We come upon a Bosmer woman hiding behind a large rotten tree stump, complaining about wasps. She explains that she’s an initiate to some hunter group and supposed to kill a wasp as her initiation, but she lost track of the wasp and now she wants us to do it for her.

“That wouldn’t be much of an initiation, would it?” Gelur says with a crooked grin.

“There are quite a lot of wasps around here,” Merry says. “Why would you need a specific one? Was it an unusual color? Would anyone even notice the difference?”

“It was big and yellow!” the would-be hunter says.

Gelur chuckles, and stops to give her a few pointers. “I’ll help you figure out how to do this, but it would be pointless if we were to do your trial for you.”

As I’m wandering through the area letting them do that, I find a book by a pond, titled The Ooze: A Fable, only slightly chewed on by one ornery tiger that had added it to its nest. Peaceful woodland music kicks up into energetic battle music whenever anything looks at me funny, and I’m not quite sure at any given point whether the music is in my head or not. (I ask my friends a few times while we’re traveling and it’s not very consistent. So now not only do I need to pay attention to whether there’s music playing, I need to figure out whether it’s in my head or not. Madgod problems.)

The next person we run across asking for help is a Bosmer man near a bridge. I hold up a finger and run past him, ignoring him for a moment as I go to absorb a Skyshard I’ve spotted under the bridge and thereby alarming another bystander by casually jumping off a bridge.

“Don’t worry about him,” Gelur is saying as I come back dripping. “He does this all the time.”

The Bosmer complains about how in the nearby town of Longhaven, some people have been disappearing into the mist and being torn up.

“Okay, sounds like a job for us,” I say before even letting him finish. “Let’s go.”

I trot across the bridge as the man mutters about how reckless I am, with my friends trailing behind me assuring him that yes, I probably know what I’m doing and I do this sort of thing all the time too, which completely fails to reassure anyone.

A handful of Khajiit tents have been arrayed alongside the road offerings wares to travelers coming through, but most of the village is made up of Bosmer tree-pods. Near a brewer with a huge cauldron, I find a copy of Darkest Darkness next to a guy who is so drunk that he cheerfully trades it for another drink. He probably would not have even noticed it if I’d just grabbed it like I usually do but I’m feeling polite.

We mingle in the town and talk to people to figure out what’s going on here, and hear stories of the mists becoming weird. Notably, they mention something about a crazy Dunmer who wanted to investigate. Damn, if I don’t hurry and catch up to him, I might lose my secret title of craziest fetcher from that particular corner of Tamriel. (But I’m not really from Morrowind, I’m from Silatar… wait, those weren’t real memories, or were they? For fuck’s sake, spinners messing with the heads of people who are already insane. Get a hold of yourself, Nerevar.)

I don’t know about the supposedly killer mists, but we’re hardly in the swamp for two minutes before I’m covered in mud and completely lost. The place is full of hoarvors and werebats, and while I hardly mind the fighting, it takes my companions poking me to get me back on track.

“It’s not like you know where we’re going, either,” I grouse.

“There’s a light up ahead,” Gelur says. “Campfire, I think.”

We find the Dunmer praying at a small camp, and he introduces himself as Mel Adrys. While he’d rather be left alone to pray, he’s willing to pause long enough to tell us about the vampire he’s come to kill. I’m not sure if Ayem is eager to help some mer on the other side of Tamriel kill one vampire, but what do I know? I have no idea why she does anything anymore. In any case, he’s not especially impressed at us and doubts our ability to avoid becoming enthralled by vampires. I’m too amused to even be insulted here. He insists we go clear out a nearby cave first, and I’m not about to complain since it’s something to hit anyway. On the other hand, there’s the small matter of finding the place…

We eventually find it, after having killed probably half the werebats in the swamp. A corpse lies outside of the cave, a member of the Mages Guild judging by his clothes. A note lays next to the body, soaked in blood and mud and rain, the only legible bits being something about a skull. Dunno what’s up with that, but that probably sounds like something we don’t want evil vampires playing around with.

Mel is standing in the cave ahead of us, waiting. “About time you got here. I was starting to think you’d gotten lost in the mists.”

“We were just being extra thorough to clear out the werebat infestation,” I lie.

A vampire sits on his knees in front of Mel, apparently having been begging for his life. Mel seems liable to simply kill him outright just for being a vampire. It’s probably just as well that we showed up when we did and that Mel didn’t get impatient waiting for us.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Becoming afflicted with a curse or disease is not a crime. The crime is what they do after they’ve been turned. And this one has surrendered. If he has done anything wrong, that’s still a matter to be dealt with by the local authorities, not foreign vigilantes.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

(I’m not totally being a hypocrite about that. I am, after all, an Eye of the Queen, so I’m an official vigilante and can do whatever I want until Queen Ayrenn finally gets annoyed at the dumb things I do.)

Mel is spectacularly unimpressed with my words. Honestly, he’s the one who’s creeping me out more here, with all his talk of prey and purification. It’s a little tiresome. I get it, I mean, I get a little bloodthirsty myself, but I’m not generally one for executing people who have surrendered unnecessarily. Is racism against the undead still considered racism? Lifeism, maybe? I dunno.

The vampire here says that these other vampires are bad and are planning to do some bad things with some evil skulls or something, and that the vampires who thought the bad vampires were bad had already run off. I thank him and send him off before the vigilante tries to decapitate him anyway.

Still, I diligently try to talk to the other vampires to get their side of the story, and they’re uninterested in talking to me rather than yelling “BLEH!” and attacking us. Well, if that’s all they have to say for themselves, I’ll let Dumzy and Blinky do the talking here.

“Hey, guys!” I yell at the vigilante. “Watch this!”

I prance through the cavern taunting and pissing off several vampires and cast my spinny light spell to shred them to pieces. Mel still isn’t impressed, the fetcher.

“Very shiny,” Ilara says appreciatively, because at least one person here has to appreciate it.

We kill everything in the cave and head back outside into the swamps, ignoring how grateful the jerk of a vampire hunter is. At least he can acknowledge that we’ve proven ourselves capable of engaging in bloody slaughter when the situation calls for it, if nothing else. And it’s one of those times that I wind up being very focused on the bloody slaughter and am glad my companions were paying attention to what we were actually trying to do here aside from kill everything.

On the way back, I decide to investigate an Ayleid ruin we run across while trying to find out way back to town through the muddy mud of muddiness. Guess what I find inside? An enclave of racist bandits! And some of them are hovering in the air while waving at glowy red skulls. Now, I’m hardly one to be too judgmental about one’s hobbies, but these guys couldn’t look more sinister if they tried. In any case, they attack us on sight while yelling “For the Heritance!” so I’m not going to feel bad about slaughtering them all.

I find a Skyshard tucked away in a sconce in one corner, and further on, a journal by someone who had experimented with death magic of some sort which, of course, the racist bandits got their hands on and are now experimenting on the experiments. That would explain the glowing red skulls. It mentions that the man planned to move to Woodhearth to settle down or something, and apparently lost his journal in the swamp or something along the way, I’m guessing. I grab it to see if I can find the owner and see whether they need to be beaten up too.

We leave the ruin and climb up out of the muddy gully and find our way back to Longhaven to let people know that the vampires are probably not going to cause any further problems. At least the ones we killed won’t, unless they can re-member themselves after we dis-membered them.

“We’ll be certain to slaughter any vampires we run across!” one Bosmer man promises.

“If they’re causing trouble, yes,” I say. “But the vampires who disagreed with the things… what was his name again? The bad vampire, whatever. The ones who disagreed have already buggered off. You don’t need to go hunting down people who aren’t doing anything wrong just because they got a disease.”

I don’t bother waiting for someone to start an argument about it. There’s a member of the Mages Guild in town, so I inform her that her (our, technically?) guildmates got involved with something stupid and got killed for it.

A Bosmer man approaches us in town to tell us that he’s worried about his wife Elly who hasn’t come back to town. Naturally I immediately agree to go look for her.

“Splendid,” Merry says dryly, ceasing his efforts to make his robes more dry. “Back into the swamp with us, thankfully not having actually gotten cleaned off first.”

The werebat population of the Shademist Moors is greatly suffering from our getting lost, but at least the mist no longer looks like it’s about to eat people. When we do stumble across Elly (completely by chance), it becomes blatantly obvious by her pallor and red eyes that she’s been infected. She tells us that she’s been hiding from her husband and wants us to kill her before she fully turns.

“Neri, I don’t think you’re actually going to change anyone’s minds about vampirism anytime soon,” Merry points out quietly.

“Probably not,” I say with a sigh. “Why is it that people are so intent upon judging people for what they are or what was done to them rather than how they act and what they do?”

“She hasn’t turned yet,” Gelur says. “We might still be able to cure her.” She opens her pack and rummages around in it.

“Don’t tell me you’re carrying around a cure for vampirism?” Elly says.

Gelur pulls out potions one by one, muttering to herself, “Hmm, let’s see… rockjoint, ataxia… do you know if you were infected with porphyric hemophilia or noxiphilic sanguivoria?” At Elly’s blank look, she continues, “Never mind. Here, drink this,” and hands her a potion.

Elly takes the potion and drinks it down. “You just happened to be carrying around all those potions?”

“I’d be an awfully poor healer if I had this magic bag and didn’t stock up on potions to cure common ailments. And uncommon ailments. And honestly, literally every ailment that could be cured with a potion I could obtain. You feeling any better?”

“I think so,” Elly says. “I’m not feeling anything making my head fuzzy anymore and I’m not so cold. But what if they come for me again?”

“We killed the head bad vampire,” I say. “So at least that one and his lackeys probably won’t be causing any further problems.”

“They wanted to make me like them,” Elly says. “I’m glad someone took care of that, then. Thank you, travelers. You’ve given me my life back.”

I lean over to whisper to Gelur, “Her eyes are still red. Is that normal?”

“I dunno,” Gelur says. “I’m sure they’ll probably change back eventually. Unless they were red to begin with.”

“You know I can hear you over there,” Elly says.

“Don’t worry,” Gelur assures her. “You’re fine. It’s not a problem at all.”

“Uh-huh…” Elly says dubiously. “Well, at least I feel better even if there’s still some lingering cosmetic effects, but I’d rather not have anyone know I was even infected to begin with. Especially my husband. I don’t know which would be worse. Fear, disgust, or pity.”

“I’ll put out a series of pamphlets educating people on the truth about vampirism to go along with the ones on responsible handling of cursed items,” I say. “If publishers will print Marobar Sul’s nonsense about the Dwemer, they’ll print anything.”

“Marobar Sul must have really annoyed you if you remember his name,” Merry says.