DAY 3

In true Nordic fashion, I have elected to get drunk before heading out to battle.  Having achieved this, the game then presented me with no combat whatsoever.

I started in... y'know, the starting village.  Not that one that burned down, the other one.  I continued on my quest to find Ord or whatever his name was.  The lumber guy.  Forget it, from now on all male NPCs will be Sven and all female NPCs will be Ulrika.  So I'm hunting for the guy when I find my old friend, Elf-Sven just chilling out after I revealed the bard's betrayal to him (you may recall the poison pen letter from last time?).

Clearly the poor boy was suffering from some elven brain malady.  I toyed with the idea of putting him out of his misery, but there were too many witnesses and besides, I don't do that any more.  Dragonbjorn's Fork of Truth will show him the way.

As I left this peaceful town in search of the inevitable tedium of Whiterun, a tooltip told me that I was meant to be slaying a dragon.  Alduin or something.  So that's good, now I know what I'm meant to be doing.  I became distracted from this noble quest once I noticed that upon killing a wolf, its body was full of gold.

Now this bothers me.  I can appreciate that a wolf would kill and eat an adventurer, they do that, but what troubles me was why the gold was in its carcass.  Maybe it had an eating disorder.  None of the other wolves were full of gold and I've killed a few today.

I plodded along slowly until I reached a farm.  And by slowly, I mean "within 45 seconds" because apparently the towns in Skyrim are at most 2 minutes walk apart which rather does bring up the question of why anyone needs to buy a horse.  I've been to America, sometimes they have several miles between their homes and the supermarket, so I'm sure Skyrim's residents can cope.  I saw some people attack a giant, so I drew my bow and hoped to cash in on some easy exp.  They killed it before I'd even let off a shot, then their leader told me off for not fighting it and told me to join their guild.  I don't remember the name of the group, but I'm going to refer to them as the Coalition of Barbarian Arseholes because I didn't much care for her tone.

I hope to join them soon.

I reached Whiterun and entered some houses looking for quests.  I found a book about an elegant dinner party and it taught me how to better shoot a bow.  So there's that.  I then went to someone's house, had a look around and after a few minutes was told to leave or they'd summon the guards.  Well, that was fair, it was kind of late and all but they shouldn't have left their door unlocked.  Within 5 seconds, they called for the guards.  I thought this was rather unfair.

I arrived at the home of Sven, the... Jarl?  Jarg?  The president of Whiterun.  A guard accosted me, saying I looked familiar, then allowed me to pay my own bounty.   I felt good about this.  I was walking away, feelings of guilt washed clean from my soul when he spoke some terrible, terrible words.  He was to confiscate my stolen goods.

THE FORK OF TRUTH HAS BEEN DESTROYED

Upon entering Sven's palatial house and without a moral compass in my inventory, I proceeded to loot anything that wasn't nailed down.  The Fork of Truth has now been replaced with the Lute of Avarice.  It will remind me to never, ever trust another human being in this terrible world.  Sven was nice.  He talked about dragons and gave me some armour.  Thanks!  He then took me to talk to a magician that was very interested in some meaningless rock I'd picked up in Dragonclaw Temple.  This man gave me nothing.  I will com for him later.  We talked about killing a dragon, which I apparently was some kind of authority on since I'd run from one once.  I then jumped off the roof and committed suicide.  On respawning, I stole some things from a child's bedroom while he watched.

Dragonbjorn, fate has dark plans for you.

 I finished by entering a temple or something and picked up a quest to save a tree.  I'm not sure why I'd be a good candidate for this, I don't think I've even heard of whatever tree-god they worship, but people are very nice when you offer to help them out here so why not?  I went to the smith, picked up a new sword, sharpened it and went out with a spring in my step.  My new blade will be named Stephanie (or Manbane.  Either or).

After walking for about 15 minutes, trying to jump up mountains, it became clear that I wasn't going to find this mother tree or whatever it was that I was to seek and I became disillusioned.  At this point, several ghosts appeared and started throwing frost at me.  I couldn't even hurt them with Stephanie, so they froze me to death and I ragequitted.

All in all, a rich, full day.

Thought for the day
Sprint is ALT?!  Who the hell even uses alt any more?!