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Going into the world and spreading merriment
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Oh. Oh no. Oh noooo.

"You can keep the ring," he says, trying to be gentle. "I just—wouldn't want to lead you on, when I don't feel the same way about it." This is so surreal.

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"Just take it, I hate you!" she screams, grabbing it from where it's attached to a string around her neck and throwing it at him.

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Ruby stops it midair with Telekinesis then pockets it. "...I'm sorry," he says, for the last time, before turning around to leave.

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...there's something glowing, between some trees, calling his attention out of the corner of his eye.

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He blinks and turns to look in that direction, then frowns. Now he's feeling it call to him, the same instinctual pull he felt towards the College when he first arrived there. He walks over to it and kneels to take a closer look.

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It's... a crystal of some sort? Roughly spherical, but made out of many flat facets and glowing softly white.

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A quest item, he supposes. He digs it up.

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"A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON," comes a voice from nowhere, echoing in his head.

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"Mara's saggy tits," he exclaims, nearly jumping out of his skin.

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"LISTEN. HEAR ME AND OBEY. A FOUL DARKNESS HAS SEEPED INTO MY TEMPLE. A DARKNESS THAT YOU WILL DESTROY. RETURN MY BEACON TO MOUNT KILKREATH, AND I WILL MAKE YOU THE INSTRUMENT OF MY CLEANSING LIGHT."

And then, silence.

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"Lady, who the fuck are you."

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No response.

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What the everloving fuck.

Why are these things happening to him.

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"Die!" screeches the hagraven again as she rushes at him, having freed herself from his mud trap.

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Nnnnope. He'll just jump onto his horse and get the fuck away.


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Then to Morvunskar. It's another day's ride, but he has pattern recognition and realises that there's absolutely going to be shenanigans there so instead of going straight there he stops when he sees it in the distance and decides to set up camp, sleep, and wake up early to go scout and see if he can't figure out what shenanigans await him in the fort.

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Mages. It's mages that await him in the fort.

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...oh fucking shit.

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Seriously? Why the fuck. How was he going to get married here. If it's infested. With mages.

Okay, no, actually, objectively speaking he's been able to overcome every obstacle so far and it's not necessarily the case that this will be a battle. Maybe they're the wedding guests.

...haha.

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"Mages take over a fort" is, like, a whole trope, in Skyrim, for some reason, and from what he can tell it's mostly the mages that go off the deep end that do it. Which in itself might actually be an advantage, depending on how being cuckoo interacts with being at all tactical?

What he wants to do is figure out how powerful, exactly, they are. Another impression he has, this one from the College itself, is that it's mostly Apprentices that drop out and haunt forts and the like, or people who never got any instruction at all; sure, occasionally there's a powerful wizard that does it, but those tend to just be solitary and take over a mage tower or something, while groups of wandering mages tend to be individually reasonably weak.

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He's probably going to have to spend the whole day scouting, to figure this out, and even then it'll be chancy. It's not like powerful wizards just spend all day casting their most potent spells.

...he considers the past several days in which he has cast many of his most potent spells every day...

.......maybe they do, in fact, do exactly that.

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A little bit of scouting does bring up an excellent point, though: flesh spells. They're all keeping near-permanent Oakfleshes, which probably places an upper bound in how powerful they can be. Of course, that doesn't help much when Ruby himself couldn't cast Stoneflesh until yesterday, but still, it's informative.

What's even more informative is the time he catches a peek of someone casting Oakflesh from a ScrollThat places an even sharper upper bound in how powerful they can be.

And many of them—though not all—have dog and cat familiars, while not a single Atronach* can be seen.

If they're playing some sort of complex game of predicting that they're being spied on and pretending to be weak while actually being much more powerful than that, then, well...

...Ruby will just run away, in that case.

But he doesn't think so.

(* Atronachs are a weak type of Daedroth from elemental planes in Oblivion; basically just elementals.)

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He approaches the fort, visibly unarmed, but Stonefleshed and with a weak passive ward. Anyone who has ever fought a mage knows that this means next-to-nothing, a mage is a threat for as long as they are awake and not magicka-depleted, but hopefully it'll still be good enough as an indication of good faith.

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They don't even try to communicate first. As soon as he's close enough there's a firebolt thrown at him.

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That makes some things easier, if not others.

"I don't want to fight!" he calls, after dodging the firebolt, because it would be terrible manners if this were enough to dispel hostilities and he didn't even try it.

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