#topic: daggerfall

[bookofalmsivi]

How do you feel about immurement? Is that how the Telvanni get their mushrooms so tall and strong?

We don’t wall people up to grow our mushrooms.  Good gods, how utterly morbid.  You make me shudder.  No, we reinforce the heart of our towers with a soul gem spire and the occasional blood sacrifice, though there are other methods.  Immurement.  Goodness, but you are grim.

…You always hear of skeletons being found in the walls of old buildings in Daggerfall.  Spooky is what that is.

[bookofalmsivi]

How do the Bretons view sexuality/promiscuity/fidelity/etc.? They seem like the sort of people who sleep with everyone and no one complains of heartache...

No one complains of heartache?  Ahaha, oh dear, well, you have one half of that sentence right, at least when discussing the upper class.  We less than blessed people typically have somewhat more monogamous leanings until we have a bit of coin in our pocket.

Look, in the part of High Rock I’m from, having a paramour or five is simply a mark of gentility and in the past, people have looked askance at kings who didn’t.  People marry to better themselves and they keep lovers on the side to…well, honestly, mostly to also better themselves but also for love and if not love, then lust.  It’s socially acceptable but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be messy.  People become jealous when you pay attention to another instead of them.  People can treat you rudely when you are the piece on the side, as they say in the common parlance, and they think that you are not a fit concubine.  Lovers can be quite cruel.

Messy business, that.  I highly recommend never becoming involved with a noble from High Rock.  It mostly ends in tears or death.

[bookofalmsivi]

What kinds of dance are popular in Daggerfall?

Well, I don’t know for certain what’s in fashion now.  The trends change so quickly and you can’t keep up on them at all unless you are there in the heart of it.  I have visited High Rock once in the past two hundred years.

Ah, but let us see…well, when I was young, what was most in vogue at the time was danse du ventre, imported in from the east.  I have never liked to dance if it could be avoided (this is because I am a lazy creature that shuns strenuous activity whenever possible) but I could do it reasonably well in my day and I looked a pretty picture in my long skirt and jangling necklaces.  I am out of practice now and moreover, my knee is too bad for any dancing.

I do not know overmuch about the peasant dances, having been removed almost entirely from that world, but I know that there is a popular step dance that mostly involves a group of bonny youths kicking a great deal and jumping and then there are these funny twirls and everyone wears these flouncy skirts that almost always fly up when one really gets into the dance.  I am fairly certain that it is mostly just an excuse to look at people’s bums.

Ballet is not generally practiced by the populace at large but I think that we all like to watch the ballet dancers.  It is said that the best dancers are from Colovia, but I have seen some very fine dancers from Rihad and there is a school for it in Solitude.  Well, there was, at least, when I was there many years ago, but I do not know for certain if it is still standing.  Ballet requires you to have very long legs and strong, thick thighs and most Nords are built like that already, unlike Bretons, who tend towards being small and squat.  I have heard that Khajiiti dancers make the best ballerinas because they are almost always light, quick on their feet, and powerful, but truth be told, I have never seen any.

Of course, you have the canario, the allemande, the gavotte, the chorronaise, which are ever popular, but I find them tedious and don’t care to talk about them.  The damnable Wayresters kept trying to make their polka dancing popular but at least when I was in Daggerfall, it never caught on there.  I wonder if Helseth ever did it.  That’s a thought.

Ooh, and there is one more but I hope that you will not think me a libertine when I mention it.  There is the cancan.  Oh, it is exhilarating.  There was a man who used to take me to cabarets and dance halls, and once, we saw the great cancan dance Gigi Ginette Gavor, who was famous for her jeweled stockings and shimmering underthings.  It was a grand time.  I thought for awhile that if I ever left the temple, I might become a cancan dancer since I had the legs for it, but I tire too easily to do such a strenuous dance, and so I stayed a voice of Dibella instead.  I miss dance halls.  The music would be loud and vibrant like this, dah-dah-dah-dah-nananananana, and the girls (or boys dressed as girls) would lift their skirts up like so and they’d kick like this and-

[Neht cannot kick like this.  He mostly just manages to fall on his rear.]

Oof.  Erm, well, it would be much better than that, I assure you.  Oh, oh dear, ah, that did hurt.  I’ll leave the cancan to the younger generation.

[bookofalmsivi]

Truth -- Would you go back to living in Daggerfall?

I miss it so very much.  Daggerfall was my home for so many years.  How could I not miss my old home?  I was born there and I should have died there.  I will not pretend that my life there was perfect.  It was demeaning in its own ways but I lived a much more comfortable existence than most and I could still call myself handsome then.  I miss it.  Skyrim is cold and strange and its natives deride everything I hold dearest to my heart.

If my safety was guaranteed and I had proof that no men of the Empire would be sent after me, I would be very tempted to spend the rest of my days by the beach, but such a thing cannot be guaranteed and moreover, I cannot abandon my work and people here.  If I left, who would raise the bonewalkers and tend to my shrine?  Who would bake the bread?  And I have my research to think about it.  I can’t just abandon it. 

I have duties to my House as a councilor to consider.  As the highest of very few Telvanni in Skyrim, I was automatically given a seat on the outlands council and I do take my role seriously.  By the standards of the House, I own this country.  I cannot go to live in Daggerfall when I know that I would have to defer to other wizards who have established themselves in the country.

And I no longer have any people left in the city.  I lived there two centuries ago.  My friends and family are long dead.  Perhaps Morimar is alive but I don’t think my old uncle would appreciate the presence of a traitorous oathbreaker.  It is a hard thing to be alone and friendless in a strange place.  The Daggerfall of today is not the Daggerfall I once knew.

I miss it but I really cannot go and live there again.  Perhaps it would not be too much of a risk to visit.  I don’t know.  But I miss it like a wife on land misses her sailor at sea.

[bookofalmsivi]

White cap, Imp stool!

White Cap: Eating habits headcanon

Garlic, leeks, and onions were considered peasant fare and highly unfashionable by high Daggerfall society when Neht was young.  Neht’s always had a complicated relationship with the nobility; he’s never quite sure if he adores all the glamor or intrigue or if he wants to see it all destroyed.  At any rate, he developed a taste for those plants as an act of spite against all the knights and nobles of Daggerfall who turn their backs on their past the minute they grasp power.

Imp Stool: Body language headcanon

When Neht’s out in Windhelm or the many tiny villages dotting the area, he makes himself smaller, slouches a little, keeps his head down.  It’s not quite a conscious decision but Neht has been trying to dispel those stubborn necromancer rumors by trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible.

[bookofalmsivi]

You could always take a trip to the Alik'r, if you're tired of the cold. How well do you deal with heat?

In the Alik’r, they little like wizards, though I understand that the Redguards find the healing and destructive arts useful, though not as useful as swinging swords and not getting wounded in the first place.  To them, I’m an unrepentant necromancer and conjurer of evil spirits.  Not that I am a foul necromancer.  Though I suppose if I took a vacation to the desert, they needn’t know that, especially when my plant experiments are better known.  I can’t imagine that anyone would have any issue with my floral research because unlike the research of most mages, it’s actually useful.

Of course, people simply don’t take a vacation to the Alik’r.  I have heard that it is beautiful in its own way, but it is so very dangerous.  I’m a child of the Iliac Bay.  If I see sand, I need to see the ocean attached, so the great desert isn’t for me.  You mustn’t think Hammerfell is entirely out of the picture, however.  I would very much like to see the city of Sentinel.  Of all the cities of Hammerfell, it’s said to be the most like Daggerfall but entirely different at the same time. 

If you look at the cuisine, you might understand.  We eat a great deal of the same foodstuffs.  Chickpeas, for example, are often eaten in Daggerfall in the form of little fried balls or else made into a kind of fritter, which tastes very good with a squeeze of lemon or dipped into a sauce made of a fine, runny Urvaius sprinkled with paprika and parsley or else eaten with honeyed figs.  In Sentinel, they prefer their chickpeas made into hummus, which is a cold and very simple dip made with the aforesaid chickpeas and a little garlic, a little lemon, some other things. 

In Daggerfall, we would eat hummus too -really, all food of the Iliac Bay is borrowed from somewhere else and modified to our tastes- but it would be full of honey, beets for a pink color, nuts, flower syrup, a garnish of berries, and generally bore little resemblance to the hummus of Sentinel.  Well, you know what they say.  Give a Breton a sea creature and he’ll turn it into a sweet.  That is, we can turn anything into a dessert.  Really, it’s quite true.  I remember going to the beach and eating bags of these little candied fish and also spicy-sweet cuttlefish.  Cyrodiilic folk might turn their noses up at our snacks, but it’s little wonder that Elsweyr folk tend to like Daggerfall food.  After all, they’re the experts on sweets.

What were we speaking about again?  Not food.  Sentinel!  Yes, I would like to see Sentinel.  Maybe when I’m better established as a mage-lord, I’ll take a vacation there and laze about on the beach baking in the sun until I’m sprinkled with freckles all over.  And I’d like to see Rihad.  In the castle, I had a dear friend named Aleshut of Rihad who had once been part of the Bane, the city’s gladiator team.  Interesting woman.  She had been a prisoner of war taken in some long-forgotten skirmish, but by the time I met her, she was the bodyguard of some nobleman.  Taller than any Altmer, cut off a breast to show people on the street that she was tough as nails and not to be trifled with, had a wit quicker than anyone I have ever known, and she was married to…well, I forget which god exactly.  They’ve got a whole lot of gods in Hammerfell.  She told me that there’s a Yokudan god of We Have Too Many Gods, but I think she might have been playing a trick on me.  We used to talk theology.  Did you know that they tell stories about Vivec and the pregnant Yoku kings?  He’s called Ansu-Gurleht.  I suppose they might not tell so many Vivec stories nowadays, though.

I need some heat to thaw out these bones.  Dunmer aren’t made for the snow.  If you gave me Hammerfell, I might never return to the east again.

[bookofalmsivi]

Censer

When I was just a little thing, it was my duty to tend to the House’s censers.  I was so small then, not even a child of ten, though I thought myself grown.  They told me that Dibella enthralls all senses and as her fingers in the mortal world, our House needed to reflect her, and that was why we kept the place fragrant.  The real reason was, of course, that the city stunk as all cities do and because the smoke helped chased off the biting insects that plagued Daggerfall in the summer.

[bookofalmsivi]

Minutemenders ]

I was there when the dragon broke.  In High Rock, I mean.  I was there.  The Imperials, they call it the Miracle of Peace and that it was the will of the Divines that we Bretic lot were broken, but I tell you, that was no miracle.  I was there.  I saw things, things that happened but didn’t.  The armies of Wayrest, they sacked the castle and presented us to the king and queen as trophies, except that didn’t happen, it didn’t actually happen, and then we locked ourselves in the castle as others invaded but we were also celebrating at a feast and then the necromancers, I…everything happened at once and none of it happened.  I was there.  And I remember an adventurer in the castle and I think that was important, but I can’t remember.  And there was a giant of metal and I think, I think that was Numidium.  I don’t know what else it could be.They say that when Akatosh breaks, his jill-wives mend time, but I think that they are not so very neat with their sewing.