The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 21)

Miss yesterday’s Cahmel? Scroll down to read Part 20 first!

When we last left our resourceful hero, he was trying to beg a longbow off of one of the most obnoxious jackasses I’d met in recent memory. Seriously, just look at that this guy and tell me your sucker-punch instincts aren’t firing.

Just, wolf turds right to the kisser. He'd never see it coming. Smugly rattling off that one bit of armchair Aristotelianism he drummed up in a haze of ganja, and then out of nowhere, turd in the face. I can't stop thinking about it. It would just shotgun the wind right out of his sails.

We’ve got:

1.)    Stupid haircut. That tonsure makes him look less like a monk and more like Danny DeVito when he gets his hair torn off in Matilda.

2.)    Creepy grin. He’s smiling like that forty-year-old guy at the family reunion who nobody knows that well, but who treats absolutely everyone, of all ages, as he would a best friend or former lover.

3.)    Mountain-man vest. Did he just cut along the belly of a roadkill beaver, dump everything out, and cut himself a couple of arm holes? Thing’s gotta smell like sweat, dust, and probably trace amounts of mice urine. It’s the fashion statement that says, “I want to display my love of badly-cured animal hides and my own sweet pecs simultaneously.” Combine with moron-sure for maximum lady repelling.

4.)    I’m not even going to go into the “Archer’s Paradox” again. Because the perfect insult would be one that adequately reflects my contempt for this kind of clueless, pretentious posturing, and that’s impossible. Besides, this line is so damn stupid it’s managed to get stuck in my head. It’s just iterating over and over, and every so often I’ll find something exciting and new wrong with it, and then I’ll get hung up some more and tear my hair out. Probably the best thing for everyone is if I just try to forget it exists.

I did consider making this guy my Dark Brotherhood initiation, but I ended up shooting the idea down for a couple of reasons. Firstly, although he’s irritating, that’s more a general function of his character than a by-product of any grievance he had towards me. I like to think I’m above such petty grounds for assassination as “he’s kind of a tushbag,” and that I have it within me to turn my energies to other, more productive avenues of murder. Plus, he has one thing that I don’t. Can you guess what it is? If you guessed, “ready access to a wide range of weaponry,” you evidently haven’t been paying attention, because the right answer was, “stupid haircut.” But yeah, okay, the fact that he’s so well armed gave me pause.

I did manage to steal a couple bows off of him. I ran my usual diabolical caper: walk up the staircase to his private quarters, pace around aimlessly as the storekeeper in question wonders what the hell possessed you to just randomly wander into his domicile, wait for him to follow you upstairs to make sure you don’t pilfer his crates of hourglasses or poop on his pillow or something, and then—as soon as he’s been kited upstairs—blast past him at full speed, hop down the staircase, and grab everything on the counter before he can catch up and resume supervising you. This time, I managed to score two bows. What I did not manage to score were any arrows. Those were located in such a position as it would be difficult to obtain them without first maneuvering them off of the counter—actually picking them up will get you arrested, so the best way to do this is to hop up on the counter next to them and can-can-kick them across the room—but I didn’t really have the time or the inclination to sort that out.

So I exposed myself to the chest, and to the Paradox, and what did I get for it? Some bent pieces of wood. Those were not going to put murder on the table. By then, it had grown rather late; most of the shops and private residences had closed their doors for the night. Not that this would stop me, if I had so much as one lockpick anywhere on my person. I’d contemplated sneaking one into jail, but at a fairly early stage of the planning process it occurred to me that there were places in my body I didn’t fancy lodging a hooked length of metal. Besides, what incentive did I have to break into anyone’s house? Best case scenario was that I found a bunch of moderately-worthwhile vendor trash I could sell to some jackass up in the frozen ass-end of the country. Worst case, I found a bunch of yarn and spoons that I could sell to my choice of nobody, because they were useful to absolutely no-one, including the person I took them from. Oh, I guess it was possible somebody would have a weapon. On their person. Which they would cheerfully introduce to my anatomy if I got any funny ideas, like any idea that was worth having at this point.

I was just about ready to give up and find an inn when I bumped into a house that was unlocked. Intriguing, not to mention unconventional. I suppose it wasn’t technically impossible that that place, right there, was where The Party was at, but to be honest, I also wasn’t sure I wanted to see the Bravil iteration of The Party. Somehow, I was picturing fewer fresh beats and fine ladies, rather more fresh beetles and bovine ladies. Like I would walk in and it would just be a bunch of men and women, all box-faced, all dressed and do’d exactly like Daenlin up there, sampling a platter of caught vermin and talking about issues like masonry and sweeping and what kind of animal feces was the most obnoxious to clean up. And then someone would start playing an instrument…outside. In the alleyway. Until someone from the party poked their head out and yelled at them to keep it down.

This was not the sight that greeted me when I entered. It was, indeed, just some homely High Elf lady’s house. Despite my having just opened the door of this one-room domicile and let myself in, she appeared not to have noticed me at all.

And suddenly, I was faced with a dilemma. You see, a functioning lock was not the only thing this woman lacked: conspicuously absent from her hip was a rusty dagger or blood-spattered mace. She was completely defenseless. And alone. And I did need to kill someone.

See…it’s not that I have a conscience, necessarily, but I guess I was under the impression that I had a little more style than this. I guess at the end of the day I could kid myself that I was a pretty cool guy, and that any acts of hostility or borderline sociopathic behavior were actually just me sticking it to dudes squarer and less gnarly than myself. Like Robin Hood, except instead of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, I was…killing people I didn’t like. So, I guess that’s not like Robin Hood. I kind of wish I hadn’t thought about that comparison, because I’d been leaning on it for like the past six months of indignities.

Yeah, screw it. I guess I’ve just proven to myself that I really am just a clueless opportunist. Why bother with pretensions, when everything I’ve done and everything that has been done to me has proven that there’s no such thing as karma? What is convenient is just to bludgeon this woman to death with my bare hands, so naturally, that’s just what I’m going to do.

I crawl up, throw a punch

SON OF A BITCH

I’M SORRY KARMA, I DIDN’T MEAN THOSE THINGS I SAID