garote | Eerie goings on in the land of Fus-Ro-Dah

Bumming around in Skyrim, to unwind after a complicated work week. I had no idea where I left off, but I knew I could pick up a random quest if I just talked to someone important. There was a town nearby, visible through the trees. Markarth, says the map icon. I headed there.

I found the mayor of Markarth. Not too hard -- just eyeballed the largest house in the town and kicked my way into it. Picked the lock to his bedroom and woke him up. From a standing position on his bed, he gave me a ceremonial axe and appointed one of his guards as my personal slave. Yeah, okay. Stole a few of his things on my way out of the room.

Pickpocketed a drunk guy in the town square, on a lark. Somehow he didn't notice the bottle had gone missing from his hand. Swiped a statue of some bare-breasted goddess from a temple, and accepted a quest to do penance for my thievery. The priestess wanted me to go up north to a frozen little hamlet and fetch a young girl who has been chosen as the temple's new figurehead. That seemed boring. But wait; she's been kidnapped by rebels and hidden in a dungeon nearby, adding the requisite killing spree to my itinerary. There we go!

Ran past a guy trying to sell me "moon sugar" and he started fisticuffs, and my follower shot lightning into his guts and he fell off the bridge. Splash!

Parked my horse out of the way of the Forsworn tower, then blitzed through the building until I found a girl in a cage. Rather than go back to her parents, she wanted to go directly to the temple. Pff. Teenagers.

On the way back I killed more Forsworn. The girl stayed out of the way but my horse didn't. Proves which one is smarter.

Back in town I barged into a mansion, looking for loot or someone to talk to, and lying on the carpet in front of me was a valuable enchanted hammer. With a start I realized that I'd bought this mansion. It was mine, and I'd forgotten about it. It had weapons on the walls that I didn't remember putting there, acquired during adventures I'd also forgotten. I've been playing Skyrim for a long, long time. A bookshelf filled with pricey books I'd dredged up from various ruins, then stacked in neat rows, then abandoned. Must have been years ago. Plenty of eerie things have happened to me in this game, but this was in the top ten for sure. I bought and furnished a whole house -- and then just spaced on it.

"I'm not allowed to stand on furniture," said the girl I'd rescued, who was still trailing me around the house while I used the forge, cooked some food, and drank all 15 bottles of mead and 8 bottles of wine from the pantry I'd inherited with the house. I'm just cleaning up, since food never rots. The only way to get it out from underfoot is to eat it. Apparently the girl had a handful of standard child-appropriate phrases that she would just blurt randomly. Charming.

Eventually I led the girl to the temple as promised. Quest accomplished, yada yada. Sold a bunch of crap at the blacksmith along the way.

Rescued a guy named Thorald in the dungeons. Pandemonium with Comedy Wolf biting everyone.

Ran up to a fort. Drew all the guards out of their hiding places, and held up my shield to gain defense points as they pinged arrows at me. I could have set up a little camp stove and had lunch behind that shield, with skill points going up all the while. Bit of a hack. Meanwhile, my sherpa Illia shot people full of ice and paralyzed them and pitched lightning bolts at them and summoned a demon and a storm elemental and generally made a complete nuisance of herself. Bodies fell in the snow all around me and eventually it was quiet. Next time I want skill points I'm going to have to snatch all those magical weapons away from her first.

"Pull the chain over there but watch out for the spikes," said my guide, the master of the Thieves' Guild. So I walked carefully over to the chain, around the edge of the room, set myself way off to the side, and pulled the chain from a distance. With a loud clank, a huge grid of spikes detached from one wall and swung out into the room on a squeal of hinges. Behind me I heard "AUUGH!" as it plowed into the Master Thief and slapped him against the far wall. He got slowly to his feet, and without another word, we proceeded into the next room.

The Master Thief escorted me all the way to the bottom of the nasty dungeon, obligating me to kill all the tough monsters, and then when I got poisoned and fell down nearly unconscious, he left me there to die, even stabbing me in the gut to accelerate my end. So typical. Then the allegedly treacherous lady we were hunting found me and dragged me outside, treated my wounds, and explained that the Master Thief had been lying to me, and he was actually an usurper who should be brought to justice! Well how was I supposed to know? He was certainly behaving in character for a Master Thief.

I find it hilarious that there is no way to verify who is telling the truth in either situation, and the best you can do in the available dialogue is act skeptical and then agree to follow orders anyway. You're the baddest badass dragon-killer in the whole country, bar none, but when it comes to politics, you just roll with whatever the last person said to you. And why not? It's all corpses and loot at the end of the day. Just cooorpses and loot.

Some guy outside a dwarven ruin called the "afflicted" puked green crap on my horse. Any other horse and I would have been concerned. Not Daft Wooley.

Went skipping through the snow to the College of Winterhold to get a book translated, and the guy referred me to another guy all the way over on the other side of the map. How do they even know each other? So much magic in Skyrim, and messages still have to be delivered on paper, by hand. Some entrepreneur could make a fortune -- big semaphore towers perhaps. Pratchett would be amused. Before I left town I got training from the assistant archmage, paying him ten thousand gold, and then sold him 23 potions of "fortify two-handed" that I'd cooked up months ago, which got me all my gold back plus everything in his pockets, and his boots, and the clothes off his back. That's business.

I still have 57 more potions to unload. Past a certain skill level, you can turn reagents worth a few bucks into a fortune, and money loses all meaning to you. Once that happens, about three quarters of everything you can do in Skyrim stops being meaningful as well. You go blundering through fabulous ruins full of treasure, murder everything that moves, and just leave the treasure sitting there. Because when it stops being about the loot ... it's all about the corpses.

Now it's time to check out some random ruin on a snowy island just off the coast, even though it has nothing to do with the plot! Because I can! Because it's there! And because my horse can swim through icewater. Daft Wooley is a wonder of the animal world; a living creature that is not just too dumb to suffer, but actually too stupid to be affected by physical processes. I've tripped over rocks that are smarter than Daft Wooley. He just gallops through them.