In Which Kendeshel Returns a Horn, Saves a Tree, and Adopts a Daughter

This is a three-session post, since a bunch of this action was my doing some followup with Project AHO stuff–but only because I wanted to find a certain character from that plot and get him stolen stuff. But I also saw another notable NPC from this plot back out in the world, and that has, shall we say, implications.

So some minor spoilers here for post-end of the Project AHO plot.

The rest of this action is me also getting in some standard early Skyrim playthrough stuff that I usually have done by now in a typical playthrough, but which have been postponed due to major mod action! Namely: finally returning the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, running the Mind of Madness quest to get the Wabbajack, running The Blessings of Nature to fix the Gildergreen, and last but not least, adopting Lucia in Whiterun.

Play by play

Play dates: 9/25-9/27/2023
Session numbers in this run: 11-13

Monday the 25th

Picked up again at the museum
Did some investigating of how the controls on the Dev Aveza work, but didn’t try to actually use it to go anywhere yet
Instead, fast traveled back to Sadrith Kegran
Went back down into Bkhalzarf to try to find that typewriter in the library
Also hit the repository while I was down there and spent the code I got from the Amusing Mudcrab
Looted all the vaults that opened up, then hit the library
A Prowler showed up while we were in there, so Lydia and Meeks and I took it out
Nothing else attacked us though and I made off with a bunch of books for the museum
Also found the typewriter and used a lot of the cubes to make spellbooks, including flame and frost atronach; did not however have enough soul gems on me to make Conjure Dremora Lord
Filled out a lot of my spells repertoire nonetheless
After that, finally found Ra’zhirra; he was attending Consul Marisa in the council hall
Took him aside and threw money at him until he offered to buy stolen things off of me
Got rid of all the stolen things in my inventory, though I bought all the soul gems back from him, i can use those!
Returned to the museum after that and did a bunch of inventory managing and crafting
Dropped a bunch of things in the sell chest
Got the display count up to 350 which triggered Auryen giving me Stendarr’s Hammer
Did another foray out into Solitude with the intent to sell some stuff I had duplicates of, after placing a bunch of things–and got a frost dragon :O
Took it out, and as near as I could tell it didn’t kill any named NPCs
Since Captain Aldis was at the front of the crowd gawking when the dragon went down, hit him up for info about Angeline’s daughter
Sold some stuff at Bits and Pieces, and bought all the Safehouse furnishing receipts off of her
Went into the Bards College again and finally got Malukah to agree to admit me, now that my Speech skill is high enough; got her initial quest to study the history books
After that decided to also run the Wabbajack quest
Talked to Erdi at the Blue Palace and convinced her to let me into the Pelagius wing
Got killed once trying to zap Pelagius’ nightmares
And saw again that Kendeshel’s hairstyle did not work with the standard Fine Hat you get in this quest
Returned to the museum to put the Wabbajack up and it took a slot in the Daedric display hall; Pelagius’ hip bone did not go up
Discovered I had to read the four receipts to get the furnishings set up correctly, so played with that
Did a bunch of crafting and inventory managing and putting a few more things on display: some clothing items from the AE, and the Ancient Dwemer Robes from Project AHO
Made two Aetherial Telvanni Bows since I needed one for display, but kept the other
Did a survey of the little armory room in the Safehouse and found a boatload of armor and weapons in there that had been sorted by my throwing the Stash spell around
Some of that was the chitin armor from Project AHO and that wound up on display too, along with some elven items
Also discovered I can now make Explorers Society armor, so tried that out!
Found a few more stolen items as I did inventory checks, including that some of the spell cubes were ones I’d nicked
Gave Snippy a bunch of soul gems to charge up, with the plan to use those to make higher tier spellbooks and spend those cubes
After a whole bunch of derping around, got the display count up to 371
Saved there until next time

Tuesday the 26th

Started off at museum
Did a bit of crafting and made the other pieces of Crimson Archer armor
Went out to Solitude to do some shopping; bought building materials from Beirand
Followed up with Angeline about her daughter
Boinged to Whiterun and bought building supplies at Warmaiden’s
Boinged to Lakeview and did some building to get the Main House structure up
Leveled up to 30 while working on building; took Stamina bump and first Sneak perk
Ran out of logs so had to go to Half-Moon Mill to buy some more
When I fast traveled in, got a dragon, a fire-breather; had trouble killing it though
Boethiah cultist showed up at the same time, and frostbite spiders, and honestly that was a little much! I got killed, and was thrown back to Lakeview
Boinged in for take two, and this time I was able to buy logs from Hern safely
Returned to Lakeview and got the Main House structure up, and a good number of the furnishings
Asked Rayya to be steward
Boinged off to High Hrothgar to turn in the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller
Hi, Greybeards! Yep, I sure am the Dragonborn! Sorry I’m late, some assholes in Eastmarch delayed me
Got Arngeir to give me a pointer to a Word of Power–which happened to be Dead Men’s Respite, so I’ll get to that soon enough
Boinged to Sadrith Kegran again, and hit the library to use up what stolen spell cubes I had
Nabbed a few books I saw on the tables for the museum library
Got more spells out of that, including Invisibility and Conjure Dremora Lord, fuck yes
Had a few too many spell cubes to match up with spells I didn’t already have
Left the ruin and on the way out, spammed my Muffle spell to try to get my Illusion stat up
Hit one pressure plate I apparently missed before and that triggered a sphere, but Lyds and I quickly killed it
Found Ra’zhirra and waited until he was off duty and willing to talk to me
Sold him most of the stolen things I had in my inventory–but only realized after I got back to the museum that I forgot to sell him the one stolen song cube, oops
Did more inventory managing, and saved at the museum until next time

Wednesday the 27th

Picked up in the museum
Went out on the balcony with intent to fast travel yet again to Sadrith Kegran
But a DRAGON showed up–so I had to take several shots at that thing from the balcony
It finally crashlanded in the courtyard of the Blue Palace
Threw Become Ethereal to jump down off the balcony without breaking my neck, then ran in and shot at the dragon until it died
Saw that it took out at least one guard, but saw no other obvious casualties
Finally boinged back to Slaverytown, and shucked more of the stuff I stole at Ra’zhirra
Sold him some amethysts, then deliberately bought them back to bump up his gold stock
But discovered I could not sell him the melody cube I’d swiped, dang
Went past Marisa on the way out and she asked if I needed anything in particular; no no no don’t mind me, I’m just slipping your slave his escape money
Went to go see what playing the Tonal Organ was like
Also stopped at the Amusing Mudcrab and bought the other two secret codes for the repository control panel
Looted all of the remaining sections of that chamber
Went into the section of the tower with the organ, and hit several chests I hadn’t hit before
Grabbed a boatload of Dwemer dishes to sell
Left the stolen cube in an empty chest, and then got out
After that, decided to try to finish up the Book of Wonders quest
Turned out the place I needed to be for the third thing to activate was right near Wayward Pass–and more specifically, Ironbind Barrow
So ran Ironbind for the first time in a while!
I think Kendeshel was sympathetic to Salma, not only because fellow Redguard, but also fellow treasure/relic hunter, which made her all that much crankier when Beem-Ja revealed his true colors
Took Beem-Ja out as well as Warlord Gathrik (twice, because Beems reanimated him)
Got the second word for Become Ethereal
Left Salma there to brood; sorry your Argonian friend was a murderous necromancer asshole, get home safe!
Got out and found the Dwemer bust I needed to activate to send the quest further along, and then had to return to Silent Moons Camp for the followup
Killed all the bandits, and after some searching, found the secret compartment with Mallus’ Codex–and figured out what it does! Awesome
Returned to Solitude for inventory and display managing and selling a crapton of things
Checked in at the Bards College and started in on the exams with Malukah
Got as far as the drum practicing
Bought a flute and a lute off of the headmaster, but he didn’t have a drum
Boinged to Hendraheim to see if I had a drum there; answer: no
But I did have a few books lying around marked as ones not on display yet, so nabbed those
Boinged to Lakeview to see if I had a drum there–and this took three tries, because bandits spawned by the house, and the bastards KEPT KILLING MEEKO, which was NOT THE SLIGHTEST BIT ACCEPTABLE
Third time through I ducked in the house fast enough that I was able to tell Meeks to stay there, then came back out and beat up on the bandits with impunity
Did a bit more building in the cellar, and realized I was out of goat horns
Boinged to Whiterun to buy supplies–and realized after I returned to Lakeview that I forgot to buy goat horns ;P
Boinged back and forth a couple of times taking care of that
Bought the child’s bedroom in Breezehome so I could adopt Lucia
Meanwhile, proceeded with the Eldergleam quest
Went out with Lydia to go get Nettlebane
Did this without any particular problem, and then boinged back to Whiterun
Came in late–AND GOT A FUCKING DRAGON, TWICE inside a city in the same session, YIKES?!
Finally killed the dragon on the steps of Jorrvaskr, and it did kill at least one guard
But at least it was also nighttime, so none of the citizens were out to speak of, so none of the vendors got fried
Ran back to Breezehome, let us assume Kendeshel made damn sure the kid she just took under her wing is okay, and then she got up in the morning to bring Nettlebane to Danica
While in there I spotted Rulnik Wind-Strider just standing around, oops
Talked to Danica, got the objective to go to the sanctuary, and cue Maurice butting in
Okay sure yes fine, you can come with
Went out with Maurice and Lydia and Snippy, after making sure Meeko was staying put at Breezehome
Killed a sabre cat and a couple of wolves en route, but no other significant encounters untilI got to Mixwater Mill, which I finally properly discovered for the map since I hadn’t before
And I saw that Orc bastard Shaglak again
He didn’t have any interesting dialogue options, so nothing I could do with him, BUT (see below)
From there, I went across the river on Heidrun, with Lydia and Snippy and Maurice
Reached and ran the Sanctuary with no problems
Got out again with the sapling and boinged back to Whiterun
And Lucia finally asked to adopt the dog, whew <3
So now Meeko is officially retired off camera and can stay safely at Breezehome with Lucia
From there, boinged back to Lakeview for a bit more building
Saved there until next time

Returning to Slaverytown but only because there’s useful shit in there

I made three return trips to Sadrith Kegran during these sessions, because I had some loose ends:

Finding Ra’zhirra and selling him all the stuff I’d stolen while running the Project AHO plot, since right now he’s my only option for a fence in the game
Finding the typewriter in the Great Hexagonal Library and making myself a crapton of spells, including the ones unique to the mod
Getting the rest of the loot out of the repository

Since I can’t apparently actually get Ra’zhirra or any of the other n’wahs out of Sadrith Kegran, I figured that at the very least, Kendeshel would make a point of handing all the stuff she’d stolen off to the Khajiit. Because he seemed like a very canny soul, and if selling that stuff to somebody else would get him enough coin to get the hell out of Slaverytown, she was on board with helping him out.

To be honest, I was tempted, extremely briefly, to just go ahead and buy Hla Fang, the player home available inside the town. I was at least mildly curious about what it looked like inside, and what useful items might be in there. And maybe I’d do a headcanon where I explicitly gave it to Ra’zhirra and any other n’wah he wanted to come live with him there.

But that would have required me to take Marisa’s dialogue option of “Do I have a place here?”

And fuck that. As I’ve noted, Kendeshel doesn’t want a place in House Telvanni in general or in Slaverytown in particular.

Instead, I finally found Ra’zhirra, took him aside, and threw money at him until he offered to buy stolen items off of me. And I’ll give the mod some props for this: I was legit amused by how Ra’zhirra chose to put this. He claimed he was simply a “lover of beauty”, and that if I had unsightly things I wanted removed, he’d pay me to make sure they were cleaned up. LOL. Very smooth and very Khajiit.

I got rid of stolen things with him three times across these sessions, only to discover later that a) I couldn’t sell him the one stolen melody cube, and b) even after three rounds of selling him things, I still had a lot of other stolen things.

I stole a lot of things in Sadrith Kegran, is what I’m saying here. 😆

One more thing I want to note about Ra’zhirra: I do also like that he explicitly doesn’t talk if he’s in range of Marisa. Which was a good character touch. If you ask him about how he managed to pull off avoiding having his tongue cut out, he throws a line that suggests he was originally supposed to be Shanath’s slave, and Shanath straight up forgot. So if this Khajiit managed to get lucky, it would stand to reason that he’d be very, very careful about who he talked to.

I’m assuming, therefore, that Kendeshel would only speak to him if she could confirm they weren’t in danger of being overheard. Or being seen exchanging any suspicious-looking items.

I imagine though that he must have been mildly bemused when I sold him a bunch of things I stole and then bought them right back off of him.

Ra’zhirra: “This one is confused. Why is muthsera buying back the same items she has just sold to Ra’zhirra?”

Me: “Consider it my donation to your Getting the Hell Out of Here Fund. Wanna sell me those soul gems a few more times? I have a few more thousand gold I can give you.”

Ra’zhirra: “Muthsera is very, very kind, and Ra’zhirra is happy to oblige her. Let us do a bit more business together.”

I was a little surprised, though, that I was unable to sell him the one melody cube I’d stolen. For whatever reason, I guess the mod didn’t want me selling that? Maybe it was missing a keyword or something? So I went okay fine and decided I’d at least go check out the Tonal Organ once to see what that was like, and see if it would spend the cube.

Answer: it did not spend the cube. And I wound up chucking it into a nearby chest. Because if I can’t actually sell it, I’m not seeing that it’ll be any further use to me at all in the game. Because while the Tonal Organ was kind of cool to play with once, I will not come back just to play around with it. It’s too damned difficult to get to. Maybe if the AHO had a version of the Tonal Organ on board I’d be more interested in hanging onto the song cubes, but it didn’t, so.

Looting the rest of the repository and doing a final loot check through Bkhalzarf in general, at least, turned out to be extremely profitable. And I found yet another Dwemer statuette, which kicked up all of my stats. Again. Which is still baffling even if it’s certainly nice? I didn’t see any obvious reason why those statuettes in particular should be bumping all of my stats.

Museum stuff

No plot for museum-specific action here. But I did pass the 350 mark in display count, which resulted in Auryen giving me Stendarr’s Hammer. So I put that on display too. Because as I discovered when he gave me the thing and I was suddenly dramatically overloaded, the thing weighs 100 of whatever Skyrim’s measure of weight is! 😮

Also, it drains Stamina off of the wielder when you hit with it. And since I’m not a two-handed weapons person regardless, this is a weapon in category Not Appealing to Anna.

Meanwhile, I bought the Safehouse furnishing receipts off of Sayma in Bits and Pieces, to try them out. I do not have all the most useful mods to take best advantage of this, such as custom follower mods that specifically let those followers consider the Safehouse their home. Or Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions, which would let you headquarter your family there. But I went ahead and bought all the furnishings anyway, just because I wanted to play with them and see what they looked like and did.

In particular I liked the greenhouse, since the greenhouse is enormous. And it came with a bunch of seedlings for you to fill out the place. I’ll have to plant more things there!

As I write this, I have only just found out that armory items cannot be placed on display manually. I saw what I thought was glitchy behavior, keeping me from manually placing elven items on the display for that. But now that I’ve checked the wiki, I’ve found that this is in fact expected behavior. Good to know. This, children, is why you read the wiki for a massive mod like Legacy!

(Source: the Notes section for the Elven Shield page on the LotD wiki.)

I discovered that I’d unlocked the ability to make Explorers Society armor, so naturally I had to try that out. And I was disappointed that I don’t actually like it much, at least on first glance. The pauldrons on it, even on the Light Armor version, are a bit too gaudy for my eye. I honestly like the Relic Hunter gear I started with better.

(Though I have since switched off to Crimson Archer anyway! Because it rocks on Kendeshel. I think I like it way better on her than I do on Elessir!)

Dragons all over the damn place, but specifically Whiterun and Solitude

In this set of sessions, I had three different occurrences of dragon attacks inside a walled city. This is highly atypical for my play history. I’ve had dragons periodically in Solitude before, but the last one I saw attacking in Whiterun was way the hell back in Alarrah’s playthrough.

So having this much in-city dragon fighting action has been a surprising trend! As of this writing, I’m about a dozen sessions in with Kendeshel, and so far I’ve had four different in-city dragon attacks with her, including the three documented here.

I don’t know if I’m just getting really lucky in this particular playthrough, if something about Kendeshel’s load order has doinked around with the dragon encounter chances, or what. I certainly have not seen this much in-city dragon action in Elessir’s and Finds-The-Way’s playthroughs.

And I’m very relieved that so far, no named NPCs appear to have been slain in these attacks. Hopefully that will continue to be the case. I’ll need to check the Halls of the Dead in both Solitude and Whiterun to confirm.

Bards College

Finally got Malukah to agree to sponsor me for entry into the Bards College, because now my Speech skill was high enough. I figure this was a direct side effect of Kendeshel getting her wrath on in Sadrith Kegran!

I’m up in the low 30’s now levels-wise in this run, but I want to run Bards College anyway. Because like I said before, the skill bumps are useful. And I’m re-visiting all kinds of things just in the name of filling out the museum!

Still, it’s kind of lollerskates that with an entire museum Safehouse to live in, I don’t actually need the bed in the Bards College dormitory.

Malukah: “And now that you’re a bard, you have a bed allocated to you in the dormitory on the lower floor. You can have the first one on the right.”

Me: “Thanks! Though I don’t actually need it, I do live right across the street at the museum. Have you been in there? We should totally compare the Bards College library stock with ours. If any of the students need to come over and study our materials, talk to me, I’ll totally work it out with Auryen.”

Getting the Wabbajack

In the first of these three sessions, I explicitly tried to do stuff in and around Solitude. I felt like Kendeshel was on some level very, very disinclined to leave Solitude unless she absolutely had to. Because she’d been through some shit.

So I decided to go after the Wabbajack. This time through I talked to Erdi to get access, since I haven’t run Potema yet with this alt.

And the main thing I want to note here is, after running this quest in Finds’ playthrough and being pleased by the German voice actor doing Sheogorath, I need to own up to not being fair to the English voice actor! Because I paid extra attention to his performance this time. And that thing where Sheogorath’s voice changes from manic and cheerful over to lower-pitched and ominous? The original voice actor does that too.

Awesome.

Once I had the Wabbajack, I took it back to the museum to get it on display. It did of course go into the hall where all the Daedric stuff is kept. And I was a little surprised to see that Pelagius’ hip bone did not go on display. This is apparently because that belongs in a chamber I have not opened up yet, from what I saw on the wiki. I’ll need to look into that.

The hip bone, along with other things categorized as “remains”, go into something called the Hall of Secrets–the primary purpose of which is to display stuff you have obtained unlawfully. If I want this opened up I’ll apparently need to do a side quest to activate it. I’ll need to think about that, since I do not plan to run either the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood with this character. So most of its reason for existing won’t actually apply here.

But I’m at least tempted to see what the quest to open up that hall is like, though.

Also, I’d seen signs of this already–but I saw again, when Kendeshel got zapped into the Fine Clothes outfit that this quest gives you, that the hairstyle I’d chosen for her in KS Hairdos completely frigging vanishes when I put a hat or an insufficiently large helmet on her. So this was the motivator for my finally deciding to switch out her hairstyle to a standard Skyrim one as soon as I could. I know there are ways you can in theory fix this, but I didn’t want to try to fuck around with them in an actively running playthrough.

Finishing the Book of Wonders quest

I didn’t know what to expect with the ending of this! I was a little surprised though that I had to go all the way back to Silent Moons Camp. And once I got there, I had issues with triangulating where the quest marker wanted me to be. I even searched out into the halls leading into the chamber where Mallus died, killing all the very surprised bandits, as I tried to see what I was missing.

And finally I realized: derp, the quest marker was pointing under me. So I found the hidden trigger to open up a hole in the floor, and that got me access to Mallus’ Codex.

Which turned out to be extremely useful indeed. Opportunity for random skill point for every 20 new locations I discover? Yes please! I’ll have some!

Adopting Lucia, and retiring Meeko

In the last of these three sessions, I started running into issues with being leveled up enough that now Meeko was going to be in significant danger from anything I was fighting. He caps out at level 25, and since I reached level 32 during these sessions, that meant there was now a growing gap between his level and mine. And opponents were leveling up with me.

As I had confirmed to my chagrin, trying to fast travel into Lakeview a few different times and having the poor doggo immediately killed by bandits.

This was not the slightest bit acceptable. So third time through, I finally got into the house fast enough that I was able to tell Meeks to stay put. And then ran back outside to hand the bandits their asses.

Me: “DIE, YOU DOG-SLAYING SONS OF SKEEVERS!”

Bandits: “Wait, what? What dog?”

Me: “THE GODS KNOW WHAT YOU DID!” <stab stabbity stab stab>

After this, I decided I’d better go ahead with the plan of adopting a kid, so that I could let the kid adopt the dog as a pet. Lucia was my best choice for this, since I don’t have Proudspire Manor in Solitude yet. And I am pretty sure that Lakeview is not going to be my primary headquarters at any point in this run, as it has historically been in my others.

So I bought the child’s bedroom in Breezehome!

Okay, kid, this, this right here, is where you now get to live. I’m going to be gone a lot, so you can have this entire house to yourself. I’m going to entrust you to watch over this place for me, okay? And also this dog! He’ll keep you company! Here’s a large pile of money to support yourself with, and if you run into any problems, you send word up to Dragonsreach, tell them the thane is taking care of you now, and ask the Jarl’s steward for help. Got it? Good kid!

That said, Lucia didn’t actually immediately ask to adopt the dog. So as I continued to do other things, for a while at least, I had to keep explicitly telling Meeko to park it in Breezehome.

At the end of Wednesday’s session, though, she did finally ask to adopt him. So yay! I was able to safely retire him, and also make sure Lucia had a companion in the house. At least until I find another kid I want to adopt, not to mention a spouse.

The Blessings of Nature quest

Running this quest again had no surprises directly related to the quest itself. But two things of note did happen while I was running it.

One: when I went into the temple to speak to Danica about bringing Nettlebane back for her, I also saw Rulnik Wind-Strider just standing around. I could not interact with him. Clearly he was in some kind of weird paused state until I proceed with his plot, and bring the Ironwood Soup back.

So I’ll assume for the moment that Kendeshel didn’t actually see that. ;D Or at the very least, if he was in the temple, he was actually lying ailing on one of the beds as he’s supposed to be, right now.

And two: while escorting Maurice to the Eldergleam Sanctuary, I went through Mixwater Mill again.

Where I saw Shaglak standing around again, in the same red robe he’d been wearing when he caught me in the first place.

At which point I went “oh for fuck’s sake”. Because what that told me was, not only did Project AHO give you no opportunity to free any of the other slaves in Sadrith Kegran, they are still trying to take slaves after the Dragonborn is gone.

But for Kendeshel’s story, I have to assume that she confronted him. So for the second time, Project AHO has actually inspired me to write fic, LOL. And even though the game gives me no way to do this, I’m going to assume that Auryen handed Kendeshel some emergency gold and very strongly encouraged her to use it to hire herself additional protection if she had to go through Eastmarch for any reason whatsoever.

I’m further going to assume that Kendeshel took this gold and hired herself three of the Companions to guard her, Lydia, and Maurice as they set out for the Eldergleam.

Which sets the scene for how her conversation with Shaglak went.

I’m granting Shaglak an ending that lets him actually get out from under the thumb of Marisa Verendas, just on the grounds that he is the only character in all of Sadrith Kegran that shows any remorse whatsoever about the town’s slavery practices. Even if he only shows it after he gets falling down drunk with the Dragonborn. This guy needs to be very, very far away from that town, and probably also needs a crapton of therapy to boot.

This also gives me a hook to have Kendeshel join the Companions, and possibly also sign up to fight for the Empire. Because yeah, she has huge motivation at this point to not let any slaver bastards ever take her by surprise again.

This will also push her to the College of Winterhold. I figure this will tie in to how she actually delved back down into Bkhalzarf on her own, because she knew there were secrets down there, so she was determined to take advantage of them in any way she could. And she knows she needs to sharpen her magic. So once she found out about that machine in the Great Hexagonal Library that makes spellbooks, she made every single spellbook she could and will be working very hard to bolster her power to be able to cast them.

Next time

My next post will have more Legacy of the Dragonborn plot, as the quest Shadows of One’s Past kicks in, and I get to find out some backstory on the museum’s head guard.