The Nexerus

Beginner's Luck SPAM

This thread is a literary abortion. Incidentally, so is the roleplay that created it, making this thread not only an abortion but a meta-abortion.

This is real news about a real person saying the real name of an actual place

Welsh is a ridiculous language that I am yet to be convinced is real.

EDIT: HAH, I KNEW IT
WELSH MIGHT BE REAL BUT THIS NAME ISN'T

It's two villages, Llanfairpwll and Llantisilogogogoch (both of which are admittedly ridiculous on their own), that some guy had combined, their names merged, when a railway station was going to be put in Llainfairpwll. They did it just so they'd have a really long name and get put in the record books, attracting tourists.

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

Elayne was not so unwise as to walk into a Nordic crypt unprepared. Before she dared to enter, and whilst Hector was coating his blade, she made sure to ready a few basic offensive spells in her mind, preparing to channel the flaming might of Aetherius at a moment's whim. It was always possible, and therefore always needed to be accounted for, that a small army of Draugr would walk out of their coffins the second Hector disturbed the tomb's entrance. Waiting with bated breath and fires burning away at her fingertips, Elayne waited for Hector to push open the door, and caught a lump in her throat: total darkness and absolute silence met her eyes, and naught else. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, Elayne followed closely behind the Imperial the multitude of possibilities of what might lay waiting for her and her partners on the other side of the doors. Once inside the tomb, the helpful illumination offered by her fellow Breton awakened Elayne's eyes to her first sight of treasure; the crypt's ancient stone walls were decorated with a multitude of inscribed symbols, each of which Elayne examined as closely as she could in the short time frame offered to her. By the time the group began their long decline down the steps that lay at the opposite end of the entrance, Elayne was already sure of the crypt's age and purpose. It was built in the time of, dedicated to, and could potentially contain a Dragon Priest. Her initial fear quickly quenched by academic curiosity, the young Breton mage trudged on eagerly down the timeworn passageway leading, assuredly, to the tomb's heart.

Memories immediately flooded into Elayne's mind of her excursion to the tomb along the Shivering Sea, long past. She had been so young, then. Barely a novice of magic, capable of casting only the most basic of incantations, and with considerable difficultly and exhaustion. It was in a tomb like this, in the same darkness that Merci was now fighting, that Elayne had first been taught to magically produce light. It was especially useful then; even more useful than it was now for this group of adventurers. It was needed now primarily to identify threats, and therefore its thoroughness was unimportant. To the students of Winterhold on that first expedition, however, the light was needed for reading, for writing, for assessing architectural styles, and even for outdoing classmates with brighter and less tiring light spells. On the day of her visit to the Shivering Sea, unable at first to produce any light at all, Elayne had been by far the least experienced mage present. Her present experience flavoured by the memories of her past, Elayne cast her eyes to Merci, and acknowledged the woman's nervousness and blush. She must have looked like that to her classmates, those many years ago, when her thoughts were plagued by feelings of inferiority, as the Daggerfall denizen's were now. She considered trying to help Merci—to share what she knew and perhaps improve her acquaintance's form—but quickly cast the thought aside. If she was embarrassed of her abilities already, surely another mage stepping in to help were would make things all the worse. She might even learn better this way. More fluidly.

Several minutes after she had begun descending the stairs, though only a few moments in Elayne's intrigued and nostalgic mind, she reached their end, and breathed an inaudible sigh, unused to such an exercise. The thought occurred to Elayne, with a chuckle, that this foreboding tomb had been quite calm thus far for a staircase to have been the most arguing task yet, and that perhaps her earlier apprehension when first the tomb's door opened was entirely unfounded. This idea was immediately thrown aside and shuttered to pieces when deathly silence of the Nordic relic was broken first by a 'click', and then by what Elayne identified as a Dwemer curse. The Elvish alchemist had triggered a trap. Her mind immediately brought down to Nirn, Elayne once again readied her spells, the flickers of flame burning once more at her finger-tips helping ever-so-slightly to illuminate the open room. What little Elayne could sense in the darkness and the rattles of sarcophagi she did not particularly enjoy; perhaps twenty Draugr, long deceased servants of the Dovah, were awoken and ready to fight.

Taking a few moments to channel her casting, Elayne struck the foes last, her mind and body bolstered by Aenyarin's call to arms and her confidence bolstered by the rest of her allies more instinctual defences. Elayne's assault was a powerful one: a firestorm, conjured towards the back of the pack of Draugr to avoid damaging any allies. The stagnant air around four or five Draugr was set ablaze, and their entire bodies burst into flames, their decayed bones burning ever brighter the closer they stood to the blast's epicentre. The spell lingered, even as Elayne's attention faded from it, and turned to Ungimros. The Bosmer had downed one of the undead abominations, but injured himself slightly in the process. Nothing a quick spell couldn't fix! Pressing her hands together, Elayne approached Ungimros from behind and cast an orangish ball of light and energy in the direction of his bleeding hand. The cut, small as it was, healed immediately, the blood seeming to glow in the second it took for the Bosmer's flesh to mend itself. Elayne smiled, pleased, on a internal level, with her restoration of her ally's full health and ability even more so than she'd been with harming the handful of Draugr. There was something innately satisfying in Restoration to the Breton mage that Destruction, no matter for how righteous a cause, could not replicate.

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

I will probably get a post up later today.

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

The cause for the perpetual gloom in Falkreath was something that interested Elayne Ashing greatly, as with all unknowns. The hold's denizens, if ever they were asked, insisted that the area's unending drear had some sort of divine cause. Usually, this supposedly mystical phenomenon was hypothesized by the peasants to have something to do with the town of Falkreath's unusually large graveyard. A goddess demanding respect for the dead, for instance, or the spirits of the deceased manifesting as grey clouds. Elayne herself suspected, less superstitiously, that the hold was merely affected by natural atmospheric phenomena relating to the nearby and mighty Jerall Mountains. Magic was a pervasive force in Nirn, but it seemed unlikely to the young Breton mage that a wizard of such immense power as to control the skies themselves would waste their grip of Aetherius on making it slightly foggy in a particular area of the backwoods of Skyrim.

Despite the Nordic tomb's remote location, the adequacy of the directions that Elayne had been given in Cheydinhal were enough for her to arrive right on time. As her robe-clad figure appeared to those adventurers already assembled, Elayne eschewed introductions to instead study the ruins. While her small, soft hands, covered by mage's gloves, gently dusted dirt and grime off of an inscription on the barrows' largely decorative exterior, Elayne considered her history with such locations. This would not be the first Nordic ruin that she would explore. Though her glory-and-wealth adventures thus far had not taken her into any long-dead Jarl's tombs, she had undertaken an extensive excavation of an ancient Nordic site during her days in the College of Winterhold. The site, situated a fair distance west of the city, in the wind-swept wastes of Skyrim's far north, had been cleared of threats and obvious valuables long before Elayne had the opportunity to explore it. That, of course, did not phase her in the slightest; Elayne was then and is now far more interested in sites of this sort for their historicity, rather than the treasures they might happen to hold. It seemed queer to Elayne that her counterparts were often so entirely disinterested in the purpose of the ruins they explored. After all, which was more interesting: the necklace around a deceased man's neck, or the man himself, and his story? Very few baubles were of greater note to the collective body of knowledge of Tamriel than the man or mer who carried them. An unexceptional tomb in an even more unexceptional area of Skyrim was unlikely to contain one.

Reaching the end of her train of thought, and all at once realizing that her lack of formal greeting might raise eyebrows of social conscience, Elayne decided to give salutations to her partners in this expedition, all of whom had almost certainly already both seen and heard her during her thoughts. Taking a second to turn her gaze towards the small crowd gathered at the tomb's entrance, Elayne noticed that her fellow Breton, Merci, had apparently just arrived.

"Hello," she muttered to the group absent-mindedly, but in a friendly tone and at appropriate volume. Having now read the inscription that had earlier caught her eye, she moved on to examining the general architectural style of the structure, her green eyes slowly grazing about as she surmised. This ruin was from around the same era as the one she'd excavated along the Sea of Ghosts, with her classmates. It besmirched Elayne's thorough nature to have to do a more 'smash-and-grab' style excavation of this second site, and to thus be left unable to adequately compare and contrast the two, but the young mage doubted her less educated partners were willing to wait the many weeks that a formal excavation would take. Turning her attention entirely towards the group now, Elayne continued, "Have any of you any experience with tombs of this type? I visited one much farther to the North once upon a time. Worked there for a little under a month, with some others from the College. My superiors had already cleared the ruin of Draugr and such, of course, so I'm afraid that whatever it is we face in there I'll have only read about. It is best to use fire, yes?"

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

They arranged a specific time to arrive at the ruins, yes? Otherwise it'd be awfully strange, given that the area is exceptionally remote, for all of them to show up within five minutes of each other (excepting Shia LaBeouf).

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

I really don't understand what you're so upset about. If you'd rather Elayne had never heard of Blackbird then I can make that change.

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

<Snipped quote by The Nexerus>

I figure at least that her family would know of the Raven-Eye merchant house, if not the pirate known as Blackbird.

@Dead Cruiser

Elayne lived in Skyrim for several years, and during the period Blackbird and those like him were operating. It would make sense that she'd have heard of him before.

Swords & Septims: Adventures in Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls)

@Dead Cruiser Glad you caught on to the idea that Elayne and Blackbird could have heard of each other's enterprises.