My Little Prequel: Friendship is Oblivious

by GroaningGreyAgony

Chapter 5

This story contains spoilers for the game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the webcomic Prequel.

Katia sniffed the air cautiously. Under the bright sharp smell of rat blood lay the odor of must and dust and decay. She shook the katana out of its scabbard and held it ready as she made a brief inspection of the rest of the room. Nothing more was alive.

Aside from the rats, there were two corpses, one skeletal, the other clothed in flesh and lying by a door that appeared to be the only other exit from the room. She left that one alone for now—she had a vague idea that the skeleton was just a trifle more sanitary.

The pony skeleton lay next to a rusty bow and shield. Also nearby were a sack and a locked chest. Katia frowned. Who would even leave a chest like that in an abandoned area? If you had time to take the furniture and the wall hangings, surely you could spare an extra trip for the chest?

The sack was useless, but Katia claimed the bow... which, unless she found some arrows, was almost equally useless. She knelt by the skeleton, and found it had been concealing a quiver of rusty arrows and a set of a half-dozen lockpicks. She wasn't quite sure where it had been hiding the arrows. It was a well known fact that you could hide an awful lot of large things in even a very tiny corpse. In fact, the amount you could store was more than the person or thing would have been able to carry while alive. Why this was so was not known and most people preferred not to talk about it. Katia's own hazy concept was that a dead person was half in the world beyond anyway. Perhaps it was trying to take all that stuff with it?

She shrugged and stood up. She needed to stay organized, and practice a bit with her weapons. Her magicka had to be conserved for when she really needed it.

She spent some time rearranging the katana so its scabbard was held secure by the saddlebag strap. She tried a few practice draws and was able to smoothly extract the katana without cutting herself after several tries and adjustments. She wasted some more of her precious magicka store on healing the results of the first few tries.

Now, the bow and arrow. She slung the quiver over her shoulder and was about to take the bow in her mouth when she remembered that it had last been held by a skeleton. And it was rusty. And it had cobwebs on it. Were those some desiccated spider corpses? She... ought to use her hooves for this one.

Like other kinds of pony, Katia's hooves were slightly flexible and could be made to grasp many objects, but she had a boon from her Khageet heritage—retractable claws. They tucked into little grooves in the sole of each hoof, and she usually left them retracted as sometimes they got painfully locked in the out position when she used them.

Now, she reared unsteadily into a bipedal stance, pinched the bow's handle, and practiced pulling arrows from the quiver, setting the notch to the bowstring, drawing, and releasing. Her retractable claws turned out to be very useful for a quick release. As she gained confidence, she sighted at a dry-rotted bucket hanging over the abandoned well, and soon was able to hit it semi-reliably from a distance of ten paces. She hoped that would be good enough for now.

As she retrieved the last round of arrows from the bucket, she noticed that there was a protective grate on this well, with a small hole for the bucket at its center. What a useful feature! Why didn't more wells have it? It would save a lot of trouble with, say, slaughterfish being put into wells, and if they got in anyway, it could conceivably keep a civic minded and helpful mage-in-training from trying very hard to climb into that well and take out the slaughterfish with a blunt instrument. The kind that had an edge on it...

She shuddered at some bad memories. Mages didn't belong in wells. She'd already sworn that she'd never enter another one.

That left the chest. Khageet were supposed to be seriously good with lockpicky sneaky stuff, but she sucked at it. She could barely open a lock for which she had a legitimate key. Still, she had some lockpicks, and a chest that made her curious, and she was trying to find reasons to delay moving on into unknown and dangerous regions, so she gave it a go.

A few minutes later, she had no lockpicks and the lock was so crammed with broken lockpicks that no key would ever open it again. Katia shrugged and sighed. Was it too much to ask for just one break? Rather than, say, half a dozen?

There was no putting it off any longer—she'd have to press on. She could not believe with anything but the very bottom of her soul that she could be of any use to the Empress, and she frankly agreed with Haurus's assessment. But that part of her soul that did believe believed very strongly that the Empress was correct and that they would meet again.

She went to the door, stepping over the fleshy corpse, and tried the knob. It was solidly locked.

Oh, this was just wonderful. Just when she had broken all of her lockpicks. Not that they would have done her any good, anyway... Where was the door key? Probably inside that stupid chest, along with the key to the chest...

She was so used to feeling sorry for herself (albeit with good reason) that she easily slipped into a stream of self-castigation and morose hypotheticals, and was surprised when the thought popped into her head, almost as if a message board had appeared before her: "Why don't you check that other corpse first?"

She knelt before the body, and turned it over, revealing a bipedal form with a snaggle-toothed snout. A Diamond Dog.

Comments

[GroaningGreyAgony]

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Updates will continue to be sporadic for a while; please bear with me.

[nemryn]

>Mages didn't belong in wells. She'd already sworn that she'd never enter another one.
Just wait until she gets to Cheydinhal