Reasons why my Skyrim character is completely insane:
- She tends to stare fixedly in a random direction when talking to people, instead of looking at them.
- She wanders through the heart of a snowstorm, or into the deepest darkest dungeon, wearing nothing but a cheap white dress. No armor, no shoes. Combine that with the big black smears of war paint around her eyes and she totally has the “broken waif” look down pat.
- She follows foxes. Sometimes they lead her interesting places. Sometimes they just get her more lost. None of them have turned out to actually be her ex, but she keeps on hoping.
Reasons why she is the sanest person in all of Skyrim:
- She's kind of creeped out by this whole “Dragonborn” thing. Especially the way every important event in the world seems to wait for her to be around. All she wants to do is acquire a lot of treasure, and if she runs into a dragon, steal some things from its hoard, and maybe fuck the dragon if they're cute.
- Her kill count: eight humans (all in the intro, before I got the hang of sneaking), a handful of wild animals that attacked her, and a bunch of undead roaming the various tombs she's defiled, both for plot reasons and because she doesn't have to think about how crazy this world is when she's sneaking around a dungeon.
Her main close-up weapon is a magic dagger named after the one dragon she let the world railroad her into killing. Lately she's taken to saying thank you to it after killing wolves/bears/giant rats/etc that attack her.
Ostensibly she is Absinthe from me and Nick's comic of the same name, somehow dropped into this serious D&D world and turned into a human. This whole setup amuses me.
(I'm playing on easy, as a thief build; I've adapted the personal disciplines of “no killing” and “no armor”, and will totally scum save games so that all pickpocket attempts succeed. Also I'll always follow foxes if one runs across my path. If I'm not doing a dungeon with a companion clomping around next to me and killing everything in sight, I will probably try for zero kills, though that would be a lot easier if I could throw distractions or douse lights… the amount of fun I'm having playing this way suggests that if Thief 4 comes out on the 360 and has a third-person mode, I will be buying that.)
(Also if I was handed a video game director position right now I would totally make a 3rd-person stealth game that stars a lady and seriously rewards you for not killing.)