Salamander Dan's Salamander Slam [it's skyrim]

Update 7

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Alchemy. Because you need to Science so hard you can beat Terriblix's magic (but nonviolently).

Yeah, so… it turns out Salamander Dan, in spite of his reading and antler-gobbling, is actually a really shit alchemist. We’ll have to save this for later.



In the meantime, Salamander Dan creeps into the local shop (which, once again, looks nearly identical to the shop in Shor’s Stone). He steals some potatoes he remembers eating; takes some cheese he’s sure became a key. Even the skin on the wall, the steak on the table looks all too familiar. Salamander Dan shudders. He has to get out of here. He has to get out of this town now.



Dan sprints right into the Skyrim beach episode.

…

He feels compelled to remove his heavy cloak while literally standing, fully-clothed, in a hot spring, but stops there. He’s not about to join these weirdos. It’s still, like, 40 degrees outside. These people are probably going to die of frostbite the instant they leave the spring. Dan turns and runs away, out of the insidious Xerox town entirely.



Halfway between Darkwater Crossing and Mistwatch (they’re apparently right next to each other!), Salamander Dan comes across this thing. He instinctively knows it isn’t science - hell, it looks positively magical - but he’s drawn to it nonetheless. Maybe it’ll help him on his other quest, to become a powerful warlock in his own right! That’ll show Terriblix, if Terriblix doesn’t explode into particles upon contact with Science.



Considering how often people try to kill Salamander Dan, this is actually a pretty good choice. If he ever learns a healing spell, he can probably heal himself as fast as people can hurt him! Terriblix never let him read the magic books, though. He doesn’t have a single spell to his name, except for, well… that one. You know the one.



Dan pokes the mysterious stone, shooting a magical laser straight into space. This won’t have any consequences down the line, no-sir-ee.

He doesn’t even feel more magical later. He does feel vaguely nauseous, but that’s probably just all the potatoes he ate. Why did he eat all those potatoes, anyway? There’s also a moment of clarity for Salamander Dan. A voice speaks in his mind.

YOU CAN’T TURN PEOPLE INTO LIZARDS, DAN. THAT’S STUPID.

...Dan decides to set that ambition aside for now. Of course, if it turns out the mysterious voice was actually Terriblix, he’s going to pick it up again purely out of spite.



While avoiding yet another wolf, Dan comes upon a smashed-to-bits wagon, a huge campfire, and a menacing-looking giant. There’s a street sign in front of this giant’s camp, containing an official warning, folded in half and impaled on the pole with a dagger, without the dagger even touching it.

This makes sense.

Attention citizenry:

The giant here has been given leave to keep his camp. Please do NOT attempt to make trade, disrupt the mammoths, gawk at, or otherwise disturb the giant. Resting here is not advised.



The note immediately falls to the floor after Salamander Dan reads it.

…

Dan sort of drapes it over the dagger that was never actually touching it, then walks away. He’s sure it’ll be fine.



IT’S NOT FINE AT ALL. An assassin immediately pops out of some bushes, screaming his head off, and does his best to slice Salamander Dan into a fashionable purse. He hadn’t bet on Dan’s ability to run away, though!

Salamander Dan’s stamina bar empties almost instantly. Straight away, the assassin catches back up and continues waving two katanas around like a colossal nerd. Dan slowly swivels his head around to look him in the eye, then slowly, lovingly, retrieves a wheel of cheese from his pocket and shoves it into the assassin’s face. It smells of sweat. Salamander Dan doesn’t have sweat glands.



Ol’ Drizzle here is stunned in absolute horror, able to do nothing but yell out in anguish before Dan feasts on his blood. Salamander Dan’s sunburn feels a bit better. On the bright side, no one actually saw th-



…

At least he won’t tell anyone the truth about this, right?

Dan quickly runs away and hides.



His hiding place, to the surprise of no one, is actually just right in front of Mzulft. Remember, folks, everything in Skyrim is crammed right together. It’s really a wonder that there’s all these untouched ruins everywhere. Maybe everyone else knows something Salamander Dan doesn’t.

Slowly, Salamander Dan twirls the Cheese Key in his hand. He trembles nervously. It’s all down to this, now. It’s all down to jamming a vaguely key-shaped lump of cheese into an ancient lock and expecting it to actually do something. With a shaking hand, Salamander Dan shoves the key into the lock with a squish.



Against all odds… the doors swing open, revealing the misty corridors beyond.

Well, the dwarves did love their cheese.



There are no signs of life around, but something’s amiss. Dan gets into his usual adventurin’ pose and creeps onward, silent as, well, himself I guess. Everything else in this game is pretty damn noisy. Giant brass faces watch him judgmentally. Between them, off in the distance… a figure, on the ground.



It’s a corpse. Obviously. Everyone’s always going off and dying in Skyrim. But there’s something troubling about it. Well. More troubling than the fact that it’s a corpse. It’s fresh. The blood isn’t even dry, and the body hasn’t decayed at all. Whatever a Synod Researcher is, this one only just died.

Which also means that he got in here without the cheese key. He didn’t have one in his inventory or anything! Maybe he had… the actual key? And lost it? Who knows. He’s got a cool magical cloak, though, so the next step is obvious.



New (and strangely clean) cloak donned, Dan takes some time to check out whatever this thing is. Some kind of inconvenient and dangerous light fixture, mixed with a completely superfluous bunsen burner. It reminds Salamander Dan of his high school chemistry class, which is… well, not promising exactly, and certainly not comforting, but. That’s kind of like science. He’s on the right track.

From behind, Salamander Dan hears a rhythmic clacking sound.



A robot spider! This is, without a doubt, the most scientific and hopefully not magical thing Salamander Dan has seen in his entire life! It’s also coming right toward him, and hissing menacingly. Or possibly just venting steam.

And then it starts stabbing him in the knees. Oh god, betrayed by science! Dan just stands there for a moment in disbelief before realizing that he’d really rather not die in such an embarrassing way. He reaches into his pockets and pulls out a war pick he found, and sets to disassembling the robot!





Quickly disassembling the robot.

Salamander Dan rips an intact gear out of it, but that’s really not going to be good enough. There’s also a soul gem on it, which is… kind of disconcerting, really. It’s not even a filled soul gem, though, so it’s fine.



It quickly becomes clear that Mzulft is both a labyrinth and a very well guarded labyrinth, with spiders patrolling all over the damn place. Dan’s going to have to keep his wits about him if he ever hopes to get through here. Especially since he’s really blatantly underleveled for this place.

He’s pretty much immediately spotted by this spider, and tries and fails to destroy it with a bow. The arrow really just plinks right off without any effect. Pick time!



A few rooms of tense (or boring) sneaking later, Salamander Dan can’t take the fighting any longer. There’s just too many of them. So instead, he does what Salamander Dans do best.

Run away in a vaguely comical fashion! But… the spider’s faster than him, so he has to smash it, too. This one has a book on it - a spellbook containing “Blessed Weapon”! It lets Salamander Dan summon a divine axe to “fight for him”, whatever that means.

...Dan stops for a moment to contemplate why there was a musty old spellbook lodged amongst the gears of an angry robot spider, but decides not to worry about it too much.



Salamander Dan very suddenly comes to something that is… clearly not Mzulft. It’s just a cave. A cave with a tree growing in it, no less! That’s absurd. Dwarves hated trees. Nature must be reclaiming the place after 3000 years.

Dan creeps along, coming to a large open cave that looks suspiciously like… every other dungeon in Skyrim, actually. Because obviously I’ve gotten tired of these ruins looking different from the norm.



Anyway, the cave is full of weird giant bugs, feasting on the corpses of more of those weird Synod guys. It’s probably related to some quest Salamander Dan doesn’t really care about, and will probably never actually do. Oh well.



Is it really necessary to tell you what’s going on here at this point? I mean… Come on.





Mzulft’s not out of surprises yet! The moment Dan gets back into the main part of the ruins, a sphere pops out of the wall and turns into some kind of orb man! An orb man with a beard, even. Truly, the technological innovation of the Dwarves knew no bounds.



Including the bounds of personal space.



Running deeper into Mzulft proves to be a terrible idea, as Dan attracts the attention of a second orb and about four different spiders. They instantly form a steam-powered conga line behind Dan, except instead of dancing and merriment they’re trying to rip out his spine.

Which, in Skyrim, is probably the same thing.



Against all odds, this turns out to be the perfect hiding spot. Maybe Dwarven science is still lacking after all.

Really, though, we’re beginning to see how stealth in Skyrim really works. You run away from whatever happens to be chasing you, duck, and step behind something, preferably in the shade. Everything runs around fruitlessly for a while, then gives up and returns to their patrols like nothing ever happened in the first place. They never catch on, because Skyrim is not a stealth game even when it tries to be.

Of course, we run into a problem here, since Dan is trapped in a big ol’ room full of patrolling, dangerous robots that he’d really like to avoid.

I’ve also leveled up again here, so… I decided to just spend the perk points I had and worry about it later. It’s not like I’ve really leveled anything except sneak anyway, might as well put it to good use.





Two perks, perfect for running away and not facing your fears! The Salamander Dan guarantee.





Salamander Dan executes a flawless, improbable, and entirely-indistinct-in-post escape! Jumping from pipe to pipe while resisting the urge to scream or do unspeakable things with potatoes, Dan makes his way out of the room, down a ramp, and even deeper into the bowels of the dwarven city.

The dwarven city with absolutely no living quarters, or indeed, infrastructure of any sort. Maybe they accidentally built a wall over the entrance to their living space and they all starved to death as a result.



Dan comes upon a ghastly sight now - a wrecked spider, sprawled out next to the fresh corpse of… a goblin? Salamander Dan shudders. This is the tallest and least green goblin he’s ever seen - it doesn’t even have eyes, for that matter! He then realizes - this is the goblin variant that only lives in caves, and is therefore much more dangerous than regular ones (though not as dangerous as, say, the kind that lives around volcanoes).

He’ll really have to tread lightly up ahead.

Continuing on, Dan finds a few more gyros and some other miscellaneous garbage, but not really much else worth noting. Man, this place sure is empty. It’d better be worth it down the road.



At long last, Dan comes upon… a door! A door labeled helpfully in Salamander-legible text, “Mzulft Boilery”. Must be where they get all their inexplicable steam.

Salamander Dan is sure he’s getting close now. But something still nags at the back of his mind. These guys… the Synods. They look like warlocks. Elves in dark cloaks, no doubt using magic extensively. But they’re all dead. Who sent them? Did any make it further?

...Why did Terriblix know to send the assassin to Mzulft?