Skyrim VR... Day 38

I woke up refreshed in the afternoon and got off to a lazy start... enchanted every single piece of jewellery I had acquired over the last week or so, and levelled up my enchanting skill. Did the upgrade dance, upgrading my followers with my cast offs, and then went out to sell the rest.

Not much of a market for jewellery in Raven Rock, but wizardypants and his underling bought most of my inventory.

Now flush with cash, this fellow came up to me, said that the underling I had recommended for wizardypants to hire owed him 1,000 septims and therefore I now owed him 1,000 septims. I think I've got about 80k septims now, so it wouldn't be too onerous to pay him... however I didn't care for his attitude.

I asked him, if I don't pay him? He threatened me with debt collectors, told me to watch my back.

"Or I could just kill you now," I replied.

He said the guards would put a bounty on my head, then turned his back and started walking away.

"They could, if they were still alive."

I loosed an arrow, and the UT announcer in my head said "Head Shot!" while he pitched over with a surprised look on his face.

Scumbag. Tried to blackmail the wrong woman.

Took his valuables and wandered off to the next dot on my map... a foreboding barrow up in the mountains.

I was not encouraged by the dead bodies and blood at the entrance.

And it went straight downhill from there. It was an ugly barrow, a BUG barrow, a barrow hostile to life--

Crawling with these glowy albino spiders and some red jumpy fuckers that exploded when they hit you. Now I'm Australian and have seen some creepy crawlies in my time, but this was some next level 8-legged bullshit.

I gotta say I really love this new 'mage arrow'¹ variant... I've been using sun arrows for the most part, but also tried the fire arrows as well, and they're both pretty great... not only do they never run out, but they also provide light for a short time too!

¹ I was googling to find out what these mage arrows are actually called, and it turns out they're part of MARC - Muken's Arcane Archery... can recommend! First playthrough and all, it's kinda interesting not knowing what's vanilla and what's a mod.

Anyway, if glowy arrows and glowy spiders weren't enough, there were some glowy bandits too.

I was completely taken off guard by that... I was expecting it spiders through and through, but apparently they could be pet spiders? I'm not sure if that's better or worse. Worse, probably.

Caught flat-footed, this guy actually laid hands on me while I was fumbling for my weapon.

Eventually the place was clear of spiders and bandits, and we got down to the business of looting and searching.

Sofia found some rubies to mine. We took a pretty great haul from the rocks dotted around the place, and a suspicious number of gems just lying about on shelves/benches.

This is how the spider apocalypse starts... some scientist doing shit in a lab that they know they shouldn't be doing.

Apparently the gems were being ground up to create these spiders.

Found a few hidden areas behind walls of webs that I had to burn with my flaming hands. More spiders, more bandits...

And this dude who popped out of nowhere, though admittedly this is a fairly trap-looking room.

I googled him later, apparently he's an evil dragon priest. I wonder if that was in some book I TL;DR'd, because it didn't come up in conversation. I'm probs missing a lot of lore by not reading... but damn there are at least three metric shit-tonnes of books in this game.

He dropped a mask I wouldn't be seen dead in.

And I guess it makes sense he was guarding some dragon runes... got another word to yell and folks.

Also in his chambers, one more of those eldritch books. This one was more of a library, no sky overhead at all.

But still had those touchy-feely tentacles. This one had a sphincter-shaped nodule that I would have steered clear of if there was any room. I rushed past, but it still slapped me.

I climbed a dark staircase in the library where I think there was supposed to be a boss fight, but the boss fell through the floor. Too bad, so sad? I guess I didn't get his loot, but then I didn't have to fight him either...

Wandered up to the book within a book and chose my upgrade.

Then, completely done with the book and barrow, we made haste for the entrance before any more spiders could jump us.

Found a little hut near the back entrance of the barrow and mined the sapphire rock... and was more than a little startled when after one swing of the pickaxe, almost a dozen sapphires popped out! Hit the jackpot!

I'm not sure one pretty scenic shot makes up for all the arach-related images, but I popped it here just in case I can trick you into reading one day more...