A Dunce in Morrowind, vol. 4

A Dunce in Morrowind, v4

by Frolja Silver-Blood

A few days ago, I was told that the Dejasyte were, barring Red Mountain, the worst place in Morrowind. This was clearly true, I thought to myself, my cloth shoes having already been eaten through by chlorine and spiky salt crystals. Also, I may have been dying at the time. Remyn seemed little better. It was hard to see, what with all the toxic fumes that were killing us. We had no directions whatsoever, and we had been walking for a while. Occasionally, we saw these guars--tiger striped ones--but they ignored us.

"Hey, Remyn," I said. "Can't you Divinely Intervene us out of here?"

"I am no mage," he said. "If we had somewhere to rest, I could recover my own magic a bit, but I learned some spells off a former mistress of mine who happened to be an apprentice in the Mages Guild, and didn't pay very much attention."

"Mistress, eh?"

"Yes. It was easier than working out the problems with my wife."

"Marriage problems, eh?"

"Yes, I know," he said. "Anyway, I am no magician. Magicka takes time to recover, or something. I don't really understand it myself. It has something to do with... daedrons? Daedra? I don't know. I don't know anything. I think I'm dying."

"Me too," I said. "That woman in the Mages Guild. Was she a witch?"

"I hope so. That way it will be legal to kill her in revenge," he said. "If we can find somewhere to stay, even a road we can follow, I can try to talk the Dres into letting you stay in a tavern with me, and then Divine Intervene our way out tomorrow... unless we end up in the lizard lands."

"The Marsh?"

"Well, we're in a very southern part of Morrowind. I don't know what part of the Deshaan we're in. It's a real risk that the closest Imperial shrine is in some no-name Whatevermoth Fort at the Argonian border."

"Hm. What's so bad about that?"

"The Marsh is equally as hostile as the plains: maybe more. Plus, the Argonians probably won't be thrilled to see me. They'd probably think I'm a Dres slavehunter."

"Ha! Amazing to think that only a few centuries ago, all our peoples were allies, don't you think?"

"I think you are making things up again."

"No, I definitely remember. We were in Ebonheart or something."

"Not to be rude, sera, but our people have literallly always been at war over something or other."

"That's not true at all! What about that one time, with that blue man. Who was he? He hated Tamriel."

"Blue man."

"He had those things. You know the ones. Didn't like Tamriel much. Or maybe the thing was that he really did like Tamriel too much. Ha! Makes you think."

"Please stop. This talking is probably wasting some of the few bits of breathable air we have left."

After stumbling around for a while, we eventually passed out on top of what turned out to be a sleeping Zoar, which must have walked along quite a way, because when we woke up, there was an elf covered in Zoar hide staring at us.

"Here." He turned to Remyn and gave him a potion. "This should heal your condition."

Remyn managed to drink it. I tried to squeak any noise out at him that would get his attention. He didn't respond.

Remyn, after about half a minute, was looking much better. "Could I have another one?"

"Not if it's for the Nord, no," the elf said.

"500 gold."

"Done." They traded, and Remyn handed me a potion. I stood up after bit, feeling healthy again.

"You wouldn't happen to have one of those restore-your-magic potions, would you?" I said.

"Do I have to talk to him?" the elf said.

"No," Remyn said. "But I could use that kind of potion."

"Well. I don't have one," he said. He was holding something weird, that looked like a stomach with the throat still attached to it.

"What's that you got there?" I said.

"Do not talk," he said to me. "I am willing to help you get to Ald Horak with me," he said to Remyn. "If the Nord is going to come with us, he has to be unconscious."

Without hesitating, Remyn knocked me out. When I woke up, I was in jail again. I went straight to the bars. "Oi! Hey! Let me out!"

The guard ignored me.

"I know you can hear me, elf! Let me out!"

"No."

"Come on! I didn't do anything! I was unconscious!"

"I'm sure you did something. That's why you were unconscious."

I paused. "Remyn Sadrethi! Talk to Remyn! He'll sort this out!"

"Maybe. I hope not," the guard said.

"Hey, listen here! You can't just hold someone in jail for committing no crime!"

"I'm sure you committed some crime. I'm sure you saw some Dunmer woman, thought she was a witch who stole your special axe and clothes, and then you probably killed her."

"It wasn't a witch!"

"A confession?"

"I didn't kill anyone!"

"I see. Then you are pathetic, because you couldn't even kill an unarmed Dunmer woman who wasn't a witch. This is even worse."

"You're not being very fair, you know!"

"Good. Outlanders do not deserve fairness. What they deserve is--" He then spoke for at least four hours about all the evils of outlanders, the Empire, the Imperial Cult (he hated Zenithar and Dibella in particular, and would not shut up about Imperial depictions of Dibella drawing her breasts too small), Skyrim, the Marsh, the Hlaalu, the Dark Brotherhood, the idea of horseshoes ("Why, outlander, do your animals wear shoes? Why are you so stupid and inferior? We did nothing to deserve being on the same plane as you. Why must we put up with your idiocy?"), his mother, Argonian slaves who keep dying before they can finish their job in the plantations, and then transitioned into his sister's upcoming wedding, how he hated his future brother in law and his family, and after at least two more hours of ranting, transitioned back to how poorly endowed he assumed Tiber Septim must have been. Eventually, he spoke so much that he passed out, and realizing that the door was unlocked, I stepped out, where I immediately ran into Remyn.

"There you are," he said. "...you didn't hurt that guard, did you?"

"No," I said.

Remyn stared at me for a moment, then at the guard, then back at me. "You're probably right. Come on. We have a place to stay here, so we'll just sleep the night, and then we can Divine Intervene ourselves out of here, and hopefully end up at Narsis or somewhere."

I was thoughtful for a moment, for no reason whatsoever. "Say, Remyn," I said. "How did I end up in jail?"

"I don't know how you end up anywhere."

"Yes, but, weren't you with me and the clothy elf the whole time?"

"The what?"

"Clothy."

"I think you mean the trader. Animal hide is not clo-" A look of defeat passed over my companion's face, for some reason. "Forget it. No, I left when we got into town because I was still hungover and had almost died, so I just plain forgot."

"I see," I said. "Well, come on. Before they find some other excuse to arrest me."

Right after that, a guard came up and arrested me. "Halt, outlander. You're under arrest," he said, arresting me.

"Again?" I said. A striped guar came from behind him and gently placed my arm in its mouth, to restrain me.

"Ah, so you have been arrested before. Now I know that I was correct to arrest you," the guard said.

"You mean you arrested this man without any evidence of a crime being committed," Remyn said, skeptically.

"That is exactly how a salt-brained Hlaalu would see things. There is clear evidence of a crime being committed, because he is a Nord."

"I see," Remyn said, "but is that worth the cost?"

"You are typical for your greedy house. How could there be a 'cost' to doing my duty?" the guard said.

Suddenly, I noticed there were some very strange things being carried around by this guard. All sorts of oddly-shapped whatsits were strapped onto his inferior, non-steel armour by weird, belt-like things. Being an educated noble, my curiosity about the weirdness overcame my outrage at being arrested.

"...what's that you got there?" I asked him.

He looked at me as though I'd urinated on his mother. "That, outlander, is a beetle water pack."

"Beetle?"

"Salt Beetles. We remove the trunk, throat and stomach intact, and we use it to collect water ready-filtered. You can whack out most of the poison from the trunk, and then it's ready to drink."

"Why would you want to drink out of a bug's stomach?"

"The alternative is dying of thirst," he said. "Any more stupid questions?"

I paused. "What's with all them belts?"

"Because, outlander, if you're caught in a salt storm, the last thing you want is getting poisoned salt all over your skin and inside your clothes. You have to keep the Zoarskin buckled tight to keep the salt from getting underneath," he said. "Can we stop talking now?"

"Well, hang on a sec. You're wearing some sort of high platform boots so that you can keep most of it out of the chlorine, right?"

"Yes."

"Why's your guar barefoot?"

"Guar don't wear shoes, outlander."

"Horses wear shoes."

"I don't know what a horse is, but only an outlander would be foolish enough to make shoes for animals."

"Ah, but that's where you're wrong! You see, back in Old Run, I remember-" My sentence was cut off by the guard attempting to strike me so hard with his blunt weapon that I would be knocked unconscious. However, with the effects of that healing potion still miraculously active, I felt only a tickle. "Well, that's quite rude to interrupt! As I was saying -"

"I order you to stop talking, outlander. I consider it assault."

"Ah, but I don't consider it assault at all! And as I was saying, back in the Old Run, you see, they had these crabs. And they lived in the crabs, right? So you see, in a way, the ground is the crab's -" The guard made two clicking noises, and the guar released my arm.

"These last few minutes have been so excruciating that this qualifies as the singlemost worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone in any circumstances. Please do me a favor and die, but do it somewhere else." The guard then pulled out a scroll from his guar's pack, and casted one of those Divine Intervention spells at us, and so again we disappeared across Morrowind in a flash of light.

****

Publisher's Note

Due to a wellspring of support and consideration, the Sheezing Horker Historical Society has decided to publish the rest of Ferana Andrethi's "Dunce in Morrowind", helped along by a surprising number of would-be-writers.

It is the opinion of Frolja Silver-Blood and her editing partners that we have compiled an accurate account of the hostile Dejasyte. While it may be closed off for serious scholastic work, the odd sailors, who moved westwards from Tear or Ald Horak and ended up in Winterhold, painted a picture of the Dejastye that we deemed good enough.

It should be no surprise that the guard character exists in reality, reportedly with the exact same attitude. The actual "crime" the Dunce was not-quite-accused-of would have been entering Ald Horak as an outlander. Not merely a port of trade, Ald Horak has strict limits on who may or may not enter.