The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 7.5)
When we last left our charming hero, he was alternately threatening and flattering a potato-faced shopkeeper with the intent of selling his stolen swag for slightly more than nothing. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered.
After loosening him up with a few legitimate items, like a fork I pulled out of a wolf’s digestive tract and a book some goblin had been using as a bogroll, I casually put down a hot bronze necklace. The shopkeeper immediately went rigid; his eyebrows flew up, and his lips parted in a stiff smile that had the edges of a sneer.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t take that item.”
“Necklaces? You should. They’re the latest craze. Oh, well, have some cheese I’ve been carrying around in my pockets.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not buying it because it’s stolen.”
There was a long silence. I stared at him for half a second, then caught myself and averted my gaze.
“Stolen?” I said, a couple seconds too late. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I inherited this from my late cousin, Realtilda. It was her fondest wish that I trade it for enough money to buy a sweet roll.”
“I don’t deal in stolen goods.”
“You don’t deal in—look, what makes you think this item was stolen?”
He shrugged. “I can tell.”
“That’s absurd! It’s not as if it’s got the owner’s name carved into it, now, is it?” I pause, then steal a half-guilty glance down at the necklace. “Of course there isn’t! There’s a great deal of reasonable doubt as to whether or not I lifted this item off of somebody!”
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to sell it elsewhere.”
“Oh, really? Maybe some shop where they don’t have a magic anti-larceny watermarking system implemented? Can you name one of the top of your head?”
“The thieves’ guild buys stolen stuff.”
“Fantastic! Another organization to join! That’s worked out very well for me in the past. Oh, fine. Any idea how I do that?”
“I hear rumors that they seek out and recruit promising thieves.”
Hm. That didn’t sound bad, actually. Certainly makes more sense than the Fighter’s Guild approach, which is to rope every man, woman, and nonexistent child into virally advertising their open slots to random passersby. Plus, hell, I’d just knocked over a whole town without getting caught. For all I knew, my invitation was in the mail.
“Right, that sounds good. Just for reference, any idea what constitutes promising?”
“Getting sent to jail.”
Beat.
“What?”
“They look for thieves that have been sent to jail and give them formal invitations.”
“So…let me get this straight. To swell its ranks with only the best and brightest potential thieves in the realm, Thieves’ Guild recruiters specifically—exclusively—target those individuals that have already been arrested and sent to jail? That’s like if the Mage’s Guild targeted people who flunked out of school.”
The shopkeeper shrugged again. I was beginning to sense that he was done with this conversation.
“So, I gotta go to jail, huh?”
“If you want to sell this stuff, yeah. Sorry.”
I turned to leave. At the last minute, he asked:
“Look…you really want to know?”
“Huh? Know what?”
“How I knew that necklace you put up was stolen.”
I nodded eagerly.
“Because it didn’t smell like monster piss.”
Ah.
Okay, that’s it. It looks like the only way to join the Thieves’ Guild is to actually get my own bad self arrested. Which means actually running out and committing a crime specifically for the purposes of getting caught. Hm…
Right, let’s go get arrested. But first, I’d better stash my stolen goods in a barrel. My take from this town alone consists of:
2 Pairs of Blue Suede Shoes–Yeah, subtle reference.
Bronze Necklace
2 Green Brocade Doublets
2 Green Silk Garments–The icon’s just a pair of pants. I see no reason not to show up at a party wearing only these.
Green Velvet Shoes
Green Wool Shirt
2 Pairs Iron Gauntlets
Iron Greaves
Red Velvet Blouse
3 Red Velvet Garments
Russet Felt Outfit
2 Bottles of Beer
2 Bottles of Surilie Brothers Wine
Tamika Vintage 415
Tamika’s West Weald Wine
5 Apples
3 Loaves of Bread
3 Carrots
4 Wedges of Cheese
2 Ears of Corn
3 Grapes
2 Heads Lettuce
Onion
2 Pears
Tomato
A Children’s Annuad
A Less Rude Song
Beggar Prince
Darkest Darkness
Frontier, Conquest
Fundaments of Alchemy
Galerion the Mystic
Gods and Worship
Mysterious Akavir
On Morrowind
The Argonian Account, Book 4
The Easter Provinces
The Real Barzeniah, V1
Clay Goblet–This is worthless, but I liked it anyway.
Flawless Diamond
2 Repair Hammers
Scales–The kind you weigh stuff on, not the kind you get by carving up an improbably aggressive fish.
Shears
2 Silver Bowls
4 Silver Bowls–I dunno, they’re wider or something.
3 Silver Carafes–I don’t know what a carafe is either. I’m sure it’s terribly posh.
10 Silver Forks
10 Silver Knives
3 Silver Pitchers
10 Silver Plates
2 Silver Spoons
1 Urn–I didn’t actually check what was inside this before I stole it, and I daren’t now.
I just hope nobody actually stores their stuff in this barrel, or somebody’s got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
He’s not going to be happy when all that stuff vanishes.
Not…happy…at…all
”
“Right, that sounds good. Just for reference, any idea what constitutes promising?”
“Getting sent to jail.”
Beat.
”
“Well, then I should be a shoe-in since I was IN jail just freaking yesterday.”
Yeah, but Cahmel got out early, on account of prophecy.
And that’s just not how the Thieves’ Guild rolls.
Toasty Virus: Yes, my guess is he’ll blame it on the Thieves’ Guild. When they sent him his ‘invitation’ they also stole his swag, etc.
The Thieves Guild recruit the clever thieves when they come up with consulting the beggars for information about the Gray Fox, and the lucky thieves when they just happen to show up in the right place at the right time for the recruitment process.
They only recruit the jailbirds for comic relief.
Yeah, I assume you know this already but like Sekundaari mentioned, the beggars give you the info on the meeting place if you rub them the right way (and you’re very welcome regarding that mental image), you can also just go there at the right time if you know about it, which is what I did pretty much every time. I’m also not sure if they don’t approach you when your sneak skill becomes high enough? So this would mean they DO approach promising thieves (or at least promising assassins, some of the skills are the same I suppose). As for the recruitment after jail… this is somewhat, if disturbingly, realistic, a lot of organized crime groups approach former convicts, sometimes there are even entire recruitment operations INSIDE the actual prisons. In this case they pretty much know you’re (morally) ready for this line of work and likely not on the good side of the law already, you probably just lack the skills, and they’re willing to teach for a share, it makes some sense.
Gentlemen. Tonight we steal the Thieves Guild.
Carafe
1. A glass or metal bottle, often with a flared lip, used for serving water or wine.
2. A glass pot with a pouring spout, used in making coffee.
Cause jugs and pitchers aren’t nearly fantasy enough.
Jugs, pitchers, carafes… Oblivion has it all! It’s a surprise that there are only ‘spoons’ and not tea spoons, dinner spoons, dessert spoons and soup spoons.
@Phase: Because the moon won’t stay shrunk long enough for us to demand a ransom.
…Stealing the Thieves Guild is kinda paradox, though…
@Kevashim Sounds like time for a mod!
Surely the only way they can make TESV any better than Oblivion would be to have even more jun… I mean valuable items lying around peoples houses.
Perhaps even antique carved wooden spoons, glass gazpacho soup bowls, crystal champagne flutes, ceremonial curved obsidian daggers, ye olde newka cola bottles… the possibilities are endless.
You know…my favorite part of both Oblivion and Morrowind was stealing stuff and then decking out a lair or seven with it. In Morrowind, my problem was that I couldn’t do fine adjustments very well…in Oblivion, it was that everything in my house is not only coated in nitroglycerin, but also marked with a red hand. Thanks, Bethesda!
wow… you weren’t kidding about robbing them blind