“It was very exciting watching the battle, once I calmed down and realized none of them could see me or touch me,” Nanwen says. “I never saw a real battle like that before. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t, before I died. I would have been as terrified as some of those poor civilians…”

The Green Lady showed up while I was asleep and for some reason everyone decided it was best if they let me sleep a little while longer. Gelur has gone around town making sure to patch up everyone that could still be patched up, and fortunately the majority of those that were still alive when we got here are still alive now. You’d think more people would take up restoration magic, considering how vital it is (pun intended or otherwise). I mean, I can heal, too, and I did it completely by accident! It’s not like you even need to be particularly religious or anything to do it.

Eran and Merry had taken it upon themselves to guard the docks and briefed the Green Lady on the situation. The sergeant doesn’t seem to have told the lieutenant what she saw me do (you know, one of those things nobody is going to believe you) but she must have told him something as he’s giving me puzzled looks.

“I hope you didn’t hang back for my sake,” I tell the Green Lady when I finally get a chance to speak with her.

The Green Lady chuckles. “No, there were some things I needed to take care of in Velyn Harbor as it was. I’ll be heading out to Dra’bul soon to meet with the Wood Orcs and find out why they acted against us, but I will undoubtedly still beat you there.”

“I’m sure there will be problems that require hitting in between here and there,” I say. “I’ll make sure they get hit.”

I’m not sure how a new Green Lady is chosen, whether it’s quite as mystical as with the Silvenar or not, but this one is apparently the niece of the last one. She even tells me her real name and the name of her aunt, which I immediately forget on both accounts and am glad they go by a handy title.

“My condolences for your aunt,” I say. “She was a fine woman.”

“Thank you. I hope I can live up to her.”

With my party gathered, our first destination out of Velyn Harbor is to find that Skyshard up atop the cliff. Eran looks like he wants to tie a rope around my waist when I have to get close to the edge just to absorb it. We’re making an exception to the cliff policy out of necessity to acquire shiny rocks. Anyway, it’s not like this is a particularly high cliff.

A little ways past the Skyshard is another one of those star sign monoliths, this one for the Warrior. When I get close enough to touch it, I notice another Skyshard tickling at my senses somewhere up ahead, inside a docks area.

“There’s another Skyshard ahead,” I say. “May I jump off this cliff?”

Eran sighs. “Why would we want to jump off this cliff when we can just walk around to the beach through Velyn Harbor?”

“It’s faster?” I say. “It’s not like this is an especially high cliff. We can jump over to that roof easily enough.”

“And there’s a nest of tigers halfway down the cliff, although I’m sure that’s not much of a deterrant,” Eran says.

Anyway, I smoothly convince Eran of my sane and reasonable plan, and totally don’t slide down into the middle of a pack of tigers for no good reason.

Once we get down to the docks, which are not too far from the docks we’d just fought a bunch of Redguards on and half blew up, we meet a mer who introduces herself as Elly and informs us that there are more Redguards at this particular set of docks as well. They’re being miscreants here also and she needs help finding her performers, because this is another carnival or something. They call themselves the Dancing Scrib.

Our task is simple: head into the shanty town east of the Velyn Harbor docks and rescue a few performers and a trained monkey, all while violently convincing Redguards to go be antisocial somewhere else. Somehow this leads to burning down half the shanty town. You know how it goes.

The bearded lady is a Nord by the name of Snaehild, and let me tell you, Nords have much more interesting names than most mer. Not that I’m still going to remember this one, most likely. She has a magnificent beard that only a Nord or a Dwemer could manage, and there’s no Dwemer around to compete against. Her green dress is a bit torn up and filthy after all the excitement, and my shitty cleaning spells don’t do much to help.

“Thank you for the effort, hero,” Snaehild says. “But I think there’s no hope for this dress. I’ll have to see if the Redguards have anything good.”

“Hopefully something that will fit you,” I say. “I don’t imagine most Redguard women are quite as tall as you.”

“Hmm, true, probably not,” Snaehild says. “I’ll have to check anyway, though. Maybe some modifications can be made if I find something good.”

The performing troupe isn’t going to be sailing off on their own ship again anytime soon, as the vessel is sitting off the docks listing heavily and half submerged into the water, much to their dismay.

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“Various race-specific exclamations of dismay!” they variously say. “Let’s just take their ship instead!”

We rescue a Bosmer performer by the name of Sal (his name is a little longer than that but everyone calls him Sal most of the time, which is nice for me because even though it’s only two syllables long, I can’t remember now what the second syllable was), who had been tied up on a rock outcropping by the water. He’s supposedly an escape artist, and is less than amused at the fact that he couldn’t escape from those ropes. If you can only get yourself out of ropes that have been tied poorly for the sake of doing a show, can you really call yourself an escape artist?

Or is this something like a ‘magician’ who does ‘magic’ by sleight of hand and not actual magic… even though sleight of hand is harder than magic? Performing by trying to show off skills that you don’t actually have doesn’t make terribly much sense, but what do I know? Maybe I should take up juggling knives in my copious spare time. It sounds relaxing.

On the beach, the Steel Shrikes (as these Redguard pirates call themselves, although weren’t the Redguards who attacked Velyn Harbor which is right over there a part of the Covenant navy? I am so confused… where was I?) …have a senche tied up under ropes, so we go rescue the cat too. He has a Khajiit name and seems to be either the Khajiit woman’s beloved pet or boyfriend, I’m not sure which. It doesn’t help that the word ‘senche’ refers to both a type of Khajiit and is a general name for a large feline. Either way, this particular large feline is either unable or unwilling to speak and clarify the matter.

We ‘sneak’ into the captain’s tent (by means of killing every pirate between here and there), which is big enough to hold an entire circus under it, and retrieve the key to the pirates’ hold. With that in hand, the performers head for the ship.

And then, with the help of the monkey (who has the very dignified name of Cumberland), we retrieve the performers’ props from the warehouse by the docks. These props, of course, include a bag labeled ‘senche snacks’ that’s actually full of salted eyeballs. That’s one spoiled senche. Although I can understand how the monkey finds the eyeballs, it (he? I think it’s a boy monkey) has no trouble picking out the other items from the massive piles of junk in the warehouse. Seriously? That’s not just intelligence, that’s clairvoyance! It’s a good thing these little guys can’t talk. They could take over Tamriel otherwise.

“Sure, why not,” Gelur says. “It’s not like mer have moved beyond shit-flinging yet either. I mean, I doubt the humans, Khajiit, and Argonians have, either, but I don’t feel like flinging shit at them today for shit we’re just as guilty of.”

“Can we please stop talking about feces?” Merry says in a pained voice.

“Let’s go finish off the pirates and not blow up this ship,” Eran says.

“I’m out of kindlepitch and fire salts, anyway,” I say, heading out of the warehouse. “Remind me to restock once we get back to a town that has not been invaded recently.”

“I’m kind of scared to…” Eran admits. “You didn’t even bother to cast Bound Pants last time before bounding off.”

“You can use wayshrines,” Ilara suggests with a grin. “Go shopping whenever you want.”

“Did you really have to remind him of that?”

We board the ship, where the performers have gotten inside and are waiting for us, presumably figuring their chances against the pirates are considerably better with us than without us. They’re a performing troupe, after all, not a band of heavily armed warriors. The bearded lady doesn’t even have a battle axe.

We kill the captain of the Steel Shrikes and let the troupe claim the ship. All in a day’s work.

“We’ll be heading on with the tide,” says Elly. “With everyone back together and our props in hand, our career has been saved! You guys will definitely get free admission if we run into one another again.”

“Where are you heading?” I ask.

“Definitely not to the north, that’s for sure,” Elly says. “I’m crossing Hammerfell off of our itinerary for the time being. Nah, I think we’ll head south and get out of these waters. Maybe visit Southpoint.”

“Redguards to the north, Sea Elves to the south,” I say. “Good luck on avoiding trouble with either of them. Southpoint was okay when we were there last. Relatively speaking.”

“By ‘relatively’ you mean that people weren’t still trying to kill one another,” Merry says. “I did not make continuous checkups on their mental stability afterward.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.

We part ways with the performers and go to scour the camp to kill any remaining pirates that were too dumb to run away or hide when they realized people were killing them and setting things on fire, as well as sort through anything worth looting that wasn’t set on fire. I keep my eyes out for any interesting-looking books, because it’s not like Hermaeus Mora gave me a blessing to make books he wanted glow purple to my eyes or something like that.

Oh, and that Skyshard I sensed that led me into this place? After thoroughly looking around and finding no sign of it, I finally think to look up. Turns out it looks like it’s up at the top of the cliff and not down here on the beach. We’ll be heading up there next, once I can figure out how to actually get up there. We’ll probably need to go the long way around back through Velyn Harbor.

Before heading up and around back through Velyn Harbor, we poke into an old mine I spot the entrance of down by the shore, just in case there’s more Sea Elves—I mean, Redguards—hiding inside.

Yeah, there’s more Redguards hiding inside. Why wouldn’t there be? And they’ve got large snakes as pets, too! Were there supposed to be Sea Elves here and they just got lost, or do Redguards also have a thing for oversized serpents?

Oddly, there’s a Nord-style shield in here with the name of a town on it. I shove it in my pack and make a note to see if someone there wants it once I make it over there, because it’s on the other side of Malabal Tor and there’s no way I’m going to still remember by that point.

There’s a Skyshard inside the mine, perched precariously on a ledge, which I carefully absorb while enduring intense stares from Eran.

According to a journal we run across inside, the Redguard pirates told the Redguard military that this mine was full of riches. Busily trying to find the hidden treasure of Velyn Harbor, the Covenant assault force divided its strength and the group in here doesn’t seem to have even gotten the memo yet that their comrades are dead and their ship in small charred pieces at the bottom of the harbor.

“I believe I may have lost my patience for investigating every hole in the ground by now if we did not keep finding reasons to go inside,” Merry comments wearily. “Are we out of Redguards for the moment?”

“Seems so,” I say. “Unless there’s survivors who decided to try swimming back to Hammerfell when they heard us coming.”

“Let’s let Velyn Harbor know they were here at least so they can secure the place,” Eran says.