Skyrim VR... Day 39

A short stroll down the hill from the spider crypt is Dumzbthar, the ancient dwarven city that Lucien has been harping on about since, well, since I first met him to be honest... he's been tagging along this whole time because I said I'd take him to study those ruins.

So I guess it was time to finally pay the debt.

Since this quest is directly related to the Lucien Follower Mod, I assume that the city doesn't actually exist in vanilla Skyrim, so it will be interesting to see what the mod community brought to the table here.

The entrance was a small tower with an elevator going down, so we pulled the lever and off we went.

Lucien was excited when he saw the place, and started chattering about the dwarven technology.

It was a little unnerving when the dwarven technology started talking back... it seems like the city is alive? possessed? something?

Luckily this guy was inert.

However, this guy was not.

We headed deeper into the ruins.

Sofia said it wasn't natural for metal to be alive, and wondered if a sword made out of dwarven steel would be able to kill on its own?

Found this sweet ride, but couldn't get it to work... no wheelies today.

It looks like the city was once a factory, though the assembly lines were no longer operating. I was continually wondering if it would suddenly start up again.

The conversation that Lucien was having with the city was getting darker the deeper we delved. Apparently the city's conciousness was once a Daedra, summoned by the dwarves through an Oblivion Gate and trapped to do their bidding?

I was getting a bit on edge with all this spooky stuff, combined with the disembodied voice that was threatening to kill us all and then steal my body. Not to mention the multiple waves of enemies, some of which were completely unexpected and gave me a couple of jump scares.

I thought this was the bad guy, but no... apparently it was just a fancy lock?

That seemed to require a mini borg cube to unlock.

Eventually I found a chamber with a fairly interesting looking contraption in it, so I fiddled with all the levers and couldn't work out what was supposed to happen.

So I turned around to ask Lucien what he thought, and... huh. Where was Lucien?

I retraced my steps and found him in a corner, locked in combat, and a message said he was 'busy' when I tried to interact with him. I was like huh. Is he bugged out? Do I have to restart this dungeon? What?

Well, one of the bonuses of VR is you can grab a NPC and drag them with you.

So I dragged.

And I dragged.

And eventually we got back to that machine.

I fiddled with all the levers again (since Lucien was still 'busy'), but again nothing happened. I was about to give up and restore my game, but I checked reddit just in case I was missing something.

And I was! Seems there was a crucial line of dialog about 'you go up and distract him while I try to find a way to shut him down'.

So I headed up, and had a chat with the city.

And the city said it wanted my body.

And it looked suspiciously like a HAL-9000.

So I was like, "Hell no." And shot it with my lightning arrow.

And so there was a fairly brutal fight, with multiple waves of automatons, not to mention some pew-pew lasers from the city itself.

But we prevailed in the end.

Then Lucien said he wanted to stay, and study the ruins. Said it wasn't "goodbye", just "see you later"... and that he would write me when he was ready to come adventuring again.

So we parted ways, and headed back out into the light.

I was glad to be done with the city, it's not natural living so deep beneath the surface.

It was nice to breathe fresh (well, fresh-ish) air again.