Yesterday I wrote about the Nightingale part of the Thieve’s Guild quest, which in turn leads to this little happy trail where you go to find Mercer and end him for all he’s done.  So we’ll watch how that goes down and how many people I almost kill because they get in front of me like asses (also, I love it when they give me permission to kill people.  I tend to speak loudly at the screen and say “I don’t need your permission, bitch!”… I’m weird like that.)

I’m going to preface this by saying… I am melee.  I prefer melee, and I don’t bother with magic or ranged (unless I’m forced to), so we’ll see how all that goes.  Dual-wielding in light armour with most of the light armour perks and almost all the one-handed perks seems like a fun game for me, so I’m enjoying it.  My gear is also dual-enchanted now, as of last night, so that should make a lot of this easy mode, but we’ll see how things go, won’t we?

I’m also, apparently, doing this companion free, as Faendal decided he would fuck off after some guy attacked me and I killed that guy– for some reason that pissed Faendal off and he started trying to kill me and let my service and I don’t feel like waiting for him to get back to Riverwood to see if I can hire him again.  I’d just gotten him full dragonscale armour, as well, the asshat.  I mostly keep him around as a mule and a ranged bitch anyway.  Oh well, I’d be mad too if my face looked like this.

Oh my god, what the derp?

As you can see, he had to have been violated by my awesome and upset by it.  I’m going to take this time to mention that I found eighteen mods to change my dragon scale armour into a Nocturnal dress in which I’d look like a stupid ho, but I decided to stick with the armour that actually makes her look hot.  I’m just sayin’.

Anyways, onto the actual reason for this post.   Something bugs me about the fact that I had to fight through a slew of guys and up some weird ramps that I might have fallen off of at any point just to get inside where Karliah already was– honestly, did she just ninja to the top in a way that I couldn’t see? Wench.

I'll just avoid falling to my death, k?

Irkngthand already seems like it’s going to be a pain in my ass, like much of the places that are enclosed in Skyrim– stupid Simulation Sickness– but you know, I think I can handle it.   Dead bandits inside, but none outside? Dammit, Karliah, way to make me work harder than was really necessary.

You get the three inside, I'll get the thousand outside, k?

I hate it when you’re supposed to meet them inside and they fuck off to some other chamber and act like you’re made of directions and know exactly where they are.  If it weren’t for waypoints I’d probably miss half the people I’m supposed to talk to.   Of course it had to be Dwemer ruins, which means annoying little mechanical shits and weird blade traps that destroy me– I hate you so much, Mercer and Karliah.

Oh, look! Scrap metal.

Fire traps and mechano-spiders and I still haven’t found Karliah.  I don’t know if they realise that when you’re asked to meet somewhere you usually meet someone at the entrance.  Yes, technically, I’m a few weeks late, but I don’t remember them saying it was dire that we get there right away.  I managed to get to level 45 right as I entered this place so we’ll just see how important I am, if I ever find Karliah through all these stupid ass traps.

So I just avoid the fire, right?

Down a floor and I still haven’t found her? I’m really starting to wonder why I help anyone in this game anymore– maybe all the Daedric princes are getting to my sensibility and I’m just going evil, but that doesn’t seem wholly right because honestly, a lot of the game’s quest people are complete wangbags.  I still want to kill Maven, but that’s another story altogether.

Apparently, according to Karliah whom I just found, Mercer killed all the Bandits inside, which means she didn’t do shit for me at all.  I hate Mercer a whole hell of a lot because he’s a complete, cocky wangbag, but I’m not sure if I hate him more than these two or not.  I love Brynjolf but I’m not sure I can tolerate him with Karliah because he kind of does nothing and she ends up acting like a monotone little wench.  Let’s get this show on the road, Karliah, I don’t need to hear your disgust with death.

One of these things is not like the others...

Great, and now we’re going to have Mercer traps and enemies on top of annoying Dwarven stuff.  I’m already hating everything about this, but I’m hoping the reward at the end will be good enough, even though my shit is already tricked out to as good as it can be (except that I’m probably going to replace my Dragon Priest mask with a dragonscale helm soon since I can dual enchant it and make it worth my while.) Go through a door and get smacked in the face with a giant, spiked flail on a chain? That’s great, Mercer, I said I was going to replace my mask but you didn’t have to smash my face in.  It didn’t really hurt, per se, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Somehow, both Karliah and Bryn see Mercer down below but I don’t see jack– it’s possible it’s just my bad eyesight, but apparently he’s toying with us and wants us to follow him but we’re in a big ass cage.  Thanks for that, Karliah, I didn’t get that from the start.

Can you spot the Mercer in this picture?

Chaurus eggs don’t bode well for what I’m going to have to fight.  As wuss as they might be now their poison spit still messes up my camera and makes me a little dizzy, so here’s hoping I don’t end up passing out on the keyboard and drooling from some kind of seizure caused by simulation sickness– it’s never happened before, but there’s always a first time, right? Falmer and all that means that the ‘companions’ I do have are going to start getting in my way, so they’ll get the shit beat out of them– I’m hoping, for my sake, that they’re set to essential so I don’t end up killing one of them and having to start all over somehow.  I doubt that they lacked the foresight to have all that set, but it still makes me a little miffed that I’ve, more than once, accidentally killed someone who was hanging out with me.  It means I tend to leave mobs for them to finish off and it takes forever while they try to eat my face.  Douches.

“That’s what happens when you cross the guild.”  True, Bryn, but I’d like to think that it’s more I’m what happens when you cross the guild.  There’s really so little to write about when you’re digging your way through dwarven ruins to try and get to some mega-douche, so we might miss some points here and there, but who cares? A gate that  need to hit two levers and that’s pretty much the only thing that proves ‘challenging’.  Anyways, onward and upwards.

Through Falmer, traps, and other such shit I traverse to find Mercer Frey,  get some spiel about how it’s our destiny to fight, and how he’s better than I am.  Really, Mercer? That’s weird because you’re dead now and I’m going to eat your corpse– not because I need to, but because you pissed me off.  That was actually a quite lackluster fight, I was kind of hoping for more, but here we are again with me disappointed by a fight with a random guild head.

Omnomnom, delicious for a wangbag.

As it turns out, that’s all there is to Mercer’s Fall, go figure.  What a douche, and this was not as interesting as I thought it would be.  The nearly drowning in a room was kind of funny and terrifying, but in the end we got out so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  I’m not sure why I thought this quest would offer more, but I guess we’ll find out just what I have to do after this at some point, if I bother finishing it up at all anytime soon and writing about it.  Who knows.

Notable Loot: Falmer Eyes, Skeleton Key, Random potions, the rest is crap.

Notable Points: Mercer knew we’d fight and decided to draw it out for an entire damn quest line? If he’d killed me in my sleep at some point we wouldn’t have gotten there.  That’s what you get for thinking I’d be a piece of cake, non?