"No; crazy people," Alanya panted, plopping down on Caius's bed and trying to catch her breath.
"Most people are crazy," Caius grinned, drawing upon homespun wisdom. "Hysteria is a common first reaction to this understanding ..."
"That's not what I mean!" Alanya snarled, making Caius shut up. "I mean there's actual crazy people calling me by name when I've never met them before and making all sorts of crazy talk and ... and ..."
Caius looked at Alanya with disguised worry; he hadn't pegged her before as being a nutcase ... "All right, relax; now, tell me, what happened ..."
"I just did!" Alanya flared.
"Tell me again - from the beginning," Caius said soothingly. "Slowly, one detail at a time."
Alanya glowered, but said " ... I had just delivered Hasphat's puzzle box to him and recieved his notes on the Sixth House. I was coming to delvier them to you when people in the street - people I've seen but not talked to before - started coming up to me, their eyes all glassy and wild. They called me by name and started chanting about the Sixth House and Dagoth Ur, asking why I denied Ur and ... and .. other stuff, I can't quite remember ..."
Caius forced himself to keep his frown off his face, putting forth a reassuring smile. In truth, Alanya's experience was a little creepy, but right now his immediate concern was for the mental stability of his Novice - his very important Novice.
"The Sixth House is actually something of a 'hot' topic right now, Alanya," Caius said with practiced smoothness. "Not many people know much about it at all, but it's becoming more known to the general public. So it's not totally impossible that these people are simply chanting some nonsense they dreamed up around some tiny factoid they heard about the Sixth House ..."
"But I don't know them!" Alanya insisted, though Caius heard anger edging out hysteria in her voice. A semi-positive sign, he ultimately decided.
"No, but don't forget you've become somewhat known here in Balmora," Caius pointed out. "Your taking out of those Tong members is still on peoples' lips, will be for a while actually. Not only that, but let's be honest - you dress distinctively. Not many people go for partial suits of armor if they can avoid it nowadays and fewer still go around barelegged and barefoot too ..."
Alanya gradually calmed down. "But ... their eyes ..."
"Pick a poison," Caius said dismissively. "There's a reason I play the skooma addict in Balmora; there's enough drug use in this town that one more glassy-eyed loon goes unremarked, even an Outlander like myself."
Alanya's expression gradually changed from hysteria to chagrin. " ... Doped up fools whipping themselves into some half-baked delusion ..." she said slowly, frowning.
"Most likely explanation," Caius assured her. "An unsettling expreince, I freely admit - but nothing out of the usual insanity that is civilized life.
Alanya groaned, hiding her face in her hands. "I feel like an utter idiot ..." she said, wondering when Caius was going to fire her.
"That's a good sign; recognition of one's lack of knowledge is the start of true learning," Caius said with a smile and a friendly pat on Alanya's armored shoulder. "Just try not to let this one incident throw you out of whack; there's a lot of insanity in this world and you'll be seeing a fair bit of it in the Emperor's service, I'm afraid."
Alanya felt relief; it didn't sound like Caius was going to fire her after all - though in the back of her mind, a part of her stubbornly insisted that Caius wasn't right on this. Caius, meanwhile, smiled as he saw Alanya's expression, and knew he had done it again; she wasn't the first Novice he had helped set straight ...
"Now then, let's look over Hasphat's note while you report to me on the details of your mission for him," Caius said ...
------
"Alanya!" Galbedir smiled, going over to give her favorite customer a hug. "Hmm, you here for business or just brightening up my day?"
Alanya hugged Galbedir back, suddenly very thankful to have made a more long-term relationship - she had had many lovers in her life but few had gone beyond one night affairs and friends after that. She snuggled into Galbedir's arms, sighing "Hi dear; business but not enchanting today, I'm afraid ..."
"Oh? Come for a cure for that cold?" Galbedir asked, smirking.
Alanya blinked. "What cold? I'm fine ..."
"Then why are you shivering?" Galbedir asked, frowning as Alanya herself blinked, finally realizing that she was still shaking, albiet not quite like a leaf.
" ... Um, would you believe me if I said some wierd people freaked me out?" Alanya said meekly, kicking herself for sounding so foolish right after.
Galbedir took Alanya's face in her hands and looked her in the eye. " ... Dearie, you're all shaken up - what did they say to you?" she asked, her voice hitting a rare maternal note.
Alanya realized then that, despite Caius's reassurances, she was in fact still rather disturbed by her encounter with the crazy people. " ... Nothing that made any sense ..." she said, sounding unsure. "Just ... managed to get under my skin; didn't realize even drugged-out fetchers would know me on the street ..."
"Hmph; that's what you get for showing the world your perfect legs and killing off Tong folk," Galbedir teased, patitng the outside of Alanya's thigh to emphesize her point. "Really Alanya, you should have expected something like this ..."
And Caius just finished telling me essentially the same thing, Alanya thought to herself, blushing again. Damnit, why am I letting this get to me like this ...
"Anyway, much as I'd love to keep you all to myself today, I have things to enchant and you said you had business," Galbedir said after a few more moments of holding Alanya close. "So, what do you need?"
" ... Is that Orc woman in today?" Alanya asked Galbedir.
"Sharn? Yeah, she's in, and is her grumpy old fart self as usual," Galbedir answered, frowning. "What do you want with her?"
Alanya smiled as soothingly as she could, trying to slip out of Galbedir's arms. "Just got some questions to ask her, about something that came up on my last adventure," she said, not wanting to go into detail about her secret agent life yet.
" ... All right," Galbedir said, hiding her disappointment; she had hoped Alanya would tell her what she wanted with the Orc magess, especially considering Sharn's not-so-secret special interests. "Be careful; I expect to see you when you're done with whatever adventure the sourpuss is bound to set for you."
Remembering Caius's casual remark about 'doing a silly errand' for Sharn gra-Muzgob, Alanya realized then how Caius got his information; she wondered how many silly errands she'd end up doing before the next raw recruit showed up ...
------
"So, my good friend Caius wishes to know more about the Nerevanine prophecies?" Sharn gra-Muzbog asked Alanya, grunting. "Well, I can write up my notes and references about the Nerevanine for Caius, in return for a small favor..."
"I understand," Alanya said, smiling her best polite smile and hoping the gold she had given Sharn compensated for her lack of formal knowledge of Orc ettiquete - if such a thing even existed. "What can I do for you?"
"Heh - I like you; you're more polite than the other people Caius sends for information," Sharn chuckled, which also sounded like a grunt. "Even if you do sleep with Wood Elves ..."
Alanya frowned slightly. "Um ..." she said, "Galbedir and I are ..."
"Young lady, when we heard Galbedir invited you over to her place to look over her s'ecret selection of scrolls', we all knew what was going on," Sharn grinned, her tusks gleaming. "Personally, I don't care, nor does anyone else - well, excpet maybe the Khaijiit cub that taunted Gally into letting a Flame Atronach run through the halls last week."
"..." Alanya suddenly felt more than a little embarrassed for Galbedir's sake. "Er, no one got hurt, right ...?"
"Of course not," Sharn grunted. "Ranis called up a Golden Saint to beat it down and clean up the mess. Which, I may add, is a perfect example of how the Guild around Morrowind operates; throw a bigger problem at a smaller one ..."
"Er, the favor?" Alanya asked, realizing how off-topic they were getting.
"Huh? Oh - I need the skull of Llevule Andrano, in the Andrano Ancestral Tomb," Sharn gra-Muzbog said. "Just south of Pelagiad, not that far. Don't let the locals hear about it though; the Dunmer get cranky about that sort of stuff ..."
"The Dunmer get cranky about necromancy in general, Sharn," said the Altmer woman passing by in languid tones. "As I'm sure you know ..."
Sharn bared her tusks. "Harmumph; it's for enchantment research, not necromancy," she insisted. "I am not a necromancer, as I have said a hundred times ..."
"A thousand," chimed in the Dunmer from acrosss the room, smirking.
"And counting," shouted the local Guild Guide from the other room.
Sharn looked ready to ecxplode, prompting Alanya to say " ... I'll do it," and turning to glare at the others, hissing "Lay off her, will you?"
"Oh, no harm meant ..." the Dunmer said. "If we were serious, you think I'd be joking about this?"
The Altmer sighed to herself, thankful that her Dunmer companion didn't know that Sharn really was into necromancy ...
"... Thank you," Sharn said stiffly, looking to Alanya. "Well then, you'll need a way to deal with ghosts ... oh; you've got an enchanted spear."
"I can handle ghosts," Alanya told Sharn - though she added It's Skeletons I'm worried about - oh why did this have to involve tombs ...
------
Now, at this point, Alanya was around level 15, give or take a couple of levels; furthermore, she had an enchanted fireball ring, had learned she could take out Atronachs and Dremora Lords if she was careful about it, and had built up her Sneak to a point where she could get in close almost all the time on most lower-leveled enemies. Not only that, but I knew from previous experience where the tomb was, and more or less what it entailed. I was, consequently, confident that Alanya would handle this quest as easily as the last.
So it came to pass that Alanya decided to take a sceneic route to Pelagiad, rather than take the silt strider back to Seyda Neen and head north on the well-defined road. There was lots of area to be explored, after all ^_^ And thus did Alanya find three places of note before finding her quest objective, and in each digression Alanya learned a very important lesson ...
The first place of note was a small mine south of Balmora, a little place with some raw ebony in it as well as some Flame Atronachs.
"Hey, I remember these from that Daedric shrine I took out last time," Alanya said to herself. "Nothing to worry about."
So Alanya started sneaking up on a Flame Atronach, and sadly for her, she got seen a little too early. And the Flame Atronach did what Flame Atronachs do - it spewed flame. And Alanya, who had been feeling pretty confident in herself, did what many adventurers do; she ran up to start smacking it.
When it went down, I the player was heard to remark " ... Wow, for two lousy fire spell attacks I sure took a lot of damage from that guy ..."
Healing up, Alanya continued looking around and found a second Flame Atronach, who also saw her before she could get up close and who also got off two flame spells on Alanya before dying. And again, Alanya realized with surprise that she was pretty badly hurt. And then the diseased and blighted rats started showing up ...
"I got careless ..." Alanya realized as she finished off the third rat, healed herself, and blinked as she felt how low her Magicka reserves were. "These things are tougher than I realized and I'm trying to act like a warrior in heavy armor, not a Ranger Huntress ..."
This is a lesson I would remember for a long time - and also re-learn several times. As tough as Alanya seemed to be to me, there were still things that could seriously hurt her; even now at level thirty, that still holds true, as I just learned while resting and getting ambushed by TWO Dark Brotherhood assassins and a diseased rat all at once - and at my level those DB guys use Daedric Wakazashis
As the second and third digression will show, however, both Alanya and I had some more learning to do ...
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