Saga also made it to Level 4: and I put +5 in Intelligence, +5 in Willpower, and +2 in Endurance.

Phon, so it looks like Niamh may be traveling with Luciana. Shadow hide them.

PART I: Looch.

It had been several days without news. Luciana was not expecting any if she were honest, given the circumstances and all, but she could not help but be concerned nevertheless; Niamh was not, even for her, at her most calm and rational when they had parted - (Niamh's assertion that they would be together had not extended as far as the lifting of the embargo that stood between Luciana and high adventure with her partner).
Niamh had been filled with resolve and a hunger to find the threads of her history and piece together what was happening to her and what her past had been when she had left. Her body had thrummed like a taut bowstring and her strange, disconcerting eyes had sparkled in the grey halflight of a murky Bravil morning.

Concerned, yes; an excitable Niamh was a truly fey creature to behold and if one added to that the "changes" she appeared to be going through, changes that Luciana barely understood, there was every likelihood that something was going to go latrine-wards very very quickly.

But what could she do?
Nothing, that was what, so she busied herself with her normal routine; working in the Suitor, visiting the chapel - (though what the Gods thought was anyone's guess) - all the usual things that she had always done, but all approached with a renewed attention to detail and an admittedly somewhat forced enthusiasm.
She knew she was merely trying to divert her mind from The Obvious, the absence of Niamh; concern for her - (and everyone else, if she were honest) - but during the day at least, she just about managed to achieve her aim.

At night though, it was very hard and she lay in darkness staring up towards the night-shadowed ceiling of her little house, listening to the noises of creaking wood, slapping water, and the scurryingof small things.
Sleep it seemed had left her at the same time that Niamh had, and she wondered if it ever would return, even if she did.

++++

News eventually did arrive, although indirectly in a traveller's tale told by an Orc trader on his way to Leyawiin from Cheydinhal. He had stopped over for the night in Bravil and picked The Suitor because, despite it's name, it was by far the liveliest place in town.
Looch had been busy behind the bar, it was a crowded evening made more so by the inclement weather and she had her work cut out, fighting through the massed ranks of drinkers with ale and platters of steaming meats and cold cheeses.
The air was thick with tabac smoke and the racous sounds of chatter and laughter. Sweat trickled down her back beneath her tunic as she bent to the task of washing another load of mugs.

So it was that she had only peripherally heard the Orc start his tale, but as he continued something made her listen more attentively...

"'Course, there'sh bin all that trouble up round my area, up in Cheydinhal." Said the Orc. "Up'n The Valus." He took another slug of ale. "Ver' shtrange."
There was a lull in the conversation around the trader as various members of the assembled company awaited further elaboration with varying degrees of politenes and patience.

"Lord Rugdumph, " continued the Orc, "Him and his lady have an est..., an estate up roun' there. Ver' good customers, grand old Orc that one. Nice fella..." The trader belched hugely, took a moment to mentally find himself again. "They was shouting about as how they were paralysed, com-ple-tely and stripped. Stripped, if you please! An' all their money wash taken, EVERYTHING."
The Orc gestured expansively with his ale, spilling a fair proportion of it.

"Niamh was somewhere there..." Thought Luciana. "Wasn't Mondstein's shop there?" She began to listen more closely to the inebriated trader's narrative.

"...more..." He was saying. "...They foun' ever'thing again, in the servant's quarters!" There was loud amusement and a number of explicit comments regarding the anatomy of Orcs and the suitability of their clothing for non-Orcs. The trader ignored them, caught up in his beer and his tale.
Luciana grinned to herself. Niamh had mentioned Rugdumph as someone "who had fecked mah over." - apparently he had got his, or so it seemed.
"Mind you, they whipped the servants o' course." Continued the trader.
Looch frowned, that wasn't funny. "Niamh, that was wrong." She thought.
Worryingly, even given her nature, that was unlike her...

The Orc went on, following a mouthful of chicken, much of which went over the bar and his audience. "Then there wash that bandit in the camp above Lord R's eshtate." The Orc touched the side of his wide flat nose. "App'rently they was mootyuallee working fer each other."
There were many nods and winks at this, corruption in the noble classes was rife and the employment of bandits was seen often as perfectly normal behaviour in the ruling classes.
"He... he ended up at Cheyd... Cheydinhal, nekked as a babe and bereft of all 'is stuff, everfin'" another slurp of ale.
"He was babblin' 'bout a invisible Thing that stopped his limbs from workin' and took everfin'. Said 'e ran, never bin so scared, app'rently. Didn' know why, just got The Fear. Course," shrugged the erstwhile storyteller, "Guards knew 'im fer a villian and locked 'im up, mighty strange though."

someone nearby shouted that obviously he'd just been played with, that there was some sport been had or he was the son of a half-septim whore - (with predictable responses).
"Yes." Thought Luciana, who had given up all pretence of working by now. "And I know by whom..." It was Niamh, she knew, she KNEW; but, it was not like her - it just felt like cruel treatment, even for a bandit. She knew that he was alive only because Niamh had for some reason left him, and that in itself was strange.
Luciana was more than used to the fact that bodies and violence littered Niamh's footsteps like leaves were strewn on the ground beneath trees during the falling months but it seemed that she was behaving in a more extreme way, somehow.
It bothered her more that she was bothered, because she could not put her finger on why.

Now another voice chimed in; "'An I 'eard they found some o' them... Camona's in a camp there, not far from your Lord Rugmuff, dead up by that little lake or whatever." Here there was a pause and then. "Dead as nits they was."
"Nuffin' unusual about that!" Cried yet another voice.
"Nah, but, "continued the speaker, "they was totally unmarked, it was lit'rally as if someone 'ad reached into them and pulled their lifes out from their chests. Seems unaccountable close to the others..." His voice trailed off meaningfully.

"Oh dear." Thought Luciana. "There's definitely something wrong here."
As she'd already accepted, that Niamh was involved with burglary and death was in no way unusual and for the Bosmer and subsequently for Looch, a fact of life; but these events seemed "Odd" somehow. Niamh did not - as it were - "play" with her food, in her world you were either alive or dead, not running scared or the victim of a joke that cost the skin of a group of totally unconnected individuals, nor did you have the life-force drained from you in what, so she had heard from rumours, was an extremely unpleasant piece of spell-work.

At least not until now.

"Oh Niamhy, what have you Done?"
Something was very, very wrong here.

PART II: Niamh.

She was floating, suspended in the chill, clear waters of the lake, her body submerged. She had been under the water for some minutes now and her lungs felt swollen, fit to burst.
She would not surface, though, rather she would stay here in this non-space; her body slowly becoming numb, her mind fleeing from the reality in which she found herself, fleeing from a truth she could not process.
And so she hung there, arms and legs outstretched, back arched; at peace.

Presently a final stream of bubbles exploded upwards from her nose and, strange slit-eyes still open, her lithe body drifted limply upwards to float upon the surface of the water...

I don't know if this belongs here but something weird is going on with me,I'm gonna get back into the game and I keep making up charcter backgrounds I never use...but I DO still want to roleplay,could it be I'm forcing my self too much into a charcter without actually playing with that charcter and letting it evolve?

Sounds like my kind of build. Only I think I´d put some points in Strength rather than Endurance in the beginning

Go, Saga!

...and uh... interesting language there, Talking Crow. "Only I think I'd some points into Strength rather than Endurance at the beginning". How would you know? You've only had one "beginning", right? Or has their been more than one? HHmmmmm?

Sorry, man I'm just messin' with ya. As usual.

Day 78: Lady Saga has re-discovered Nornal. She was on her way back to Cheydinal to sell off a bunch of loot she's gathered up over the past week or so, but who can resist a dive into an Ayleid ruin?

Cadlew Chapel. I'm not familiar with that name.

You should be!

Why? In case you don't know: I have one of the worst memory banks in a modern human being. I seriously don't know.