In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 8)

When we last left our courageous hero, he was abandoning the frail old woman he’d sworn to help, buzzing a strip club, and signing on to Larceny, Inc. He was just about to receive his first mission—and boy, was it a doozy.

Remember when I mentioned that House Redoran has its seat in Ald-Ruhn, this freakish sand-blasted city whose high-rent properties are located inside the shell of a giant crab? My mission is to go there and steal some of House Redoran’s important documents.

See, it’s like this. By massive coincidence, I sound exactly like this Redoran officer who, according to Hlaalu espionage, died very recently. It says a lot about this outfit that she felt the need to specify, “We had nothing to do with it.” Anyway, the upshot is that Redoran doesn’t know he’d dead yet.

I’m supposed to go in wearing an official House Redoran ceremonial helmet (which covers my entire face), ask for the documents, and bring them back to my superiors. Good lord.

I mean, I’m not surprised that Hlaalu is doing this, exactly. I got the impression they wer kinda shady from the beginning. What strikes me about this mission is they hand to some slaphappy rookie who, as far as they know, has exactly enough cunning to operate the doorknob on their way in and sign their name without snapping the pen. For all they know, they could have just handed a sensitive espionage mission to a stuttering milksop who, when asked in a firm tone of voice, would blow his cover and blab on his employer.

That’s not even considering the fact that you could, you know, very easily be a spy for one of the other houses. I mean, they don’t know. I’m just some dude.

I’m just saying, if I ever reach the top of the ladder, first thing I’m going to do is issue all doyens a memo:

Please answer the following question and resubmit.

Which behavior is acceptable around hires so new, you have to glance down at their name tag before addressing them?

1.)    Giving him a delicate assignment, failure at which will result in a massive PR issue for the House.
2.)    Entrusting him with the transport of sensitive documents concerning other houses, documents which the third House would probably pay a hefty price for and the original house would pay to get back.
3.)    Discussing matters of espionage in explicit detail.
4.)    All of the above.
5.)    All of the above at the same time.

The only proper response will be mailing it back blank, possibly with WTF? scrawled in the margins. Anyone who answers 1-3 will be sent to a re-education course. Anyone who answers 4 will be fired. Anyone who answers 5 will be fired out of a catapult.

Luckily for these morons, I’m both competent and loyal. I’m not sure who’d have more explaining to do if this went south—me, House Hlaalu, or the supervisor who assigned this damn mission.

Speaking of going south, that’s exactly what I’m not about to do. The city is some ways straight north of Balmora—not a very long walk, all told. Flush from my rousing success in navigating towards Vivec, I’m going to proceed to there on foot. Given my movement speed, it should only take me about oh who the hell am I kidding, this is going to take forever, isn’t it.

I've marked a few waypoints on this map. The gold X represents my current location, the red X represents my destination, and the blue X marks the spot where they'll find the starved corpses of me and all 643 of my followers.

Resigned to my fate, I set out.

Mercifully, I reach the midway town without bumping into any disabled clowns with no sense of personal responsibility. Actually, the journey was pretty uneventful all around. Nice weather, level ground, chirping birds, periodic assaults by overgrown and vicious wildlife that are willing to fight me to the death for no good reason, pretty flowers by the roadside. It’s quite relaxing, really.

This is a picture of me relaxing.

The midway town is Caldera, a little spit of a town that’s gained notoriety for a few reasons. The first is that it’s a decent nexus in the Mage’s Guild teleportation travel network. The second is that it contains Creeper, a merchant that inexplicably a.) has 5000 drakes in cash on him, compared to the 100—500 you’ll find on most people, and b.) will give full price for any item under his approved categories, which includes most of the really expensive stuff. He’s a cheap, overpowered easter egg of an exploit that kind of sort of abused the hell out of with my serious characters, partially because he was one of the only merchants in the game it was remotely convenient to sell choice loot to.*

I didn’t linger here for long. I did accidentally read a skill book, which gave me enough skill points to level up for the first time. So, yeah–Cahmel is officially twice as badawesome as before.

Which, considering that he runs away from anything more threatening than a gigantic green dog, isn’t terribly impressive.

I set off. A minute passes, and I still haven’t found any pathetic losers with contagious personal problems—it’s enough to make me a little nervous. I mean, it’s all well and good asking that everyone grow some initiative, but that’d put honest folk like me out of work if people actually listened.

Not pictured: co-dependent mouth-breathers.

Thankfully, it’s not long before I see a silhouette in the distance. Oh, thank god—someone, somewhere, is daunted by the everyday tasks of their own life. I’m back in business, baby. Of course, I severely doubt it’ll beat the whole lady/glove situation in terms of pathetic absurdity.

tl;dr: A witch stripped me naked and stole my axe. I now fall under the Oxford definition of a "man with nothing to lose". (Also: I'm not sure I want to know more about the "trade" of a naked man standing by the side of the road. Who's filled with irrational hatred towards women.)

…

That. That’ll do it, right there.

Tune in next time, where I fulfill my Helping Total Strangers quota for the next couple of lifetimes.

*Let me explain. Let’s say I have 10 Spriggan Soul Gems, which could be sold for 70,000 each…except that no merchant in the game has nearly that much money. So I’d take them to Creeper, who by that time stocked about 50 incrementally cheaper items that I’d sold to him over the months. What I’d do is, I’d  sell him one of the gems, then buy back most of my old crap until the transaction balance was 5,000 drakes to me. Then I’d wait 24 hours for his money to replenish, sell 5,000 worth of crap back, wait 24 hours, sell 5,000 of crap back…

Months later in game time, an hour later in real time, I’d end up with a couple hundred thousand drakes. In the Morrowind economy, that basically meant that I had enough money to do anything, at any time, ever. It was worth it the hassle, if only barely.