In Which Faanshi Retreats and Bails to Riften

Faanshi’s latest session, played yesterday (Friday 5/20), had two major items of note: I had to retreat from Volunruud because I could not take down the boss Kvenel for the life of me. And after doing that, I sent Lydia home to Breezehome so I could head off to Riften and follow up on Brynjolf’s little marketplace shenanigans proposal!

By which I mean, “Khajiit will join your Thieves Guild, and thinks you will find that she is very, very good at it.”

Highlights

• Play date: 5/20/2022
• Session number in this run: 12
• Boinged from Solitude to Dawnstar
• Dragon! Everybody came running to kill it, and fortunately nobody died that I could see, especially Rustleif and Seren
• Made some leather armor at the forge which bumped my Smithing; gave Rustleif the book and that bumped my Smithing again
• Sold dragon bits to Frida, bought potions
• Boinged to Windhelm; saw the two dickweeds hassling Suvaris
• Went in the inn to sleep; surprisingly, the innkeeper is not a bitch to Khajiit, apparently she just hates Dunmer? ;P
• Also surprisingly: the inn bard was actually singing Age of AGGRESSION, and distinctly sang “Down with Ulfric, the killer of kings”
• Went down to the docks and got payment from Kjar; could not however find Scouts-Many-Marshes?
• Boinged back to Whiterun to track down Amren for training; slept the night at Breezehome, then found him, but had only enough gold to pay for four rounds
• Went up to Dragonsreach and destroyed the blessed axe i got from Temba for its enchantment; also dropped a Light Armor enchantment on my scaled armor
• That let me level up to 25; took Health bump and next Armsman perk in One-handed
• Made some potions and sold them to Arcadia, which let me buy another round of training with Amren
• Boinged down to Lakeview and started building Main House structure; burned through a bunch of materials and made several pieces of armor
• Boinged back to Whiterun; found the Khajiit on site so sold all the pieces to Ri’saad
• Headed across the plains to hit Volunruud
• Flame atronach vs. conjurer; didn’t find the conjurer’s body but did take out the atronach
• Started running Volunruud
• Draugr Deathlord in the section with the axe, and that fucker handed me my ass multiple times; once I accidentally shot Lydia when I was trying to shoot him, and GODDAMMIT ME, so I had to roll back from that
• Had to stay the hell out of his line of fire and keep throwing in the fire atronach, and throwing healing magic at Lyds
• Kvenel: also a goddamn problem; couldn’t kill him! Beat a cautious retreat to power up further
• Came out of Volunruud
• Spotted flyby dragon
• Successfully shot down an elk; practiced Conjuration via Soul Trap on the elk body
• And then had my ass handed to me by a spriggan on my way south along the plains >_<
• Thrown back to coming out of Volunruud, so fuck it fast travel to Whiterun time
• Got courier with another Letter from a Friend, this time for Hag’s End
• Made a few potions
• Bought straw, glass, and goat horns from Belethor
• Boinged to Lakeview and made a couple more furniture items
• Tried to hoof it from there but got in a fight with a troll; killed it! Lost track of Lydia though, wtf
• Found her again when I fast traveled to the watchtower, at which point I sent her home because Khajiit has thievery business to attend to
• Took the cart to Riften
• Planted the ring on Brand-Shei without any problems; got Brynjolf to pay me and tell me to find him at the Ragged Flagon
• Bit of trouble getting down there; had to fling the atronach at the first two lowlifes in the Ratway
• Also killed by Gian the Fist a couple times
• Finally took the shortcut through the gate and sprinted past the last lowlife, who followed me into the Flagon–and was then promptly mobbed by EVERYBODY IN THE FLAGON, including Galathil the Face Sculptor lolololol
• Got the directive to go lean on Bersi, Haelga, and Keerava
• Had to still get past Gian on the way out, but found a good place to hide from him while I kept throwing the flame atronach at him
• Got finally back out of the Ratway, and saved

Commentary

Boinging into Dawnstar to give Rustleif my copy of Night Falls on Sentinel resulted in a dragon attack, like you do. I was very relieved that the dragon didn’t appear to kill anybody. And very amused that at least a dozen people came to gawk at me slurping up the dragon soul! That’s like, half the population of Dawnstar. 😉

Boinging into Windhelm with the goal of picking up that little bounty from Kjar on the docks had two little opportunities for character development, meanwhile.

One: seeing the two dickweeds hassling Suvaris when I walked in through the gates. Suvaris always then turns to the player and angrily demands to know if you hate her people, too. From what I know of Khajiit history, there is some grounds for a Khajiit to be anti-Dunmer, given that the Dunmer have a history of enslaving the Khajiit.

But I don’t feel like going that route. So while the game only gives you the option to tell Suvaris that no, you don’t hate the Dark Elves, what I think Faanshi actually said was:

“This one’s people were once enslaved by yours, but Khajiit does not hate your people as a whole. Only the ones who are enslavers. Also, this one understands what it is like to be in this cold land where you are not welcome. Her people are not even allowed in the cities.”

My headcanon here also suggests that Suvaris might have actually remarked on that, because yeah, a Khajiit walking into Windhelm or any other city in Skyrim is highly fucking unusual. Whiterun and Falkreath, I’m thane there, the guards actually know me, so it’s reasonable that they wouldn’t give me shit at the gates. Windhelm however has no goddamn idea who I am yet.

So there’s an interesting question here of whether word of a Khajiit Dragonborn is starting to spread enough that all the guards in the various cities are on the lookout for an armored Khajiit with an armed Nord housecarl following her around. And they wind up going “Is that the Dragonborn? That might actually be the Dragonborn. Do we let her in? Or do we piss her off by telling her no? She’s Khajiit but she’s Dragonborn for fuck’s sake, AUGH THIS MAKES MY HEAD HURT, fuck it, just let her in already.”

Not like Faanshi is privy to any of that, though. Or that she’d actually tell Suvaris “the guards let this one in because she is Dragonborn”. I think she probably gracefully demurs and says something like, “Khajiit is very grateful that the guards at the cities she has visited have been polite, and are allowing her in to spend her coin and do her business.”

Second character development opportunity was going into Candlehearth Hall to rent a room. Apparently the bitchy innkeeper in there is only bigoted about Dunmer? She didn’t bat an eye at a Khajiit walking up to rent a room.

But what was way more remarkable to me, as the innkeeper took me to that room, is that I heard the inn’s bard start to sing. And what she was singing was Age of Aggression. Not Age of Oppression, which is what I’d expect to hear in a Stormcloak-controlled city. Especially in Windhelm, Ulfric’s home base. I’m pretty damn sure I heard the bard give the intro line about the song being an ode to Skyrim’s truest sons and daughters, the Stormcloaks–but then she sang “Down with Ulfric, the killer of kings”.

And I went WAIT WHAT? :O

What makes this extra special hilarious: I looked up the bard in question, Luaffyn, because I wanted to see if there was any known bug with her singing the wrong version of the song. And what I found was, she’s a Dunmer. So this is a situation where an inn run by a woman who actively hates Dunmer has hired one to be her bard–which by itself is interesting.

But this is also a Dunmer bard who’s singing the Imperial version of this song in an inn run by a woman who hates Dunmer, in Ulfric’s own city, just a short walk away from Ulfric’s own palace.

Now, the actual explanation here is that yeah, this was just Skyrim being its gloriously buggy self, LOL. But I’m entertained as hell by Dara’s idea that Luaffyn is totally trolling her employer. And everybody else in the inn, for that matter.

“Khajiit thinks this bard is very brave to sing these words here. Or very foolish. Or perhaps both.”

Because yeah, I also kinda gotta worry in this narrative about whether Luaffyn would actually survive the day, singing this song this close to Ulfric’s own palace. :O

After that amusing little incident, I headed to the docks to collect money from Kjar for killing his renegade crew member. And I tried to find Scouts-Many-Marshes to hit him up for Light Armor training, but to no avail. Doing a search about this found me reports by other players that Scouts apparently spends all his time inside the Argonian Assemblage, due to a bug. So if you want to interact with him, you have to get in there and get him to follow you back out, and do it so that you don’t get attacked for trespassing!

Which seemed more complex a thing than what I wanted to spend time on at that point. So I went “fuck it” and boinged back to Whiterun.

Next major area of note: actually having to retreat from finishing Volunruud! Because for the life of me, I could not take out Kvenel. I even tried a slow and careful “snipe him, then run and hide” strategy, but the fucker kept finding me anyway and one-shotting me to death.

To wit: ow.

I’m aware that I could have dialed down the Difficulty to get past this problem, but I didn’t want to do that. So I decided on retreating, and seeing what I can do to power up some more before Lyds and I come back to kick his ass.

Still though, it concerns me that I got that much of an ass-handing from him. I hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come as I continue to level up with this alt.

So since I had to bail out of that, I elected to go get the Thieves Guild plotline underway properly. Which also involved some ass-handing, but at least this time the opponents encountered in the Ratway weren’t anything that a combo of flame atronach + judicious hiding couldn’t handle!

And I gotta say, it was very impressive how I got chased into the Ragged Flagon by that last lowlife that I passed–only to provoke every single NPC in the Flagon into attacking the guy! Even the Face Sculptor!

Next time

Still not a fan of the playing the heavy and intimidating the shopkeepers in Riften part of the Guild shenanigans. And I feel like it’d be particularly dangerous for a Khajiit to do that, realistically speaking. It feels like a damn good way to get my ass kicked out of Riften.

I’m still going to do it, mind you, since I have to do it to proceed through the plotline. But at least as of Ysani’s playthrough, I know how to do it in a slightly less bothersome way. Though Khajiit suspects she may have an unfair advantage, brawling these people with her claws!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/22/2023: Restored missing gallery, and added play date and session number markers.