The next town on the road to Dune is the excessively punctuated village of S’ren-ja. On the way in, there’s a Khajiit woman by the name of Tazia working on repairing a bridge, who commiserates about all the problems the town has in hopes that we might be able to lend a hand.
“Of course!” I say cheerfully. “It’s not like we had anything better to do than solve every problem in every village along the way!”
Eran clears his throat and adds, “And besides, we were probably going to stay the night anyway.”
The town is comprised of a loose cluster of Khajiit-style buildings, spread out among farms with crops and livestock. Per Tazia’s suggestion, we decide to stop in at the biggest building first to talk to the clan mother about the local problems.
“It is always nice to travel all day and then take a break by finding someone to help,” Merry says.
“It is kind of nice, really,” Gelur says.
“Sometimes Ilara-daro feels like people have forgotten how to help others,” Ilara adds.
“Not only that,” Merry says. “There are many things that those such as we would find trivial that are beyond the ability of ones such as these common Khajiit farmers. There is much that can be done with a simple spell or a well-placed blow. Think of that next time you see an Altmer standing around overseeing ‘lesser’ races hauling something that they could have easily moved with a telekinesis spell.”
“You are really not fond of Telenger,” Ilara says with a grin.
There is a line of bickering Khajiit in front of the clan mother’s desk, each claiming the other was here first. When I approach, the clan mother asks me to get in line.
“We’re here to help,” I say. “Do you need something hit, set on fire, stabbed, magically lifted into the air, shot, or located?”
“You five would help solve our little problems?” the clan mother says. “Hmh. I suppose I should not complain of having a party of bored adventurers show up on my doorstep.”
The clan mother describes some of the various problems that have been brought to her lately. Milk Eyes is having problems with rats in his well. I decide to take that one. Ezzag believes bandits are stealing his crops. Eran and Ilara take that one. Kalari’s house is haunted. Merry and Gelur go for that one.
Next to a bed, (and conveniently out of sight of anyone, because I’m sure nobody saw me stroll by this way), I find a book titled Cohort Briefing: Arenthia. (A brief Imperial briefing about Arenthia. Exactly what it says on the cover.)
We split up to solve the town’s various minor problems.
Turns out Milk Eyes’ well has a huge cave with an entire skooma production factory in it. No wonder he thought the water tasted funny. Tazia, the Khajiit I spoke briefly with on the way into town, accidentally fell into the well somehow. (Considering the size of the hole in the cover, I doubt it was any “accident”, but I don’t call her out on it.) As she’s no fighter, I let her stay hidden while I go and kill everyone in here.
“Tazia saw you take those alembics,” she says when I return to her.
“Of course,” I say. “Good alchemy equipment is expensive. My homemade cleaning formula will get any skooma residue off.”
I’ll be honest here. I wasn’t actually trying to design a cleaning solution when I discovered that. I was trying to make a poison. Sadly, it’s not poisonous to people. It does, however, do a better job of cleansing surfaces than my cleaning spells do. I can make myself not dripping in blood, but alchemy demands more precise standards than simply not smelling bad or looking scarier than intended in public.
“Tazia also saw you gather up all the skooma.”
“You were just going to leave it here for the next smugglers to pick up?” I wonder.
“No!” Tazia says. “She was going to destroy it and burn down this lab!”
“This is Milk Eyes’ well, if you’ve forgotten,” I say. “Don’t get me wrong. I love a good explosion, but that sounds incredibly unhealthy for the water supply. Not to mention completely unnecessary. Also, they have unrefined moon sugar here too that hasn’t been made into skooma yet, and it was probably stolen from someone who would like to have it back. Like possibly the guy who said bandits were stealing his crops?”
“… Good point,” Tazia says. “Fine. Let us go outside and destroy the skooma and return Ezzag’s moon sugar.”
Tazia didn’t count how much skooma I’d taken, so we go out and destroy about quarter of it. Seems like a waste, but whatever. Goodwill and avoiding suspicion are more important than coin sometimes. (Why does anyone even care so much about skooma, anyway? If people want to make poor life choices, that’s on them, but nobody gets on people for doing things that are equally self-destructive. Like High Elven poetry deconstruction.)
Once that’s taken care of, I meet up with my friends outside the big house.
Eran and Ilara have dealt with the moon sugar thieves. (Why would the clan mother think children playing pranks had harvested half the field and hidden it?) And by “dealt with” I mean apparently Ilara hired their leader, who was the only one who survived and surrendered rather than flee.
“Ilara-daro told her, she was too obvious, yes? She took too much at once, sloppy sloppy, dropped bits along the way all over the ground in a trail leading right up to her little cave. This one gave her important advice, an old Khajiit saying, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep.’”
“What do you plan to do with your shiny new bandit?” I wonder.
“This one does not know yet,” Ilara says. “She will have to think of something.”
“May I suggest not having her to do further banditry?” Eran says.
“Surely not!” Ilara says. “She’s far too bad at it.”
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“I feel that Neri is a poor influence,” Eran comments.
“I need to figure out what to do with the skooma I confiscated, too,” I say.
Eran sighs. “Case in point.”
Merry and Gelur approach us, looking none the worse for wear. They weren’t the ones diving into wells for “rats”, although I don’t envy them having to deal with ghosts instead.
“How’d the haunted house go?” I ask.
“It wasn’t actually haunted,” Gelur says.
“It seems the local Khajiit family is poor at communication with one another,” Merry explains. “The father never admitted to his daughter that he was running skooma, so she had no idea that he’d been murdered because of it. And because of the family’s debts, the uncle decided to make her think the house was haunted with illusions so that the upstart crime lord wouldn’t kill her.”
“We found her uncle in one of the houses near death because he fucked up his spell real bad,” Gelur says. “We got the spell down and I brought him back from the brink of death and then forced him to go talk to his niece.”
“The spell would have fallen soon enough when it finished consuming his life energy, making his efforts doubly pointless,” Merry says, shaking his head.
We compare notes, and my friends hand me all the pieces of illicit correspondence they’d collected in their own investigations. It seems that a Khajiit named Rakhad was behind all the town’s ills. After reporting this to the clan mother and showing her some of the notes as proof, she seems quite shocked that the situation in town is a bit more complicated than a series of minor problems.
“It’s alright,” I say. “We just need to find this Rakhad and beat the shit out of him. Problem solved.”
The clan mother points us toward a cave Rakhad used for unspecified projects that almost certainly had something to do with skooma. She thinks we might be able to get information on his current location there, but as it turns out, the place is full of bandits and he’s there himself.
We kill him as well as any of his lackeys who are too dumb to surrender or flee. Which is entirely more of them than is sensible. Do bandits really hate Nirn so much that they feel the need to hurl themselves at our blades?
“Shouldn’t the guards really have been taking care of this sort of thing?” Eran wonders as we head back to the big house. “I understand that they don’t want to rove into the wilderness to clear out bandits, but this was all right here. What are the guards even for?”
“Sweetroll thieves,” I say sagely.
“I would assume that they prevent wild animals from attacking the village, at the very least,” Merry says.
“And not trolls,” Ilara adds.
“Are there any trolls nearby?” I wonder, glancing about as if I’m going to see one lurking behind the posts holding up the houses.
Ilara grins. “We spotted one while looking for terrible thieves. A real big one, down near an old dock.”
“Ooooh!” I say. “And I assume you were going to mention that after we dealt with all the village’s problems?”
“Of course.”
Eran leads the way past the fine crops of moon sugar. Past the south end of the village stands a dock that has seen better days, jutting out over water that is now too shallow to boat down, as evidenced by a boat stuck in the mud tilted at an awkward angle. Not far upstream from the dock, near what looks like it was once a waterfall, stands a large figure that most definitely is not a troll.
“That’s a Daedroth,” I state the obvious. “Trolls are furrier.”
Ilara shrugs. “It looked like a troll from a distance and this one did not have time to take a closer look. She figured you’d probably want to fight it either way.”
“True!” I say cheerfully, pulling out Shiny from my bag. “Let’s do this.”
The Daedroth is big and tough, but nothing special so far as Daedra are concerned. Once it’s down, I search the area and find a journal discarded in the mud that once belonged to someone named Lauron, who apparently thought summoning this thing to cause trouble was a great idea. He probably got eaten.
“At least this didn’t have anything to do with Rakhad,” Eran says.
“Probably,” I say. “Probably didn’t have anything to do with Rakhad. For all we know, this Lauron might have been working for him but just didn’t mention it in his journal. Probably not very likely, though.”
“I feel that there are entirely too many people in the world who perform ill-advised experiments with Daedra,” Merry observes.
“This one was making crocodiles eat people,” Gelur points out.
“He should have stuck to crocodiles,” Ilara says, shaking her head. “Let’s go back to the village. This one overheard someone deciding to make a huge batch of moon sugar biscuits to celebrate everything being fixed.”
“Say no more,” I say. “The moon sugar fields will make me forgive S’ren-ja for needing both an apostrophe and a hyphen.”
Before we actually settle in for the night at S’ren-ja, I discover that there’s a wayshrine just north of town that can prevent me having to stay the night here and continuing to try to remember where the punctuation in the name goes.
Azum didn’t want a severed head decorating the path up to her caravan, so it may as well decorate my stronghold instead. I put up the Bosmer head outside the gates with a sign that says “Hadran - Slaver”.
“It’s a very Orcy decoration,” Eran comments.
“I should collect more of these,” I say. “I kill a lot of people but most of them don’t seem worth extolling. Like, who the fuck cares about Abnur Tharn’s thirteenth cousin, anyway?”
“This fetcher was running a slaving ring while operating a popular establishment, so his death is worth celebrating?” Eran says.
Grishka comes out the gate to greet me. “Ah, you’re back! And with a new trophy!”
“Grishka,” I say with a smile. “Nice to see you back, too. How’d the scouting go?”
“Fantastic!” Grishka says. “No Dark Anchors spotted nearby, and the Sea Elves mostly seem to live on the coast. It might take them quite a while to notice us. The wilderness is dense and hunting is plentiful. I saw birds and animals I’ve never seen before and I can’t wait to see what they taste like.”
“Can we get an outpost set up using local materials?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” Grishka says. “We can go with nothing but metal weapons and equipment, since we don’t have a mine locally available there. Forinor gave me a communication orb that will let me contact him at a large distance, so we won’t need to keep the portal open at all times.”
“Are you planning on going there yourself?”
Grishka gives a short laugh. “Of course! The opportunity to see a new land and hunt on grounds no other Orc has done before? I can’t pass that up! And who else is going to run the outpost? I suppose if it wound up growing large enough, it would need its own chief, but right now, this is a perfect job for a hunt-wife.”
“I don’t suppose he has more of those magic orbs?” I ask. “I completely forgot those exist, and I had to retrieve one once, even. A lot has happened, okay?”
Grishka’s laugh isn’t short this time. “I’d have thought you already have one! Roku’s right, you are scatterbrained sometimes.”
“At least I have people to remember things for me,” I say with a chuckle. “Now that I can remember things if I remember to write them down, I’m going to need to remember to write things down more. Are there more of those orbs on hand now or should I write down a note to myself that I should acquire one?”
“As it turns out, you can just buy things like that,” Grishka says. “It’s no wonder the Wood Orc tribes are so scattered and disjointed. Anyway, yes, and I already ordered ones for every stronghold. Also as it turns out, the High Elves are a lot happier about our alliance when we’re giving them gold.”
“Do I want to ask what that cost?” I ask.
“Surprisingly cheaper than you’d think,” Grishka says. “But nah, don’t worry about it. We got more gold coming in than going out.”
“Oh yeah, speaking of which, I have a large quantity of skooma that I need fenced,” I say. “And if I show up at one single outlaw refuge with it, someone’s going to think I busted a large skooma factory and might be annoyed at their supply chain being disrupted and I prefer good fences to stay friendly to me. So I’m going to need to go visit every one of them I know about that I have a wayshrine near.”
Grishka is staring at me like I’d just started speaking Dwemeris. “You… I…” She recovers as her mind finishes processing that. “You’ll have to have Roku make a note in the budget. Half of our income is sale of confiscated goods from bandits you slaughtered.”
“He does a lot of that, yeah,” Eran says. “The worst part of adventuring with him isn’t the massive amounts of battle, but watching him shove every single thing he could potentially use or sell into his bag. We wound up having to get our own bags and join in just to make it go faster.”