Since I suck at managing the numbers, don't go into this expecting that all of Alcyra's skills will match up with the required experience she needs to level.
I tried to match up the numbers correctly, but I think I messed up even just in this first chapter, and I cannot be bothered to fix it. I will have a status screen at the end of each chapter with her level as well as what her various skills are at, but if something is mismatched, you can chalk it up to me fucking it up and move on, or rant at me for it.
Also, I don't actually have any kind of plan, as per usual, so if I write something stupid and then later on it doesn't make sense in a certain context, assume it's because I'm a dumb-dumb and messed up. I'll obviously try to make things work, but, well, with the fact that I only plan small and fun events but not the overall plan, it's probably inevitable that I screw up.
Anyways, enough nattering on, I really hope you enjoy, because this is the 37th story I've started xD
Chapter 1
When her eyes drifted open, the first thing on Alcyra's mind was that the wooden beam above her head looked flimsy, she could easily hit it to bring down the floor above.
The next was utter confusion, as two sets of memories overlapped each other and quickly merged together in her eidetic mind. In one set of memories, she was twenty years old, a deserter of a special operations unit who had been sent on a mission behind enemy lines with absolutely no hope of escaping, something which their commanding officer deemed as a need-to-know fact. She also distinctly remembered lasting only a week before being captured by said enemies, tortured in almost every conceivable fashion until she couldn't even think a straight thought, then executed via repeated impalement in front of trillions of fanatics.
And in the other set of memories, she was a sixteen-year-old runaway orphan. Born in Riften to a Khajiit father and a Nord mother, she inherited her father's keen eyesight, useful for spotting things, but the fact that her eyes were slitted like a cat left her ostracized as well as the fact that she was always too sharp for her own good, spotting details that others missed. Both her parents were dragged off by Falmer that had invaded Riften through the Underway, leaving her to go to the Honorhall Orphanage. She spent years there before getting fed up with Grelod's treatment of the children and left, stealing a pouch of septims as she left. Said pouch was the reason she was currently sleeping inside, she had spent a septim and got 3 days to stay at the inn, including meals.
But, according to her new past memories, that was wrong. Ten septims should buy one night and no food, something she knew because Skyrim was a game. Further reinforcing that was the fact directly in front of her face was a four-way arrow, pointing to four different menus, each of which she knew from memory. One pointed at the word 'map', then one at items, magic and skills, each of which would open a menu she was familiar with. Beneath them was a bar proclaiming that she was level 1, and then beside that was the date.
Frowning slightly, Alcyra reached up, swiping her fingers to the right and opening her inventory. Within, it told her that she had nothing equipped, and with a glance down, she could see that she really didn't have anything equipped. Curiously enough, she was not even wearing any underwear, but she supposed that the game only had that as they required a censorship method. She opened the tab marked as all, and the only thing that lay within was a single book marked as 'read me'.
Alcyra sat up upon seeing that, curiosity and worry gnawing at her in equal measure. Eventually, she selected the book, watching as it floated in front of her and opened. The writing was in English, not in Nordic, which meant only she would be able to even read the book. She scanned the first few pages, her eyes widening as she did so. The book was...weirdly helpful, it was apparently telling her adjustments that had been made to compensate for her current reality.
Beforehand, Septims were the only currency, but now there were also Potemas and Mantiarcos for silver and copper coin values. She was able to retrieve coins in any denomination simply through desiring it, though obviously she wouldn't be able to withdraw more than she had. Alongside that, a lot of items had been revalued. Some changes Alcyra had already lived through, such as the price of the inn, or the cost of a bowl of soup. Others she would have to discover on her own, but for the most part, it would be the reduction of prices, not increases.
Flicking through the rest of the short book, she dismissed it, laying back down with a sigh. Her current reality was a modified game that she remembered playing before her death. It was a good thing that Skyrim was chosen instead of something she had barely any knowledge of like World of Warcraft, she would be absolutely shafted there. Skyrim was one of her few vices. Where others took up smoking, boxing, drinking or fucking, she played Skyrim and another game called New Vegas endlessly, letting the true freedom envelop her. She could make her own choices with nobody around to stop her.
Of course, that worked better in New Vegas where everybody could be killed, she could at any point fly right off the handle and massacre everybody in sight, which she only did occasionally when she got bored. But Skyrim was so much more beautiful, a snow-capped landscape for her to enjoy. According to the book, it was also way bigger than the tiny island-sized region the game had made it into.
She understood why it was so small, it was entirely reasonable, but that didn't matter. Riften, just from her memories, was not just a sad collection of like 15 buildings, it was a serious town, with thousands of buildings covering much more land than the game version had. She had never seen any of the other cities, she lived her entire life in Riften, but if Riften was any indication, they would all be just as large.
Next, she opened up her magic, and as expected, there was no magic in there. The Dragonborn always started with Healing and Flames, but Alcyra had never even seen a book that covered magic, let alone gotten the chance to read it. It did list Khajiit Eyes as a permanent effect though, improving her perception and giving her a bonus chance to intimidate during dialogue.
Closing that, she opened her skills, seeing the familiar constellations and sighing. All of her stats, aside from a rare few, were at a base of ten. Her Sneaking was at 17, her Speech at 13, Block at 14 and Lockpicking at 11. As she read, she remembered reasons why that was the case. Sneaking was obvious, Speech was convincing people not to get in her way or be annoying, while Block was raised due to the fact that some of the older kids in the orphanage liked taking out their anger on her, the loner who nobody wanted to be friends with. Lockpicking was how she managed to escape the orphanage the night she left, as Grelod always locked the door at night to stop them from running away.
Humming slowly, she scrolled through all the skills, inwardly debating what she planned to do. Magic was certainly one route to take, it was powerful and flashy, but she also liked the all-too-familiar appeal of sneak-based ranged attacks, staying far away from the primarily melee enemies she would be engaging. Perhaps both would be in order, since there was nothing that said she couldn't work on both.
Closing down that menu, she then brought up the map, looking it over with a keen eye. From the scale bar that was a new addition, she could see that the distance between Riften and Ingress Inn, a new location that she was staying at, which was directly north of Goldenglow Estate, was three kilometres. From Riften to Helgen was about fifty kilometres. Still not as big as it could have been, since that was halfway across Skyrim, but much bigger than the default size of Skyrim, which you could cross at a walking pace of 3 miles an hour in under 2 hours.
Alcyra closed the map and shut her eyes for a moment. She could feel that her natural urges were to panic, scream, rant or refuse to believe it, but not believing it was a stupid notion. She was here, with two sets of memories, the bed beneath her was real, as was the air she was breathing. Even if it was fake, what good would panicking about it do? No, it was best to figure out what she intended to do next.
And, after a short period of debating, she decided that magic was the way she wanted to go. Sure, shooting things from the shadows with a bow was safer, but if she lived her life always choosing the safer option, then she never would have died before. If she chose safer, she would still be in the orphanage enduring Grelod's tender mercies. No, magic was what she wanted to wield, and it was going to bend to her will, whether it liked it or not.
Swinging her legs off the edge of her bed, she arose and looked at her folded-up clothing. Reaching a hand out, she could see an option to 'take' the pile of clothing, and for a moment she was confused about how she was meant to do it before simply choosing to take, and in the next moment the clothing vanished. The book had explained how to open her menu again, it was akin to a mental button she had to push.
After thinking hard for a moment, she managed to do it, swiping her hand to the side and seeing that her clothes were simply marked as just that, 'clothes'. She tapped a finger on it, equipping the clothing and shivering slightly at the utterly alien feeling of having all of her clothing literally appear hugging her body, as well put-on as was possible, including the fiddly laces that ran up her back all being perfectly done as if one of the kinder girls in the orphanage had helped her with it.
Pushing that aside, she then looked to her bedside table where her iron dagger laid. Sure, it wasn't a good defence, but nobody, literally nobody, walked around Skyrim without some form of defence. Reaching out, she took the knife into her inventory, then opened it and equipped the knife, a sheath attacking itself to her waist with the dagger sat inside of it.
Alcyra drew it out, flipping it over her hand casually, then hopping back with a quiet curse as her fingers missed their movements and sent the dagger off her hand and into the floor. Evidently the fact that her one-handed was only at ten was messing with her own abilities. Brushing a thumb against her jaw, she idly wondered just what kind of advantages she would be able to use in order to level up faster.
All she could think to do would be to get one of each of the base spells, then use those to start levelling up. Conjuration would be necessary to level up Destruction, Illusion she could easily do by just finding a place to hide in public and casting calm repeatedly. She could level up Alteration by using Fury on a chicken, levelling her Illusion, then using Oakflesh or Stoneflesh on herself, allowing the chicken to attack but dealing next to no damage. Any damage it did do she could heal away with Restoration, which she planned to level up by repeatedly mutilating herself then healing the damage. As for Enchanting, that was an expensive venture, so she planned to worry about that later.
The only blip in this plan was that she had to acquire the base spellbooks, which wasn't easy. In the game, Healing cost 50 septims, and she doubted it would be cheaper, since the printing press didn't exist, meaning books would be all written by hand and thus much more expensive. She had spent 1 septim for a 3-night stay at the Ingress Inn, and she had 27 left, so just over halfway to being able to being capable of buying it.
So, rather than do that, she instead decided that her first stop would be heading north a short distance. There was a skillbook of archery, and while she wanted to do magic, it wouldn't be good to not have a backup plan. After sweeping the room again, picking up her dagger and then taking and equipping her boots, she left her room and then the inn, getting a few curious or lustful looks, but nobody approached her, probably because of the guard that was currently supping there, nobody wanted to attract attention by following a girl out of an inn after all.
As she exited, she turned her attention to the compass in her vision, orienting herself north and departing into the wilderness. Her map was incredibly valuable, since it still looked almost the exact same as what she remembered from the game, only scaled up. Using that, and spending just over an hour trekking through the region, she was able to home in on the tents.
Getting closer, she used the rocky terrain to hide herself, her eyes affixed to the small stealth bar that had appeared when she crouched down. Moving closer, she almost jumped out of her boots when she was informed that her sneak had risen to 18. Glaring at the words until they vanished, she crept closer, her eyes affixed on the tent that she knew held the book she was searching for.
There was one hunter in the camp, who was currently working a deer carcass over. Alcyra stopped then, her mind running over the possibilities. Slowly, without alerting the hunter, she moved from side to side, grinning when after a short while, her sneak rose to 19. More confident now, she started to sneak around, keeping almost entirely out of sight as she grinded her sneak.
When her sneak reached 22, she was met with the pleasant sounds of her levelling up, making her grin as she fell back to decide whether she wanted to spend her perk point. Her knee-jerk reaction was to spend it on getting a rank of stealth. Being harder to detect would be utterly invaluable to her, but it was situational. In cases where she wasn't able to sneak, she would need to wait until she got 100 points of sneak and got Shadow Warrior, which would allow her to break combat and hide.
The fact was that she couldn't use any kind of normal mechanic abuse to help her. Normally levelling sneak would be easy with a dagger and slicing the hell out of the Greybeards, it would also let her level up Restoration by using Healing Hands, but she doubted they would be quite so free to allow her to abuse them. That meant skill trainers would definitely be invaluable to her. However, they were also expensive, and she didn't know if they'd actually be quite so easy, since they might require her to actually train.
Sighing, she closed her menu, holding back her level-up for later and returning to sneaking around aimlessly. When she hit 27, she levelled up again, and she stopped at 30, having started to get a bit bored of sneaking back and forth repeatedly. She crept up over the rocks, wary in case the other hunter came back, or the one who was now tanning leather turned to face her.
Fortunately, at no point did they turn around, and she was free to slip inside of the tent and pick up the book she was looking for. Interestingly enough, since she wanted to pick up the book and not read it, the book wasn't automatically opened and used. Out of helpless curiosity, she snuck further forward, grasping the knapsack that was laying at the edge of the tent.
She slunk backwards, her eyes affixed to the back of the hunter until the rocks broke her line of sight. When that was done she turned and started to make her way south again, only stopping to grin when she was certain that nobody was following her. Kneeling down, she opened the knapsack. Inside was a Potion of Resist Cold, a Silver Garnet Ring that immediately went into her inventory, and best of all, a Healing book.
Alcyra knew that books could spawn in knapsacks, but the fact that a book she required was there instead of the fucking thousands of potential book spawns was...suspicious. But even if it was, she needed to ability, so she focused on the book and 'used' it, watching as the book fizzled into nothing and her mind was pressed with additional memories of how the spell was meant to be cast. Opening up her menu, she opened her magic and saw that she now had Healing available.
Equipping it in her left hand, she tested it out, the knowledge coming to her mind freely as a glowing ball of golden light formed within her hand. It did nothing because she wasn't injured, but that was quickly remedied. Alcyra pulled up the skirt of her clothes and exposed her leg, then drew out her knife and unerringly stabbed clean through her calf, baring her teeth at the immediate onslaught of pain.
Against all the medical training that had been jammed into her brain, she pulled the knife back out, blood spurting from both wounds. Immediately she flexed her left hand, pushing her magicka through her arm and into the ball, which fixed its attention on her wound and closed it, the flesh sealing up and leaving no evidence that she had even been wounded, aside from the streams of blood of course.
Grinning despite the faded memory of pain, she looked at her Magicka. Thanks to the fact that she was only using an iron knife and she herself was dictated by game mechanics, she only did four points of health damage to herself, which her Healing spell was easily able to heal. Exhaling slowly, she centred herself, then drove the iron knife into her leg again, removing it and healing with a flash of magic, before repeating.
What surprised her was that after two announcements of restoration rising, she was told that her one-handed had also improved, which meant that just using her dagger on herself constituted as using it in general and gave her experience for it. Beforehand she was debating finding some other way to grind restoration, since while she was a bit of a masochist, even she couldn't find it in her to enjoy simply sitting there and repetitively stabbing her calf then healing it.
Then, she stopped and considered her knife. Why was she doing such a long and wasteful action like stabbing then recovering when she could be doing slashes? Flicking the knife against her leg, she opened up a shallow cut on her shin, and checked her menu to see that it had done the same four points. Frowning, she slashed her leg repeatedly, the pain far less than being stabbed in the calf and the action far faster and more efficient.
Doing this, she opened up ten cuts, dropping her health to 60 points, then healing herself up to full again with a burst of magic. Idly, she wondered whether the dagger would kill her if she stabbed it into her chest. After all, it was only meant to do 4 points of damage, and in the game, even being shot in the head made no difference. Since she wasn't suicidal, she reversed the dagger, then drove it into her abdomen, down to the hint which left the tip poking slightly out of her back.
The pain felt a bit like being shot, though thanks to her frankly horrifying levels of experience with pain she was able to ignore it and instead focus on her health and the wound itself. Nothing extra had happened, despite the fact that the knife was going through her intestines. There was no bleed effect or severe wound status, she had taken four points of damage. Even with the knife left inside of herself, she was still just sat at 96 health.
Humming, she grasped the handle of the knife and drew it out of her stomach, blinking as she felt her internals shifting slightly. Deciding to repeat the experiment when she had a mirror, she resumed slashing at the top of her shin with her knife. She ended up spending a whole hour doing it, and owing to the fact that Skyrim was following actual 24-hour days, that meant she raised her restoration from the measly ten that it had been at, all the way up to 51. Doing so, as well as the increase of One-handed from 10 to 23, meant that she power-levelled from level 3 to level 10.
Deciding to allocate a few points, she opened up her level up, and immediately was met with a conundrum. Health, Magicka, or Stamina. Stamina was quickly out of the running as per usual, since she didn't actually need it as much as the other two. Magicka would be needed for any of the bigger spells or making her restoration more efficient, she could go longer before needing to wait for it to recharge. But on the other hand, having a bigger health pool would give her longer bursts of healing, and would also help in future when she got into fights.
Gnawing at her lip, Alcyra evenly split her increases, and placed the last one into Stamina simply because while she had decided it was fairly useless, she had an odd number of level-ups and didn't want to favour one stat over the other, they were both valuable. With that done, she then had 9 points she could assign. One immediately went into Novice Restoration, halving the price of Healing. A second went into Regeneration, giving a 50% boost to her Healing spell.
She put a point into Stealth and then one into Muffled Movement. She bit her lip, with 5 points left she had nothing that jumped out to her as necessary. She placed another point into Stealth and then got two levels of Armsman for her one-handed. She placed a preemptive point into Novice Conjuration and withheld the final point, not willing to spend it when she might want it for something later on.
Closing the menu, she drew out her dagger, spinning it around as she had tried before, this time managing it without fumbling and dropping the weapon. It was near to her old level of skill with a knife, so at least her muscle memory could come in handy now. Flicking the blade, she put it into its sheath, glancing at the large pool of blood on the ground.
She kicked snow over it regularly to keep the smell down, but she was letting a lot of blood it, it just kept building up. She spent a few minutes shunting a bunch of snow over the area, concealing the blood beneath it and possibly freezing it. With the evidence of her power-levelling hidden, she started to walk back to the inn before getting curious. Opening her map, she focused on the icon for the inn, and when it asked if she would like to fast-travel, she hesitated before accepting it, appearing beside the inn but out of sight of those walking around.
Walking back into the inn, she bypassed the main room and went straight to her bedroom for the night, shutting the door and then hopping onto her bed, sitting there with her legs crossed. She selected the book that she had nabbed from the camp and it opened, raising her archery from 10 to 11 instantly. With that done, she tossed the book back into her inventory and planted her chin on one hand, resting her elbow on her knee.
Her main order of business was to acquire a lot of money very quickly. The best way to do that would be to first ascertain how certain money-making methods worked in this pseudo-modified world. If she got into alchemy, could she turn wheat, blue mountain flowers and butterfly wings to make potions. If she could, she could start to make and then sell potions for a profit, grinding levels from it and making her potions increasingly better.
If that wasn't an option, perhaps blacksmithing was an option. Raw materials would be easy to gather, she knew where to find ores after all, but it depended on whether or not she could actually smelt and forge things as she could in the game. She knew that in Riften there were multiple blacksmithing shops, some of whom had smelters that matched her memories, but if she went back, she ran the risk of being arrested for stealing septims.
The closest option would be Redbelly Mine, there was a smelter there. But, from the fact it took an hour to reach the camp with the book, walking there would take about 5, maybe 6 hours. As she thought about the time, she realized that there was something she needed to check, what the exact date was. Bringing up her menu, she read the time, frowning as she did so. It said Morndas, 3:31 PM, 8th of Hearthfire, 4E 200. That meant she had about six months before the Dragonborn was due to be executed at Helgen.
Six months until dragons started to roam the world once again.
Okay, and that's the first chapter.
I would have gone longer but I want to see how people react to this story. I've changed some things obviously, the entire map is bigger, cities are bigger, there will be odd additions in places that I deem necessary, mostly throwaway locations like the inn that Alcyra is staying within, but for the most part, important stuff will happen at actual locations, so if you want to, you can track Alcyra's journey using the interactive Skyrim map, it's what I'm using to plot out her journey. Please, review and whatnot so I know how you feel.
Pat reon support really would go a long way, so if you could spare a bit of cash, I'd much appreciate it. Fanfiction literally have a vendetta against links, so please go to my profile to find a link, or simply visit the website itself and search for Fireflux. In return for your support, depending on what level you support me, you can get access to chapters a few days early, or a week early, or if you are particularly crazy, you can make a request for me to upload a chapter for any of my stories once a month.
