In Which Alarrah Drags Her Housecarl Off on a Cross-Country Jaunt

Twitter thread from 5/15/2021, in which Alarrah and Lydia jaunt cross-country, follow up on a Letter from a Friend pointing at Dead Men’s Respite, and battle hostile vampires and ghosts along the way.

In Which Alarrah, After Finally Getting a House, Promptly Drags Her Housecarl Off On a Cross-Country Jaunt, Which Means They Don’t Actually SLEEP in the House:

1:21 PM · May 15, 2021

1. Decided my next goal, after getting the house in Whiterun, would be to knock off another item on the miscellaneous quests list.

1:21 PM · May 15, 2021

I’d gotten a mysterious “Letter from a Friend” via courier, which was one of the ones you get with a hint about where to go to find another Word Wall with a Shout word on it. This one said I should go to Dead Man’s Respite.

1:22 PM · May 15, 2021

2. So Lydia and I set off again! And this was yet another quest in the vicinity of Morthal–this time a bit southwest-ish of where we’d killed the dragon on Eldersblood Peak.

1:22 PM · May 15, 2021

3. More miscellaneous hunting on the way. Also more spotting of, and VERY DELIBERATE AVOIDING OF, a distant giant. This one had two different mammoths, I think.

4. Also spotted another airborne dragon, though this one didn’t actually get near us? So we didn’t go after it.

1:22 PM · May 15, 2021

5. Instead of following the road this time, I decided to go cross-country and see if I could get to the destination just by keeping a laser focus on the arrow. This more or less worked, though I discovered several times that I had to circle around geographical obstacles.

1:23 PM · May 15, 2021

Also got to practice my jumping, which is good since that’s another of those two controls at once thing, moving forward with the left lever while hitting X.

1:23 PM · May 15, 2021

6. And, since this was cross-country, sneaked my way through almost all of the jaunt! Sneak is now 53 as of this writing, definitely my best skill.

1:24 PM · May 15, 2021

Guards are periodically telling me “Hands to yourself, sneak thief” when they’re not going “Could you really be the Dragonborn of legend?” Lol.

1:24 PM · May 15, 2021

7. Discovered a couple of miscellaneous locations on the way that I’m pretty sure were bandit lairs, but did not elect to investigate them. Maybe later. (I’m pretty sure the locations were Orotheim and Redoran’s Retreat? I’ll need to doublecheck the names.)

1:24 PM · May 15, 2021

8. After it got dark and we were traveling well into the wee hours of the night, we got jumped by a vampire fledging. The damn thing hit me with Sanguinare Vampiris, the disease that leads to vampirism in the game.

1:25 PM · May 15, 2021

Not being in the mood to turn into a vampire, I nabbed a potion of Cure Disease back from Lydia and sorted that problem!

9. We also took down a couple of bears. Two bears at once.

1:25 PM · May 15, 2021

10. Not terribly long after the vampire fledgling, we also spotted a couple of ghosts! Which was a new thing, and notably, the ghosts had lines like “I don’t want to do this!” and “This is not my choice!” as they came charging at us.

1:25 PM · May 15, 2021

One got near enough to Lydia for me to see her kill it, at which point it disintegrated into a pile of ash. Interesting.

11. Finally found Dead Man’s Respite and started working our way in.

1:26 PM · May 15, 2021

Became obvious pretty quickly that this was another draugr nest, and it didn’t take long for me to find another Dragon Claw key thing, this time a Ruby one.

1:26 PM · May 15, 2021

12. Also spotted another ghost. But this one didn’t seem hostile, or at least if it was, it didn’t seem like it saw us? But it did walk off further down into the barrow, in a possibly plot-relevant “this is where I need you to go” kind of way.

1:26 PM · May 15, 2021

13. As we went further down into the place, we took out more draugr (and I clobbered a Restless Draugr with one blow, which was satisfying). We also took out a couple of Frostbite Spiders.

Tonight’s adventuring will pick up again from here!

1:27 PM · May 15, 2021

Editing to add

1. This post was originally written on 3/18/2022, but backdated to the time of the tweet thread for organizational purposes.
2. Post updated on 12/30/2022 to reconstruct the original Twitter thread in the post body, and remove links off to Twitter.
3. 10/1/2024: Updated the HTML reconstructing the tweets to use a new CSS class I added under the hood, to make it easier to globally change the styling on posts that use this format.