Hour 63: Moths & Mages

I go to the Imperial City and 'wait', and before long a messenger arrives telling me to meet the Gray Fox! At last! He has a job for me which involves stealing a crystal from some blind monks. Shouldn't be too hard, right? As an aside, I really feel like Bethesda could have gone out of their way a little more to give the Gray Fox a unique voice actor. I mean they did it with Lucien Lachance. I think they must have wasted too much of their budget on Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart, when they could have had some more perfectly fine voice actors scattered throughout the game instead.

So, I head to the Temple of the Ancestor Moths again, that place I stumbled upon a while ago. There are monks there this time, and I manage to convince one of them to show me to some secret catacombs, after casting my Charm spell on him. After that, it's a fairly simple dungeon crawl to get the artefact. I square off against many cool-looking blindfolded kata-wielding monks, but they all fall relatively easily to my spells.

After I return to the Gray Fox, he thanks me and says he may have more work for me but that I'll be required to fence more stolen good first. Fortunately, I have already fenced so much that I fulfill the requirement immediately. I feel this is a broken mechanic which broke my immersion a little - it would have been nice to have to actually complete some more Independent Thievery. My next mission involves stealing a special arrow from the Bravil court wizard. This quest is pretty involved and has me snooping around in the castle before finding a secret passageway to a tower out in the countryside. Part of the passageway is underwater and I have to defeat a Giant Slaughterfish - a pretty scary fight. The next part of the pathway is so well hidden underwater that for the first time so far I have to actually take to Youtube to find out where to go.

After battling my way through the labyrinthine 'Wizard's Grotto' to reach his secluded tower, and slaying numerous mages and Daedra, the wizard, above, who sports a neat set of ebony armour, is uninterested in me and is tinkering with some potions. I steal the arrow from under his nose and leave without so much as a peep from him. I return to the Gray Fox and must wait again for my next mission (the broken fencing mechanic kicks in again).

During this mission I leveled up for the first time in what feels like forever. I think I just haven't been doing much fighting over the last 10 hours, what with all the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests. I am now level 18, so it's as good a place as any to take stock and have a look at my stats again: