In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 29)

(Hadn’t realized how much of my buffer I’d eaten through—not a whole lot to today’s LP. I’ll get some more gameplay under my belt before next week’s entry.)

When we last left our mighty hero, he’d been inundated with curses until his muscles turned into licorice. At least, I’m assuming it was the curse that did it. It’s possible that it was just a radioactive bonewalker, since I seem to have gained the proportional strength and agility of a rotted corpse.

I had to tweak this screenshot heavily to make the bonewalker visible. I guess the CHEAPNESS is fogging up my vision.

No hyperbole: my strength score was actually reduced to zero. This left me in a bit of a quandary. In Morrowind, your ability to carry objects is tied directly to your strength. The higher your strength stat is, the higher the upper ceiling of weight you can carry is. I’d been lugging around some 240 pounds of assorted crap—some of it essential (my armor/weapons/teddy bear), some of it valuable stuff I couldn’t be arsed to sell just yet, some of it random rubbish that I picked up by accident when I was quicklooting chests or trying to pick up specific objects in crowded areas.

Anyway, 240 pounds had been a comfortable load when I was Cahmel, muscle-boy and idol of ladies everywhere. Now that I’m Cahmel, weed-boy and poster child for degenerative muscle diseases everywhere, my comfortable load is a little closer to -5 pounds. In fact, if I want to be able to move at all, I can carry somewhere in the neighborhood of no pounds, nothing ounces. Doing the math, and considering the average weight of my equipment and random loot, this works out to a carrying capacity of anywhere between zero and none items. If I want to powerwalk my fur diaper thing across the room, I’m going to have to do so entirely unburdened, leaving all of my armor and weapons behind.

Alternately, I could chug a potion of restore strength, which all experienced adventurers carry with them for exactly this purpose.

…Uh. I, uh. I think I left it in my other diaper. I mean, obviously, I wasn’t dumb enough to go up against a cult of necromancers without carrying restorative potions. Duh. I guess  I just, I just misplaced it or something. Maybe a scrib drank it while I was sleeping or something, I dunno.

Well, I do have a spell that will boost my strength very temporarily, but I have to rest 24 hours between uses. I can’t rest here, since there’s bogies about, so I’d have to cast it, do as much tomb-clearing violence as I could in a very short window, and then run outside before it expired so I could rest up again. It’d be like deep-sea diving, only with evil skeletons, and I’d be wearing a more ridiculous helmet.

No, I don’t like that idea. Nor do I like the idea of pressing on, sans gear. Something tells me that attempting this dungeon naked and unarmed is something other than a winning strategy.

I scroll through my inventory, racking my brain for a solution. Unfortunately, I find one.

Divine Intervention.

It was a scroll I’d saved for exactly this kind of emergency. When cast, it would take me from wherever I was and plop me down at the nearest Imperial fortress. Once there, I could rest up, cast the strength booster, then run inside and search for someone who could sell me a restore strength potion, or at least a protein shake or a gym membership or something. I wouldn’t even have to abandon any of my gear. I’d just have to abandon this entire dungeon, and very likely all of the progress I’d made in it so far.

Only that, huh.

I wish I could say I thought long and hard about it, but…well, there wasn’t a whole lot to consider. True, there were a few possible solutions to this problem, but only one of which them was easy in the short term. I mean, in theory, I’d have to re-fight my way through the tomb at some point after porting away, but that was in the future. This is the present, where I have a choice between streaking my way to the nearest town and blowing a scroll and calling it a night.

I cast it, appearing outside Fort Somethingorother.

The patrolling soldiers (well, milling around soldiers, anyway) seem rather unimpressed that a bloodied black Steven Hawkings in bug armor has just appeared in front of them without warning or explanation. Their apathy seems a little strange at first, but it makes sense once you think about it. The spells are widely available, and get shilled by random NPCs during conversations, so adventurers randomly teleporting into their courtyard is probably a pretty frequent occurrence. The first time a half-naked guy appeared out of nowhere with a dozen slaughterfish in his pants, impossibly both soaking wet and on fire, they probably got used to the whole thing. I wonder if there’s ever any awkward civilian applications—like some middle-aged guy teleporting in with some lipstick and a sheepish expression on his face, or someone appearing clutching a couple bulging sacks of coins and trying to walk away casually.

Now that I think of it, there’s probably some sort of Divine Intervention betting pool going on. “Man, if one more flaming wood elf appears this week, I’ve got next month’s rent all sewn up!”

Anyway, I cast my magic Charles Atlas Build Bigger Muscles In 1 Seconds spell and run inside. It doesn’t take long to find a potion maker—unfortunately, he only stocks the watery kind of potion, and he’s barely got enough strength restorers to bring me back to my former glory. So…if I’m going to do this properly, I’m going to have to go get supplies somewhere else.

Great. Looks like I’m walking to the nearest town, first.