Spoiler’s Possible: Including Thieve’s Guild quest line

As much as I love playing Skyrim, it’s hard for me to actually be able to play it for any length of time because of a little condition called simulation sickness (which is basically motion sickness but in a simulate environment– your brain plays tricks, more or less) and let me tell you, being a gamer and having simulation sickness is not at all fun.

However, I do get to play sometimes, as long as I pace myself and allow ample time for breaks and adjustment for my eyes and nausea– music also helps here, for some reason, having it playing in the background instead of just game sounds somehow soothes me– I’m able to enjoy the game for a little bit, at the very least.

I’ve failed to complete the main story line so many times over just because I get distracted by side-quests and end up going down a path of another quest line and getting pulled into that one.   Today I finally got around to playing through part of the Thieve’s Guild quest that is actually interesting: the Nightingale initiation.

It’s kind of funny how it works out that you get to lead so many things in this game, but before all that happens, you usually get shunted into some new kind of power or position and get handed armour that will make you all the more powerful, well, if you haven’t already decked out in dragon or daedric armour, depending on your proficiency.   I honestly wish the Nightingale armour was better than my dragon armour, because though I love both of them, I find myself particularly in love with the Nightingale stuff (which my best friend predicted when I first started playing the game in the first place.)

I do love my dragon scale armour.

The story line itself involves you helping Karliah track down Mercer, who was a douche from the start and I was hoping I’d get the chance to kill him, and reclaim the glory of the Thieve’s Guild, since it had fallen down the tubes since the previous head had fallen in a ploy that had Karliah blamed for his murder, and Mercer taking his spot.   She’s pretty adamant about you needing to be at the head of things and find all this information for her to help clear her name and reclaim the guild, and it’s kind of annoying how you tend to get pushed forward into these things regardless of how you want to do them.  The good thing about Skyrim is that even if ‘time is a factor’ you can deviate off your quest path and do five weeks (in-game time) of stuff before coming back to a point you were meant to finish a day after you got it.

Before you know it, you uncover the plot and all is fine and dandy, you need to hunt Mercer down, which involves breaking into his house (this annoyed me since I had to use a bow and arrow to lower the ladder and I am a melee girl until the end– I won’t even use them to bring down dragons, I wait for them to land and fight me) and finding where he was planning on going.  Turns out he has some big heist planned, but no one really cares because Karliah is determined to get me into the Nightingale hold and indoctrinate me to her ‘religion’, all while forcing me to play dress up in armour that is less good than what I’m already wearing– what an edge!

It is pretty hot, I'm not going to lie (updated by mod)

She swears up and down that it has nothing to do with faith, but that we need the edge to take them on, so somehow Brynjolf and I end up in their little place and bowing before Nocturnal, who, as far as I can tell, just likes having people on her side.  I’m pretty sure if I were some kind of super power I wouldn’t tolerate a failure like Karliah‘s, no matter how many awesome people she brought to give themselves to me.   But apparently we’re so awesome that it’s okay, and Karliah is forgiven her sins for now and told not to screw up again, and then suddenly I’m a Nightingale and somehow I missed what all that means– I probably shouldn’t have been staring at my armour and pondering how to have it without sucking.

Sure, there's nothing cultish about this, carry on.

That’s all I know about how I got to this point.  The Nightingale are some kind of secret sect of the Thieve’s Guild that only had three people to begin with– with one being dead and the other being a traitor, that left my character and Brynjolf to take the place of the other two.  I suppose a trinity is more powerful than otherwise? I’ll see how this plays out with the next part of the quest, when I get to it.

Next up: Mercer’s Fall