You know, Sigrid says with a smirk, she could just electrify the cage until you fall off it. It wouldn’t be polite, but neither is sneaking into someone’s home in the dead of night.

… You’re an Atronach?

Sigrid lets out a wistful sigh. Oh, how I wish I were so lucky! But no, I’m wearing eighty thousand septims worth of spells and enchantments right now, all for the same covetable magic absorption you received through fortuitous star alignments at birth.

Then again, it’s a little funny if you think about it. There you are, with a gift of literally divine origin, and yet someone like me can just buy the same thing. Starsigns, pyrokinetic powers, and even invisibility all seem a little passé when someone with the right equipment can just-

Again, Sigrid emphasizes, she can see when you’re getting ready to throw something. And you do know that had a sheath on it, right?

You admit the sheath thing occurred to you pretty much right when it was leaving your hand, yes. You don’t exactly operate well in stressful situations, and being trapped in a secret spiraling death-oubliette by a creepy mind-controlling evil sorceress kind of qualifies as one.

“Evil sorceress”? Katia Managan, your words wound me more than any dagger through the heart! I assure you, I’m no evil sorceress here to cause you harm. I have only your best interests in mind, along with mine and everyone else’s.

Since I happen to have you over, though, I just want to talk. Find out where we got off on the wrong foot, and see if we can put things back to how they should be.

Just you and me. Heart to heart. Woman to woman.

I’ll even unsummon the tumblespider, if he’s making you uncomfortable. They like to stop bouncing and listen when there’s talking.

You don’t have those things anymore! You used them while breaking in. Right now, your inventory is mostly clothes, keys, and books – nothing that will help you in a tight situation.

The bread you picked up contains the necessary alchemical reagents to let you temporarily see invisible things, and the tacks and ball you threw are still within reach, but Sigrid is going to see anything you try. She’s probably already getting suspicious, since you’re standing here thinking instead of replying to her.

You’ve actually been imagining a timer up there for a while. You’d rather ignore it, though, since you kind of have enough to panic about right now.

You left it wide open. That click was the sound of the trapdoor being shut.

Clinging to the top of the cage like this, you can’t see who’s coming. But you definitely hear heavy footsteps echoing through the otherwise silent cave.

This isn’t just a piece of enchanted paper you can read to release a spell! This is a 300 page book explaining how to cast one. It would take you over an hour to read this in its entirety. You have about nineteen minutes before the invisibility cloak blinds you – and probably less than one minute before those footsteps get down to you.

Regardless, you flip through enough pages to determine that the book explains a summoning spell, not a teleportation one. All six books seem to be identical and a large amount of pages are dedicated to explaining jargon, suggesting these were probably used for a classroom of magic students.

The footsteps are getting louder. You stow the book back in your inventory before it can give you away.

Oh, right! You guess you skipped those.

Acting fast, you quietly pop the lid off one of the barrels. It’s full of water, and picking up water is apparently not within the scope of telekinesis. Without even trying, you assume the barrel is too heavy to telekinetically tip.

The other one, though… that looks like imp gall. You’ve had no problem telekinetically picking up globs of it before. If you’re quick, you could probably grab a little bit to-

Katia Managan!

I see you’ve found my lucky bowling ball! And I don’t mean that facetiously – it actually has a minor luck enchantment. It gets a strike every time.

Okay, on the bright side, funneling all your panic into an attempt to bend the bars seems to have burned the panic down to a manageable level. On a less-bright side, it also seems to have done nothing to the bars, which remain as unbent as ever.

You turn your attention back to escaping. Not to panic, but between the cloak’s blindness curse and the looming possibility of Sigrid waking up and finding you, you’re on more than one time limit right now. It’s basically a race at this point to see what will fuck you over first.

As best you can tell, there isn’t any sort of chain or rope attached to the top of the cage. The whole thing must have either been hidden in a ceiling compartment hundreds of feet above, or floating directly above the pillar while invisible.

Given that you’re in a Mages Guild, the convoluted “it was magic” solution somehow seems more likely than the feat of engineering the alternative would take.

Like you suspected, it’s a soul gem and some burnt-out rune-type things. You know what magic enchantments are enough to understand that the gem was keeping a spell maintained, but not enough to know how it actually works, if the spell can be restored, or even if there’s any energy left in the gem.

Heck, you’re not sure if restoring the spell would even lift the cage back up. It might be designed to levitate the cage, or it might be designed to hold something in place twenty feet above you. Even interpreting something like this is way over your level, let alone getting it to actually function.

Without any other real options, you take a look at the crates by the wall. You swear, next time you’re gonna look at all the insignificant background details before touching the clearly-important thing.

Although the crates themselves are too heavy to draw to the cage, you have no problem opening them and looking inside. Some of this stuff looks rather expensive; you find dozens of little glass alchemy-mixing things, dozens of identical robes… someone could equip and train entire classrooms full of mages with this stuff, were it not packed away down in this oubliette.

Oh, hey, daggers!

Alright, they’re silver daggers. That little nuance of magic is never going to stop pissing you off.

It’s not a bag, it’s a rolled up pelt. As for what’s inside, it looks like it contains… the rest of the pelt, all rolled up. The leather straps around it look rather sturdy, however; you might be able to bend the cage bars if you wrap them around a pair and twist.

Or at least, you could see that working for bars that aren’t an inch thick and made of solid steel.

The remaining two chests seem to be locked, and are too heavy to pull. This box, though, contains a set of paints.

Or she might come down while the cloak’s recharging, which would leave you blind, completely visible, and at her mercy with no chance of escape or fighting back. As long as you can get these bars apart and escape before the cloak runs dry, you’ll be fine. Or heck, even if you only manage to get out of the cage, you can hide in a barrel or behind that wall while it recharges.

If you were going to try to recharge the cloak, you really should’ve started it as soon as you were trapped. The way you see it, the chances of Sigrid coming down and checking the trap get higher with every second, so losing a big chunk of time while blind is not going to be your advantage if you want to get out of here before-

You hear a latch click echo through the cavern.

You’re not panicking… yet, at least. Sure, this was unexpected, and you think you may have nearly lost your tail under the edge of that cage, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the break-in failed and you’re going to die painfully and horribly. At least not yet.

There’s still nobody around. Your cloak has a good amount of invisibility left. All you have to do is puzzle your way out of this trap, and you have plenty of ideas.

You place the ash yam on the pedestal. Despite weight being restored to the pressure plate, the cage does not retract back up. You aren’t actually sure why you expected it to, but that was pretty much your best idea and its failure increments your panic level by about 10%.

First off, you’re not a cat. Second, flexibility only helps you bend. When it comes to fitting through tight spaces, all that matters are the thickest parts of your body. Which is to say, your head, hips and chest.

Well okay, really it’s more just your head and hips.

It’s your head.

Still not panicking! However, thinking about how justified it would be to panic right now pushes you a little closer toward full-on panic. It’s probably better to focus on solutions.

You take a look at the-

Whoops, hold on.

You stretch your arms and hold the red orb far away from you, squinting at it as best you can. From what you can tell, it’s just a bowling ball. It has three holes, no ominously-swirling auras inside, and weighs exactly as much as a bowling ball. It apparently had only two jobs: look important, and weigh down a pressure plate until some idiot decided to take it.

In your defense, you didn’t expect there to be a baited trap in an otherwise-empty locked room inside a locked building. If this whole room is part of an elaborate trap, it probably means the incriminating-looking chained door was even more bait, and this entire thing was designed specifically to catch people like you who wanted to take Sigrid down.

So much for any hope of hiding your intentions. You can’t even remember if you checked the second floor before grabbing the rusty key and careening down here.

Thankfully, the cage seems to be made of regular steel, meaning it doesn’t block your magic the way living things or silver seem to. Less thankfully, a steel cage still weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

Somehow, coming face-to-face with the ineffectiveness of your skills is building your panic more than being stuck in the cage.

Chewing up a single alchemical ingredient outside of a properly-mixed potion isn’t going to give you super intelligence, even if the book said they were used in that kind of potion. Best case scenario, tediously grinding the entire yam to a fine pulp with your very non-grinding Khajiit teeth will make you a tiny bit smarter for a couple minutes, and then it’ll be gone.

But… you’re running out of options, and you need to get out of here before Sigrid finds you or the invisibility wears off. Maybe a little extra intelligence is what you need?

You don’t feel any different, but you aren’t sure what a minute gain of intelligence even feels like.

Alright, think. You need an idea. Some brilliant, intelligent idea that can get you out of here.

You are going to die in a cage.

Additional resource credits:
Cider – sad throw

Additional resource credits:
Makkon – environmental art, intro art
Flaise – programming
Connor D – more programming
Kobalstromo – even more programming
Silence – music (“Weregilded”)
OrchestralDesign – more music (“Just Your Average Day”, “Summer Nights”, “Uncharted Territory”)
Rawrunes – window closeups
Cider – talk graphics, closeup poses
AMKitsune – particles
MyEmeraldTears – eyes closeup
Squiggles – talk graphics
Ryavis, Bropocalypse, Whimbrel: carryover resources from Katia: Excelsior
Samulis, Ali_6868, georgisound, sagetyrtle, natemarler, pfrazen, Tristan_Lohengr,
j1987,dansotak, Josethehedgehog, nextmaking, HerbertBoland, 13FPanska_Mokrolusky_Tomas,
soundmary, Inespector J, jergonda, InSintesi, jmbphilmes, adamlhumphrey, ztitchez, stijn, Monkey Pants,
kwahmah_02, KristopherTiberi, EverHeat, deleted_user_71, EFlexTheSoundDesigner, nicktermer,
chrillz3r, Sauron974, MAJ061785, volivieri, Fluffayfish, Kyle1Katarn, genel, mshahen,
rhythmpeople, buzbe20, Raulitoto, pauliep83, MaxDemianAGL, Adam_N, Zabuhailo, ejgvibes,
davidjwoll, CapsLok, Yap_Audio_Production, bajko, Ryding, kevinkace, SpliceSound, beman87,
LoafDV, MWLANDI, rivernile7, JakLocke, rambler52, theBoatman, justkiddink, Speedenza,
yottasounds, rombart, Pastabra, 140178sound – sounds
QuiMoritur, Stupidjellyfish – sound hunters
FriSha – the intro sound, which might be better described as music
Samuel Adler – basic arithmetic for tedious image positioning
Chevy Ray Johnston – Flashpunk
And a special thanks to Jemmysponz’s (now late) Dakota the Golden Retriever for
modeling. You know an update has taken too long when a collaborator dies of old age.

It’s a nice outfit.

…Also, you might’ve requested a few long-desired additions that drove its price up a little.

Huh? Your arms are right here. They were just hidden behind your cloak, it’s not like they disappeared.

Anyway, you’re on a time limit here, so you tell the shopkeeper you’d like to get this finished up as soon as possible. You have a few things that might interest her, and should hopefully be enough to pay for the clothes and get you outfitted with some basic supplies.

Right, she says. It’s late, she’s tired, and she wants to get you out of here too. Let’s see what you’ve got.

First up: these lovely dead imp parts! You took everything that looked like it could be kind of useful. You figure maybe someone could use the intestiney-bits to make a pair of socks, or sausages, or-

Okay, no, the shopkeeper interrupts. She appreciates the whole “making a good sale” thing, but you’re laying it on kind of thick. Also, if she wanted imp intestines, she’s pretty sure she has an entire storeroom plastered in them.

The green bits, though, they should fetch a decent price with alchemists. How does nine septims sound?

Hey, you shrug, that’s more than any bloody organ dug out of your own body is worth.

Actually, she says, Khajiit hearts retail with alchemists for around fifteen gold.

Wow, that’s… you could’ve comfortably gone your whole life without knowing that.

Next you have this cloak that a ghost was wearing at some point. You aren’t sure what size it is, but you can confirm it is larger than a women’s small, so… yeah, that doesn’t narrow it down at all.

So there’s a naked ghost running around now, the shopkeeper asks.

What? No, he had an extra cloak, I didn’t-

It was a joke, she says. Anyway, ectoplasm is hard to come by, and traveling mages are always looking for a safe source. She’ll give you, say, twelve septims for it.

You were, ah, hoping for a little bit more, actually. That’s enough for some supplies, but just in case your… work today doesn’t pan out like you’re expecting, you were hoping to have a little bit set aside to repay a debt to a friend. Like… thirty-five gold.

Do you have anything else to sell, the shopkeeper asks?

Not unless she’s in the market for a scrap of bread or a tiny pouch of chopped cilantro.

What about that spear Rajirra left behind, you ask.

What about it, the shopkeeper says.

Well, she left it behind. Also, she used it to lock me in a room to die. Doesn’t that basically make it mine?

Rajirra never actually gave it to you, she points out. Also, she left it behind on store premises. If anything, the shopkeeper says, it should be considered her spear.

Yeah, but… when she ran away, she lied to you and said she had given it to me. Given that was the only thing she told anyone on the topic, that would imply I’m the closest thing the spear has to an intended owner. There’s also the whole issue of need: this whole time I’ve been in Cyrodiil, I haven’t once had some proper steel to defend myself with. If at all possible, I’d like to leave this store fully equipped to handle whatever things this dangerous world might throw my-

Alright, alright, the shopkeeper says. You win, the spear is yours.

I’d like to sell this spear and I’m very sorry.

Twenty septims, the shopkeeper grumbles. And you’re lucky you’re getting that much.

Is that everything, the shopkeeper asks? It’s late, and now that she can actually get some rest she’d like to close up.

Wait, you say. I, ah… I have something else.

Just hypothetically, what could I get for this?

Less, now that you’ve broken the clasp, she says.

It’s a drama clasp! You just pull on it real fast and it clicks open. I used to have some outfits that… nevermind.

The amulet is enchanted, you explain.

It tastes more like it’s cursed, she says. I think that’s… silence?

Well, yeah, it’s… you guess it’s kind of cursed too.

The Mages Guild gave it to you back when you first learned you had powers. Destruction magic is apparently driven by strong emotions or something, and any time you felt hurt, or dehumanized, your magic would start to trigger whether you wanted it to or not. The amulet of silence was how you kept it reined in.

You guess those are still the same sort of feelings you draw on when you use your magic, but… you think you’ve gotten better at feeling them on your own terms. I mean, lately you’ve been able to whip up some fire-feelings pretty much whenever you need them. And, you guess more importantly, you’re no longer breaking down in tears over every little joke that reminds you that you’ll… never be something you can see as a person.

It’s weird to admit, but you think you might actually have this under control – at least as much as the amulet did. And, on top of that, you think you need to show yourself you have it under control. If you’re gonna be a real wizard, it’s time you take off the dorky safety-hat and start acting like one.

Safety hat. You mean helmet, she asks?

No, I mean like those little… okay, yeah, I guess those are still called helmets. Huh.

Well, either way, she’s afraid it’s standard policy is to turn down ordinary cursed items – even ones with potential uses. It’s probably for the best, though. It sounds like this is something with sentimental value to you and she wouldn’t want to-

There. Now it’s an empty amulet. People can, like… put in their own birthstone or something, to personalize it.

Fair enough, she says. For a plain bronze amulet with a special clasp, she’ll do, say… fourteen septims?

Perfect. Alright, I’ll need thirty-five in gold. Yesterday you said rope cost about three; I’ll take a bundle of that. This book is… ooh, “Fundamentals of Alchemy”? How much for it?

The shopkeeper says the nightwriting edition should probably cost a preposterous amount extra, but at five years without a buyer she might as well do the standard price. Five septims.

You’ll take it. Also, you really need something to drink.

Well there’s some Cheapest Mead for one septim, or-

Grape juice, you interrupt. And, ah, assuming you still have a coin left after that, a sweetroll.

Here. This is for the trouble.

Well, on one hand, this magic cloak is basically the textbook definition of “backfire disastrously”. Long-lasting invisibility might increase your chances of getting into the Mages Guild unspotted, but if anything at all goes wrong during the break-in, like you take too long or Sigrid wakes up and dispels your invisibility somehow, the cloak is only going to make things a thousand times worse and probably shatter any hope you’d have of salvaging the situation or even escaping alive. And on top of that, this is a general store; you could just as easily use your earnings to get some quieter, darker-colored clothes and maybe even that short invisibility scroll in case of an emergency. It would certainly be more reliable than some finicky magic cloak made by an eccentric enchanter.

On the other hand, though, a fully-fledged invisibility cloak would…

No. On the other hand, you don’t actually have to go through with the break-in at all.

With Rajirra out of the picture, you just earned 170 septims. That’s enough to buy a new copy of the book you ruined, stay at the inn until Asotil comes back, and return to Quill-Weave having accomplished absolutely everything she sent you to Kvatch for. While the shopkeeper might want to pay you in store credit, she’s stood by her bargain thus far and would probably give you your payment in raw gold if you asked.

You could just… walk.

Sure, it wouldn’t be glamorous. There’d be no big, triumphant return where you reveal to Quill-Weave that you’ve gone above and beyond her simple courier job and are able to pay her back for all the damage you did to her home. You’d be costing the shopkeeper a lot of money, holding her to your original agreement even after destroying her entire storage room. And Sigrid… well, you’d leave her be, and just become another one of the many people she was able to rob and abuse without consequence. But in exchange for these things, you could succeed. For the first time in your life, you could make it through a simple, stupid job without fucking it up by trying to make everything a little better.

I’d like to know more about the cloak, please. Like, what type of invisibility spell does it use? I remember there being a few types, some breaking easier than others.

The shopkeeper nods and says it’s a good question. From what the enchanter told her, it’s the sturdier type of invisibility. What’s it called, the one that makes a tight suit of light that bends around your body? She can’t remember the spell’s name, but she distinctly recalls that it’s not the traditional Invisibility spell, which just creates an easily shattered illusion that the place you’re standing in is empty.

Well, okay then, what about the blindness, you ask? You said it lasts up to an hour, depending how long you stay invisible – could a healer or potion cure it ahead of time? Will the blindness take effect immediately if the cloak falls off or something? And, if I’m an Atronach, could I possibly resist the blindness?

The shopkeeper admits she hasn’t tested the cloak too extensively – she might be living in Cyrodiil, but this deep-end magic stuff still gives her the heebie-jeebies. To answer your questions, though: first time she tested the cloak, she had a healer on-hand for emergencies. Traditional healing spells didn’t do anything for the blindness, but Oleta did manage to chip away at its duration a little with Dispelling magic. Taking the cloak off seemed to trigger the blindness the same as deactivating the spell any other way. And as for Atronachs being able to absorb the blindness, she’s not sure. She’s only ever known a few people born in the Atronach’s month, and the last of them died of old age years ago. Basically, back when inns started giving out free condoms on Heart’s Day, your kind instantly went from half the new births to none of the new births.

That makes sense, you guess. You confess you’ve only ever met one other Atronach, and he was long-dead too. The shopkeeper asks what you mean by “was long-dead”. You say it’s complicated. It’s a thing.

So, if someone were to, say, wear the cloak for thirty minutes, take it off, then put it right back on again, would the invisibility reactivate for the rest of that hour, while they were blind? Could they spend the next thirty minutes blind and invisible while the cloak recharges the first thirty minutes, after which they repeat the process, near-permanently invisible but spending every other half-hour blind? Alternatively, if you wore the cloak for forty minutes, then put it back on to become blind-and-invisible, would the twenty-minute blindness merge with the forty-minute blindness such that they’re invisible and sighted for forty minutes, invisible and blind for twenty minutes, and visible and blind for only twenty minutes more?

The shopkeeper explains, again, that she hasn’t tested the cloak too extensively, let alone that… pathologically. From what she’s determined, though: when the cloak blinds its user, it turns completely inert for just as long. Even if the invisibility spell was deactivated early, any attempts to reactivate it won’t work until enough time has passed for the blindness to have worn off. So, crazy plans to circumvent the enchanter’s weird caveat probably won’t bear fruit. Is that everything?

Er, no, you say. You apologize for all the questions; you just think you’re about to do something really stupid and, since there’s pretty much no talking yourself out of it, you’re trying to come up with an approach to it that’s as un-stupid as possible. So the vibe you’re getting about this Cloak of Gray Tomorrow is that it’s not too dangerous if it’s used in short bursts so you can get to a safe place and let it recharge, as opposed to trying to get everything done in one go and having it blink out on you as soon as an hour is up. What about offensive uses? Could you, like, telekinetically throw the cloak over someone, and then pull it off a few seconds later to blind them?

Okay, the shopkeeper warns, you’re getting a little too far into magethought now. If you want to blind someone in a fight, you throw a regular sheet over them. That way, they’re instantly blinded and you don’t have to worry about an angry, invisible aggressor.

Oh. Right, you say. You forgot that was a thing too.

Any other questions, she asks? Or are you ready to make your call on the payment?

Can I try it on?

She points out that “can I try on the invisibility cloak” is one of those lines they very specifically warn students about in Shopkeeper College.

Do you trust me?

Well, worst case scenario here is that you silently accept your payment for the imp job, leave, and she can go to bed. Anyway, she supposes it makes sense that you’d want to get a handle on the cloak’s nuances; make sure it’s something you can deal with and all that.

You half-chuckle. Please, you say, you’re no stranger to weird magic, you just want to make sure it still works. For an invisibility cloak that’s actually within your budget, you’re pretty sure you can handle whatever weirdness this Cloak of Gray Tomorrow throws at you.

Makkon wrote:

NickTaken wrote:

”Quantum” wrote:

Cloak: Be hideously colorful.

Oh what the fuck!

This isn’t even gray. What is this color scheme even called? It’s like… festive holiday disaster.

Well, it’s called the Cloak of Gray Tomorrow, the shopkeeper says. The implication isn’t necessarily that the cloak is gray, but that tomorrow is gray. As far as she figures, the name makes sense.

Sure, it makes technical sense, you say, but there are still rules of good taste when it comes to naming things. If you’re gonna put “gray” in the something’s name, you can’t just carry that theme halfway and then dump it by the side of the road.

She shrugs and says you don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to. It’s not like it’s written on the cloak anywhere.

Maybe… maybe it’s called gray because of that particular silver lining?

What, the shopkeeper asks. It was a joke, you say. Like, the fact you can change its name is a silver lining, and silver is like… you know what, nevermind, everything about this joke was a mistake.

But seriously though, I was kinda hoping it’d be dark gray or something, so I’d be a little less obvious if I have to hide in a corner, blinded, waiting for the invisibility spell to recharge. The waiting periods with this are going to be kind of tense, though. Do you have, like, maybe a book I could read?

A book to read while blind, the shopkeeper deadpans.

Maybe something in nightwriting, you ask? You can read the basic type and some of the Level Two stuff. It’s kinda something you pick up when you have extremely fickle and self-destructive magic powers built into your eyeballs.

She… honestly, nobody’s ever asked before. She vaguely recalls a traveler once pawned one here, and can’t remember anyone ever buying it. She’ll check to see if it’s still on the shelf.

So, how do you, like… turn it on?

The hood, she calls over to you. Flip it from down to up.

Woah. That’s, ah, weirder feeling than I was expecting. The blindness makes everything turn black, though, not gray. That name was just really fucking awful.

Better than “Festive Holiday Disaster”, she says. So you’re good with the cloak as payment for the imp job?

It, ah, is kind of growing on you. Yeah, you… think this might actually work. You’re still looking for some new, quieter clothes and were serious about maybe getting a book to read, if that’s a thing she could throw in or-

“Throwing in” isn’t her style, she says. Go for the “or”.

Or barter for. Right.

Well, she’s got a nice, low-key outfit in what looks to be your size. Anything else you’re looking for – assuming it’s not a mirror – she could probably scrounge up. For the right price.

You do have some things to sell, you say. At the very least, you want to get some basic, ah, danger escaping supplies. Like a center punch.

… Did you just change in front of me, the shopkeeper asks.

Yes, you admit. But it was like… really fast, so it wasn’t weird, right?

No, she says, it was still weird.

Okay, no, that’s… as much as you’d like to go find Rajirra and at least have a stern discussion regarding the whole “locked you in here with a monster” thing, you have bigger fish to fry. You remind yourself that your top priority is still breaking into the Mages Guild so you can steal back your stuff, complete Quill-Weave’s courier job, and prove once and for all that you are capable of accomplishing simple tasks without messing up.

You might have gotten a little sidetracked, what with all the robberies and nightmares and fighting magic-users, but your primary goal is still to get that package back to Quill-Weave. You’re going to get into that guildhall, as soon as possible, no matter what it takes – even if it entails ignoring something you’d like to do, or doing something you’d rather not.

Holy shit, absolutely nothing about this was a good idea.

It turns out it’s actually pretty hard to remove something’s entire intestinal tract with your bare hands and fashion it into usable rope. The longest intact piece of imptestine you got out of this is about three feet long, the whole attic smells like a slaughterhouse, and you kinda feel like you’ve desecrated a corpse in some way divine figures would disapprove of. The only solace you receive from this action is the knowledge that you very briefly dismissed it as stupid before doing it anyway.

You guess you’ll try a different approach.

The hinge pin is easily accessible, but like you said, it’s pounded in there pretty hard. Your telekinesis isn’t particularly strong, nor very good at rotation. If it was, you’d have, like, an awesome-looking magical spinning barrier around you. Constantly.

Your best bet for disassembling these hinges is to find some proper tools, or something else sturdy and pointy you can use to tap the pin out.

Those are calipers. They’re basically pliers that are too fragile to use for anything more intensive than measuring something’s length.

And like… people can see lengths. You don’t know why someone would want a tool for it.

The imp didn’t drop down from the roof, it was just hiding up in the ceiling rafters. Even if there was a hole in the roof, though, you’d need some sturdy rope to get up to it. And then once you were up there, you’d be on the roof and need even more rope to get down. Really, you’re not feeling the whole get-on-the-roof thing.

That, on the other hand, you… guess you could see working. Other than the bony bits, this dead imp is starting to get kneaded into a fairly soft cushion. The biggest challenge would be getting it through the window, since it’s pretty large and too heavy for your telekinesis. Also, landing on it would make a huge mess, but that’s starting to matter less at this point.

Hm. This linen is pretty thin, badly burnt in places, and soggy with blood. You might be able to twist and knot it into an okay rope if you doubled it over, but at that point it would be getting pretty short.

You could try flying on it like a magic carpet, but your telekinesis isn’t really strong enough to lift your entire bodyweight, or broad enough to hold an entire piece of cloth into shape. It would probably be more like holding yourself in a giant sack that slows your fall slightly, assuming you didn’t just rip through the bottom and come crashing down in a heap.

As for the crates themselves, if the first one’s any indication, they’re just full of house supplies – plates, candleholders, that sort of thing. It’s nothing that would be useful to you, and most of the stuff in here is already cracked and broken – probably from all the magical explosions going off nearby.

Looks like this hand mirror made it out okay, though! That’s seven years of bad luck you don’t have to deal with.

Luck probably isn’t real anyway.

Anyway, most of your ideas for getting out of this room are complicated, horrible, and probably going to end in grievous personal injury. Maybe this is one of those instances where you need to think like a witchhunter and find the simple, direct solution nobody would think of, like an easy magical way to push your telekinesis through the silver-lined door, or pass yourself down through the floorboards, or…

You stomp on the floor and call down that the imps are all gone, and that you’re locked in the attic. Also, please bring a clean towel. Like, preferably one that you don’t care about.

Sweet ass-fucking mother of Talos, the shopkeeper says.

You quickly explain that things got a little out of hand. First it turned out there were three imps roosted in here instead of two, and then the last one was ten feet tall and knew all the fire magic. You’re sorry for breaking her, like, everything, but you weren’t exactly expecting you’d have to fight a giant death monster one-on-one.

Uh-huh. So, from the way this spear looked like it was there specifically to bar the door closed, the shopkeeper says she’s going to assume that your friend’s story about “leaving you her weapon and an expensive Summon Storm Golem scroll while she ran to get her poisons” was complete bullshit.

Woah woah woah, you say, she told you that she… she said that… no! She didn’t do any of that! She’s just a fucking jerk who ran and locked the door behind her as soon as stuff got bad.

Done and done.

You also whisper a quiet “thank you” to the silver-lined door for keeping you from telekinetically moving that spear. Not having to prove your side of the story is a real silver lining here.

Oh wow that pun is amazing. You wish the shopkeeper knew enough context for you to say it out loud.

You turn your attention back over to her. The initial shock of her decimated storeroom seems to have worn off, and she is now making an audible list of damages. She notes that most of the food is burnt, the cloth rolls have been reduced to scraps, every single mirror seems to be broken…

On the bright side, at least her surplus rope, grappling hooks, and climbing harnesses survived unharmed.

She knows the two of you agreed to ten septims to cover any potential damages, but this is a lot of damage. Essentially everything she had in storage is burnt, shattered, or soaked in an inch of blood, and that wasn’t exactly something she budgeted for. On the other hand, you basically did fight the King of All Imps in here, so it wouldn’t be –

It, ah, sounds like we’re going to talk about business, you call up to her. You’re pretty sure the two of you should be performing these sorts of negotiations down here at a counter. Like proper, professional businesspeople.

Anyway, she reiterates, there’s a lot more damage than she anticipated. Granted, she hadn’t realized the imp problem had been that severe, or else she probably would have had the Fighter’s Guild deal with it sooner. Hell, if they’d known how bad it was, they probably would’ve asked more than 200 for the job.

You ask if she’s trying to change her end of the bargain. No, she says, a deal’s still a deal. But if it’s all the same, maybe you’d consider letting her pay you with something from her stock, rather than raw gold? It’d be less of an impact on her, financially, and it already sounded like you were looking to turn around and spend the reward here anyway.

Well, you admit that was the plan back when you thought you were going to be walking away with about 40 septims after giving Rajirra her cut and paying for the magic scroll. 170 is more than you’ve ever had to your name at any given point, though, and you aren’t even sure what sort of things people would, like… spend that on. You ask her what it was that she was planning on paying you with. Maybe more scrolls?

That depends entirely on you, she says. Was there anything in particular you were looking for?

You, ah, mention that you could use a new outfit. Your current gear is kind of noisy, cumbersome, and – as of a few minutes ago – brightly colored, and you’d like something a bit sneakier. Not that you’d use it to steal anything, of course; you’d just like to avoid any more unwanted, life-or-death fireball exchanges with people who actually know what they’re doing.

The shopkeeper nods and says she understands; the best confrontations are ones you can avoid. If it’s stealth you’re looking for, actually, she might have just the thing.

Every few years or so, the town will get a travelling hedgemage passing through looking to offload a bunch of stuff they made as enchantment practice. It’s rarer these days, what with the rising price of magetallow candles, but when one shows up she’ll usually snag a few dozen bits of magic clothing and jewelry.

Isn’t enchanted clothing usually worth, like, tens of thousands of septims, you ask? You’ve seen it for sale in the Guilds back in Hammerfell, and the prices were never exactly in the 170-septim range.

Those were probably professional, Guild-produced pieces, she explains. Most of what she gets from private enchanters are little things, like a linen skirt that makes you jump a few inches higher, or a wool hat that clears up nearsightedness. The soul powering the enchantment is usually something weak, like a rabbit or wild boar or whatever else the enchanter had been hunting for dinner. Like she said, most of what she gets are practice items: quick things made to help the enchanter work out flaws in his or her technique.

The piece she has in mind for you, though, is more of an… experiment.

An… experiment?

As in, a magic item with a caveat. Technically it’s probably worth more than 200 septims, the shopkeeper says, but she’s been sitting on it for years without a buyer.

The enchanter who sold it to her called it The Cloak of Gray Tomorrow. Long and short is: it’s an invisibility cloak. A powerful one, too; last time she tested it, the spell lasted almost an hour.

An hour! That would be more than enough time to… escape from all sorts of danger while doing perfectly legal activities. Why wouldn’t something like that sell?

That’s where the caveat comes in, she says. While you’re invisible, everything is fine and the cloak is amazing. But as soon as you deactivate the enchantment, take off the cloak, or otherwise stop the invisibility spell, though, you go completely blind.

Like… forever?

The shopkeeper snorts. Nobody would use a magic rag that makes them go blind forever. No, you just lose your sight for as long as you were invisible, down to the second. The longer you stay invisible, the longer you can’t see afterwards, and by the time your sight comes back, the invisibility spell has recharged.

Does that… make the enchantment use less magicka? Pairing a good thing with a bad thing like that?

No, the shopkeeper says, I’m pretty sure it just makes the cloak require twice as much power as it would otherwise. Hell, an enchantment that strong probably took thousands of septims worth of materials to make and needed a Daedra soul to power it. I asked the enchanter why anyone would waste that much on an invisibility cloak that blinds you, and she just said that it “seems fair that everyone else should get to be invisible too”.

Look, Sigrid did a lot to show me and the others in town that magic wasn’t all bad, but frankly: mages are weird. Every single one of them.

Additional resource credits:
Cider – usual

This thing you just did, in addition to solving nothing, had the unique effect of making this entire situation slightly more inconvenient in every conceivable way.

After making it through that entire fight without any of your fire spells hitting the walls, you aren’t going to burn the building down to get through a door.

If it’s just something jammed through the handle, though, it should be no problem to…

Oh. Right. You guess if builders hadn’t foreseen this, anyone with the slightest bit of magical ability could go wherever they wanted by simply unlocking doors from the other side.

From the mark on the door, you’re guessing there’s a silver ribbon or something running between the boards. You’re more than capable of jostling the door itself with telekinesis, but the magic on the other side of it feels all weird and distorted. Telekinesis probably isn’t gonna help you here.

That, on the other hand…

The hinges are definitely accessible, but you don’t think the lockpick could survive the 24 screws necessary to take them off. If you want to tackle the hinges, your best option would be to find something pointy and sturdy you can use to pound the pin out. Maybe a proper turnscrew, or a chisel. With the pins out, the disconnected door should slide right toward you.

You just exploded a giant fire demon in a room full of landmines by punching its head off with a burning fist. You felt unstoppable. You hate this wooden door so much.

You guess you’ll go look for some tools.

Yeah, that’s…. honestly, you think you were already planning to just keep the armor set and never compete. At least the “incomplete raiment” will give you an excuse so you don’t have to feel bad about bailing. Heck, the Arena Master would probably even appreciate it, knowing that one of his suits was damaged in actual life-or-death combat.

Bon voyage, leather gloves. We barely knew ye.

Then again, that dance competition is going to be your only way to pay Quill-Weave back if this Mages Guild heist goes horribly wrong and backfires disastrously, which we can all agree is absolutely, undeniably going to happen. If your raiment is incomplete, the Arena Master will probably charge you for replacement parts, which you can’t really afford.

But you can, ah, probably fix these gloves? Yeah. They just need a little TLC.

You put the shredded scraps of charred leather in your inventory. And mark them as broken gloves to remind you what the heck they are supposed to be. You’ll find some way to solve this later.

Jumping out of Quill-Weave’s window and spraining your ankle gave you just enough acrobatics experience that you now know not to jump out of second-story windows. This lesson was further reinforced yesterday, when you broke both legs jumping off the roof of a two-story building.

Seriously, falling off buildings these last two days has taught you two very important things: first, you always land on your feet, and second, your feet hate that. If you want to get safely out through the window, you’re going to need some kind of rope.

If you want to get out through the window, you’re going to need some kind of rope.

Ooh, right. With your inventory bar as packed as it is, you almost forgot that you picked up… that…

Oh come on! She called you a “racial stereotype” for stealing that off the ground and then pickpocketed it from you?

Additional resource credits:
Cider – usual