In Which Gyllerah Quests All Over Summerset

A lot happened in this session, rather more than I can easily summarize in a single post title! Engaged with some of the special event stuff going on on ESO right now; ran the plot at the menagerie that Paul ahd run before; went with Paul to hunt for remaining time break portals to close for the Psijics; hit two different abyssal geysers and contributed to the kill on the first; ran the plot at the haunted Direnni acropolis with Paul; and last but not least, did a solo run at Rellenthil to investigate the situation with a woman wanting to convince her brother not to join an acting troupe.

Y’all will note that the highlight deets are sparser than usual for my posts! This was because this was a very busy session, and I was preoccupied with actually playing, so didn’t take as many notes as usual. Still, got enough typed in to build a post from!

Highlights

• Play date: 10/22/2022
• Session number in this run: 21
• Started things off by going to check out the event camp that Paul had mentioned to me, and got a quest to collect 30 cursed feathers for a witch at the camp
• Ran the zoo plot at Sil-Var-Woad that Paul had done before, got good loot off that, including a plunder skull
• Went hunting with Paul for remaining time breach portals to close for the Psijics
• Wound up hitting not one but two Abyssal Geysers because we showed up when other players were hitting them; got good loot off the first one including another plunder skull, but we didn’t get there in time for the second one
• Then went to the Direnni Acropolis and ran the plot there
• We wound up choosing to burn the body to release the soul, and yeaaaaaaaaah feeling kind of ambivalent about that choice, but at least we got a quest reward off of it
• Paul called it a night at that point but i wasn’t ready to stop yet, so I did some crafting for a while to sell things
• Then went to go fish the foul water spot in the sinkhole
• Stopped in Rellenthil on the way back and ran the plot involving helping a woman find her brother who wanted to join the acting troupe in the village
• Resolved that by amicably reuniting the siblings
• Leveled up to 23
• Then returned to Alinor and ran the new round of writs

Event quest commentary

Spooky season shenanigans are in full play right now on ESO, and I’d already seen an event tent camp set up for this. Paul told me more about it, so I went by there to check it out and launched a quest to bring 30 cursed feathers to a witch. Who, apparently, needed me to use these to help stop a fearsome monster in the Evergloam!

(That wacky Nocturnal with her realm full of fearsome monsters!)

More on this to come; this part was for now just kicking off the feathers quest.

Untamed and Unleashed quest

Paul beat me to this quest, so since he and I have been kind of doing the side solo quests on our own while working on the bigger ones together, I swung around to get caught up on this one.

This was a good quest. 😀 Showed up at Sil-Var-Woad to find an elf named Talomar looking for a creature called Lotus–who, I learned once I talked to Talomar, was an indrik who’d gone missing. And apparently this was not all going on in the place, for the Royal Menagerie was suffering an outbreak of escaped and extremely pissed off creatures.

I agreed to help Talomar try to find Lotus. This required me to make my way into the menagerie and fight multiple pissed off lions, echateres, and even a couple of mammoths. (Which makes me wonder exactly how the hell the staff of the menagerie rounded up all these very large beasts and managed to keep them on site? Not to mention that was a hell of a lot of lions, I had to fight at least a dozen of them. Did they somehow manage to capture a couple of prides’ worth of lions? Or were these breeding stock?)

Found out soon enough that a bunch of the menagerie staff had been killed in the outbreak–though I found one living caretaker, Elise Mallon, a Breton who was a junior staffer at the place. And, apparently, an undercover spy for the Queen. She confessed to poisoning the feed and pissing off the animals, but her plan had gotten out of her control. Because she was really there to investigate strange disappearances of a lot of the animals, into a locked-off section of the grounds.

And this was spearheaded by Conservator Vinelore, who was the actual villain of this plot. She was conducting experiments on animals, trying to convert indriks into her “immortal Aedric avengers” to be predators on all the non-Altmer races. Yikes.

Took her out without a qualm, and resolved things with Talomar and Elise, leaving Talomar with his beloved Lotus to take over the menagerie and make it a nature preserve.

(Hopefully he’ll get in additional help to round up all those lions.)

Hunting for time breach portals, and visiting geysers

Paul and I got a bit out of sync finding the portals on Summerset to resolve that quest for the Psijics. We discovered that if we weren’t together when either of us got a clue to trigger the Augur of the Obscure, finding the related breach wouldn’t count for both of us even if we were grouped. So we had to re-find a couple of the ones Paul had already, so I could get credit for them.

While hunting for those portals, we wound up actually also visiting a couple of the geysers! Which was big exciting fun. We got to the first one fast enough that we were able to participate in the kill of the big bad, and I got some excellent event loot out of that.

We didn’t get to the second one quite in time though. Paul got in on that kill but I was too late.

Quite fun though and we will have to arrange to do the rest of those properly.

Lauriel’s Lament quest

Next big stop we did was at the Direnni Acropolis, a large and spooky haunted estate. Paul and I were both solidly down for some haunted estate action, and I in particular knew I’d be getting Fighters Guild credit for fighting undead. So we jumped into this one happily.

However, as we proceeded, we learned that the main force haunting the place was a bound spirit. Who seemed innocent… at first. We eventually discovered evidence that in life, Lauriel had taken up necromancy. And had been bound, buried alive, into the acropolis. By her own sister. Yikes.

For a good part of the quest I think Paul and I both wanted to think the best of the ghostly Lauriel, even though we were having warning bells go off in how creepy she was being, and how various other ghosts kept trying to warn us about her. At the end of it, we were presented with the choice of lighting braziers to keep her bound in the crypt, or burning her body to set her free.

We chose the option of burning her body… only to have her chortle about having so “much to do”, and that wasn’t the slightest bit ominous or anything.

And when we made it back out of the crypt and reported to the nearby bailiff of the Divine Prosecution what had transpired, he immediately chastised us for releasing an evil spirit. He still gave us the quest reward, though, so… yay?

And there was also an epilogue, a couple lines exchanged by guards, about spotting something headed towards the island of Balfiera. Where, y’all may recall, Paul and I started the game in the tutorial, and where Norianwe had in fact identified herself to us as a member of Clan Direnni.

Um. Yeah. Oops.

Sorry about that, Norianwe! If you need me to come over there and put Lauriel back to rest, you can reach me at the Golden Gryphon Inn in Alinor on Summerset!

Manor of Masques quest

Last but not least, I did a solo run of a side quest in Rellenthil, where I agreed to help an upset woman looking for her wayward brother–so that she could try to talk him out of signing on with the local acting troupe, and in her opinion therefore throwing his life away when the two of them had both been accepted to the College of Sapiarchs.

This was a significantly lighter-hearted plot than the previous one, to be sure. But not without its depths, as I had to navigate my way through the rituals of the House of Reveries, as well as the drama and backstory between the two siblings.

And I was legit surprised about the character Alchemy turning out to be the missing brother. Especially given that Alchemy presents very clearly as female during this plot, and even sounds like a woman. Which raises a bunch of real interesting questions about what level of genderfluidity Alchemy’s got here. This is not a question the plot gets into. But we have a young man rejecting a life that would have made him a mage, and instead now is not only an actor, but also presenting to the public with a female identity. Real hard to read that as anything but Alchemy being genderfluid at the very least, or possibly non-binary, or even trans.

From what I see on the wiki, this is not the last I’ll be seeing of Alchemy, either. Awesome. <3

Next time

Paul and I actually ventured off Summerset for the first time, so as to run the current ESO event quest–and had a passing encounter with a mysterious Hooded Figure as we did!

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/24/2023: Restored missing gallery.