Over the next few days I settle into a routine of sorts: I get up, go shopping, and cook food for the day. I then walk to Heartwood Mill, hunting game on the way, and chop wood for a couple of hours before returning to Riften. I have dinner, socialize a bit, and go to bed. Little by little, I buy the things--the non-food things--that I need. I get decent clothes; I no longer look like a homeless person who stole someone’s good leather boots. My walks to and from Heartwood go quietly enough, although I do have one scare--an encounter with an Argonian thief who attacks me when I refuse to hand over my hard-earned wages and knocks off more than half my health with a couple of blows. There’s nothing to do but puff out my chest and speak as commandingly as I can; he immediately calms down and I run away before the Voice of the Emperor effect wears off. That day I return to Riften by a different route. As soon as I’m back in the city, I buy a steel sword. My efforts at hunting have what might generously be described as mixed results: I sneak up on a deer and shoot it, my arrow causes only a slight injury, and the animal promptly runs off into the forest and I am unable to get another clear shot. Thinking that I need to hunt smaller game, I shoot a fox: I fail to take even this small creature down with a single arrow, and it runs away. I do manage to kill a rabbit with one shot, but getting that shot takes quite some time, and it turns out that a single dead rabbit does not provide even one substantial meal. After a couple of days I start to notice that whenever I shoot a deer, it’s injured already, which is rather puzzling, as I’ve seen no hunters in the area--even the psychotic wolves have been conspicuously absent lately. This leads to a growing conviction that I have been walking back and forth between Riften and Heartwood shooting the same exact deer every time I pass it, and it isn’t recovering from its injuries in between encounters with me. I do finally get my deer, but the dubious method I have employed seems only to argue against my pursuing hunting as a profession--it’s not just woefully inefficient; it’s cruel. And is it necessary? It occurs to me that Nona could go on like this indefinitely, sleeping in Riften and working at Heartwood Mill. It’s easy. It’s profitable. It’s dull. It’s everything she’s always wanted! Well, not quite. Nona’s not an ambitious woman, to be sure--but her modesty does not extend to a lifelong commitment to a career as an unskilled laborer. She wants a profession--a skilled profession. If chopping wood required a skill, an honest-to-goodness learning-by-doing Skyrim skill with actual perks (“Level 100: chop an entire tree down with one stroke”), then she might be interested. But it doesn’t. She isn’t. (And then there’s the fact that chopping wood is really, really boring. For me as a player, I mean. I know, I know, I’m playing Skyrim as a character who doesn’t do anything and walks everywhere; I must be immune to boredom, right? I laugh in the face of tedium! I monologue when set upon by monotony! Actually, no. See, even though playing Skyrim as Nona isn’t the most thrilling thing in the world, writing about it is actually a pretty interesting exercise. But I can’t write about exactly the same day over and over again. No doubt there are writers who might do that sort of thing and even find artistic possibilities in it, but I’m pretty sure I lack whatever natural gift, or natural lack of self-reflection, is required to pull that off.) So Nona trudges off to her unsatisfying job every day for one reason: in the evening after work, she can visit Elgrim’s and practice her alchemy. So far she’s been using just the ingredients she’s gathered, and there’s not a lot of variety. With her Heartwood income, though, she can afford buy ingredients from Elgrim and experiment. She discovers some new formulas, and even gains a level, putting her first perk point into alchemy. Progress! It’s all too easy to neglect your social life when you’re working to put yourself through school, so I try not to let that happen with Nona. The jerks in the Bee and Barb only get ruder the longer she stays there--I could swear that Vulwulf Snow-Shod times his anti-Imperial tirades solely for her benefit, and Maven Black-Briar and her son seem to approach every so often specifically to insult her--but she meets someone new every day. She finally gets around to visiting Honorhall Orphanage, where Grelod the Kind works tirelessly to ensure that no child leaves her care with even a trace amount of uncrushed spirit. I’m astonished that Hagravi could be at all charitable toward her: if I’d grown up in this orphanage, I’d probably hire someone to murder the old hag. But how would I ever find a person willing to do such a thing? I also run into Ingrun Black-Briar. She seems pleasant enough, and I hope that we might have a great deal in common, being students of Elgrim and all, so I ask her why she became interested in alchemy. She gleefully describes her fascination with watching the destructive effects of poisons on people. Um, yeah. I guess I’m not going to have a best friend in this horrible family after all. I wonder what the one who’s in prison for murder is like? There’s Wujeeta, an Argonian skooma addict who desperately wants a healing potion but doesn’t seem to find my homemade ones acceptable; Olette, a little girl who picks my pocket; Wander-Lust, a robustly cheerful Argonian woman who travels Skyrim seemingly as a way of channeling her dead son, who could never stay at home. (I actually have to cut our chat short; some of the Interesting NPCs have conversations that can last for hours and hours of game time--some day I’ll have to try this mod with a character who doesn’t have to eat.) There’s Bolli, an affable fisherman I meet in the Bee and Barb and wouldn’t mind having dinner with, but he always seems to be sitting with Haelga. And there’s Jade, a woman who left the Thieves’ Guild to become a disciple of Mara and speaks tremulously of her ineptitude as a matchmaker. (The competition between disciples to get people together is apparently rather fierce, and Jade doesn’t want to be stuck handing out Dinya’s insipid leaflets.) I like Jade. I find her whiny at first--her voice has a slightly hysterical quality--but her story is amusing (her parents used to lock her in a room, and she learned to pick the locks and break out; she ran away from home and joined the Thieves’ Guild because she had no other skills, but she couldn’t bear to actually steal anything). And, oddly enough, she likes me--she actually seems to want to accompany me on my travels! I’m going to have to give this some serious thought: Nona would love to have a companion, and in Skyrim you usually have to do a quest in order to get someone to join you, so this is a rare opportunity. If Jade were a tough adventuring type, it would perhaps be too much of an opportunity. But Jade seems highly reassured by Nona’s assertion that she keeps to the roads when traveling because there’s so much scary stuff in the wilderness. “Oh, then we’ll make great companions!” Jade exclaims. No need to decide immediately, of course--I’m not going to bore Jade to death by insisting that she trudge over to Heartwood to watch me chop wood every day. But talking with her gets me thinking about the future: Nona would like to get married, some day, and the quality she prizes above all others in a prospective spouse is that he or she not live in Riften. It would be best, then, to visit the Temple of Mara and obtain an amulet before leaving town: with money coming in, she can afford to do that. Greed battles daily with wanderlust in Nona’s head: every night she contemplates leaving this rotten city behind, and every morning discovers some new commodity she cannot live without and trudges off to work again. The very last thing she buys is a horse. Nona could buy a horse anywhere, but she finds the Riften horses especially pretty, so a Riften horse she must have. On Morndas, the 25th of Last Seed, Nona gets to the mill early, works hard and diligently; returns to the Temple of Mara to buy flowers from Yushari, a khajiit flower-seller who emphasizes romance in her sales pitch but is brazenly materialistic in her outlook; heads down to Elgrim’s to extract essences from the blooms. She is starting to turn a modest profit on potions and has everything she wants for the road; this, she resolves, will be her last night in Riften. She has a venison chop for dinner and visits Mistveil Keep, where she has never yet entered; chats with Dirassi, a hypochondriac maid; returns to the Bee and Barb. In a celebratory mood, she samples one of the local brews, a Cliff Racer, which goes down easy but has a tremendous kick. One foggy hour later, she stumbles into her dingy room for the last time.
2 Comments
Todd
4/30/2013 06:51:01 am
It's like the blog of the anti-T'lar! I'm enjoying it. :)
Reply
Mewness
4/30/2013 07:31:00 am
Lets see ... female, ugly, and completely unadventurous. Oh, and able to remember people's names. You're right, she IS the anti-T'lar!
Reply
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201 And All That
Nona Plaia may well be the most boring person in Skyrim. Below are links to her "adventures" in chronological order.
A Life More Ordinary Mods An NPC is Born The Lady in the Lake Adrift in the Rift Opportunity Chops Studying Abroad Witches, Wolves Footwear is Not Enough A Modest Proposal Scales of Love Dances with Beers Five Rules to Live By Plain and Pusillanimous Watery Woes How Not to Stage a Murder Hot Heads and Cold Graves Run Nona Run Interlude A Fool Suffers Gladly The Markarth Discomfiture In Search of the Unknown It's Raining Bandits Down and Out No Holds Barred Beyond the Pale The Slippery Slope Mission Implausible The Nord in the Next Room The Only Living Girl Victory is a Gateway Drug Continuity Break Wherever You Go Archives
August 2014
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