a place further west where the road will turn north towards Darkwater and Fort Amol:

There's a bridge over the river (you can partially see it in the picture above) and no sign of any missing person. We go along the road a little farther to the north where we can turn left and take a path uphill towards the source of the waterfalls. However, we fail to find anything and I'm getting extremely frustrated. I just hate being in the dark (figuratively speaking) like this, having to find something on mountainous terrain where you spend most of your energy on merely finding a route across yet another mountain and when you've finally found it, you look at the map and see that you've actually ended up going in a wrong direction. Things like that. The girls see my irritable mood and run behind me on tiptoes.

We go a fair distance southwards and end up in a village called Nimalten:

I like Nimalten. The sight of people around me going about their daily business makes me feel calm and safe. I take off my helmet and walk around and exchange a few words with a number of villagers. Turns out Nimalten is being built. There's no shop here yet and not even a pub, for which vital need men have to walk to Ivarsted further south.

That's where we'll go too. Realizing that we've digressed so far south that Ivarsted (in the ancient times spelt "Ivarstead") is actually quite near, I figure we'd better skip that relatively unimportant quest in the mountains and head straight for the possible location of Aetherium Forge south of Ivarsted. On our way there, since we're already in this region, we'll drop by High Hrothgar. Has to be done sometime. You may remember, that's the holy place where I'm supposed to go, summoned by that elusive and mysterious order of Greybeards – or Gaybores, as Bardslayer calls them. He doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of them.

As a matter of fact, Bardslayer has informed me that the Gaybores' quest as such is pointless, but I still have to do it for one reason – since the Gaybores are revered by the Nords to the extreme, they are the only force capable of ending this unfortunate war that is ravaging Skyrim day in, day out. They hold themselves for so spiritual that it won't be easy to convince them to get involved in a matter as mundane as this, but I must at least try. That's why I'm going to heed the Gaybores' summons and go to High Hrothgar.

A quick bath in a nearby river, and a quarter of an hour later we're in the village of Ivarsted.

The young woman over there is called Fastred. She yearns to get away from this boring place.
She's in love with a certain Bassianus who has promised to take her away to great adventures one day.
Fastred's parents will have none of it, though. To them, she's a child utterly incapable of thinking for herself.

We chat with a few people on the street and pay a quick visit to the inn. Maybe I should have postponed the inn for later. The dusk is falling when we finally come out again and begin our journey up the mountains.

Next to the trees on the right edge goes a path downhill towards Nimalten. That's where we came from earlier today.
To the left of us is a bridge across the river. This is where we'll be going right now.

There's a staircase commonly referred to as 7000 steps  that leads from Ivarsted to High Hrothgar. Actually, a part of the path is stone steps and a part is just earth, so I wouldn't have even a vague idea how many steps there actually are. All I can confirm is that the windy path up the mountain is very long, although quite comfortable for running. By the way, the people of Ivarsted tell a tale about a Khajiit traveler who actually endeavored to count all the steps. As to what became of him, various people's versions differ widely.

As we get higher, the grass is replaced by the snow. Outside of some spider caves where we've been in the past, this is one of the most joyless places imaginable. Nobody lives here except snowtrolls and we kill even those because they wouldn't let us pass otherwise.

No, actually there are some goats as well, and they don't bother us. Anyway, soon the sun goes down and there's only moonlight reflected by the snow. The weather is quite horrid.

It's not easy to discourage pilgrims, though:

This is not the Dånstar bard. It's another woman with the same name.

In the castle that is at the end of the stairs, I have to search around for a long time before finding anyone who would talk to me. Saving the world, or for whichever other reason they summoned me by this Skyrim-wide thunder message, doesn't seem to be high on the Gaybores' priority list.

As we find out, the castle is inhabited by a group of old men in hooded cloaks. Their leader (of sorts) Arngeir holds me a solemn sermon. I spare you the details, especially because most of it goes through one of my ears and out the other. I mean, many Nords would probably be painfully shocked if they heard me talk like that, but the thing is, when someone walks up to me and says: "I have figured out a purpose for your life; now pay attention, I'll tell you what you need to do..." then this is precisely the degree of respect he'll get from me. A man needs first to demonstrate that he has the kind of personality that I can deeply respect and admire, and then I'll become receptive, indeed eager to prove I'm worthy of him. With people like the Gaybores, I'm just waiting for an opportunity to take my leave without being outright rude.

That said, they paint glowing runes onto the floor to teach me two new shouts (more precisely, one shout and an existing shout's upgrade) and that's kind of cool, even when the shouts aren't too useful.

One part of the training takes place in the back yard.

But all that blabber about understanding the way of the Voice and staying true to the genuine I-don't-know-what... Give me a break, really! I walk up to the glowing symbols and then I have the shout and can use it. What is there to understand and what's it supposed to have to do with my lifestyle? All right, maybe it's not so easy for you, but that is not my fault. I didn't exactly ask to be born with this "gift". I'd much rather have my memory back.

I'm relieved that Lydia is cool about my attitude. She's not much for religion either. She prefers things you can actually see and touch. We are very similar in this respect. As to my occasional sarcastic comments, she tells me playfully that I'll get it all back when we visit Breton territory.

I'm dog-tired by the time the Gaybores finally let me go – with the sacred mission to retrieve something called Jurgen Windcaller's Horn from a place called Ustengrav northeast of Morthal. It takes almost two hours to get back to Ivarsted and then I'm stopped by two sturdy men who wear masks that look like something between a pig and a devil. They ask me if I'm the one called Dragonborn.

Mr. Pigmask, do you have any idea how tired I am? No, he just goes on about some Lord Miraak and how they're going to kill me to prove I'm not really Dragonborn. Look, can you just kill the Dragonborn in me and leave the rest alive? Where are my followers anyway? Oh, they're right behind me. And two village guards observing the situation nearby. Yet, the Pigmasks won't leave me alone. Maybe I shouldn't have told them I was tired? Might have made them think I was an easy target. I'm not, in fact. They are. After that's taken care of, at almost 4 o'clock in the morning, I can finally get some sleep.



next awakening

General rehearsal game, hours 04..07

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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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previous part


Editing the appearance of my character, I discovered something very weird. There was a little sharp spike on top of each cheekbone. I went several times through all the sliders that had anything to do with the cheeks, and adjusted their values back and forth, and that little spike was impossible to get rid of.

Whatever. I made that thing as small as I was able to, chose a different hairstyle and continued my game.
Added much later: I believe those cheekbone spikes were caused by the slider Face Weight.

I checked out the inn bathroom created by a mod I've never previously had. I was able to wash myself with soap and I got clean.

Afterwards, I was stuck in the bathtub. I couldn't move anywhere, not even with the help of tcl . It seemed to be a bug of either Bathing in Skyrim  or Friendlier Taverns. Fortunately, I found a remedy – the command epc  (short of "enable player controls"). I'm glad I did because sometimes one gets stuck like that during sex – I believe it happens when you accidentally press E during the intercourse. Hopefully, epc  is going to be helpful in that situation, too.
On a more serious note, I saw a few comments warning that when Bathing in Skyrim redresses you after bathing, your gear can lose its enchantments. I'm beginning to regret that I took the mod. Oh well, I'll just have to remember to strip manually. And that's what the general rehearsal is for – to find out about such things.
What disturbed me more was that one of the doors in Roriksted inn wouldn't function. It didn't open when I pressed E . I was only able to get through after the innkeeper had opened it. Has Friendlier Taverns  fucked up that door? It shouldn't have any business doing that, but I can think of no other reason. Got to check it out with TES5Edit.
Added later: I found that Friendlier Taverns creates duplicate doors. In other words, it places a door to exactly the same place where a vanilla door is. You will have to press  E twice to get the door open. That's outrageous behavior on the mod author's part!  Friendlier Taverns has absolutely no business touching those doors, let alone doing something as dirty as duplicating them.

For the rest of the day, I talked to people in Roriksted and then I had my first sex. I did it with Dagvidr and it was great, although his penis was disappointing.

I have created myself a set of sex rules. I'll spare you the details at this point, but the basic idea is that after I've had sex with a man, he falls in love with me and the next times we have sex, he gives me something from his inventory, for example money. That is not prostitution; he gives me not a fixed amount for sex, but a part of his possessions, because he considers me his girlfriend and wants to support me. However, he'll hate me when I have sex with another man in the same location. I can have no more than one boyfriend per location at any given moment.
Furthermore, I have a reputation in each location which decreases when I do things that are unbecoming of a decent woman, such as have sex with a man who is not my boyfriend, let myself be seen naked by anyone other than the man I'm having sex with, and such. When my reputation falls too low, my sex partners will no longer become my boyfriends – men will agree to have sex with me all right, but I can no longer exploit them. On the other hand, I'll become entitled to buying a prostitution license.
In general, the sex rules are meant to give me an incentive not to sleep around (which I, being a man in the real world, would be naturally inclined to do). In order to keep my reputation, I must avoid changing boyfriends. On the other hand, in order to make things more unpredictable, I am letting SoS  equip NPCs with penises of various shapes and sizes, and I won't stay with a boyfriend whose penis is ugly. The catch is I can't know beforehand what a man's penis looks like, nor how wealthy he is. So there's always certain risk involved in choosing a boyfriend, as well as in deciding if it's worth it to leave him and take a chance with another one.

I returned to the inn to get some sleep. Guess what? I had forgotten to get dressed after sex. Goodbye one more Roriksted reputation point! (I had already lost one by having sex with Dagvidr, because he was not yet my boyfriend. Should I have sex with him again, I won't lose any more of my reputation, because he is my boyfriend now.)

In the morning, I headed west, aiming to find a place called Elisdriel I had seen in my magical visions. I killed a wolf and found a mine called Soljund's Sinkhole. A man named Perth told me that they can no longer use the mine, because it's infested with draugrs. I didn't think I was strong enough for that task, but I went in anyway, just to have a closer look.

Now, I have decided to cut down on the use of Khajiit Sense of Smell  power, because it gives the player an unfair advantage. I have activated it in this game all the same, because I'm a Breton and one or the inborn special powers every Breton has is 25% magic resistance . That being ludicrously little, I replaced that special power with the Khajiit Sense of Smell . However, I had never used Sense of Smell  in this game until now. Now I did use it and saw there were many draugrs. I sneaked closer to a group of three that seemed to be near. Sneaking was of no use. They detected me from behind a corner. I ran out of the mine, one draugr followed me and was killed by Perth and the guard. I went back in, lured one more draugr closer to me and killed him. So far, so good. I carefully approached the third one. He wouldn't come down and chase after me. He just stood there and hissed. When I came out of cover, he began to shoot at me and I was lucky to escape with my life.

Clearly I had pushed my luck far enough. Time to move on. I headed west and arrived at the edge of a very high cliff overlooking a river. I saw structures in which I believed to recognize a forn village I had seen in my magical visions. The distance was large, but I went into sneak mode all the same. In spite of that, five red dots suddenly appeared on my compass. It seemed hopeless for them to climb up to where I was, so I risked a shot at one of them. I hit it and the game informed me it had been a hagraven. The enemies were not getting closer to me, but my arrows did very little damage. I was likely to run out of arrows before the next enemy would be dead. So I left.

Passing by Soljund's Sinkhole, I noticed a group of three men labeled Hired Thug. I had seen them earlier in Roriksted inn and tried to talk, but they wouldn't say anything to me. Now when I approached them, they kept walking, minding their own business. When I talked to them, they became hostile and killed me in a couple of seconds.

After reloading, they attacked me again. They were far stronger than me. The only thing I could do was try to run away. I was slightly surprised when I actually succeeded. From this point on, I started to use Sense of Smell  all the time, because obviously there were great dangers lurking about. This was not a region where a level 3 or 4 character was supposed to wander, and if this hadn't been a rehearsal game, I wouldn't have been here, of course.

I found myself near Roriksted and got attacked by Hired Thugs again. I ran into the village, but they followed me into the inn, attacking me, and the guards just stood there and didn't interfere. That was obvious nonsense. I reloaded.

I went north, killed some wolves and skeevers, discovered a house with a dead man inside and gathered some loot after witnessing a battle between a stork patrol and a thalmor patrol. After that, I was able to switch from heavy armor to light armor. I never use heavy armor in my games, but this time I had to, because the default armor the game had given me at the start was all I had.

By the way, it's weird that Sense of Smell  marked a common thalmor patrol as hostile. I can't remember it happening in the past, and they weren't actually hostile, they just told me to make myself scarce, and when I turned around and walked away, they didn't attack me.

In my next encounters, I tried the Flames  spell, figuring that 8 points damage per second would be better than hitting with a sword that does 8 or 9 points of damage. However, the animals I tried it on eluded the spell very easily by moving aside. Besides, I soon realized that I need magicka for the Healing  spell to save me from death when I'm in trouble. So I'll stick to my sword from now on.

The good news is that DUT's perk overhaul mod lets you make the Healing  spell really very powerful very early in the game. That is extremely helpful at a time when your gear and skills are painfully inadequate for proper fighting.

I discovered Elisdriel. There was nothing like food or gear there I could have picked up, but I was able to sleep and it was generally a lovely place to be. However, when I went out in the early morning, I met three Hired Thugs right at my front door. This was going too far. Elisdriel is supposed to be my sanctuary where I can take a break from all the troubles. I disabled the Hired Thugs with the console. They were hopelessly strong for me anyway.

I traveled north, discovered a shack with a fisherman and a Khajiit orphan, and then a nearby village called Dunstad Grove. There I decided to call it a day (in the real world).


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I had to investigate that Hired Thug infestation which had seriously disturbed my game.

When I checked them with the console during the game, I was astonished to discover they had been created by skyrim.esm . I'm not sure I have ever seen them during my hundreds of hours of previous games.

I did a web search in order to find out what might have been the cause of overwhelmingly strong Hired Thugs emerging with such frequency. Turned out they are actually sent after you by the first person you steal significantly from. Now I remembered having met them in a previous game. I was on such a high level that I was able to kill the thugs without breaking a sweat, and I found a contract from the corpse of one. It said a man from whose house I had recently stolen stuff (without getting caught, because there had been no witnesses) had hired them. Then I went and killed that little piece of shit who had the insolence of thinking he could punish me.

That had been my previous game. Their appearance in this general rehearsal game made me think once again how screamingly idiotic Bethesda game developers are.

Firstly, they let people in the same house see through walls that you are stealing, which is obviously impossible.

Secondly, they won't let you sell any stolen articles until you are a member of the Thieves' Guild and have a perk – by which point you are bound to be so high-level that you can live off loot and no longer need to risk punishment by stealing.

And on top of that it would appear that your stealing more than one item per house causes three men being sent after you against whom you don't have a slightest chance of defending yourself, and they would keep pursuing you and not stop until either you or they are dead.

That is so manifestly game-breaking that I am officially giving myself a permission to take care of the Hired Thugs with the console in the future.

Now, what were the people thinking who created that ludicrous travesty? It doesn't take an Einstein to realize that the only time when you actually need to steal for a living is in the very beginning when you aren't yet equipped to go dungeon-looting. Why would the developers of Skyrim make stealing unfeasible in the only game stage when stealing would make sense? It looks almost as if Skyrim's theft system was directed at pathological thieves, people who enjoy stealing things of insignificant value (because there's virtually nothing of significant value to steal in Skyrim) just because it's fun for them. Considering how important a role stealing plays in the game, Bethesda seems to expect that cleptomaniacs make up a significant part of the gamers.

It had been such a thrill and triumph to have found that empty house with an unlocked door, and to have been able to clean it up of everything usable. Bad as I felt about violating another person's home and depriving him of something he had probably worked hard for, I felt proud of having found a way of increasing my survival chances at a time I was barely able to kill a wolf. So it was a real shock to find out that Bethesda had actually done everything to make that kind of advancement impossible.

The Bethesda game developers' thinking is so unspeakably weird that I'm giving up trying to make sense of it. I'll just stick to my adjustments to make stealing feasible – Khajiit caravans buy stolen items, obvious fences buy stolen items, and now I have this new rule permitting me to make Hired Thugs so weak with the console that it will actually be possible to kill them. I mean, I could use the console command disable , but I'm not sure if it wouldn't simply make them reappear later (although I'll find it out soon in my current rehearsal game). I'm also entitled to get loot from their dead bodies as compensation for the game developers' screwing me in such a malicious and underhanded way.



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