The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 22)

More troubles with Icewind. I’ll let you know what took so long when I post it up. In the meantime, Cahmel.

When we last left our streetsmart hero, he’d brought fists to what was evidently a magic ninja warmace fight. This served to complicate what was otherwise a fairly straightforward scenario. See, my projections for this encounter were: start fight, kill lady, become night-stalking death-dealing prisoners-not-taking murderman, solve all problems, win everything. Recent developments having challenged this possibility, it may behoove me to revise. Off the cuff, I’m thinking: start fight, die sobbing and wetting myself.

She's almost too cool to beat me up. Almost.

For those of you out in the audience wondering what just happened: remember those guys that carried out a successful assassination on the emperor of the realm at the beginning of the game? Yeah, she’s one of them. To a man, they’re trained in the mystic art of summoning awesome badass armor and overpowered weaponry that look great on the back of the box and disappear instantly when you kill their owners, thus achieving the troll game design difecta of pissing and ripping the player off. To my knowledge, which is embarrassingly extensive, the only way to get the armor for your own usage is to cheat. Which would seem fair to me; if your enemies get overpowered haxx equipment that they pull out of their collective asses and don’t share with you, it seems equitable to return the favor.

I’m not going to lie; the fight was brutal. The only reason I survived it was because I was so damn low-level. See, if I’d been higher level, her stats and damage would have scaled alongside me, and I’d be expected to Put Up at a substantially higher grade. Which wouldn’t have been a problem…if I weren’t using my fists, which I have not previously employed in a pursuit more dangerous than Billy Blanks air-boxing. As a result, I dish out less damage punching than I do singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Again, though, I’m low level, so the game expects less of me and I can just sort of coast without needing any actual skill or experience at what I’m doing. It’s the public education system of leveling.

Long story short: I won. It wasn’t entirely surprising. The more successful warrior is often the one who is able to sacrifice the most on the field of battle, and I ended up surrendering my pride, my faith in a just universe, and three-quarters of my facial bones. But it’s cool: the little message popped up that made everything worth it.

"Your killing has been observed by forces unknown..." Ooh, can I guess? Is it the Masons? The reptilians? A cockroach? Google? Or is it the evil-god-worshiping murder cult already on record as watching this sort of thing?

To kill the moment with overanalysis, because that’s kind of what I do here, that whole “observing” thing must be a tedious job. It’d be like Minority Report, but without all the glitzy special effects and social commentary.

“Looks like this guy and his wife are having an argument. Looks like he’s really mad about something. Gee, I wonder what he’s going to—oh, look, he’s gone and murdered her, what a spellbinding twist.”

“Think we oughta recruit him?”

“I dunno. I guess it was an okay murder.”

“Did you maybe feel like it wasn’t, you know…”

“Pointless enough?”

“That’s it, bingo. What else we got?”

“Half-naked outlander crept into a lady’s loft and punched her to death.”

“Brochure’s in the mail!”

So that’s resolved. Felt good to cross it off my to-do list, you know? Get shirt, find purpose in life, kill someone for no good goddamned reason–looks like I could just go ahead and check that last one right off. And hey! She had a shirt right there with her, and some pants that weren’t sewn out of tree moss.

What an auspicious haul! I get clothes AND assassin volunteer hours, and there's no negative repercussions whatsoever. Everything's coming up Cahmel!

I was in something of an awkward situation, here. For starters, I had no idea what he was charging me for.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself that in this universe of infinite possibilities, this is perhaps the sole situation in existence–and all possible existences–with an unambiguous answer. That’s until you check out what my current fine is, which is 65 gold. And I already had a bounty of 25 for assorted miscreancy.

So what happened is that a guard heard screams, burst into a moonlight loft, and discovered a wanted ex-con with bloody knuckles standing over the dead, naked body of a local woman, and from this situation somehow prescribed a 40-gold fine. Which would actually be hilarious, if I’d had 40 gold. In my current state, I had no way of paying my way out. All I’d done was batter a woman to death in cold blood, but for all the legal pressure I was under, I may as well have stolen the crown jewels. Oh, wait.

Is he wearing makeup?

When you can’t pay the fine, you’ve got two options. You can resist arrest, which means that guard will immediately try to kill you—along with all of his guard friends for a hundred miles—and anything you do to fight back will exponentially increase your bounty. And if you ever come across another guard, he’ll instantly recognize you and press charges once more, meaning you’ve either succeeded in postponing your Adventures in the Legal System or in wasting even more of your time running away from guards like it’s goddamned Benny Hill and you’re the villain. Actually, scratch that–I lack the dignity of a Benny Hill villain.

That’s option one in a nutshell. The other option is going to jail and losing two points of a skill that statistically speaking, you don’t care about.

I ran for it.

Nothing like a leisurely jog after a good homicide.

Yeah, it’s stupid, but I look at it this way: I would rather pay the fine than go to jail, and if I stick with this Dark Brotherhood thing, I should be able to make some money in the immediate future. So maybe I’ll live my life haunted and careworn, trembling at every footstep, anticipating the drop of the hammer of justice with every waking moment. It’s nothing I haven’t handled before.

My borrowed welcome long-since rescinded, I legged it out of town like the place was on fire. The guards gave chase for a while, but balked and turned back once I plunged headlong into wolf and bandit country in the middle of the night. Suckers.

I did take a moment’s breather and try on my new duds. I might be a rain-soaked, battered fugitive squatting in the middle of nowhere as I made my way to try out the only disreputable career option left to me, but at least now I wouldn’t have to look like a complete jackass.

Yeah. That’s what I call a sharp ensemble. Who could have guessed that raiding the wardrobe of a deranged female cultist was not the first step on the path of style and gravitas? But it beats sack cloth and dirtsmell, I guess. And maybe the shirtlessness will make people mistake me for a tough jackass instead of a broke one.

I limped to the next town, which, thankfully, didn’t really have much in the way of guards. I managed to make it as far as the inn without any difficulty. And even then, the difficulty wasn’t so much “dodging Johnny Law” as “scraping up the ten goddamned gold to buy a room.” I finally managed to scrape up the cash by selling her some of the flowers I’d accidentally picked on the way over here.

The room was exactly what I’d come to expect: a bed, a few valueless unattended items to sate kleptomaniacs, a vague sense of disappointment that one’s life has come to this. That is to say, a series of rented or unearned beds, each a shade smellier than the last, until I sleep forever in an unmarked grave. Or, more probably, inside a wolf. Or a bandit. It could go either way.

Screw it; I was too tired to worry. I just ran halfway across the continent, and what I really needed was a good solid eight hours of oh just cut straight to the interruption.

There we go.

This is Lucien Lachance. He’s a murderer, and he’s really, really enthusiastic about it. You know that guy who has a slightly unusual and very technical job, like zoo lighting engineer or graphite mixer, and he spends every party in a sense of gleeful anticipation waiting for someone to ask him what he does so he can bore them with every weird-but-boring detail? That’s Lucien—but only after you mix him with the guy who got stuck with a socially negative label and decided to make it a badge of honor, except he’s the kind of guy that wrapped the label up in negative stereotypes to begin with. To wit: because I punched a lady until she fell down, I’m a “taker of life” and a “harvester of souls.” He informs me of this with a gleeful voice, like Vincent Price being informed his pizza just arrived.

There’s this definite culture in the Dark Brotherhood like murder is some sort of sacred act of power and mysticism. I guess that’s cute, but it doesn’t really jive with the mindset of most murderers, who are usually desperate, don’t really give a rat’s ass one way or the other, or are beyond lucidity. I guess it feels a little bit weird for the association of contract killers to be so wrapped up in gothy posturing.

Anyway, he wants me to join his little club. First thing I gotta do is kill a guy named Rufio–this time, not with my hands. Lucien offers me a dagger that he describes as a “virgin blade,” which wins the very exclusive award for, “metaphor I least wanted this guy to use.” Lucien tries to pass himself off as the cool kind of creepy; whether he succeeds, I’ll let you be the judge.

He doesn’t.

See, I was lying to you just there. Comes with the murdering asshole territory.