The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 20)

I’d always kept my career options open. My mama raised me to believe that no matter how comfortable your situation might look, there could be an even more lucrative sucker you can murder and/or murder just beyond the next horizon. It’s a philosophy I’ve stuck with most of my life, and, okay, maybe it’s pushed me onto some hard times. Maybe I’ve lost a few promising careers, maybe I’ve burned a few too many bridges, maybe I should just pick a murder-opportunity and stick with it. But all of that was behind me, because at long last, I’d found a career I can stick with: incarceration.

That’s the short version of where I’ve been for the past few months. The long version features repeated counts of public intoxication, pawning most of my equipment to afford to buy off jail time, managing to avoid the rap, getting intoxicated again to celebrate, and waking up hanging half-on, half-off the town walls with a clay pitcher under one arm and a dead dog under the other. I also happened to be in that state that poets refer to as “all one’s glory,” and that I have come to refer to as “weary inevitability.” Once I righted myself, cleared my vision, and caught a glimpse of the surrounding countryside, I could immediately recognize six of the charges that were soon to be leveled against me, guess at another four, and make wild, bizarre, and ultimately correct speculations about another twenty-six. I think the only reason the guards arrested me is because if they killed me, someone would have to dispose of the body, which would mean touching it.

And that’s how I spent my summer vacation: kicking bones around a 5-by-5 cell and composing poems about how much I hate everybody. So far I only had the one. It was a haiku, and it went like this:

I hate everybody.

How many syllables are these things supposed to have?

But then, eventually, the day of my release arrived. They were kind enough to let me keep the sack-cloth pants and manacles. I was kind enough to rob them blind on my way out. Not because I was going to fence any of it—I’d rather shave my face with a brazier than subject myself to the Thieves’ Guild brain-dead pseudoconomy. Call it opportunistic reflex mixed with malicious instinct. Still, since everything I took was fiscally valueless and more broadly worthless, I was really down to my drawers and my wits, and you know what those things have in common? I can’t eat them, I can’t sell them, and I tend to lose them whenever I’ve got a drop of liquor in me. So it would be accurate to say that upon being released from prison, I had absolutely no prospects whatsoever.

What did I want to do with my life before I got arrested? I had a plan. I had this big, bold plan that involved not being here, doing this. Just before I got arrested, I’d hit on this wonderful idea that tied together my general contempt for my neighbor with my inability to hold an honest job. That’s right—I wanted to become an assassin, and to do that, I’d have to kill someone. That is, someone who wasn’t trying to kill me first. Which actually narrowed the options more than you’d think. So far, half the people on this continent have attempted assault the moment I moved upwind. Take the cabals of random mages and bandits out in the sticks, for example: now that’s a culture that has unprovoked assault down to a science.

Actually, that raises a great question. Assuming I’m not just a unique snowflake, and that there’s not just an inscrutably glory to my murder technique that draws Brotherhood recruiters like blisters gather pus, wouldn’t every single marauder and necromancer I’ve bumped into have gotten a Dark Brotherhood invite by now? The DB seem to knock the things out automatically, like they’re a crappy YooToob channel that sends friend invites to any account that comes down the pipes. No, I’ve got it—they’re that dodgy WoW Guild, the one that’s loud and about a dozen members strong and has <<Blood>> or <<Legion>> or <<Knights>> in the title, the one that’s owned by a 12-year-old and administrated by power-hungry jackasses. They really want to be competitive in the Arena this season, and their best DPS just got banned for binding racial slurs to his chat macros and spamming Trade, so the guild’s active members spam the chats with invites and maybe a few exasperated newbies join because they’ve had the bad luck to find the “Accept Invite” option faster than “Squelch,” or because they were vaguely aware joining a guild was something you do, but tragically unaware of the handful of organizations founded around something beyond an adolescent’s ego.

Anyway. There was one obvious obstacle in my path, which was that I didn’t have a weapon of any description. Granted, one does not actually need a weapon to murder someone with, just like one doesn’t actually need to wear pants while beekeeping. Call me spoiled.

Since I’d already cleaned out the Fighters’ Guild, the only place left in town to get a decent weapon was the goddamned Archer’s Paradox. You remember—the archery paraphernalia outlet run by that insufferable asshat wood elf. I’d box his ears, but from the looks of him I’d probably gash my knuckles open.

Something about that grin makes me want to throw wolf turds at his face.

His prices were pretty reasonable. I was sort of hoping they wouldn’t be; if his pricing model was entirely divorced from reason, there was a chance, however miniscule, that this would translate into giving stuff away for free. Which was the only economic model I was presently disposed to support.

Well, almost the only model.

Double your pleasure: more tomorrow!