In Which Kendis Goes Fishing and Forges an Aetherium Crown

Super-short Kendis playthrough post for Skyrim, just to get this cleared out of my queue. Main action is advancing the Fishing quest line, and finding the Aetherium Forge with Katria’s ghost.

Play by play

• Play date: 7/11/2023
• Session number in this run: 69
• Picked up at Lakeview
• Went out to try some fishing since I had pending fish that needed catching
• And it was even raining! So I didn’t have to break out either Swims’ lucky fishing hat or the Ring of Kynareth
• Fished at the Guardian Stones, in Riverwood, and at the river by the crossroads, but only managed to nab the pearlfish I needed for Swims
• Fast traveled to Riften at that point to do more fishing there–all three places, since I’d actually discovered there’s also a fishing spot on the lower level of Riften, near the entrance to the Ratway
• Finally caught the pygmy sunfish
• Reported back to Viriya and got her next bounty, the one for taking out the crabs in Dawnstar
• Reported back to Swims to give him his fish and the hat, and got the Argonian fishing rod from him
• Shortly thereafter got the courier with Swims’ note about arctic fish
• Realized I was going to need the Alik’r fishing rod to get Mila her second goldfish, so fast traveled to Dawnstar to do the crab attack
• Got dragon when I came in! So had to take it out along with Rulnik and Gogh
• While the townsfolk were all HOLY CRAP SHE ATE ITS SOUL, rode around to the beach
• This time the crabs were NOT invisible ;D
• Took them all out and also snurched the dead mage’s journal
• Leveled up to 56; took Health bump and Apprentice Illusion perk
• Spotted Blood Dragon flying around nearby, and that dragon appeared to be attacking the unmarked bandit camp, so took out the dragon and the bandits
• Boinged back to Riften
• Read the mage’s journal and reported back to Viriya; got her to give me the Alik’r fishing rod
• Did more fishing around Riften but didn’t catch a goldfish
• Boinged to Tundra Homestead and slept there
• Then remembered the fishing spot near there is a stream, not a lake
• Boinged over to Fellglow Keep since the wiki said there was a goldfish spot there; keep had respawned so had to fight the exterior mages and the flame atronach
• Found the pond but it didn’t have a fishing spot
• It did have actual goldfish so I just jumped into the water and caught one, which resolved Mila’s quest
• Boinged back to Whiterun and gave her the goldfish
• She gave me her treasure note so I went and collected the stuff out of her chest that she offered me (gently! because not going to be cavalier with a kid’s offered treasures!)
• Boinged next to the College of Winterhold
• Got five rounds of training with Drevis in Illusion
• Sold him a bunch of my enchanted jewelry since that bumped up his gold stock
• Then headed off to the Alchemist’s Shack to get within range of Bthalft
• Took out a bear but also spotted a dragon’s shadow as it flew overhead; that appeared to be a flyby dragon, though
• Rode on over to Bthalft and took out bandits there
• HI KATRIA
• Ran the forge with her as per previous playthroughs
• RIP Katria, I will treasure this crown and kick your apprentice’s ass for you when I see him
• Got a bunch of loot as well; overloaded, so tromped slowly back out of there
• Mounted up and fast traveled back to Whiterun
• Made a bunch of dwarven ingots and sold all of them to Warmaiden’s, since i don’t have Dwarven smithing reactivated yet
• Sold other things as well to get the load down
• Boinged back to Lakeview and saved there until next time

Commentary

Nothing much to say here since all of the content here is stuff I’ve done before. I’m mostly just going ahead and doing this post to get it out of my queue! I have a lot of backlogged notes to turn into posts.

I did however learn two useful things as part of this session, both of which were related to fishing.

One: I had somehow failed to realize that Riften actually has three fishing spots, not two. There’s the one out back of the fishery, the one near the bottom of the back stairs out of Honeyside, and one down on the lower level of the city, not far from the entrance to the Ratway!

Which just goes to show that I really ought to pay better attention even in places I think I know well, because I still haven’t found all the potential fishing spots in this game yet.

And two: every time I’ve run Mila’s goldfish plot so far, it takes me forever to find her a goldfish. But now I know there are confirmed spawn points for them, where I can get goldfish without even having to fish for them. Awesome.

Next time

I’ve been paying a lot less attention to this playthrough lately, partly because ESO has taken most of my play cycles, but also because playing vanilla AE on the Switch is now less interesting to me than playing on the Deck.

But that said, I don’t want to bail completely on Kendis even though I now have two other playthroughs firing up. Kendis’s playthrough survived while Harrowhark’s imploded, and I’d like to see Kendis get her fair shot at Alduin!

So I do want to go ahead and run her through Dragonborn. But first I want to finish knocking down side quests still on her queue. Next session I play with her will probably be more of that.

Screenshots

Just the one screenshot this time.

Editing to add

• 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.