Lost in Skyrim

by Daniel Story

The city gates are enormous and foreboding and I’ve walked through them a thousand times before without noticing how enormous and foreboding they are. I’m in Whiterun, the most-geographically centered city in Skyrim. I use it as my home base, although there’s not really any reason to — in order to get to another city, wherever it is in the world, I just open the map and click on the icon. This is called “fast travel” in the game. I can fast travel anywhere I want, anytime I want, as long as there are no enemies around. There are no enemies around.

My name is Umberto, and I’m a high elf. I have ferociously elongated features and a wild cloud of white hair — sort of like a cross between Albert Einstein and Aladdin’s Jafar. I’m level twenty-eight. I’ve spent most of the time it took to get to level twenty-eight making magical items. This is called “Enchanting” in the game, and my Enchanting skill is 100. I am literally the best Enchanter in the known world.

I got this way by mass-producing Iron Daggers of Turn Undead. This requires: 1 Iron Ingot, 1 Leather Strips (the game sometimes has a weird relationship with plurals), and 1 filled Soul Gem. It goes like this: I take the Iron Ingot and the Leather Strips to the Anvil and make an Iron Dagger, then I take the Iron Dagger and the filled Soul Gem to this little glowing table called the Arcane Enchanter, where I enchant the dagger with the Turn Undead power.

If I were then to take this dagger and strike a zombie or a skeleton with it, that zombie or skeleton would run away. But I never do. I choose this particular enchantment for no reason other than its value on the open market. I bring the Enchanted daggers right back to the blacksmith whose Anvil I was just using and sell them to her for 210 gold. I do this in batches of twenty or thirty. When I select the selling chain in the dialogue list, she says, “Looking to protect yourself, or deal some damage?”

She usually can’t afford to buy the whole set, so I sell the rest to her husband inside the shop. When I select the selling chain in the dialogue list, he says, “Looking to protect yourself, or deal some damage?”

Iron Ingots come from Iron Ore, which you hack out of Iron Ore Veins with a Pickaxe whenever you come across them. Iron Ore Veins are surprisingly plentiful. Leather Strips are made from Leather, which is made from animal skins. Usually, it’s the pelts of wolves and bears, because they attack me all the time whenever I’m just walking around outside. Soul Gems I mostly buy from wizards. To fill a soul gem, you cast the spell Soul Trap on something, and then you kill it.

I mostly ignore that while I became the best Enchanter in the world by killing a thousand beings and collecting their souls in little crystals.

Lydia waits beside me in some very foreboding (and, I would like to add, very well-Enchanted) armor. She is my Housecarl, which seems to be some cross between bodyguard and personal servant — basically, Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. She’s a bit impulsive, and tends to rush into combat and get hit by the lightning bolts I can shoot from my hands, but she doesn’t seem to mind that. In fairness, the armor I made for her is really good.

She’s been with me for quite a while now, rushing enemies and carrying my extra inventory. She has a room in my house, by default — smaller than mine, for sure, but it’s nice to have her there. “You lead, I follow,” she likes to say.

I open up the map to fast travel somewhere. It is covered with little icons representing other cities, caves, fortresses, crypts, farms, watermills — every place I’ve been to before. You can only fast travel to places you’ve already discovered on foot. If I’ve killed everything there is to kill in a certain location, it is marked “Cleared” on the map. Lots of places are not Cleared: Skyrim is really large. I have no idea which place I’d like to go to.

I open up the Journal, which tracks active quests. I could go to the Thalmor Embassy and try to con my way into a party to get some information on why dragons have suddenly returned. I could go to Dawnstar and check out a new museum that a courier brought me a letter about. I could go to this cave where I was told I could find a Word of Power (and, seriously, who wouldn’t want a Word of Power?).

Lydia doesn’t care where we go. She’ll go with me anywhere, and jump in the way of the bears and bandits we find there. I would appreciate her input, though, if she could give it, because I don’t really care where we go, either.

Skyrim is really about choices. Well, dragons and choices. They plop you down in a world full of dragons — and caves and butterflies and cities and people — and you get to choose what you’ll do from there. Choices have consequences, inside the game: kill someone in a city in broad daylight and the town guard will come after you. Some choices stack, and build on each other, like choices you make about your character. What will he or she be good at? How will he or she deal with all the zombies and bandits that are always attacking out of nowhere?

The game, in short, gives you the tools to write your own story, to carve whatever path you like through its mountainous, snowy terrain. Most of its features make sure your moment-by-moment choices are unconstrained: resources are plentiful, time is irrelevant (you can say you’ll meet Tolfdir in a few hours and instead meet him in three weeks), and there are people everywhere who want to give you something, little or big, to do. You can do that thing, or ignore them and come back later, or ignore them and not come back later. You can take the quest and sit on it for months; you can deliver those letters to her family whenever it fits in your schedule. You can fast travel.

Despite these little conveniences, Skyrim feels shockingly — almost troublingly — close to real life. I have to choose, moment-by-moment, what I’m going to do. Certain choices will make people hate me, and refuse to associate with me in the future. Certain choices will prepare me to handle future crises or obstacles; certain other choices will set me up for failure. Other people are happy to advise me (or involve me in their schemes) but the choices are mine to make.

And I find myself here, in front of the gates of Whiterun, over and over again, wishing for fewer choices. Wishing for someone to just tell me where to go. Real life gives me plenty of complex choices, plenty of opportunities to develop my skills, but with the benefit of actual significance and depth. Skyrim, in trying to be so close to life as to provide an engrossing escape, has come so close that it offers no escape at all.

I have slain, I think, fourteen dragons. The first time I slayed a dragon, at level six, I was cheered by nearby guards, then awarded the title Thane of Whiterun — which, according to Jarl Balgruuf, dude-in-charge of Whiterun, means that I’m effectively Derek Jeter. Everyone in the city will know of my honor and treat me accordingly. This turns out not to be true. The guards still hurl sarcasm (”Let me guess: somebody stole your sweetroll?”) as I walk by. No one buys me drinks in the tavern.

The next thirteen dragons brought nothing special. The individual experiences were designed well: the monsters appeared out of nowhere, often right as I came out of fast travel, with a swell of epic music that, even after I could Enchant my equipment so well that dragons stopped representing a threat, provided a real oh-shit moment. Then they swooped down screeching from the open skies and the viking choir crescendoed and we fought and I killed them and I collected their bones and scales and sold them for money. There’s a cool swooshy animation — kind of like the light trail screensaver on a Mac — when I kill a dragon and absorb its soul (totally different process than the soul gems mentioned above; don’t ask) but that stops feeling quite as exciting around the eighth or tenth time.

What I really want is some connection. I guess that first dragon sort of got my hopes up. I wasn’t just Thane, I was Thane of Whiterun. I had a place. I bought a house there. I belonged.

Which is not to say that normal folk all over Skyrim don’t recognize me as the historic-scale badass that I am. Everywhere I go, people spot my beacon-like potential, and literally run to me. They all want me in their organizations, they all think I can return to them their lost family heirloom or clear their silver mine of its spider infestation. And they’re right: I can. I’ve killed fourteen dragons. I’m Arch-mage of the Mages’ College at Winterhold. I’m the best Enchanter in the world.

Of course, if I say “No,” then the interaction is over. There’s nothing else they want to talk to me about. It’s like walking across an endless landscape of telemarketers.

So here I stand, in front of the giant gates of Whiterun, wondering to which telemarketer city I want to go. Or which telemarketer-given-quest I want to complete, before returning to its respective telemarketer. They’ll say something nice in the initial dialogue (“You’ve done a great service for me and my sister”) and give me some item or amount of gold that means nothing, and then they’ll forget about me.

Then I realize: the one person in this world who likes me for me, who stands by me even when I accidentally torch her while trying to torch giant flesh-eating insects in subterranean caverns, who’s never once asked me to retrieve any lost artifacts or clear out even a single undead horde, is right here, with me.

And I know where we have to go.

Riften is a dark, multi-tiered wooden city built in a swamp in the far southeast corner of the map. It’s run by the Black-Briar family (think The Sopranos) and the Thieves’ Guild, who mostly work for the Blackbriar family. Some guy invited me to join the Thieves’ Guild and told me what I’d need to do, but I’ve not gotten around to it.

Even during daylight hours the place is pretty bleak. As we walk through the city, we overhear some guy getting shaken down by a thug and ignore it — the same way we’ve ignored it every other time we’ve been here. This is the Crime City, so ending all of the crime would take at least one if not two substantial chains of quests, and I’m not in the mood for that (and I haven’t been at any time prior). So whatever it would require of me to help this poor sod would just be a drop in the bucket anyway.

Instead, we track up the dreary cobblestone street to an opening in the wall along the left that leads up to a grand wooden building, so out of place: the temple of Mara.

There are, depending on who you ask, eight or nine gods in the Skyrim pantheon. Even though the gods are demonstrably active in normal life (touching one of their shrines will instantly cure any disease, for example), all of their priests are portrayed as street preacher-esque kooks. Or at least over-eager youth pastors. Maramal, orange-robed priest of Mara, is no different. He wants to tell me all about the church of Mara. I let him.

The Church of Mara is the only institution in Skyrim that performs marriages. I ask him about them. It goes like this: when someone is interested in getting married, they put on an Amulet of Mara (which he can sell to me for 200 gold) to indicate that they want to get hitched. Just generally. It’s like a physical OKCupid profile. I buy an amulet, and put it on.

”Is that an amulet of Mara,” Lydia asks, when I speak to her. So coy. “I’m surprised someone like you isn’t spoken for.”

A new dialogue option has appeared in the list: “Interested in me, are you?”

Umberto. You smug bastard.

”Well yes, why wouldn’t I be?” she replies, voice laden with barely restrained passion. “Are you ... interested in me?”

The game gives me two options: “Yes, yes I am” or “No, I am not”. Lydia waits.

”Yes, yes I am.” A thousand times yes, Lydia.

”It’s settled then,” she says. So practical, so straightforward. “Brief as life can be in Skyrim, at least we’ll have each other.”

We announce our intentions to Maramol, who tells us that the wedding will happen tomorrow, from dawn to dusk. It’s 10:28 PM. I take Lydia across the street to the Bee and Barb inn, and rent a room for 10 gold coins, bringing the total price of the wedding (Amulet of Mara + night at the inn) to 210 gold coins: one Iron Dagger of Turn Undead.

Maybe it’s improper to have a room together the night before the wedding, but what the hell — we’ve been living together for months. We sleep until 5:47 AM (I’m not sure when dawn is, and I figure it’s better early than late). Lydia is already awake – and fully armored – when I wake up. I wonder if it’s bad luck for me to see her now in her wedding outfit. We go to the temple.

The ceremony is quick and charming. Lydia stands there in her dark armor, holding her shield, looking radiant. “A life alone is no life at all,” says Maramol. We come to the I-do's.

”I do, now and forever,” says Lydia, full of hope.

The game gives me two options: “I do, now and forever” or “Stop the wedding! I can’t go through with this”. Lydia looks at Umberto expectantly. I have a choice, but not really. “I do, now and forever.”

Maramol declares us husband and wife, and presents us each with a ring. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, a little black box pops up: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: MARRIED. I talk to Lydia, and we decide that we’ll live in my house. I see a new dialogue option on the list: I can ask her for a home-cooked meal. I do. She gives me one.

I open my inventory and look at the wedding ring. It’s magical, but it sucks. I’m not going to wear this, and I hope Lydia doesn’t wear hers. I can make her a better one. I’m the best Enchanter in the world.

Image courtesy of PC Gamer

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