The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 25)

(FRAPs problems in general. No screens for the moment, I’ll get them in retroactively.)

When we last left our crafty hero, he’d just asked two witnesses where his target was before nipping past them and stabbing him to death. This takes care of the practical portion of my exam; Lucy’s apparently used the same asspull bullhonkey mechanics he used to ascertain when I killed the first guy to monitor my progress on the second, so all I needed to do was find a place to rest and he’d swing by. The nearest place to rest up is back in town, so I needed to get going if I was going to make it before…

Actually, hang on a tick. It occurred to me that technically speaking, I was in an inn. Assuming they weren’t subsisting off the ten-gold-per-day Roo-fee-o was giving them for his little paranoia tax—and if they were, then they were in for a rude upset—they probably had other rooms. Go to sleep as the only other guest of the hotel you just murdered a man in? Heck, why not? Even if someone made the jaunt down into stank-ass lonely-old-man-land, apparently desperate to find out what a deranged senior citizen would be doing that would cause him to miss breakfast, and even if they managed to conclude that the murder was committed by the shifty questions-asking heavily armed traveler that had visited the victim right around time of death, I wasn’t in any real danger of prosecution. If they lodged any formal accusations, I’d just hide the murder weapon somewhere. Like their kidneys.

So I bought the room, and…well, okay, technically speaking I attempted to buy the room, realized I didn’t have enough money on me to pay for the crappiest room not occupied by Tommy Wiseau, put up with the innkeeper openly mocking my poverty, sold him a few flowers I picked by the side of the road, and then bought the room. And then I settled down for a nap, and before you can say, “Was he seriously waiting just outside or does he really get some sort of broken teleportation power,” Lucy was all up in my personal space. Dude’s lucky I haven’t slept naked since the wasps-in-the-bedpan incident.

Let me translate this from emo poetry into English: I killed the dude thoroughly enough to merit entrance into the DB, and as such, I get to know the location of their hideout and the password to get me through their evil talking glowing door. First thing I need to do is hit Cheydinhal.

Cheydinhal’s one of my least favorite cities in the game. It mixes the irritating sprawled-like-a-dead-ox layout of bridged cities like Bravil with the sterile suburban aesthetic that’s at its worst in towns like Chorrol. There’s a quest in town related to corrupt taxation that’s more or less worth doing, but other than that, I can’t say I recall anything particularly nice or pleasant about being there. Even the NPCs are mostly surly and annoying there.

I find the spot indicated as the façade on the outside of the Dark Brotherhood’s sanctum. They’ve holed up the basement of an abandoned house–because apparently, they’re as thick as a swimming pool full of lard. Seriously, this is just about the worst possible place they could be hiding.

Let’s say you’re a citizen, or politician, in a town of maybe a hundred people maximum. That’s a couple dozen houses at any given time, with most of the land within the city walls already built upon and real estate at a relative premium. The house for sale in Cheydinhal definitely falls on the expensive side compared to houses available in, for example, Bravil and the Imperial City. Wouldn’t it behoove you to seize any abandoned property and resell it to an interested buyer? Or to renovate said property? Or, at the very least, to have someone poke their head in and take a look to see if there’s anything worth auctioning? It’s pretty well implied that any disinherited property goes into the hands of the local government, so there’s no reason that place should be an exception. And the minute anyone poked their head in, they’d find a glowing red evil door with a massive handprint on it that screams, “Check it out, this is the Big Evil Bastard clubhouse. Please alert the Imperial Guard and have them camp outside here, apprehending anyone stupid enough to stick their head out.”

What’s to stop that from happening? The door to the house is locked, but with an “easy” grade two-tumbler mechanism that slowed me down only the thirty seconds it took to buy a lockpick from the pawnshop. Once you’re inside, the Dark Brotherhood’s big scary obvious front door is pretty much right inside the basement—and before you make an excuse like, “Well, they obviously just kill anyone who comes near it if they’re not in the club,” that’s demonstrably not true. Even if you’re not even aware of the Dark Brotherhood questline, you can come down here as often as you like and nobody will ever treat you as a threat. You can picnic down here for hours, cheerfully reading by the glowing red light of the door, and nobody treats you like a threat. If the game gave you the very reasonable option to go downtown and report this place—you can argue all you like that people consider the DB a myth, but there’s no way the Legion would just ignore a big scary evil door in the middle of a populated area—then half the guild would be rumbled before the week was out. The only two exits to the hideout are that door and the nearby well, and neither would be an inconspicuous mode of egress for a glowing-armored assassin in a Hot Topic hood. Sure, the Guardsmen can’t get in the hideout, but they have the advantage of a steady supply of food and water. Eventually the assassins would be forced to make a break for it, and without spoiling the future of this quest line, let me just point out right now that these guys are by no means unkillable. A proportionate force would make cut them into hash.

In conclusion, this hideout is a.) very likely to be discovered, b.) a deathtrap the moment it is, and c.) cliché anyway. This is another example of the DB’s obsession with romanticism and gothic posturing getting in the way of their doing a good job. They were so wrapped up in getting a suitably dark, badass hideout that they didn’t consider getting an actual house.

Advantages of using the basement of a populated middle-class home as opposed to a rotting two-story:

1.)    City officials rarely poke their noses into private residences.

2.)    The coming and going of people would not be considered suspicious.

3.)    The use of a higher-quality lock wouldn’t attract any attention.

4.)    Just, less suspicious in general. If someone were to look through town for the location of a cabal of murderous assassins, they would be more likely to check the abandoned structures than some guy’s house.

5.)    Doesn’t smell like spider farts.

Yeah. This was going to be interesting.

Next: Cahmel’s first job! As in, his first assassination job, not his first regular-type job. He’s never had one of those.