In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 9)

When we last left our legendary hero, he was interrupted in the midst of a peaceful nature walk/wildlife murder parade by the appearance of a naked, belligerent Nord. I’m sure he doesn’t have some sort of petty personal issue that he needs me to solve for him at all.

Surely this is the face of personal responsibility.

As you may recall from the last episode, he has the following complaint: he was traveling with this evil woman who, as soon as they broke camp, paralyzed him, robbed him, and left him for dead. This was a totally unprovoked attack, and there is absolutely no other circumstances that led up to this situation. Now he wants me to team up with him, find the witch, and murder her to get his stuff back.

Well, gosh, if you can’t trust enraged strange men with the last name Wine-Sot enough to murder other total strangers, then who can you trust? Lead on, good man, lead on.

Oops—actually, I’m going to be doing the leading. And here we come to the biggest goddamn headache about this game—the sassafrassin’ vague quest directions.

All too often, the most valiant, epic part of your quest will have nothing to do with killing things, robbing things, or…actually, that’s pretty much it as far as most quests go, but I digress. No, your most formidable task is to find where the hell your objective is.

Joe NPC gives you a quest to find his pinking shears, which he’d left embedded in the hide of a Slargmurder. He needs you to go to the Slarg Caves and find it. Now, if you are unfathomably lucky, he will mark the Slarg Caves on your map…but that almost never happens. More frequently, he’ll give you directions. Will they be good directions?

Guess.

“The caves are…northwest. You know. Like, kind of…that way? Look, it’s right at the foot of the hill. Near the sharp rock. Not like there’s a couple dozen thousand million of those out there, right? Also, there’s a river nearby…or not? I forget. Hold on…look, you know that farm? What, you don’t? You telling me you haven’t combed every inch of the Arsend Swamps? Well, it’s…it’s a cave. You can’t miss it.”

Things are no different here. This is a direct quote:

“I believe she is (…) northwest, though I could be wrong as the spell disoriented me a bit, it did. You know this area better than me—lead the way! This witch shall rue the day she met Hlormar Wine-Sot!”

…

Where do I begin?

1.)    You believe she is northwest? Believe? I believe you are wasting my goddamn time, fellow traveler.
2.)    Oh, so I know this area better, do I? And what are you basing that on? Let me break this down for you, in small words so your woaded-up vine-sotten meatscrap of a brain can process it: I got off the boat about a week ago. I have never been here before. I don’t know this area from a kwama’s rosy backside. Actually, know what? He’s probably right. There are slugs that live a country away that have a better grasp on this bloke’s surroundings than he does.
3.)    Regret the day she met you, eh? Again, think I need to straighten this out for you: you? You’re naked. You have no weapon save the dagger you’ve got tucked under those tasteful fur undies, and between you and me? It’s not that intimidating. What you are so loudly boasting is that she’ll regret the day she met you, totally schooled you, and drove you to tattle to the first stranger you bumped into afterwards.

I take him on anyway, though. Not because I’m thick…well, not entirely because I’m thick. Mostly because I want to see how this works out.*

As advertised, this guy’s directions are a load of horse puckey. I wander around for about ten minutes before finally, I bump into a woman.

A deal, you say? Does this deal, by chance, involve me escorting you to some random location? Why, keep talking, madame!

She is not the witch. She is a trader who needs my help finding a nearby town.

Okay, seriously. What is up with people assuming I know my way around? Did I accidentally steal a shirt with a MorrowindLand Employee badge on it? I have no idea where anything is. I swear, it feels like I can’t walk into a building without everyone coming to me asking where the bathrooms are.

Anyway. As a reward, she offers me a magic item called the Boots of Blinding Speed. This is where I start drooling.

Okay, so…little glimpse behind the curtain here. The truth is that while I often feign ignorance or surprise as events unfold, pathetic amounts of hours playing this game have given me a pretty damn intimate knowledge of its factions, NPCs, and storylines. Usually, I act dumb for the sake of joke, or don’t let on that I know where something is going…but in this instance, I think it’s important to note that I know exactly where this quest is going, and where it is going is giving me the most awesome item in this whole frickin’ game.

See, as I’ve mentioned, the movement speed in Morrowind is absolute cobblers. You just sort of mope to and fro like a hamstrung man on his way to a root canal, watching as you’re overtaken by elderly clouds and legless dogs. It’s a chore to get from Point A to Point A1, let alone Point B.

The boots…well, the upshot is that they strap rockets to your keister. You start flying fast as a starved jet pilot towards a Golden Corral, making every movement pure pleasure. If you should remove them at any point afterwards, you feel like your veins have been filled with concrete.

Of course, there’s a price. If you don them without having formidable magic resistance—tricky without some pretty fancy artifacts—you are literally stricken blind. Not permanently, but for as long as you wear the boots.

I can find a way around that, though. Like I said—know this game. In the meantime, I gotta have those boots.

So I detour even further, setting off for the town. It’s almost nice traveling with some companions—the little quips, the creative pathfinding, the occasional team-building exercise wherein we would all dogpile an animal enemy and then the AI would bawl me out for accidentally hitting them when they dove into my line of attack, the painfully slow movement rate okay, yeah, it was hell and a half escorting two NPCs at once.

Just taking a leisurely jog with my friends, a naked man and an aimless woman with no sense of direction, wondering where it all went wrong.

Finally, I drop her off, get the boots, and get back to business. Oh, and on the way I bump into another NPC. He wanted me to drop off a note with some woman back in Caldera, the town which (for those of you keeping score) I left that morning with the vain hopes I would reach Ald-Ruhn by the next day. Screw you, pal. I take the note anyway—I’m bound to go back there eventually, albeit weeks later than he probably wanted it delivered.

After a bit of searching, I do manage to find the “witch”. Upon talking to her, I find that—gasp and shock—there’s more to this story than meets the eye!

Yeah, apparently, this Nord fellow was getting a bit too friendly with her, so she paralyzed him out of self-defense and robbed him to teach him a lesson. She agrees to return the stuff to him in a few days, and asks me to convey this offer to him. Uh, yeah, he’s standing five feet away, lady. Ask him yourself. Suddenly, as soon as the prospect of looting bodies is removed, I’ve lost interest in negotiating this warped soap opera.

Oh, alright. I give him the offer. It is at this point that he completely loses it.

Wine-Sot summarizes the situation as follows: she’s lying, I’m going to kill her anyway, are you with me or against me?

Neither, you clown, but that’s not really an option. I say I’m not going to help him kill her, and he attacks me instead.

You know, you’d think the odds would be pretty squarely against him. I mean, it’s a heavily armored warrior and an apparently-powerful witch against a big naked drunk man, right? Well, I imagine it would be, except for two things:

1.)    I’m still a bit fatigued from running here, which means I’m susceptible to his melee attacks, and
2.)    THE GODDAMN WITCH DOESN’T LIFT A SINGLE FRICKIN’ FINGER.

This shaved ape is just going ballistic on me, knocking me down and curbstomping me into a festive gory pulp, and she’s standing off to the side with this stupid grin plastered onto her face. Not once does she move a single muscle, except occasionally to turn to follow the battle, as if this is her idea of a fun spectator sport. In this corner, the berserk naked man! In this corner, the broken guy in the can made of bug skin that, in 20-20 hindsight, is turning out not to be such an effective material for armor.

Finally, I manage to hack him down.

Maybe you should have called yourself Hlormar Blood-Clot! Hah hah! Get it? Because I hacked him open with a blade until he bled to death!

Weary, I turn to the woman for my reward. Well, that was a tough fight, but I imagine that magic axe will be useful…

WHAT.

You sit there watching this freakish half-human half-monkey mutated hybrid beat me into a bruised mass, all because I refused to attack you, and then—after I nearly get killed—you offer me some health potions? And then, to add insult to injury, you very pointedly don’t give me the spare magic axe you have lying around, saying you’re going to give it to someone who can “handle its power”?

Hm. Actually, I can see why she’d have reservations about that. She can’t just trust any old person who’d defend a stranger from a frothing berserker, after all. Plus, she might be afraid I’d hurt myself with it–don’t want such a magical weapon falling into the hands of a novice. She needs to give it to someone who can prove they can handle themselves around edged weapons. Well, that’s reasonable. Please, allow me to demonstrate that I’m quite familiar with the proper use of a bladed instrument.

Oh, what’s that? You want to give me the axe now? Why, thank you, good woman!

As I walked into the sunset, whistling and playing with my new axe, I reflected on the fact that as much progress as I had made in that game day, I might as well backtrack to rest in the inn instead of in the wilderness. For the sake of appearances, I did not do so.

Next up: I bump into more quest NPCs on my way to Ald-Ruhn. Oh, I friggin’ wish I was kidding.