Ho-oley Cow!

Last night I decided to play Oblivion again and had the longest, second hardest but most exhausting dungeon crawl I have ever had playing this game! All I can say about it is Holey cow!

It all started out innocently enough...


I was on my way from Bruma to the IC with Val close at my tricorns heels when I came accross a puzzling and very interesting sight. Ahead of me was a female bandit with a bow and arrows firing in my direction, obviously intending to rob me. Thinking this is just another routine robbing I hop off my tricorn to easily kill her and loot her corpse. So I do, kill her and loot her corpse, taking her clothes because they were priced over 50 septims. When I turn her body over she looks like this:

"What the.... I didn't shoot any arrows at her.." I laughed, though, at the choice of placement! Then I looked up and saw this down the road not far from her:

Goblins dead strewn all over the road. I walked up to the farthest one, where the female bandit was standing by the tree when she saw me and began shooting at me, and found that goblin had on him a bow and arrows. I pieced together the evidence in my mind and figured out the female bandit must have been in a fight with the goblins and killed them before I came on to the scene. She must have taken a lot of arrows from the arrow wielding goblin before she could kill him. I was thoroughly amused by this! XD Oh what stories you come upon when you're on the road! Must have been a pretty tough woman to still fight with a billion arrows sticking out of your womb!
My day is starting out great!

I reached the IC and entered the AU grounds. I stopped before going up the steps to the tower that housed the arch mage .. and paused remembering the crumpled note I found earlier. I know I've got super important news to report to the arch mage, one of the guilds has been burned down! And all the mages killed! With threats from a great evil that this will happen to all of the mages! But I also promised myself I'd check in with the note and inspect what it must mean later.. so I decided "One more little, brief break from the mages story line won't hurt.." (priorities messed up anyone?) I began searching the grounds for a well that might have something around it.. thinking they met at the well maybe they dropped some evidence as to what they were doing there.. or meeting about. Now there are a few wells at the AU, i've checked them all before, though, and none of them had any significance about them...
I didn't find anything around any of the wells, but I did unexpectedly find this:

Ah huh...it opens up..
So I went inside.

As I expected it was filled with water. I knew that was probably the case because most wells do have water. I wasn't worried even though there appeared to be no air pockets in sight because of my trusty Nistor boots!
Poor Val wasn't so lucky though..

He soon passed out. I would just drag his body along with me and revive him when we hit air again. I looked around at the vast expanse of the under water cave with awe, never before had I seen an underwater cave so big! It was neat though. Near by there was a dead vampire body floating lifelessly.. little did I know what I was getting myself in to...
If I had known, I would not have gone further..

A long swim past slaughterfish brought me finally to dry land, opening up in to a small cave which lead through a couple of short tunnels. Val was behind me as soon as he was able to breathe and we were crouched and sneaky, I was having fun so far.. On the way there were a couple of live vampires that attacked us, but nothing we couldn't handle. The further we got the more vampires there were, though, and it soon became more difficult to get past them. The further we got, also, the more dead vampire bodies we found. There's no way to tell yet whether it was due to disease (I don't think vampires can get them.. so..) or other means.. Then we emeged into what appeared to be the main gathering place (like a living room if you will) for the vampires. It was well lit, filled with food and as soon as we were within sight they ALL rushed us at once! We were overwhelmed by the sheer number and power of them and.. I died. So.. I tried a different tactice, died again.. and again... No matter what method I tried I continued to die, these vampires are just too strong!
Eventually, though, with Val's help and what seemed like an hour of repeatedly trying we got them all killed. This is what the aftermath looked like:

Yes, I did loot some bodies naked. In fact, I had been looting many bodies all the way here. Actually, there was so much good loot that I was nearly crawling due to all the weight on me! I even piled some on to Val and left him just as heavy, and I still didn't know how much more we had to go! I was beginning to worry I wouldn't be able to Klepto all of the loot on our adventure! Somehow in the fray I was horrified to find out I had caught a disease.. the worst one of all.. Vampiric hemophilia (or whatever it's called. ) If left untreated you turn in to a vampire, forever. I began to regret ever comming in here. As I fatiguedly dragged my feet around the room, finding it hard to breathe under the weight of all my loot I found some really awesome daedric weapons that will net me a wonderful profit! But I also began to think to myself "Vampire?! I don't want to be a vampire! Why did I ever get myself in to this!" And I was genuinely scared for myself. It seemed we were stuck in here with the scent of dead blood all around because I spent the longest time running back and forth trying to find a way out. The doors were all locked except for the maze but it took me four times of running back and forth to figure this out. The scent of the decaying bodies began to turn my stomach.

The room split in to 3 more hallways each leading to a door. One was a maze which I bravely delved in to(It was pitch black and I only had my light spell and night eye to see with), got lost in for a good half hour or 45 minutes, took a time out to stop myself from panicking, then found a lever which I pulled and then found my way back out of the maze. Each hallway that lead to a door had vampires lurking in them just waiting to pounce on me and it took a good while to clear those hallways out. The more vampires we killed the weaker we got due to fatigue, diseases and just plain old not having the time to regenerate because the vampires keep comming! I collapsed on the bench in the gathering area wide eyed, panting out of breath and nearly trembling..because the doors down the other hallways were still locked even after pulling the mazes lever. wondering "what am I gonna do??". Val took pity on me and tried to cheer me up with "well, we've come this far we can't go back now."
Poor attempt right? Well it worked. I forced myself on to my wobbly legs, reluctantly dropped half of my and Val's loot to lighten us (we'd need it) and continued on. I found a key hidden somewhere (I forgot where) and finally got to open one of the doors.

I tried avoiding getting attacked by vampires by turning myself in to a deer (remember that ability I have?):

It worked for a while.. until I tried opening chests and containers to get what was inside. Then they all rushed Val and I and attacked! Well, I couldn't fight very well as a stag so this just wasn't going to do.. Plus I kept getting strange looks from everyone as they probably wondered what a deer was doing wandering around in their cave of evil..

Attempt 2: Use my invisibility ring! Works like a charm! Now not only do we have a fighting chance but they can't fight back very well when they can't see what they're swinging at! While you may think "Why, that's cheating!" Fear not, for we still were getting our butts kicked (especially poor Val who was hunched over and constantly coughing from disease now) and still were dieing once in a while. Thank gawd for saving often! (the game just isn't fun any more at this point)
The further we went the darker things became and i'm not talking about light wise. Some room housed ominous statues, others had really horrible sounds comming from them that made you think of the pits of hades. There was a zombie corpse or two laying on the ground cut up and everything looked very grim. Luckily early on in some rooms I happened to find a few cure disease potions, passed one to Val and drank one myself. My vampire disease mysteriously was cured from it! (Cure disease potions aren't supposed to cure vampire disease).

From here on I chose my loot carefully, only taking the highest leveled or most expensive things and leaving all kinds of other things behind. Val happened to get some new daedric armor from this and looked snazzy but I think I forgot to snap a photo of him. Taking tourist pictures when in this place was the last thing on my mind! While I was getting cool things, my whole body burned with fatigue, my vision was blurring in and out and I felt like I could die at any moment. I was litterally sitting in my computer chair worrying that my avatar was going to die and not be able to continue!

There were rooms with huge statues that had been destroyed in such ways as to be reminescent of the gruesome death of a great, evil beast:

Long, dark, scary hallways that seemed to threaten to eat your very soul:

The further we progressed, the more I wished I wasn't there. I constantly wondered "when is it gonna end?". I dreaded encountering just one more vampire, but there were always more. I began to wonder if I would ever see daylight again.

Then, just as I had lost hope... I came in to a huge open cave that looked more like a home straight out of Morrowind:

While this wasn't daylight and I knew I wasn't out of this horrible place, this change of scenery with plants and benches and actual light was extremely refreshing! Of course as soon as we began to make too much noise we were detected and rushed by many more vampires again. The encounter left us gasping and barely able to stand, but still alive. I considered just being alive a great success.
This whole journey my journal had been updating with information: I will share it with you now.

This is everything I have discovered so far.

After killing most of the vampires in that area, we moved on and I was suddenly slammed in the face with the feeling of intense heat! The next area opened up to something that made me gasp in awe! Who knew that this was here!

A vast cavern filled with lava! This is where the bad vampires had been living for a while. There were rooms dug in to the walls of the cave near by. Not wanting to stay in this intense heat for long I moved on.
The next room was a refreshing, welcoming cooler temperature. A huge door stood before me with graves on either side cloaked in swaths of mist.

 

After killing the vampires guarding the door I opened it with trembling hands, fearing what might be on the other side. "is the door so big because it needs to be big to allow entrance and exit of the beast that lives inside?"

When I entered I again was taken by awe and gasped. What I saw took my breath away!

A huge statue of Boethia! Admittedly a very bad daedra to most who prefer not to be evil. I had emerged into a great castle with obviously evil  inhabitants. Eerily, this room seemed pretty deserted. I never knew that having no enemies around could feel even scarier than having many enemies around until now. Cautiously and a little jumpily I eased past the huge statue to the great room beyond, and found another large room much like the first with many vampires that suddnely rushed forth. Val and I were caught in a fray and I zapped the nearest vampire donned in fancy clothes. After looting his corpse naked I learned this particular vampire I had slain was the leader of them all. Hm.. he was pretty easy to kill for a leader..

With his key I snooped past the commotion of fighting and scrambling vampires in to the leaders personal quarters and found lots of items to loot! On his table was something interesting..

Among vampire dust, cure disease and poison potions and some ale was a human heart. Eew... ... ...*Yoink!* Mine!

Who knows.. it might come in handy somewhere!

After looting I returned the the room where all the vampires were dead and Val stood gasping, barely alive after fighting them all. I myself had been barely breathing the whole time and heard my heart beat and heavy breath in my own ear! I looked down at him from the banister outside the leaders quarters and thought to myself "How are we going to get out of here? I don't remember the way out and the place is still crawling with vampires, like cockroaches.. there's no way we'll be able to avoid them all. I don't think we'd survive.." Then I remembered a special ring I had in my pocket for just emergency occasions. It was a warp ring that would warp us to the Imperial City market district..

Rushing back down the steps toward val with my hand on the ring in my pocket I passed more vampires who became aware and began rushing after me! This attracted even more! And as I approached val, quickly reaching out and grabbing his arm to take him with me while gasping from the fatigue, we were swamped! Only to teleport out just in the nic of time! 

It was all over. We arrived on the cold, cobblestone streets of the IC market district panting heavier than I ever have in my life with lungs burning from being so tired of doing so. We could barely stand. We were so tired that both Val and I had to take a moment with our hands on her knees, leaning against the near by stores wall, just panting, for quite some time.. I think longer than I have ever had to. "Ho-oly cow.." was all I could say to myself.

After a good what seemed like 10 minutes, I finally straightened up and looked around, then realizing that the very store whose wall I was leaning against was the armor one "what luck!" Val and I waited the five or so hours until it became morning and the store opened,(Normally I hate waiting, but the safe, peacefulness was a welcome change and we definately needed the rest.) then went in and sold all of our loot!

Here is the story as my journal states it:

I think I have accumulated enough emotional trauma from this event to need a few days of recooperating.