I'M CAPTAIN KIRK

• Though Shadowmere is implied to be the same horse in both games, it is referred to as a female in Oblivion and as a male in Skyrim.

either Shadowmere is the world's first trans horse or weird Dark Brotherhood assassin horses have magic sexswitching abilities

 

or maybe the dark brotherhood is like REALLY BAD at horse keeping

 

it's not that hard to sex a horse, guys. it's not like cats, or hamsters. the evidence, or lack of it, is right there

 

tbf some of these people seem to have a very tenous grip on reality. I suspect their grip on horse balls isn't much better

 

considering Shadowmere literally rises from a bubbling black pool in a billow of black smoke with the sound of frantically galloping hooves fading in, it's possible they just don't have a very good grip on reality or balls either.

also, from somewhere (probably my armour?), i got the ability to occasionally paralyse people when i shoot them. it's the funniest thing because they literally just seize up and fall over but they don't ragdoll like normal, they just. stiff as a board

 

That needs oocq´ed

 

help i've fallen back into the skyrim mod pit and i can't get out
also my brain simultaneously really wants me to write a particular bit of fic and will not let me commence doing so

 

judging by how many times the 'non-essential children' mod has been translated into different languages, some people really want to get in on slaughtering some smalls

 

Phyriel (let's just use her name, it's easier even if she gets weird about it) had a grand old time once I convinced her that we did want to join Their Spookinesses in their cave of ill repute. She immediately enjoyed Babette's company, though it probably helps that Babette is a pretty dead-on (haha) reference to Claudia from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, so she probably perceived her differently because of my reaction. For her part, she's like, yes I rather do understand what it's like to be constantly underestimated by the people around you so that you just have to take comfort in knowing you'll get the last laugh. Every time I take a million screenshots of landscapes and they're all very dark because she's most comfortable at night, she thinks of Babette, and I recall a vague memory I think I have of Claudia's frustration with painting because no matter how good she got at it, all her landscapes were necessarily night scenes, which does rather limit one's artistic range. It might have been in the movie. It's been a very long time so I'm no longer sure about my memory at all except that I'm pretty sure this happened somewhere to someone in an Anne Rice property. In any case, even though it's entirely possible to go out in the sunlight if you don't mind a bit of mild discomfort, it's still a thing, and Babette would probably understand. I think "understanding nod in passing" would probably cover their dynamic.

Her reaction to Astrid was something like, you are pretty and capable, but not very strong and far too fond of head games. Wait, are you flirting? If so, please do not. I got a girlfriend with a pickaxe on her belt and nothing is better than that, and I'm not actually sure if you're flirting. Astrid: vaguely uncomfortable, what is your deal, thanks for the horse.

Overall, they sure are a funny little group of people who live in a cave.

Delvin, though, is a sincere delight. Phyriel, who has rarely been sick a day in her life without supernatural influence, responds to his voice with attentiveness because he sounds like he has a bad head cold. She recognizes that it's probably the result of a broken nose that was not set properly, not illness. (That is either some damn fine voice acting or some damn good casting, and either way, hats off to you for that, Skyrim team.) But even though he's probably fine, he still registers irrationally to her as "look out for this one who may not be feeling well". Mostly this manifests as being sure to visit when she's in the area and quietly keeping him company from time to time. It's not like she thinks she's doing him some sort of favor, it just seems like common sense to her that if someone you care about is not feeling their best, you offer your presence and assistance if it's wanted and as you can. She probably had a close friend or family member with chronic illness or disability at some point.

Shadowmere. Shadowmere's gender seems sort of like a daedric prince's gender. It probably doesn't matter to whatever Shadowmere is nearly as much as it matters to your average horse. It also changes sometimes without any explanation. I think Shadowmere was "she" in Oblivion but I can't recall for sure. (Edit: which you already noted and I completely failed to parse that I had read it. Heh.) I'm pretty sure Shadowmere can do whatever they like, and if they take a fancy to Frost, well Frost is a very fine example of a horse. Quite hard to do better than Frost.

The x is a place holder for an unknown digit. The x's have to do with official expansion packs you have installed, maybe so that it knows where exactly it should be looking for the file(s) for whatever object you're asking about. I have never really had to understand it entirely. Just try replacing the xx with anything from 00 counting up to 04. One of those ought to work unless it's Skyrim Special Edition in which case I'm very much not sure, but perhaps continue counting up if it doesn't work? It will say something about script not compiled if you give it the wrong number, and you can just try again.

The numbers are hex so it works exactly like regular numbers except you can have up to a value of 15 in any single digit, but they ran out of digit symbols after 9 so they had to use letters in place of numbers. Counting goes 1, 2, 3, ..., 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11, 12... A is worth 10, B is 11, and so forth, up to F for 15. Then the next number after hex 0F is hex 10, which is equal to 16 in decimal. It very much doesn't matter if you know what the number is equal to in decimal, that's the computer's business. And those are really not numbers to the computer either as it's not going to be doing any math with them, they're unique ID labels that happen to be numbers because that's pretty easy to work with. Like assigning a national ID number to a citizen, you don't plan to add and subtract them, numbers were just convenient for that purpose. The console is not case-sensitive for the letters so don't worry about that either. I doubt you'll have to count high enough for letters to get involved anyway. I'm betting xx ends up being something between 01 and 04.

 

you've got there already but also shadowmere is some kind of daedric respawning monster that happens to be shaped like a horse, I think if they want foals they could get foals

 

They're a funny dead bunch of people who live in a cave now, and Rilli is quite satisfied with that, because Nazir made it and Nazir is about the only person in that group she actually gave a shit about. Nazir's a cool dude. She'll keep him.
Babette is also alive, of course, but you win some you lose some. Rilli might make some effort to get along with her now. Maybe... child vampires... are okay vampires? Maybe? She'll get a knife in the neck if she thinks Rilli's blood is free for the taking, though.
Cicero is also alive, although he was left alive mostly to spite Astrid; he's amusing, but also annoying. He will be permitted to stay alive at this point though because Rilli is slightly afraid of the Night Mother.
Rilli claims that shooting Arnbjorn in the back while he was fighting the agents was an accident caused by all the fire and smoke, but it's difficult to take her seriously when she keeps grinning like that.
She did get very... Into the whole killing the Emperor thing, she thought that was great fun, even the one that didn't end so well. Apparently donning chef's garb makes her try and take cooking seriously, which is odd, but she sure did instruct the cook into creating a delicious meal, apart from the deadly poison. The wind was sort of taken out of her sails when the real Emperor was actually expecting her and didn't put up a fight or require her to sneak up on him, though; she was so deflated by that she didn't even bother to go out and murder all the sailors on the deck, when she'd been having a whale of a time killing everything that moved inside the boat.
...Some of those agents were not worth the paper their contracts were printed on, mind. One of them ran past a crouched, bow-drawn Rilli four times within about six inches of her without even getting the slightest of an inkling that maybe the person who'd been shooting all his friends was actually quite nearby.
The only reason he didn't die the first time was because he kept moving and it was hard to get a clear shot on him.

You both make excellent points and weird half-daedric foals are definitely in the future. if only there was an actual horse-breeding mod.
Speaking of horses, the horse mods I picked up yesterday allowed me to give Shadowmere straight-up dragonbone armour, which looks. just absurdly evil. It's great. I set up horse camp outside of Riften for now, but in the grand tradition of modding games that are vaguely unreliable as they stand, I have no idea where Frost is any more. Next time I boot up I'll try and retrieve him. Maybe he's feeling hard-done-by?

I mean, it's not the first time I've lost things. I lost both my spouses at different points. I lost my son, though it turns out he's still just up at the Solitude stables where he started, because the mod is apparently having difficulty persuading the game I actually adopted him (i can't even talk to the kid any more. I'll see if moving the fambly to a different house summons him). I have also lost my land in Hjaalmarch, although from checking the wiki I think I was looking in the wrong place to begin with. Losing a horse is just par for the course at this point.
I'm honestly not entirely certain whether or not I bought the land in Falkreath so I may have also lost that. It's fine. It'll turn up.

Thank you for elucidating on that! Turns out son boy's refid starts with 02; since I located him anyway I just used the console to check. Should moving home not summon him, I can now summon him anyway (and keep him prisoner if the game still thinks I didn't adopt him)

 

Time for screenshots!

Spoiler: big pics

Shadowmere in his new fancy-schmancy mod armour, and Rilli in her current usual getup. Which really makes that agent failing to spot her on the ship even more terrible. How is that in any way stealth? I'm pretty sure stahlrim glitters at the slightest excuse.


This Person Is Definitely A Chef, Yes, That Sure Is A Chef Right There (chef's garb courtesy of the cook we poisoned earlier, of course). How could she be anything else? She's wearing a chef's hat!


Game please. Game. Game I don't want to sit on the corpse. Game no. Game. He's still warm. It's like sitting on a warm toilet seat, but squishier.


Okay there was definitely some chicanery going on in this cabin before I even got here and started shooting everything that moved. The chap in the middle with the arrow sticking out of him, I shot him, that's fine and dandy, but I walk in post-murder and the first thing I see is the agent over on the bed on the far right, who was already dead. Okay, I figure, maybe he consumed something that disagreed with him, went to sleep it off, and discovered that it disagreed with him more terminally than previously thought. But during my whip-round of the room to ensure I'd picked up everything even slightly approaching valuable I discovered the owner of the leg you can see sticking out from under the bed in the foreground. Why was there a body stuffed under the bed? Bodies are really hard to fit under beds, as I found out while trying to hide the corpse of the erstwhile Gourmet earlier. What was the guy I'd just shot doing before I came in? What was he up to? No good, clearly. I probably did the world a public service by nailing him right in the heart. It probably nearly cancels out the way I shot the Emperor between the shoulderblades shortly afterwards and then stole all his clothes.


Delvin. Come now. You know your beloved Guildmistress doesn't torture for funsies. Strictly business, any torture she indulges in. You should know her better than that by now!
May I also observe that it is cute as fuck that he's the one who does all the interior decorating for the Dawnstar sanctuary? Did he also redo the Thieves' Guild hideout when it got back on its feet? There's a man I can admire. And @Verily, you're right, he does sound like he's got a bad cold, and it is pretty durn good voiceacting. Gotta love Delvin. He's got a better attitude than Vex, anyway.

 

bought dawnguard so i can install more mods

i am the reason my life is spinning out of control, it's me.

 

Rilli built a house, which is a nice way to say I speedran the construction of Winstrad Manor in Hjaalmarch, after discovering that the reason I couldn't find my land was because I hadn't bought it yet, and was asking the wrong people about it. But we fixed it. I now own... all the land.

Unsurprisingly, Rilli is bad at the Green Pact: she won't chop wood herself but she's quite happy to pay other people to chop it for her and then build a house out of it. But then she's hypocritical about most other things as well, so this is fairly par for the course.
I did take her on a whirlwind tour of every mine I could remember maybe possibly had iron and/or corundum in it though, because although her usual attitude to mining is 'why would I do that', she has proven quite willing to mine for things she really wants, like silver or gold or houses. We popped by Darkwater Crossing to visit the guy we rescued, annoyed him by knocking over all his stuff, and also somehow I never quite realised that there's a dragon who likes to fly around its nest really close to there? What do the miners think about that? Did they just get used to it? It never seems to come on over. Maybe it's a mascot?
You can also hear a dragon fucking about on the other side of the ridge from the Manor. Maybe I should go and deal with that eventually? ...Eh it'll just respawn. Dragons make fine neighbours, it's fine. It's fine.

We also found a man who had found some gold and then been crushed by a rockfall, which was very sad and ironic and also we took all his gold.

I installed a mod that adds more beds and some other features like winemaking materials to Hearthfire homes, and as a result there are so many beds in my house, and the cellar is so enormous, and also there is the persistent sound of hitboxes colliding but I can't pin down where it's coming from. I thought it was the books that flung themselves across the room but they seem to be staying where I put them, yet the noises continue.
Maybe we have a poltergeist. Guys, I think we have a poltergeist. I only just built this house and already it's haunted this is typical. I'm going to blame the fact that it's literally about ten feet away from High Gate Ruins, and there's a weird stone circle a little ways away where I was attacked by wolves. Maybe it's the ghost of the wolves? That's probably it. Or the ghost of the chaurus reaper that attacked me the first time I arrived to commence building, the little shit.

Frost managed to show up at the horse camp, so that's good, I was getting worried about him. I'm going to move it to outside the Manor just as soon as I get my human family shifted over. I have a feeling that I'm going to have to go chasing spouses, because while the more-beds house mod was designed to work with the extra children mod I have, absolutely nothing was designed to work with the extra spouse mod I have, and if both Rune and Sapphire make it there without complaining I will be greatly surprised. The kids? Who fucking knows.
...I should probably try and work out how the horse inventory that's supposed to come with the horse mod works so I don't have to go back and forth ten thousand times moving my impossible amount of shit across from Honeyside to the Manor. On the other hand, I could just weigh myself down impossibly, stagger out of Riften, get on Shadowmere and fast travel. We'll see. Moving house is just as annoying in Skyrim as in real life, apparently. But with more dragons and fewer utility bills.

I can't wait to see which spouse gets kidnapped.

 

Screenies! Just a couple this time.

Spoiler: big pics

So the horse mod has a setting to let your horse follow you about when you're not riding it. Usually, this is very handy; you can even set them to not follow you if you're sneaking, so a huge equine-shaped monstrosity with glowing red eyes and large amounts of dragonbone barding doesn't ruin your ambush.
Sometimes, however, this fucking happens. SHADOWMERE. GET OUT OF THE BRAZIER. SHADOW. NO. OFF THE BALCONY. BAD HORSE.

This is fine.
Would you believe we actually initially got stuck in the water on the other side of the walkway on the right, tried repeatedly to jump out, and the first and only time it worked got us stuck on this side?
Screenshot taken while Rilli and Shadowmere were sinking very slowly into the swamp water at a 90-degree angle from the usual.

 

I mean if it makes you feel any better this is canonically the state of about half of valenwood during the second era, they import wood from other provinces of the empire and use that bc it's not The Wood and they didn't hurt any plants themselves so it's fine right????

 

elves these days
it's a disgrace is what it is

 

Yeah I think that’s fair, and Phyriel agrees. I’m not sure how she agrees since she most definitely doesn’t ask permission from anyone except, in my headcanon at least, Lydia (not a happy camper but she’s honestly seen worse and at least this monster is on her side, she only gets asked in emergencies, and it means she doesn’t have to trail around after an increasingly vampiric vampire) and her wife (probably did not marry this particular elf because she was super into normal people). But if someone wakes up while she’s biting them and fights her, she really wouldn’t blame them.

Babette seems to most enjoy eating people who prey on children, which Phyriel thinks is both practical and civic-minded of her. She has an interesting idea of good citizenship.

Assassinating military strategists is just so annoying like that. Phyriel, who wasn’t sure she wanted to kill the emperor during a civil war though she was certain she was going to anyway, was fairly gratified to find he was on the same page about it. It probably meant she wasn’t making things worse in a way that this guy hadn’t already planned for.

In any case, better us than that clown who shoves bodies under beds.

In her defense, there is a long history of Green Pact Bosmer being willing to buy wood from outsiders as they need it. Some people think it’s hypocritical. But maybe someone who is very focused on the now and doesn’t believe in wasting resources unnecessarily might figure the trees are already dead at this point and might as well be a nice house or something.

Everyone needs neighbors! Dead wolves, a dragon, the bodies in that shack Astrid dragged you to that one time, angry necromancers, horkers, um is there a giant, the spouses we lost along the way slowly tickling by, it’s the neighborhood experience!

Also, losing things including your fambly, your house, your horse, your haunting, and your mind is just the biggest possible Skyrim mood.

 

so the main problem with moving house turns out to be not getting everyone there safely but persuading them it actually exists as a place.

This being Skyrim, anything from mods to the basic game itself could be the probable cause of Fuck You That Place Isn't Viable To Move To. I've disabled the marriage mod, which is apparently a big culprit, but it didn't do squat and now I'll have to go remarry Rune again eventually when I put it back on (which will, hopefully, be after I've got everyone moved in, because i'm not playing silly buggers). I've tried disabling the housing mod but it didn't do anything either.

I have three (3) more things to try when I feel like banging my head against a brick wall again:
1) sleep for 24 hours in the house a couple more times, because that worked for one guy and hey anything's worth a shot (it worked on the fourth try apparently lmao)
2) move everyone to a different house first and see if that changes anything
3) disable house mod, put beds and chests in in plain vanilla build mode, re-enable house mod. This is noted as potentially causing mod errors on the mod page itself, so it's a last resort.
4) the very last resort: disable house mod entirely. would be sad to do this, because it makes the place like a thousand times prettier and gives you extra space and all sorts.

for now though, balls to it, i'm tired and i need lunch