So after all that, I was heading back to Winterhold. Rather than reverse my course - and risk crossing the front lines of the civil war again - I decided to make my way north to Dawnstar and then hire a boat to take me to Winterhold. While the old city itself was perched high on a cliff, there was a small landing at its base from which I could ascend to the city - and its college. The backtracking part of my journey - passing through Whiterun Hold by way of Riverwood - was uneventful, though as I neared Frostfield dark clouds filled the sky and pelted me with rain. It was only when I reached the edge of The Pale that the rain finally subsided, replaced with a growing chill on the air. 

 

 

As I approached Fort Dunstad I started to feel a strong urge for a hot meal and a warm hearth. I figured I'd stop over at the Stumbling Sabrecat and take care of both. Maybe stay the night, too, depending on how long I stayed.

 

The shout of "found you!" followed by the crackle of magic. I felt a searing heat wash over me as a rope of blue energy leapt from the treeline. I reached for my bow, but before I could loose a shot two armed bandits were charging me. I swatted a sword out of the way with my own weapon, thankful I'd found that fine bow of dwarven metal back during the battle in Markarth, and leaned into another strike to catch it on my pauldron. Another lash of magic struck me, and I almost lost my footing in a spell of dizziness. 

 

They'd got the drop on me: I wasn't going to win this fight. Blocking another slash, I pivoted on my heel and dashed for the trees on the opposite side of the road. A magical bolt scorched the side of a nearby pine tree, but fortunately missed me this time. I could hear the crunch of footsteps in the snow behind me, but with each stride they seemed to be falling further behind. Still running as fast as I good, I rifled through my bag awkwardly until my hands settled on a glass bottle. I pulled it out and was immediately grateful to find that my fingers hadn't lied - it was one of the healing potions I'd brought back from Northpoint. 

 

I jerked out the cork with my teeth and sucked down the potion. I could feel the burns on my right side tingle and throb for a moment before the pain subsided. Just then I broke out of the trees and found myself on a cliff overlooking the fort. My eyes conveyed an unfortunate revelation: it wasn't just bandits on the road. The fort itself was crawling with them. Rough men in patched and weatherbeaten armor, the Imperial banners torn down, and lingering signs of battle not year cleared from the interior. I wouldn't be visiting the Stumbling Sabrecat after all, it seemed. 

 

 

I considered my options. I seemed to have lost my pursuers and the men below me seemed oblivious to my presence, but getting down might be difficult. I was at the top of a sheer cliff, and if I wanted to push further away from the fort I'd either have to backtrack (and possibly face my ambushers) or climb up some boulders that were blocking further progress along my perch. I decided on the boulders, ultimately, and set to climbing. But for a persistent pain in my chest where the spell had hit me, the process of ascending wasn't actually all that hard. I thanked the newfound strength I'd gained from the Warrior Stone. 

 

At last, I reached I point where I couldn't go much further around. Fortunately, there was a ledge within jumping height beneath me, and I hopped down from my perch. One more hop, with a bit of a running start to miss more rocks at the foot of the cliff, and I was rolling through loosely packed snow.

 

 

The chill was incredible, and awful, but I'd managed to get past the fort; now I was in another dense copse of trees. I was pretty confident I could sneak past the fort, but I didn't trust my stamina to hold up in the cold. So I dispensed with sneaking and just tried to keep my distance as I pressed on north. As I broke out of the valley the fort controlled, my teeth started chattering. I realized belatedly that my fur cloak was starting to grow stiff - the wet from the morning's rain storm was turning to an icy blanket on my back. But I saw what looked like a lantern in the distance, and I summoned my strength to press towards it.

 

At length, the trees parted and I found myself standing before the ruins of an ancient battlement, now clearly given new purpose as a settlement. A guard in the colors of The Pale stood watch, and I waved to her, trying my best to speak clearly in light of my shivers.

 

 

"Is... is there an inn here?"

 

The guard shook her head, and for a moment I despaired, until I realized she was doing so in judgment of my condition, not in denial.

 

Gesturing back and over her shoulder she said, "up the stairs on the left. Though I think you need shoes and trousers more than you need a drink." 

 

I managed a feeble smile and, thanking her, shuffled towards the stairs. To my great surprised, I found that the inn was in large part an outdoor biergarten. Why someone thought it was a good idea to build something like this in the frozen north was beyond me, but I crouched over its large fire pit and greedily started soaking in the heat. 

 

 

At length, I made my way over to the bar. Gesturing over my shoulder I said, "that's... ah, some fire pit you've got there."

 

The barman nodded perfunctorily, "Indeed it is. Can I help you with something?"

 

"A room, I hope. And something hot to drink."

 

"Can't help you with the room, I'm afraid. Only got one and it's already booked. But unroll your bedroll by the pit if you want. It stays lit all night. Drinks? Now there I can help you."

 

 

He turned from me for a moment, returning shortly after with a steaming mug. "Not much to choose from, but you look like the kind of takes your tea spiced. Am I right?"

 

I nodded enthusiastically, quick to claim the the hot mug and slurp at it. "It's good," I concluded.

 

"Used to be better, but the way south's been closed for a while now. No good way to get goods in from Whiterun."

 

"I noticed," I groaned. "I practically walked into Fort Dunstad before I realized it'd fallen. I was lucky to make it out of there in one piece."

 

"Huh, you had no idea? You must be new around here."

 

I shrugged. "I've been traveling in High Rock the last year. Seems like a lot has changed."

 

"Aye, it has. It has. The civil war's heating up again, and the more time those boys spend fighting each other, the less time they spend fighting the damn bandits." 

 

We chatted a while longer, and I eventually supped on some grilled fish. Dunpar Wall might have been a literal ruin, but it seemed like its inhabitants had made a comfortable home out of it. After talking a bit more about the way north to Dawnstar and the best trails to take, I started to feel my eyelids weighing heavily and excused myself to lay out my bedroll. Before I knew it, sleep was overtaking me and I drifted off to the gentle crackling of the fire pit.

 

 

Behind The Scenes

Bye, Bye, Arm Bondage

When I enabled Toys with the "casual" preset, I forgot to completely turn off the softcore arm bondage feature. Today I got a frank reminder of that error when a random bondage pose started to play while my character was sitting on the toilet. This interrupted the PAF animation scene and resulted in my character getting stuck with a permanently unremovable prop stuck to her feet and with the first person camera permanently disabled. I rolled back the save and corrected the setting so the chance of random softcore bondage is always zero. 

 

This does remind me that I need to go in and totally disable the softcore strip function also. Since the MCM doesn't support this, I'm on the fence between recompiling the MCM script to meet my needs or just removing that keyword from every toy that has it. That's a back burner issue for now, however, as I'm only going to make a change like that "hot" if the feature starts to become disruptive to my game - which it isn't (yet).

 

 

Hmm, perhaps I spoke too soon. It seems that there is now a 40% floor on magical wrist bindings, so we are just going to remove that feature from the game... and we'll kill softcore strip while we're at it. The less invasive approach is to recompile the script, but since we have a major Toys update imminent that's not really a good long term solution: rather, it's just signing up for re-work. So we'll go into xEdit and strip (no pun intended) the keyword from all the affected toys.

 

...or not. Before I deleted them, there were about six paragraphs of explanation of how to remove these unwanted keywords, but towards the end I discovered that Whorecrux relied on detecting the armbinder keyword for some of its features. While adjusting that dependency would be pretty easy in its own right, it made me realize that by doing a brute force removal, I'd be signing myself up for having to repeat this cleaning every time any Toys mod got updated, including potentially having fix quests and otherwise do more invasive work. 

 

We're going to try one 'light touch' workaround before we tear apart the MCM script, though. Toys stores its default MCM values in a JSON file and also allows for exporting of profiles. We're going to change the starting value in the auto-MCM (which reflects my current setup, conveniently) for both features to zero and then copy the auto-MCM to an exported profile in the relevant folder. With that done, we'll see if we can work around the floor and just force those values into the game without having to recompile the MCM script.

 

 

Loading into the game, we find that the auto-MCM file alone was sufficient to fix the problem: both sliders are now set to zero. That's great, because while I don't want either feature to be active in my game, I'd rather not patch it out entirely for exactly the reasons we see with WCX --- other mods may depend on items with those keywords being in the game. Note that I did not do anything to remove the hardcore versions of these effects - hardcore strip and magical armbinder. These appear on significantly fewer items and because of their 'always on' status they're less disruptive. Indeed, Virgin Marie has suggested I work around the floor value by just setting the unwanted options to 100%, effectively turning them into their hardcore versions. I considered this, but ultimately rejected it because of the context the softcore devices appear in: for them to be hardcore would have a very disruptive effect on gameplay, even if it was a more predictable one.

 

When 1.8 and future versions of the framework roll out, I'll probably still need to go back and redo the JSON changes, but that's a much lighter lift than parsing through dozens of keyword references or taking the time to make sure I don't break anything by recompiling a script. So for the time being at least, this workaround is good enough for me.

 

 

What's Killing My Faerie?!

As much as I like him as a plot device, I'm having a lot of trouble getting Vafi to not only stay equipped, but even to just stay in my inventory. If I add him to my inventory and equip him through the menu, he only stays out for a few seconds before disappearing - and being totally removed from my inventory in the process. If I use the console to add him with equipitem he'll stick around until something external touches my equipment state... and then he gets removed again. This is clearly not functioning as intended. I'm pretty sure this is linked to Dwemer Faeries putting its little guys in the FX01 slot (slot 61) and some other mod screwing around with that slot. 

 

Because of the way this was happening - a timed removal of a slot 61 item - I had an early suspect of what mod might be causing this. Thanks to some excellent consultation and assistance from @VirginMarie, we quickly localized the source of the problem to a single line in the main Shout Like a Virgin script. Disabling it caused the problem to go away. Of course, this quick and dirty recompile is not ideal and in fact could cause problems in the SLaVE quest, so it's not a permanent solution, but VM is now aware of the problem and hopefully future versions of SLaVE will address it.

 

As an added benefit, I finally got to the bottom of a configuration problem that was preventing me from compiling scripts that used Sexlab functions. This means that when we loop back for the next big update, I can finally fix the compatibility issue between PAF and iWant RND CACO.