Seeking Home (Night Eye)

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Zephyr
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Seeking Home (Night Eye)

Post by Zephyr »

"30 pts for 30 sec on self","30","45","Former Orcish Legionnaire, now smuggler, gets lost in the wilderness.","Unnamed Imperial fort in unnamed province; fort is part of town (like Gnisis), and is within walking distance of a Dwemer ruin with a hidden entrance, and a small port town; fort has prison tower","Orc, Khajiit, Imperial"

Seeking Home
The Autobiography of an Orc Volume VII
By Orgol gro-Muk

And so my new-found friends became scattered in the midst of an Imperial ambush. I dashed west, weighed down only by the sword I'd stolen from my jailbreak, and the clothes on my back. After several hundred yards, it dawned on me that Kievier would still be at the Dwemer tower, waiting for us to return. Not being terribly intelligent, it did not dawn on me that the Imperials might have known about our stronghold too. In any event, I thought it probable that those of us who escaped capture would likely return there, and I couldn't abandon Ma'Dar, who had been such a good friend.

So I abruptly stopped running, spun on my heel, and started walking back the way I'd come. Lacking creativity, I'd simply ran in a straight line. Had I been followed, that would have been very, very bad. On the bright side, it also meant that I wasn't too lost. In the time since the ambush, the sun had fallen from the sky, and I very quickly found that not being too lost during the day was quite a different beast from being not too lost at night. In short order, too lost I became.

Besides my bearing, I lost track of the hours as I stumbled through the countryside, trying to remember what direction the coastline was in. If I could find the coast, I could probably follow it back to our Dwemer ruin, or to the port crawling with Imperials if I was unlucky. However, not knowing which way was which way certainly made either option problematic. Rather than pausing to figure it out, I bulled ahead, becoming ever more lost.

Then it hit me -- I was disoriented because of the darkness. If I cast the Night Eye spell Kievier had taught me, I'd be able to tell where I was. Maybe.

After my vision brightened, I surveyed my surroundings. Nothing looked familiar. Then, from behind a hill, I saw a low, quick shape running toward me. If I hadn't cast the spell, I never would have seen it. Confident, I drew my sword and waited. The shape slowed, apparently seeing that I had stopped moving. It rose, into a posture I recognized: a humanoid, out of breath. As it walked closer, I finally realized what it was.

"Ma'Dar!" I bellowed, "glad to find you!"

Between breaths, she corrected "Ma'Dar... found... you... silly... Orc."

I sat on the ground while she caught her breath. When she did, she informed me that she had been trying to track me down the whole time I'd been lost. She was afraid I'd lose my bearing, walk back into town, and get caught. Considering I'd saved her life, she probably felt the need to repay me. I'd given her a hard time, since I'd wandered so randomly as I became ever more lost.

Finally, I asked her if she knew the way back to the tower. "Of course" she purred, "but Ma'Dar does not think it wise to go home now. They knew we were coming. They might also know where we came from. You see? Employment comes second to staying out of cages. We must seek a new home."

I nodded in agreement. But without gold, how far could we get?
Xui'al
Developer Emeritus
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Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2005 9:21 pm
Location: Wastelands of Canada.

Post by Xui'al »

Added.
'What if man is not really a scoundrel - man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind - then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be.'
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