Day 10: A step too far

Ah, Kitten!  Home of thieves and people who are upset because they live in the city of thieves!  And the entire surrounding area is full of giants and spiders and dragons so they can't even leave, not if they wanted to!

That's hilarious!

I met an angry man who told me to go away.  Douche.  Then I met a friendly man who promised to give me something if I framed another man for a robbery.  So now we can add that to the list of crimes.  It all seemed to be going quite well until a guard came and shouted at him.  Like an idiot, I watched.

Oh God, that's an axe.  Oh God.  Dragonbjorn, what have you done?!

This is too much.  Far too much.

Well, I thought I'd calm myself down with some shopping because that gave me a genuine pang of guilt when I met this guy.

 Those eyes.  Those hideous unblinking eyes.  Staring, watching, knowing.  No.  No, he knows too much.  He must be removed from the equation, it's the only way to preserve my reputation.  Killing is the best way now.  The only way.  Stephanie, you have slumbered long enough.

I went into the sewer to see the thieves because they're like the Ninja Turtles of something and have an awesome sewer base.  I killed this guy and he fell over prone which was sort of funny.

 Then I killed this guy and when I went to search him I found he was a named NPC.  This made me worried that I shouldn't have killed him.  That he would have spoken to me instead if I'd have given him the chance.  But no, a life of dreams, ambitions, all ended by my hand.  By my will.  I took him.

Me.

No mere Nord, Dragonbjorn, for you now are a GOD.

Oh my.  What have we here?  An... orphanage...

NO.  NOW IS NOT THE TIME

The thieves' guild was terrible.  All damp and leaking and stuff.  I decided to take all their things because it seems like what they would have wanted and they totally didn't complain or anything.

Then I went to a noble lady's house and found a summoning circle while I was stealing all her things.

I needed to get out of here.  This was a terrible place filled with evil and sin.  I could feel its impurity crawling into my mind, suggesting dark desires and terrible pleasures.  Riften, surely you are the source of all evil in this world.

I went into a dungeon to perform some good works and hopefully clear my soul of its taint.  I found a sword floating in the air.  I think it's an omen.

I then, on the instruction of my advisor and adventuring companion Mr Huntington proceeded to the bard's college because apparently they would teach me lots of things.  So they did.  They also sang Ragnar the Red all the f***ing time so I had to take corrective action.

Yep.  Not so clever now, are we?  Not so clever when I've taken ALL OF YOUR INSTRUMENTS AND THROWN THEM IN THE RIVER IN WHITERUN!  Ha!  Where's your bold hero now?!

I may have been a bit drunk at that point, but it seemed like a great idea.  Then I went back to the college and the instruments had respawned.

Friggin' wizards, I tell ya...

I went to see a lecture.  It was pretty funny, because if you stood at the lectern and looked at the students, you couldn't see them over the lectern.  And it's not like I'm a tiny person like Professor Flitwick, I'm a big strong warrior with thick boots.

 Another poop elf dungeon?  Why not?  This one had a shrine made of spider eggs so I defiled it.

I then took my ill-gotten gains back to whiterun and bought myself a house so I would have somewhere to store all my gemstones.  That was a good plan.  I paid the man to redecorate it for me and redecorate it he did.

 I ASKED FOR DECORATIONS.  RAW BEEF DOES NOT BELONG ON A CROCKERY SHELF.  God, I can't work under these conditions!

And excuse me, but this is MY house, Lydia.  Dragonbjorn's!  Did I say you could come in, let alone hang out in MY bedroom?!  We're not even married!  Jesus, if I brought a woman home right now, which would be totally okay because it's my house and I'm a single man, what would she think?  How would I explain that?!  You're lucky that I've decided not to kill named people any more because otherwise I'd be paying the steward of Gondor up in Dragonsreach to build me a body dumpin' cellar!

Note to self, build body dumpin' cellar

 S... Stephanie?

Steph?

What... what's happened to you, girl?  You...

Thor, why hast thou forsaken this simple man?!  I only tried to save this world and I've faced nothing but temptation after temptation!  I'm a mortal man, I can only resist for so long!  And then you punish me, you corrupt and you twist the only thing that truly matters to me in all of Tam'riel?  Except for my flame atronach which I'll marry when I'm in Hell.

Well, whatever.  Thor's not exactly a reasonable sort of guy, I think, so he was probably going to kill me at some point.  Might as well get my blaspheme on now, right?

I stabbed a dragon in its stupid fat face and it melted.  Somehow nobody ever thinks this is strange which makes me wonder if other animals do this.  If I, the dragonborn, can absorb dragon souls, I don't see why there shouldn't be a rabbitborn or a pandaborn.  I mean, dragons are noble, magical beasts?  My arse.  They're arson-loving brutes.  Terrorists, I'd call them.  Not like those mudcrabs.  Stalwart warriors, ever ready to defend their homes and families from any invader, no matter the size, no matter the overwhelming odds.

Forget this, I'm gonna be mudcrabborn!

I went into a tomb with a magic blue light in it.  I didn't know what all that was about, so I decided to do what comes naturally and jump in it.  This is why I don't play Call of Cthulhu.  That went sort of well for a while.

 Just because I'm a hero doesn't mean I can't enjoy myself, y'know.  I wish people would stop being so uptight about all this duty and honour and crap.  I mean, I am still a human, thanks very much, I still need to have time for leisure.

And then I found a book.
"Blah, blah, raiding, blah, jumped onto the cairn, blah, blah, blood sacrifice..."

Suddenly, jumping on that cairn became far more hilarious.  Apparently Dragonbjorn is immune to ghostly compulsions and probably curses, too.  Which means he must have a decent will save and he's sure as hell not a cleric, so...

I'm a paladin?

Guess I'd better find a new god then, 'cause I sure as hell can't worship Thor any more.  Not after what I said.

Well, the Internet says that Hephaistos is the god of swords, so I suppose that'll do since there isn't a god of looting pubs and orphanages.

Not until Dragonbjorn ascends beyond his mortal shell and takes his rightful place in the Nordic pantheon, anyway.

Better get to work, then.  Excuse me sir, have you a few moments to hear the good news about-

 Ah, silly me, you're already a convert.  Well, that's wonderful news!  Spread the word, friend!

Wow, I feel a lot more comfortable with myself now!  No more compulsions to murder children or anything!


I'll end on one last picture, of a ghost that I shot with some arrows but somehow the arrows were stuck in the ghost.  GHOSTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Thought for the day:
I wonder if I would better serve Hephaistos by weilding two swords or one BIG one.  I sort of like my shield.  Maybe I can justify it by saying that the shield turns aside maces and axes, the tools of the deceiver.  Yeah, that sounds great.

And remember folks, sharing and/or subscribing is caring!  Or whatever! 

DAY 9: Innocence lost

I was wandering around town trying to increase my smithing by creating 50 daggers.  I'm not sure how creating daggers makes me good at making boots, but it does and that's that.  I found myself short on funds, so I travelled to a vendor to sell my delicious potions.

I should mention my potions.  See, I'm trying to find out what every alchemy ingredient does, so I'm kind of banging them all together.  On the one hand, I'm getting a lot of alchemy levels but on the other, I wind up making a lot of potions of magic regen that also paralyse you.  I figure I can probably use these as bait in some kind of man trap or something later on.

But anyways, I wander in to a trader, sell all my gear and then sneak up behind her and pilfer her things.

Suddenly it hits me.  This wasn't even a conscious action.  I used to only pickpocket people who wore fancy hats and looked like they had a lot of money, but I found myself reaching into the pocket of the kindly, friendly potion shop lady who keeps asking how my health is and suggesting I look after myself.  She's been nothing but kindness itself to me and here I am, hand in her pocket just looting her.

I stopped and took a long look at myself after that one, I can tell you.  Thankfully, these silly feelings of guilt soon passed and I went on to loot many other innocent people.

Onward then, to avarice!

I went to the mages' college.  People don't seem to like them and I think this is because they are all awesome wizards and the people of the surrounding town have magic envy.  That's okay, I think, it's hard to live in the shadow of someone else, espcially when that someone else is throwing fireballs and generally having a lot more fun than you, but it's not nice to be a poor sport about it.  I feared a peasant uprising, but thankfully the town of Magechester had, like, 4 bumpkins and two guards.  Not a big threat.

As you can see above, the mages' college has a goat as part of its student body.  It might be a mascot or something for their quidditch team?  God alone knows, but I didn't kill it in case it was the archmage practicing his alteration magic, because you don't stab archmages.  They're real dicks about that kind of thing.

I fancied a wash after all this vigorous running about and killing things, so I jumped in what looked like a fountain made of magical light.  I don't know if this was a disrespectful thing to do but nobody complained so I went ahead and bounced around a bit.

I investigated and found all kinds of useful things!  They even had a dungeon in their toilets!  I don't know why I opened the door leading to the midden, but I figured there might be treasures down there or something because otherwise why would it even be a named location?
 

I found this guy down there.  There was some kind of story associated with him about some kids who'd tried to harness magic that was too powerful for them and they'd got themselves transported to hell or whatever.  Big deal.  The way things are going, Dragonbjorn is most certainly going to hell and quite soon, too, so maybe I can rescue them or something.

The demon was all like "you can't save them, man, their souls are stuck in Oblivion but maybe you'd be cool and do me a favour or whatever" and I was all like "Dragonbjorn does not give in to the demands of terrorists!  Have at you, foul spawn of the darkest pit!" and I stabbed him SO hard.  He was quite the pushover!

 Then I looked him up on a wiki and it turned out that he gives you some pretty good swag if you help him.  And I figured that there wasn't a way to save those kids anyway, so I may as well restore my save and take his silly quest.  Dragonbjorn is now a murderer, thief, bar brawler, trespasser, butterfly mutilator and now a demon sympathiser.

When I arrive in hell, I am going to have my own frigging COUNTY.

I summoned him with this thing.  I had to put 5 magic rings on a hand and he popped up.  So let that be a lesson kids, if you have 5 rings, you summon Captain Planet but with 4, you get sucked into hell and your soul is damned for all eternity.  And that is why they let that kid with the power of Heart hang out with them, even though Heart is the worst superpower since everything Aquaman has ever done in the history of forever.

Also, he filled a nice ethnic minority hole.  You don't see enough Southern Americans on 90s cartoons (except Lost City of Gold).  Very forward thinking.

I went on a magic lesson and knocked down a door with the power of my mind, because that is how you solve your problems when you are Dragonbjorn: master elementalist.

Added "Demon summoner" to the list of felonies?  Yep, got that noted down here...

I found some guy at the end of the magic lesson who was basically invincible.  No matter how hard I hit him, he didn't register at all.  I was beginning to regret my 50 levels of alchemy and enchanting.  Thankfully, I was able to summon the fire lady and Benny Hill my way through the entire combat while she burned the flesh off his bones.  We were going to fist bump, but then she went back to hell.  When I get there, I think I'll marry her.

I think her name is Claire.  We'll have the most beautiful children.

I don't know what this is at all, but my teacher thought it was a big deal so we went to look at it for a bit.  I think I was supposed to tell the headmaster about this, but I went off to do a quest for the librarian instead.  It has just occurred to me that I've left that teacher in this frozen hellhole of a ruin now for at least 5 days, that he is of quite an advanced age and that he had no food or water.

"Manslaughter".  Check.

I learned how to cut people's heads off.  It seemed like a good idea.  Here you can see one of these heads and how it offers me the "Search" action.  It turns out that he kept an entire suit of armour in there!  I find that really funny.  I mean, just think about that for a moment.  An entire suit of armour in his mouth.  If you're not smiling a little bit right now, really think about it and if you're still not smiling, it might be because you're more mature than me.

I killed a lady and she proceeded to duckface me.  That was sort of awesome.

Then I accidentally found a den of vampires.  They were sort of tough.  I killed them all and found they had an entire bookcase full of shoes.  I thought you usually kept those things on shoe racks or in closets.  Under the bed at worst.  I think I need to learn some carpentry because there's an obvious niche in the market.

Then I found a giant camp.  They were chilling out and stuff, but one of them saw me looting his chest and got all pissy about it.  Not my fault mate, you left it out in the open and at least I'm going to put it to good use unlike those bandits.  Him and his mate chased me a good half kilometer and I was running out of stamina, so we had a little discussion about their anger issues.  Then I shot them a bunch of times.  They were carrying quite a lot of gold!

I took a photo from inside a dragon's breath.  It was pretty cool until he killed me.  Some kind of poetic justice there, methinks.

Oh, this guy.  This is the scariest guy in all of Skyrim.  He walks up to me, all casual like, and offers me a mead.  I have a few immediate thoughts:

• Why is he partying in this bear infested waste?
• Why is he offering strangers mead?
• Is he going to mug me when I'm drunk?
• Is this mead poisoned?
• Will his three mates jump me?

I genuinely walked away from him without turning my back, but it seemed like he genuinely did just want to party.  Needless to say, I didn't drink that mead.  It's like the time I found a beef stroganoff mix packet under my windscreen wiper, I appreciated the thought but I just didn't want to eat unidentified free food.

OH MY GOD GIVE ME 5!  JESUS CHRIST DO IT NOW!

I quickly learned that it is far easier to Fus Roh Dah bears off of mountains than it is to hit them.  Funny, too.

I finished today by going to the thief village.  That Kitten place, I guess.  Funny that the sign was so far back in my adventure because Riften was like 20 fuggin' miles away.  I think I'll fit in here!

Thought for the day
I think I need to stop being a dick to people.  They've gone from hiring thugs to hiring assassins.  This seems a bit much.  I mean, for the majority of the time I just steal gems and stuff.  The cost of hiring a trained killer have to be astronomical.

DAY 8: Descent into madness

Let's start with some new gear.  First, there's my freeze ray.

With this, I will stop (the world).

Next, there's my dear Stephanie.

She's so fine.

Aaand since they haven't been pictured yet, the fork of truth and the lute of avarice, united at last.  They're having a strange effect on my moral compass.

So I went dungeon diving.  I enjoy that a lot.  I opened a portcullis or something which seemed to upset this guy but I didn't care about that.  I mean, he was dead and all.

And then I got violated by a dragon.

At this point I cursed my encumberance.  I had fast travelled to a town with no general store and almost had to dump the dragon's bones.  Wasn't a problem in the end though.  I went into a mine for a while and learned nothing.

Then I went back to the home of Sven Beardforger and returned his mighty horn.  The nice man told me I was a true dragonborn, which was nice because it's not like I've proved that to EVERYONE or anything but it's always good to be recognised for your achievements.  He then said his mates were going to shout at me, which is a process that most men don't survive...

Well, eff you too, buddy.

A bit more spelunking.  I found a nice man in the starting city who was talking about a cave.  I don't remember the name, shimmersham cavern or whatever.  From now on, it will be named the Cave of Bitter Frustration because I totally died like 7 times in there.

I found Smeagol.  I stabbed him in the throat and he fell over with his hand over his throat which I thought was quite funny.

Then it turned out there was an entire race of Smeagols and that they had this godawful civilisation or something.  Seriously, everything these people make is revolting.  I nearly threw up in my mouth a little.

I mean it's a house made of like a living ribcage or something.  What the hell?

I stole one of their shield.  It looked like a turd with a crab claw on it, but it was better than what I already had.  God knows how it was better, but I picked it up anyway.  It... looks kind of sticky.

I went on a bit further and found out where the people of Skyrim get their melange from.

And then spider eggs.  "Gee", I thought, "spiders.  I can handle spiders.  And they're giving me so may eggs that I'm going to be gaining alchemy experice out the ASS.  Thanks, spiders!"

They proceeded to kill me 5 times.

This injustice did not go unpunished.  I am Dragonbjorn, deliverer of judgement, scourge of the arachnid menace.

And then the bastards brought out their golem.

I mean come on, really?!  I got this dungeon location from a man in the newbie town.  Noobville.  Tutorialberg.  Why would you even do-

Oh, ha.  He can't get out of that room.

DOVAHKIN

I then walked into a house made of bloom.

And I found a treasure chest with some sort of magic egg in it.  I picked it up because it had a unique name and a low encumberance, so I figured it was some kind of future quest item.  I was just walking out of that dungeon, annoyed that my great treasure was an axe with some kind of undead turning enchantment when someone started yelling at me.

I looked around.  Nobody there.  Hmm.  Well, that was terrifying.

She yelled again.  Apparently she owned the egg.  She said that if I returned it, she would use me as her divine tool to cleanse the land.

Dragonbjorn decided that this was a quest.

I'm genuinely concerned about this.  The boy is starting to show some very significant symptoms of schizophrenia.  He is hearing voices, they are telling him to kill and he is obeying them.  I don't want to act on this but... well, it's a quest.  You have to do quests.  That's what they're for.

 I'm in some trouble here.

I will obey, my Queen.  Together, we will purge the land of the unworthy, the 8 legged terrors that plague it.  Perhaps when we're done, we can move on to the bipeds.  Such an orgy of blood and gore will never have been seen since long before Uriel Septim's reign.  The skies will turn crimson as the fruits of my labour cascade from every mountaintop, staining the land with rich, warm...

THIS DOG HAS A HILARIOUS FACE

 I made some more stuff!

And I apparently found the Queen of Hearts.  That was pretty funny.  She didn't have much to say.

Then I found this thing in Whiterun.  It posed me a few questions.

Chief among them was a pretty simple one.  In a world where the dead walk the earth on a regular basis, thirsting to end the warmth of the living, why would you A) bury all your dead in one place and B) put that place in the middle of your enormous walled city?

This is exactly the kind of shit that Romero was trying to warn us about.  I think tomorrow I'm going to go in there and start some fires.  Y'know, just to be on the safe side.  They'll thank me for it in time.

Then I found the king of the resistance.  I don't know why they had a king, but I took his chair.

All hail Dragonbjorn, lord and master of the all the lands of Albion

And finally, this thing was pretty funny:

Thought for the day
I really hope that I can't learn to smith Falmer stuff.  I don't want to go harvesting poop.