LIFE IN MORROWIND - DAY 10

With every day in Morrowind, I get more and more entangled in the intricate tapestry of the local politics. Today, I joined the Fighters Guild.

Obviously, I am no fighter - but the admission standards for this guild are apparently quite low. I guess their approach is simple - if you can handle your tasks and survive, you are good enough. If not - well, they will take someone else to continue where you left off.

The first task I got was a very easy and quick to earn 100 coins - I just had to help some local lady to eradicate a rat infestation in her house. Granted, we are talking about the local Morrowind rats, ferocious beasts the size of a sheep with razor sharp teeth. And I had to fight them in very close quarters which made it all the more dangerous. So I was quite proud of myself when I killed them without getting a scratch - I used the combination of summoning and invisibility spells, and found it very practical.

I reported the successful completion of the first task and promtly asked for more work. This time I was dispatched to a nearby egg mine to deal with a couple of thieves. Near the entrance to the mine, I met some local workers, who told me they know about the thieves and that I should find them hiding somewhere in a remote corner of the mine. 

These "egg mines" are quite commonplace in Morrowind. They are, in fact, a backbone of the local economy. For someone seeing one for the first time, it was anything but commonplace. Imagine an ant colony but created by ants as big as cow. This is more or less exactly what they, colonies of huge local insects, "kwama", a confusing network of underground tunnels crawling with various grotesque types of this creature. As I was explained, some of them can also be hostile to intruders, even if they do not touch the mine workers, whose smells they recognize as something familiar.

So I proceeded through the passages with a lot of caution, using invisibility spells from time to time as I had no desire to fight these overgrown worms and beetles. 

After a few hours, as I was starting to wonder if I should just abadnon this job and never go back to the Fighters Guild again, I found what I was looking for. As I opened a door leading to some new cavernous passege, a man who looked just like any of the other workers, suddenly grabbed his pickaxe and rushed at me. To make matters worse, one of the nearby kwama foragers also noticed me at this moment and decided that it did not like my smell. 

By this time, I was quite tired of all the invisibility spells I had to cast over the previous hours. I tried to cast one again - and felt panic surging up as it failed. The thief  - for it was surely one of the two I had been sent two deal with - was almost upon me with his vicious pickaxe.

The intevention scrolls are a great thing, for it takes just a second to use them, and they require no concentration or effort of will unlike a normal spell. Such a scroll saved my life this time. I collapsed on the doorstep of the Balmora temple, shaking and dripping with cold sweat. The thieves would live another day, but more importantly - so would I.