In a Hostile Country: The Saga of Cahmel (Let’s Play Morrowind, Part 47)

When we last left our punctual hero…wait, what was he doing again?

In the exotic sugar-sweet smoke of the South Wall Corner Club, life was beginning to sink into a delightfully simple routine. Each morning, I would carefully pencil in an itinerary that consisted of the kind of violently irresponsible, premeditated binge-drinking only someone in my position was really capable of.

I was the perfect storm, you see. I was embarrassingly wealthy, due the sheer volume of high-risk mediocre-pay jobs I’d undertaken in the past few months, and yet was coming off a streak of soul-crushing failures potent enough to make a hyena write introspective poetry. I’d managed to line my pockets by repeatedly shaming myself, getting drubbed, and putting the lives of my nonhuman and technically-human companions on the line (then running away from that line, hiding in a closet, and sucking my thumb quietly). All these gave me both the means and the warrant to start drinking alcoholic beverages like they were healing potions and my ass was on fire.

I've also got this house. Not gonna lie, I kinda lost interest in it when I discovered it wouldn't ferment.

That was…geez. Like, pretty much a month ago. Since then, I haven’t taken a single quest, unless you count the brief-but-noble odyssey of Cleaning My Own Vomit Off the Corner Club Carpet (quest reward: two intact kneecaps). Anyway, last week, as I went to pay for my Scrib Jerky Cocktails, I noticed the money purse was getting a bit on the light side. This means I needed more money, which means I needed to get some honest work, which means, somewhat depressingly, that I needed to get back to murdering things. You know, I don’t actually have any ethical qualms with making a career out of killing stuff, but I kind of have to admit that certain aspects of it give me logistical trouble (such as the part where I fight the stuff and then kill it). I’m not sure the whole thing plays to my strengths, in the final analysis. Is there, like, a profession that centers around getting beaten up humiliatingly? One where I won’t risk getting Uncle Crassius as a client?

Whatever. Time suck down that self-respect I’d been holding onto for a special occasion and go pay a call to the Fighter’s Guild. Next stop: Ald-Ruhn.

I had to heavily doctor this screenshot for it to be comprehensible. For the first twenty minutes, it looked like some sort of bug building in the middle of a sandstorm, as opposed to the frolicking meadow clown pictured above.

First quest they’ve got for me is a simple babysitting operation. A junior member of the Buoyant Armigers, an unjoinable NPC faction, wants to take down a necromancer and his host of undead baddies. She decided that she needs the Fighter’s Guild support in doing this. You know, when your organization is subcontracting out to other organizations for simple tomb-cleaning jobs, either you need to hire more dudes or you need to hire some dudes that suck less. Or maybe just pay the other, apparently competent organization to do all the work instead of bankrolling your own dead-weight employees.

Alternately: just send in a bunch of experienced highly-trained guys, wait for them to decide they don’t feel like doing their jobs, then ask some outlander intern with more scars than sense to go over and fix the whole thing for everybody, then punch your superior in the face. Twice.

Actually, now that I think of it, nobody I’ve worked for has ever said, “Ooh, this guy’s a bit of a rookie and we’re sending him into a dangerous situation. Maybe we should use the buddy system on this one.” Hell, if Hlaalu had let me pay the Fighter’s Guild to do my work for me, I would have been all over that action. It’s not like I didn’t pay my way to success whenever a fundraising mission or bribery situation popped up, and really, I can’t imagine any other way decadent bureaucrats like Uncle Crassius would manage to get to the top of the ladder. Actually, that’s a lie: I can imagine a thousand ways Uncle C would climb the ladder, I’d just really, really prefer not to.

Tomb is way up north. I can Silt Strider to a place with a boat, then take a boat to somewhere on the same island, then walk the rest of the way and hope the Cliff Racers have developed a deep-running racial memory of me killing all of them and won’t come after me en route. And then, when I’m done, the reverse of that. I’m really not a huge fan of free anywhere fast travel, but god dammit, it has a time and place.

I make the journey north, and eventually show up outside the necromancer’s headquarters. My employer’s waiting there for me, and I immediately see why she needed backup.

Was there some kind of goddamned sleeve famine, or something? Did the blight cripple the sleeve harvest? Is Dagoth Ur sacrificing sleeves for his ascension? Inquiring minds *inquire*.

I don’t know how much she budgeted for a Fighter’s Guild escort, but she seems to have had to dip into the sleeves budget to make it happen. You know, I’d probably look towards adequately equipping myself before I blindly enlist the aid of untrained outsiders, especially if running this sort of mission is actually my job. This is like if an exterminator had a choice between buying safety equipment for handling insecticide fumes, or else just hiring Bobby Smatkins down the street to run around stomping bugs with him. On the one hand, I’m kind of flattered that they’re willing to risk the wellbeing of their biceps just to have me around, but on the other hand this whole situation is making me flash back to the time Hlaalu screwed me over but fancy. Remember, the one I whined about earlier in the entry? This mission has the all the same red flags as that one: hard to access coastal location, evil Dunmer necromancer hiding behind his tomb-boys, ineffectual light-armored ally who expects me to do all the heavy lifting, me spending too many paragraphs complaining about all of the above. Even as I entered the tomb, there was this voice inside my head telling me that if I fragged my follower, smacked my head against a dead badger’s claws for twenty minutes, stabbed myself in the ribcage, then ran all over creation while drinking every health potion in my backpack and sniffling like a seven-year-old girl watching Titanic, I’d probably save myself a lot of time and hassle and come to about the same net profit.

It was at this point that I stopped daydreaming about how annoying this quest was going to be, only to discover that I was, in fact, midway through it.

Blinking slowly, I glanced around the dungeon, drinking it in like an improbably skilled TV show forensics specialist. There were a lot of twice-dead bodies lying about the place—as in, the bodies of undead creatures that had very recently fallen prey to recidivism. All of the corpses bore the telltale mark of a Cahmel Special (a lot of shallow top-down cuts signifying a weaponized spaz attack, smelling faintly of human panic and urine). My NPC cohort was jogging along after me, weapon still holstered, yelling—and I am not making this up—“Hey, wait for me!”

There were, I reflected, three possibilities.

1.) I had wandered in just after my evil twin brother, Mahlbrow, kill-stole this whole dungeon to spite me

2.) Whining about standard quest structures was my hulk-trigger and I’d butchered a lot of high-level guys in a red haze, or

3.) This was a piss-easy mission, and my buoyant friend was lazy, a complete coward, and/or a total wet noodle when it came to actually fighting things.

Leaning towards that last one. This mission wasn’t going to be a challenge after all; the only way I’m going to hurt myself in here is if I sprain my arm smacking these guys into the ground like railway spikes. Nothing in this level poses even the slightest threat to me, and this whole mission is going to be about as tense and risky as kickboxing a ladybug.

Jackpot!