Redemption, part 2 Options

[jack cloudy]

Click here for Redemption Part 1


Alright, part 2. Still not much redeeming going on but whatever. Now instead of continuing the story, I figured I'd use this post for all the miscellaneous stuff. Things like a character list and the recap for part 1. So be warned that this post CONTAINS SPOILERS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!


RECAP FOR PART 1 Again SPOILERS!

One night, the palace is breached by unknown assailants. Following standard protocol for such events, the Emperor is secretly transported to the prison by his Blades. The Imperial Battlemage, Ocato, declines to join him, claiming that the situation is under control and that his services aren't needed.

Despite having reached the prison safely, the Emperor soon finds that he is still in danger. It is then that Uriel receives help from an unexpected ally. Angoril Bobardi reveals that the very cell he has inhabited for decades, contains a secret escape route that was built during the simulacrum at the order of Jagar Tharn. With this passage and the considerable magical prowess of Angoril, the Emperor manages to flee the deadly trap.

Also freed from the prison by Angoril is Maorlatta Orgnum, a young (by elf-standards) and somewhat naive girl who was arrested for the crime of sleeping in the park. Once free, she quickly makes herself scarce and eventually finds herself in the shack of an old fisherman who lives on an island in Lake Rumare. The fisherman seeks the help of the thieves guild to rid her of the manacles and prison outfit that would have every Legionnaire arrest her on sight. Unfortunately, the one assigned to pick the locks on the manacles informs Vicente Valtieri instead, who takes a personal interest in the girl’s talent for camouflage. Maorlatta is saved by the Redguard Sorian, a young and rather strange lad who keeps going on and on about something he calls an Ansei. The two team up to go treasure hunting in a nearby Ayleid ruin.

Meanwhile, Angoril returns to the prison. Pretending to be from the palace, he gets a vital clue from the Argonian private investigator Grey-Tongue. The Argonian sends him to Chorrol to find the source of the assassins distinctive red robes. To get to Chorrol, he summons a shiftgate, circumventing days travelling. From Chorrol the trail leads to Kvatch, a city whose precise location he does not know. Unable to summon another shiftgate with reasonable accuracy, Angoril seeks more mundane passage to Kvatch.

While Angoril is travelling, Maorlatta and Sorian hit the Ayleid ruin. After some trouble with a zombie, they strike gold and find an abandoned office with some intact artefacts. They attempt to sell the artefacts in the Imperial city, where they are intercepted by Grey-Tongue and then Vicente Valtieri. Sorian again makes the vampire flee. The next morning Maorlatta wakes up in the Imperial palace with no recollection on how she got there or what happened during her stay at Grey-Tongue’s house. Jauffre interrogates her in the garden at the top of the tower.







Redemption's persons of questionable importance

Main characters:
Angoril Bobardi: An Altmeri sorcerer who inhabited a cell in the Imperial prison, fully aware of the secret escape route. After leaving the prison, he makes it his task to track down the leaders behind the red-robed assassins.

Maorlatta Orgnum: A Maormer from Pyandonea, sent to Tamriel at the command of king Orgnum. Circumstances land her in the same prison as the Altmer. After escaping, she returns to the pursuit of her own goals, one of which is to become filthy rich.

Side characters:
Grey-Tongue: An Argonian private investigator. He is a friend of Hieronymous Lex and has been hired by the guard-captain in the past. Grey-Tongue is hired now as well by the city-guard to investigate the events at the prison and find Uriel’s corpse.
Guard-Captain Hieronymous Lex: Hieronymous Lex is the man put in charge of investigating the massacre at the Imperial Prison. Upon finding that Uriel Septim was seen entering the prison that night, he hires Grey-Tongue to help him uncover the truth.
Sorian: A Redguard who saves Maorlatta from Vicente Valtieri. A simple wandering swordsman with a slight Ansei-obsession.
Rajn Geydar: A Wood Elf who lives in Kvatch. At one point possessed a piece of the Balac-Thurm.

Others:
Guard-Captain Argelius: A colleague of Hieronymous Lex who describes him as the man to call when you need subtlety.
Bannon: A merchant who travelled with Angoril from Chorrol to Kvatch
Baleni: Daughter of Rajn Geydar
Doruk: The Bouncer who worked at Rajn Geydar's restaurant. Deceased.
Penald Baurus: Blade and bodyguard of Uriel Septim.
Berius: Lord Protector and Head of the palaceguard in the Imperial City.
Valen Dreth: A Dunmeri prisoner. Not the most pleasant sort.
Jennifer Renault: Blade, recently promoted to captain.
Glenroy: Blade and bodyguard of Uriel Septim.

Fenasim: A member of the emperor's Palace guard.
Mankar Camoran: The father of both Raven and Ruma. He is the leader of the Mythic Dawn and its prophet.
Raven Camoran: The ‘Hand’ of the Mythic Dawn, an organization with an unknown purpose. What is certain however, is that the Dawn wants Uriel Septim dead.
Ruma Camoran: The sister of Raven, she serves the Mythic Dawn as Priestess. In the same night that the attempt on the emperor’s life is made, she infiltrates the vaults beneath the Imperial palace to steal two artefacts.
Harrow: A member of the Dawn, Harrow used to be an Armiger stationed in Vvardenfell.

Ludius Bester: Member of Bester and Bester, the Kvatch Hall of Mercantile Interests. He runs the office in lower Kvatch.
Aelwin Merowald: An old fisherman who lost most of his leg to Slaughterfish. Friend of Delmar Tunius.
Rajn Geydar: Owner of the Eight Provinces, a restaurant in Kvatch.
Ra’Jezhr: A Khajiiti lockpicker in the employ of the Thieves Guild, Ra’Jezhr is also coerced into serving the Dark Brotherhood’s interests.
Simanuel Rosendorf IV: The owner of a silk-plantation near Chorrol

Umbacano: An Altmer who lives in the capital city. A well-known collector of Ayleid artefacts.
Uriel Septim VII: The Emperor of Tamriel.
Brother Tanner: A priest who serves in the Kvatch-temple. Looks like a Septim.
Delmar Tunius: An old fisherman who lives on a small island in lake Nibenay.
Vicente Valtieri: A member of the Dark Brotherhood, he takes interest in Maorlatta’s talents at stealth, and desires to make her an assassin, with or without her cooperation.

Latta’s evergrowing list of people only she knows:
Levvelyn of Glashorn: The hero of a popular series who spends most of his books saving the world, slaying vicious monsters, duelling devious Altmeri warlords and chasing the girl.
Irrillys: A fictional princess of Pyandonea, she is Levvelyn’s love interest. Posesses an unfortunate talent for being kidnapped by devious Altmeri warlords.
Mettildi: The Maormer that taught Maorlatta how to fight, though his methods traumatized her to the point where she is mentally incapable of defending herself.
Master Zelthir: Another Maormer put in charge of educating Maorlatta. Master Zelthir is a well-known and highly respected healer.

This post has been edited by jack cloudy: Sep 22 2013, 07:36 PM

[jack cloudy]

Woops, I'll have to fix the errors.

But yeah, racism leads to hasty conclusions.


Okay, this update ended up being longer than the usual at ~2400-2500 words. It also is more procrastinating when I think about it but hey, I had fun writing it. And because we keep hopping between viewpoints without changing location, I mentioned the viewpoint character at the start.



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Chapter 10.7, Sorian


We never learned more from the Scamp. By the time we dragged the princess away from the injured so she wouldn't keel over on her feet, the mongrel was gone. Baurus checked for tracks, but the bag we put it in hadn't been opened or moved. It was just gone, poof, went up in smoke. Maorlatta told me this was the natural order of things with Daedra but also mentioned again that it should have faded into Oblivion long before I'd gotten down the mountain with it. Creepy, if you ask me.


Not that I got much time to mulch over the freaky nature of Daedra. I thought I could while hanging at the back of the big meeting but no,the pointy-ear just had to go and put herself in the center of the stage and be her bossy self. And she was the one who had been so set on staying 'discreet'. I swear, I just couldn't keep up with her. So much for elves being slow to act. The only good news was that it got us a room in one of the few solid buildings here. There was no actual bed, but it definitely beat sleeping in the mud under the open sky.


It had other perks as well. Such as the seclusion we needed to do our thing. The princess and her new, better, bodyguard had come up with the idea of everybody teaching everybody. Baurus would teach me how to fight like a jerk while Maorlatta stomped whatever she fancied into my head. I actually kinda liked Baurus' lessons. Sure, the guy was somehow even more serious than the elf which really got on my nerves, but he knew his craft. And his stories on the differences between all kinds of swords and what it meant in battle was interesting. The princesses'...I didn't give much for her things. She had the habit to just start rambling and what use did I have for anything she taught? Healing? In her own words it had taken decades for her to learn how to cut people open without hitting anything important. I would be old before we were finished. Alchemy? I didn't know any of the terms she used! Magic? She was no archmage and while throwing fireballs sounded awesome, she refused to talk about those spells. Letters? Ok, I supposed that could be handy for reading maps and signs. But on the whole, I'd rather stick with Baurus' sword-lessons.


Of course, there wasn't much I could teach them in return. I was just a militia-man turned adventurer. Everything I knew Baurus knew better, apart from the occasional story. So in the end I soaked their wisdom like a sponge, spilled half of it when the princess ran out of words and used elvish ones, and did some chores on the side. One of those chores was that I got to wash and paint her face. Like Baurus, it was one of the things she'd picked up after being kidnapped by the Blades. In this case, someone had given her a 'woman's secret weapon', also known as a box full of powders, brushes, and paints. She never told me much about who this 'Jennifer' was, but I figured she was a Blade. That was the only thing that made sense. Just like how Baurus was probably a Blade, though he claimed to be fighter's guild. I mean, where would she hire him? Skyrim? She couldn't have made it that far by the time Grey-Tongue and I caught up with her!


Anyway, every night I helped her clean herself and every morning I was in charge of fixing her face so her own magical facepaint didn't show. That was harder than it looked really as her skin needed to be completely covered but if I put it on too thick the whole mess just flaked off again. Tonight it was even harder than usual because she'd spent the whole day getting other people's blood all over her. Luckily I found a crate filled with pieces of soap. While I was busy rinsing, we talked. For the most part we avoided actually important subjects like the crazy storm outside but at one point the princess decided to switch to something that mattered.

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"So, Sorian. I've been wondering. Who is this warlord called 'Tharnie'? And why did everyone involved start proverbially licking the Bosmer's toes when she said she'd defeated him? Is this some important war of yours?" She asked me. It floored me for a moment. How could she not know? The Imperial Simulacrum was the biggest thing to happen since Tiber Septim became a Divine! But I supposed she wouldn't know that either. For all that she acted like she was smarter than me, the elf really was clueless about things everyone knew. I supposed I couldn't really blame her for that one. She'd told me about Pyandonea and it sounded like a literal backwater, hidden behind reefs and constant fog. What most got me was how she said that most people didn't even know the word 'foreigner' there.


So I told her about the Simulacrum. I told her about the evil wizard Jagar Tharn, who had banished the Emperor to Oblivion and taken his place on the throne. How he'd changed his own face to match Uriel's so no one would figure it out. I told her about the Eternal Champion and when she asked, explained that noone knew exactly who or what the Eternal Champion was. I told her he was probably an Ansei but Baurus laughed at that. Anyhow, I said to her the story of the Eternal Champion. How he was imprisoned by Jagar Tharn in the catacombs deep beneath the palace. How he escaped from beneath the foul wretch's nose. I told her about the Staff of Chaos, a magical weapon and the only thing Tharn feared. How the impostor had broken the staff into pieces and hid it all over Tamriel. I told the tale of the Eternal Champion, who had journeyed the land and braved the pits and tombs where the pieces of the staff lay hidden. Tharn's minions were always on his heel, Daedra and worse monsters, but the Champion cut them down by the hundreds with sword and spell. Nothing could stop him from remaking the Staff of Chaos. Finally, with the completed and rejuvenated staff in hand, the Champion returned to the palace. There the wizard and hero battled, their powers blowing the top off White-Gold tower. Finally the Staff of Chaos destroyed Jagar Tharn and the Eternal Champion, though mortally wounded in his duel, next walked into Oblivion to free the true Emperor.


I didn't actually get to finish the story. She'd been frowning from the beginning and by the time I got to the final battle she started babbling in elvish and crying. Then a rainbow washed over her face and hands and she openly began bawling like a baby.

"Hey! Hey! What's wrong now? Is it something I said?" I shouted at her. I looked around worriedly, for the walls in this place were thin and cheap. Baurus dissappeared out of the room, maybe to throw everyone else out of the building before they found out that their new leader had lost it. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her in an attempt to make her stop but she slapped my hands away.
"No, it's not you. It's just that I'm never going to get home! And I never even wanted to leave in the first place!"


Her words began to flow out as if a dam had broken. There was nothing I could do to make her shut up but listen and hope that Baurus had indeed forced everyone else out of earshot.
"I had to, it was my duty! And I wanted to matter! My estate is a decrepit watchtower guarding against a continent that no longer exists, all my titles are shared with two dozen cousins, uncles and aunts who have a stronger claim on every single one of them and my only purpose is to preserve an unimportant bloodline! I'm the expendable Maormer who is just Orgnum enough to look good as a diplomatic envoy but not Orgnum enough to be missed! Oh sure, the adoption raised my status, but who is going to remember that when grandfather goes on an expedition? Nobody!" I was ashamed to admit this to myself, but though I was worried about what had caused this sudden outburst, I couldn't help but listen with rapt attention. This was different than the usual glorytales she bored me with. This was the real Pyandonea she now cried about and I knew that I was never going to get another chance such as this to learn about her secrets.


"So I get here and the first thing those rotten falseblooded poopeaters do is turn around and go home! Then I get tossed in a prison, almost eaten, shot, eaten again, bound into serving some old lying king because I am too nice for my own good, dragged into a warzone which turns out to be the end of the world and now you tell me that the only man who can deliver me home got his face melted off!"


With that she snapped shut. I wondered why Tharn of all people would know the way into Pyandonea, when she didn't know herself. But I didn't ask her. She wouldn't tell me anyway.


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Instead I tried to divert her attention away from her heartbreak.
"Let's talk about something else. What is this balad drum? I sure never heard of it." I said, grasping at the first thing that came to mind, namely the whole mess with the Wood Elf from earlier. It wasn't the best idea, given how the Wood Elf had led to Tharn and Tharn had led to well, no need to explain that one.

"Balac-Thurm." She corrected me automatically as she wiped the tears from her eyes. I scrounged the office for a handkerchief and gave it to her.
"Thanks. It's the spear of Auri-El, which bound Mundus into...straight....regular...conventional...it was used to make the world we live in." Maorlatta explained but like most times when she tried to tell me something difficult, she ran out of words. Luckily the dumbed down version was something I could understand for a change. Important artefact of the Divines, got it. But there was one thing that she got wrong.
"I'm pretty sure the wood elf called it a ball, not a spear." I told her and to my surprise, the corners of her mouth went up in a half-smile.
"It's from the Merethic era, Sorian. Details on that period are fuzzy at the best of times. Spear, sphere, it's the effect that's important, not what it looks like. Besides, Aedric and Daedric artefacts tend to change shape when nobody's looking. It gives the chroniclers a fit, believe me."


The princess had gotten her humor back, that was good at least. She loudly blew her nose with the kerchief, then folded it and laid it on the armrest of her seat with badly hidden disgust.
"Right, so it is something that made Tamriel and we don't really know what it looks like but it is probably a crystal ball of sorts. So, what is the link between the Balac and these Daedra?" I asked her then. "Seems like an odd coincidence to appear at the same time and place." She didn't answer, but blinked and let a flush of colour wash over her face.
"It seemed to have your sandals all twisted." I explained with a shrug. She had almost gotten as upset over the treehugger's tale as mine. Not to the point of screaming and crying her head off, but enough that I was glad I'd painted her face right.


After a moment the princess clapped her hands and nodded to herself. Then she gave me an explanation. A confusing one.
"How to explain? Daedra can't come here on their own strength. They're from outside and don't belong. Hmm, imagine our world as a big mansion. Now we have a thief who wants to enter the mansion but the master of the estate locked all the doors. What would the thief do?"
"Pick the lock, obviously." I said.
"Argh, no you idiot. He...probably would." She coloured some more and was quiet for a bit.


"Let me try again."


"Imagine the world as a big mansion. All the doors are locked, the servants never leave and the master does not freely hand out keys. There is a vaguely defined person of hostile intent. We'll call him the outsider. The walls are thick and strong, spellspun glass. The outsider can't break them down. There are three ways he can gain entry. First is by going to the backdoor. There are servants not loyal to the master. One of them could open the parcel-hatch which lets the outsider slip in a basket full of rabid rats. The master and the loyal servants will notice of course and remove the rats before they can do much harm. The rats are minor Daedra such as the screechers and the unloyal servant is a summoner.

The second involves the unloyal servant again. This time the unloyal servant will steal one of the master's keys by killing one of the loyal ones and taking his. The key is then passed on to the outsider who will use it to have a hired thug enter the mansion. The thug can do more damage than the rats, but afterwards the master will change all the keys so it only works once. And the unloyal servant is usually the first on the thug's kill-list. I'm talking about making a pact with a Daedric prince now which involves acts of evil and sacrifice. It could be what happened at Kvatch. But I doubt it."


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I thought I understood the important part. Summoning Daedra was hard because the world....didn't like it?
"And what's the third?" I asked. She had quieted down before telling me about that. Did she run out of words again?


I noticed that Baurus had returned. He stood in the dooropening and gave a silent question. The princess nodded to him and he closed the door to sit down with us. I could see he was relieved I'd managed to calm the elf down. Maorlatta waited till he was seated before she continued.
"Balac-Thurm. The master key." She said. "Look here. If you have the master key, the master no longer matters because you are the master now."


It was Baurus who asked the question that had been at the tip of my own tongue.
"You're saying it makes you a god?"
"No, but close enough."




OOC: The Uesp and such say that the Staff of Chaos was created by an enchanter in the first era. I'd already come up with my own theory for the staff before I learned that however. And since the story is pretty much based on my theory, I decided not to fix that. Besides, power-wise it is more on par with the various Daedric/Aedric artefacts than the random enchanted clutter you buy in a store.

And yes, odds are pretty good that I'll explain at some point what the connection between Tharn and Pyandonea are. Mind you, I've already dropped a hint here and there.