There’s one more way in which I’m departing from The Elder Strolls: rather than playing a boring, unadventurous man, I’ll be playing a boring, unadventurous woman. For too long, men have dominated the fields of aimless wandering, casual gossip, and quest avoidance. It’s time for a woman to stand up (before sitting down quietly and folding her hands) and prove that she can be every bit as inadequate as the least remarkable of men; that she, too, can lead an existence free of any noteworthy accomplishment; that her aspirations are not inherently greater than man’s, and indeed need not rise any higher than a life of quotidian domesticity in a home belonging to someone else. Are you with me, sisters?!
Here, then, is Nona Plaia, a young Imperial woman with, if all goes well, a very inconsequential career ahead of her. (While a Nord would clearly have been the best choice for sheer blandness, I made her an Imperial because the Imperial racial power seems less heroic to me. Nords can get enemies to flee in terror; Imperials can only calm them down.)
I’m also taking the liberty of adjusting her starting skills with the console. I don’t understand why Imperials in Skyrim get all these bonuses to magic and nothing to Speech--in both Morrowind and Oblivion, they got a bonus to Speech and no bonuses to any magical skills. Imperials are supposed to be good with the talking and the questioning and the schmoozing, dammit. I reduce Nona’s Destruction skill by 5 and increase her Speech by the same amount.
I decide to start Nona’s career in Ivarstead. It’s not far from Cyrodiil, and she could easily have come over the border before Helgen was destroyed. She doesn’t have much in the way of supplies: she is dressed in rags, and carries only 17 septims, an apple, and a dagger. What dismaying set of circumstances could have reduced this innocent young woman to such a state, alone and friendless in an inhospitable land, with so very few possessions? Whatever the story is, it’s probably much too interesting to be suitable for this blog. Let’s just say that Nona prefers not to discuss it.