Rant of mine, written late at night, with some really big spoilers for a Dark Brotherhood quest. I really, really do not advice reading this unless you're done with... the fifth note, as it was by far the most enjoyable quest I've done so far. I apologize for any potential lack of consistency and weird grammar, but I'm really tired right now. Highlight to read.
Recently, I was sent off on a quest to assassinate five members of the same family heritage. As usual, I never questioned my superiors with any "whys" when they gave me direct orders. I was just an efficient tool guided by their mischievous minds.
At first, I visited an old lady (a member of the family), who mistook me for someone else who would supposedly help her run errands. The old lady handed me a shopping list, expecting me to be nice enough to deliver gifts to everyone in her family. With a smile on her face, she paid me 100 gold to set everything up for her. Indeed I would carry her wish out, and I started off by delivering a poisoned arrow into the front of her skull. Her dog apparently found my action offensive, so I had to put it down too.
The first name on the list led me to a dark cave, guarded by Timber Wolves. Deep inside the cave, I found a girl who slept on a bedroll, guarded by an additional army of Timber Wolves. She looked like she was in her mid 20's, pretty girl. Let's just say the CSI's of Oblivion will have a hard time identifying her using dental records, should they ever find her.
It didn't take me long to find the girl's sister, who looked like she was roughly the same age. The big difference was that she was wearing a rather heavy-looking armor with an even heavier-looking sword complementing it. She was employed as a city guard, until I riddled her chest and arms full of steel arrows. Of course, mutilating a city guard in public is by most people considered to be... legally inappropriate, so I got a 1000 gold bounty on my head, and had aggravated city guards coming my way. I suppose my little act of having confronted my target beforehand to sadistically threaten her life, may have had something to do with the bounty. She managed to cry out for help, so I suppose the guards wanted to heroically save her life. Unfortunately for the girl, I won the trials of speed, and had officially become an infamous villain as of now.
After the sword-loving city guards had chased me out of the city, I hurled myself into a nearby river to lose my followers. Halfway across the river, I spotted a bowman in the distance, firing projectiles at an even more distant, moving target. As an Assassin proficient in the art of "Running Really Fast", I tracked the bowman down, who turned out to be another city guard on the loose. The target in question was a deer fleeing for its life. The guard apparently did not even care (or did not know) that I was an escaping murderer, so I joined up on the city guard's side in a fairly lengthy chase for deer meat.
After the deer was slain, I stood back and watched the city guard approach the dead deer suspiciously with his bow firmly gripped. He eventually looted the corpse for meat. Seconds after, he must have gotten second thoughts about his choice of hunting partner, as he ran up to me and angrily shouted that I had violated the law and would have to pay the fine of 1000 gold or be sent to prison. I blatantly refused, and killed him where he stood. I looted the deer meat from the guard's corpse, crushed it in my mortar along with some spices and had it magically turn into a potion of moderate power. At least my bounty had not been increased from my latest murder of a city guard, as there were no witnesses this time.
Next up on the list was a family member who spent his days at a secluded inn in the forest. A guard waited at the counter, but I managed to evade him as I snuck up toward the room of my victim. Apparently my stealthiness had failed yet again, as my target screamed for help the very instant I opened his door. The previously seen armor-clad guard rushed to my location with heavy footsteps, which eventually resulted in another dead target and a slain guard who provided a new, shiny armor for my collection. Unfortunately my bounty had gone up to over 2000 gold as a direct result of this, which was at the time more than I was carrying around. No turning back now; would I be apprehended again, I would either be sent off to jail for perhaps many years, or I would have to run away from the fairly skilled guards well capable of dealing with me if in greater numbers than one.
My final target was located in the Imperial capital city, home of, you guessed it, city guards. I was shorly after my arrival cornered by four guards who charged at me all at once. They covered the entire width of the road I walked, and I had no desire to be arrested again. To my left and right were walls preventing me to escape, but I knew I would have to get past the guards somehow. A wide staircase elevated the road a bit, which turned out to solve my problem. I climbed the staircase, waited a moment for the guards to start climbing it as well, and then I ran toward the guards and jumped over their heads. The staircase had given me the little extra elevation I needed to acrobatically get past them. A swift escape followed, and I managed to get into the house of my target. Unfortunately I did not know whether the target of my mission resided in the basement or on the upper floor of the building. A guard followed me inside, so I decided to run upstairs, hoping that it was the right choice of paths. My luck really wasn't with me on that day.
The upper floor was the home of a pissed off mage, perchance a necromancer, with a body guard. The mage started casting very destructive attack spells upon me, just before not one, but THREE of the city guards appeared on the floor I had just entered. With the mage almost killing me with a single spell and the three guards ready to hack and slash me into tiny dices of meat, I surrendered to them and was sent to the prison of the Empire as I could not pay my hefty fine.
Of course, in Oblivion, you get to sneak a single lockpick with you into your prison cell (don't ask me where it's kept). I had no intentions to do my time, so I swiftly broke out of my cell. On my way out, I spotted a guard slowly striding toward me, and the narrow prison corridors would not easily let me escape from his watching eyes. I really did not want to be seen; clearly an escaped prisoner who has had all equipment but a single lockpick confiscated would have a hard time combating a heavily armed prison guard. I jetted toward a nearby cell, which was locked, so I used the lockpick to break into the cell, and closed the bar-covered door behind me. Amazingly, the guard walked right past me, toward my original cell. He stopped at the end of the long corridor where my cell was located, but did not seem to find it alarming that I was missing from my cell. I sauntered over to the bedroll in the new cell of my choosing and decided to nap for a few hours; not because I was tired, but because the guard scared the crap out of me. Maybe hiding inside the bedroll for a few hours would make me invisible?
When I woke up, the guard was gone. I guess Sithis had made my unholy wish of invisibility come to pass. I opened up the unlocked cell door, and silently snuck toward the exit. Unfortunately, another guard spotted me on my route to freedom, and alarmed others of my escape. I swiftly grabbed my confiscated equipment from a nearby chest and threw myself down into the prison sewers, eventually finding my way out of the city with no-one or nothing following me but a fetid gift from the sewage water I strode through. I had eluded death or possibly years of imprisonment, but did not want to rest or rejoice until my real task was complete. I needed to get into the basement of my target's home.
The second attempt was initially fairly similar to my first. Guards chased me as I ran across the city streets, and civilians quickly evaded me like the plague. Inside the house, I entered the basement, a cramped wine storage facility, to find the final target of my contract. Two of the guards almost instantly followed me downstairs. The target, Matthias, had a body guard just like the mage two floors above, which summed the fight up to a total of four heavily armed melee fighters attacking me simultaneously. Matthias was the ONLY one I desired to kill so my bounty would not go up any higher, so no area damage attacks seemed particularly tempting. But it got worse.
After a while of having jumped around, having tried to slash the right person with a magically enhanced dagger, an additional three guards suddenly entered the basement. Initially, the three newcomers bolted arrows at me, but shortly after changed their minds and lunged at me with their blades drawn instead. SEVEN melee fighters versus one assassin in a very cramped space was not quite what I was designed for. After getting the painful sensation of sharp steel cutting through my flesh an innumerable amount of times, along with the bitter taste of half an army's worth of healing potions poured down my throat, I managed to liquidate Matthias with many steel arrows directed into his thick armor. His body guard must not have been very pleased when I escaped the scene, barely alive but pumped with adrenaline and a large grin on my face.
My reward for the assassinations was rather pleasing, but I was still around 500 gold short from paying my bounty of some 2400 gold. To be able to walk the streets of the cities again like a free person was one of my main goals, so I took another contract. This one appeared a lot easier, as it only involved the murder of one person; a "master of unarmed combat". Finding his location was not very hard, a house inside one of the large cities, but the guards still hunted me even though it was late at night. Inside the house, I found my target: a Khajiit with a large, catlike face and a bare-chested, muscular, human body, sleeping on a bedroll in his training room. Sandbags were suspended from the ceiling, so I figured they could possibly be nice to hide behind, should I be unsuccessful in instantly killing him as he slept on his bed.
The pestering guards would, as expected, not leave me alone, and the Khajiit woke up in the tumult as two of them entered the room. The exact reason why he awoke is unclear; maybe the guards sounded like they inflicted minor earthquakes on the wood plank floor of the room with their heavy metallic boots? Either way, the Khajiit amazingly decided to attack the city guards, killing both of them off after a fairly short while of fighting. It was fairly impressive of him to to punch two heavily armored guards so hard with his hands that they died after only a few blows. Even more amazingly, he went right back to sleep after he was done killing them both, even though he most certainly spotted me, the assassin set out to kill him, right next to him. He even knew I was there to try to end his life. Confident bastard.
I woke the Khajiit up as he returned to his sweet dreams after his killings, which resulted in him giving me a vexed remark about the fact that I was in his room. I threatened his life with a catchy, sadistic phrase pertaining to the will of the Dark Brotherhood, which apparently only pissed him off moderately. Moments after, he delivered a hit so hard with his fists that I flew across the entire room, having my head bang into the wooden wall.
Other than his initial, impressive demonstration of physical prowess, the Khajiit turned out not to be very strategic, and kept running straight at me to attempt to punch me in the face. While the fight was lengthy, I could fairly easily evade his brutish attacks and riddle his body full of around 30 arrows before he fell lifelessly to the ground. I was rewarded 500 gold for the fight, and paid off my bounty shortly after. And so, I can once more walk the lands like a free assassin.  |
 "Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram
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