[Even though this story has cars and guns and denim jeans, I've been trying my hardest to make it fit within the lore of the Elder Scrolls. I think I've done more research into the backstory of these games than I have for my last history final. Part of it is because I know if I screw up somewhere, I'll get one long comment on how my entire story has fallen apart because I got one guy being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the backstory, but mostly I just have my fingers crossed that somehow a bit of cyberpunk can be thrown into the canon lore of the Elder Scrolls. I also wish there were dragons in Saints Row and nu-metal in Sonic.

I have some weird aspirations.]

Chapter 5

"I know this is a lot to take in. How are you holding up?"

One of the seven faces spoke, but whoever actually said it didn't register with Xak. No longer sitting in the cramped cockpit of an aerocraft, he now found himself sitting quietly in a secret room underneath the floor of Belethor's shop. The Twin Lamp's "Command Center" as the shopkeeper had put it. The place was hardly as impressive as the name lent it, being little more than a box with plaster walls, a ramshackle display of video screens and an old poker table being used as a lectern. Roomier than the cockpit at least, but more depressing.

His fingers still clung to the cup of lukewarm tea. Not one sip was taken within the last half hour. Every neuron in Xak's brain was working towards a different purpose, rewiring his mind to adjust to the new reality he found himself in. The only word he could think of to place the sensation was "full". His head had been stuffed full of Nuveloth's sights and sounds and now his delicate psyche was trying to digest it all.

"I don't know." He finally answerd. "The more I see, the more questions I have. The Telvanni in power. The Nerevarine a tyrant. And all these incredible machines..."

Fargoth pulled up a chair next to him. "You're on a different planet now, Xak. Everything is going to be turvy-topsy at first."

Finding little comfort in his thoughts, Xak shuffled away the images of Nuveloth and found a question remained in his head. "There is something that's bothered me. The Telvanni were doing everything they could to keep me from leaving that tower. Why haven't they followed me here?"

Belethor was, as Xak had come to expect, quick to answer. "One thing that hasn't changed about the Telvanni is that they don't play nice with others." He traversed the room over to a large blue map representing the city he just saw from above. "Nuveloth is divided into six autonomous districts, each owned by a Telvanni magister and independently policed. Now, the Ceph make up the Telvanni's army, but they are not a police force. They aren't allowed to barge into places they don't control unless there's a serious emergency going on." Xak watched his finger trace around the six circular districts, all triangular in their shape pointing towards the grand tower at the center. Nuveloth was in this way divided so that everybody got an equal piece of the pie. He stopped at the northwestern slice. "We are situated here, in Mistress Llunela's district, and it just so happens that Llunela hates the Archmage's guts. It's going to take one big emergency for her to let Ceph troops set foot in her neighborhood."

Xak finally took a sip of his tea, now bitter and cool. It at least helped his mind process things."I take it that's why you dangerous rebels own and operate a shop here."

"That's what I like about this guy. He catches on quick!" Belethor gloated to his fellow rebels. "The reason they haven't followed you is because you technically haven't broken any laws yet. The explosion and your escape are on us. But piss off the Telvanni enough and they will let the Ceph come after you eventually. That includes our dear friend Llunela."

"But why me? Why did I matter so much to them? Why all those operations and experiments?" The memory of Xak's days waking up in Dr. Adrus's care reared their ugly head again.

"It didn't have anything to do with you personally, Xak. For the past eleven days you've been going through what the Ceph like to call 'processing'." Belethor's tone turned surprisingly somber, like his overflowing ego had finally run dry. "It's what they do to candidates for their army."

Stands-With-Fists rose to explain. "Normally when Nirnwalkers are brought to Masser, we're given a few respiratory implants to help get used to the new air and gravity and then sent on our way. You on the other hand were getting the special treatment. The Telvanni doctors were filling you up with state-of-the art cybernetic combat implants. Then they keep you locked up and don't tell you a damn thing as to why. I'm sure you know from experience that can drive a man insane."

Xak could remember vividly the bleakness of waking up again and again to a room covered in his own reflection, completely isolated and starving for answers. His captors were treating him like cattle and they weren't ashamed of it. If the Telvanni were trying to take away his humanity, they nearly succeeded in making an animal out of him.

"Through processing, the Telvanni were both building you into a Ceph trooper and trying to break your spirit so that they can brainwash you into joining them. Some people take longer than others, but eventually they would have cracked you. Processing doesn't stop until they do."

He mournfully recalled his last meeting with Onorith. Haven't you noticed they've been improving us? Xak hadn't known the spellcaster very long, but he respected him. In the two weeks they traveled together, he came to know Onorith as one of the brightest men he ever met, even if he was equally pompous. Yet when they met in the mirrored cell, Xak found a changed man. We are being remade. Xak, if we endure this torment, we could become one of them! Onorith had vast arcane knowledge and centuries of experience over Xak, yet it only took the Telvanni a week to hammer and bend his mind into the shape they desired. Why? How could a man like Onorith succumb so quickly while this bartender from Glenpoint fought until his fists bled?

"So what you're saying is, they were trying to turn me into one of their soldiers?"

Fists clicked his tongue behind serrated teeth. "In a way, they already have."

"What's that supposed to-"

"Is he here?" called a young voice from behind. Everybody in the room turned to see the trapdoor open and a pair of slender feline legs emerge down the stairs. The Khajiit charged down the steps before catching sight of the people gathered. Her sapphire eyes lit up. "Xak! You made it!"

"Ka'ilah?" yelled Belethor. "What the hell took you so long? You had us worried sick!"

"I had a few loose ends to tend to. Safe to say, my days as a nurse in the cybernetic enhancement department are over." Ka'ilah entered the room's dim light toting a heavy satchel over her shoulder. It took a moment for Xak to recognize this as the same girl who rescued him from the Terminal building. He had never met a Khajiit he could describe as beautiful, but without the nurse headscarf her youthful face bloomed. A pattern of dark stripes raced around her heart-shaped nose and almond eyes, adding to their gem-like glow. He must have been staring because it took her to say something to shake him out of it. "You know, we've met three times now and you have yet to say hello to me."

"You have a habit of showing up when I least expect you." Xak defended. This was the first real sentence he ever said to her.

"That's no excuse!" She dropped the satchel to the floor and threw off the hood of her jacket. It turned out she had dreadlocks, long white locks that draped down to her shoulders. Between her snowy hair ran streaks of deep blue and purple. Xak had never seen such adventurous hair dye, threatening and compelling at the same time. "How much did I miss?"

Sigurd pulled up a chair for the girl. "We were just telling Xak about the implants the Telvanni gave him."

"You mean he hasn't seen them yet?" Her jaw hung open, revealing a set if fine white fangs. "Sigurd, turn off the lights. And you," She snapped a finger at Xak. "take off your shirt!"

Xak raised an eyebrow. His first instinct was to outright say no and drop the issue, but looking around the faces nodded in agreement. Whatever purpose this could serve, he had to rule out Ka'ilah's own entertainment. Besides, his clothes were still damp from his dive into the fountain and sitting in them wasn't getting any better. With a reluctant sigh, he stood up and lifted the wet shirt over his head. The lights went off just as he stood bare-chested in front of Ka'ilah, but nothing else changed. "Alright, now what." he shrugged.

Ka'ilah was unfazed. "Just look." She seized Xak's wrists and held them before his eyes. His sight blurred in the darkness, but steadily he could make out a faint blue glow. Something was running up his arms, coursing along his wrists and extending to each fingertip, like glowworms on a summer night. As the picture focused, Xak's heart raced. The blue lights were embedded beneath his skin, outlining his very bone. Looking down, he saw the blue lights hid under every part of his body. Jagged, sharp lines traced his sternum, heart and lungs and ran down even deeper, further than he wanted to guess.

He screamed. Throwing off Ka'ilah's grip, he rubbed the lights on his arms like trying to shake off a fetid grime, but they persisted. Xak launched into a frenzy of mad scratches as arms around him reached out to stop him. His leg tripped over the chair behind him. He tumbled to the ground but still kept rubbing, scratching, clawing, trying to evict this alien presence from his body. A pair of hands captured his arms, followed by two more. Four people had grabbed him by the time he surrendered. There he lay, his bare chest rising and falling and the blue lines pulsing with each beat of his heart.

"What mad sorcery is this?" he demanded. The memory of Dr. Adrus cutting open his limbs and fixing metal circuits to his bone surfaced. He had taken the doctor's operations as twisted experiments or a sick hobby, but his handiwork lingered beneath Xak's flesh. He was struck with a sense of impurity, as though his body was no longer his own.

"Not sorcery. Cybernetics. The marriage between man and machine." Karliah's voice reached him. She was close enough to be one of the arms pinning him to the ground. "You're still you, but those devices the Telvanni fit you with are every bit a part of you as the scars."

One by one, the arms receded as Xak's breathing stabilized. He was allowed to sit up on his own, fixated on the lights dotting each of his knuckles. "Why have they done this to me?"

"They wanted to turn you into a cog in their machine, but you slipped loose." Belethor's voice explained. "This is what makes you so important, Xak. No free man has the implants the Telvanni gave you."

Karliah's voice returned. "We all have some cybernetics within ourselves. They help us breathe the air, get used to the gravity, and other mundane things the Telvanni used to need magic for." Looking around the room, Xak's focused eyes could now see that he was not the only one with the lights. The others had a faint blue glow that hid deep in their throats. Yet none of them could compare to the light show Xak's body was putting on. "You, on the other hand, can run faster, jump higher, and punch harder than any living person on Nirn. Like it or not, Xak, you have been given an incredible gift. Learn to use it, and you could take on the Nerevarine himself."

Xak recounted the sequence of his two-week imprisonment. The Orbital Room. The Doctor's Lab. The Mirrored Cell. It was finally making sense. Dr. Adrus installed the cybernetic implants one by one. In the Mirrored Cell, he was tested to make sure each part was doing its job. In the Orbital Room, his body was restrained and given time to heal before the next round of implants. And he wasn't alone in this process. "The others I was with... Galynn, Onorith, Jaulius... The same was done to them?"

"Except in their case, the Telvanni finished the job. They're probably learning to march in step while singing Nuveloth's motherland creed by now." Belethor shook his head in disgust. "Like we said, anybody with a military or guild affiliation goes straight to the barracks. You're here because we threw a wrench into the process."

With a click, the room flooded with light again. Lathirec stood by the light switch. "Speaking of guilds, I think it's time we learn a bit about our friend here for a change." He held his arms out like waiting to be handed a prize. "So Xak, which garrison did you belong to?"

Perplexed, Xak delicately came to a stand. "What?"

Guessed Sigurd "Were you Fighter's Guild, Imperial Legion or Stormcloak?"

Xak raised an eyebrow practically into his forehead.

"No, much to scrawny for Tamriel's military." Jarri shook her head. "He has to have been a mage. Which college?"

He squinted and shrugged speechlessly.

Said Fargoth "Perhaps he was an adventurer or freelancer. Ever plunder an Ayleid ruin?"

"No, no," Xak insisted, shaking his head. "I've never been an adventurer! Never been in any college or any guild or anybody's army!"

The eight faces around him unanimously shot each other a puzzled look, then slowly turned back to him. "Then... What are you?"

Xak turned to each of the eight faces surrounding him. One after another, they awaited his answer with a mix of confusion and eagerness. He already knew they wouldn't like what he had to say.

"I'm a bartender."

Silence. Xak could see all the hope and enthusiasm in each face slowly wither and die, one by one reincarnating into puzzlement, then a horrifying realization, and finally anger and utter disappointment.

Lathirec picked up the nearest book and chucked it at Ka'ilah. "Damnable girl!" It narrowly missed her head.

Karliah jumped to her defense. "Lathirec, this is not her fault!"

"An Altmer would never make such a blatant mistake!" He shot an accusing finger at the girl. "Hells, even an Argonian couldn't be so foolish, and that's scraping the barrel of stupidity!"

"I'm standing right here, banana-skin." growled Fists.

Lathirec defiantly walked up and shoved a finger in his face. "And if this were Tamriel, I'd have you both standing in iron maidens by now!"

With two thick arms, Fists lifted the high elf by his shirt collar and threw him onto the poker table. It snapped under the weight and both men to crashed to the ground in a flurry of papers and punches. Xak watched as the chaos in the room divided into two clashing waves as people tried to pull the Argonian and the Altmer away from eachother.

"Well somebody please tell me why me being a bartender is suddenly the end of the world?" He yelled over the curse words being thrown around the room.

Sigurd broke away from the brawl to explain. "It took us months to plan your escape. To tell you the truth, we had no idea who we were rescuing. It was all Ka'ilah." He nodded over to the Khajiit. Xak turned just to catch a glimpse of her legs vanishing into the trap door above the stairs. She left the room without a word. "We sent her in to decide who we should bail out. She was supposed to pick the best, most experienced fighter the Telvanni had snatched."

The violence in the room calmed as Lathirec was thrown off his attacker. "She went fishing for sharks and caught a guppy!" He spouted through a bloody nose. "Now it's too late to go back for seconds. Those holes we crept through will be plugged for good. We just taught the Ceph every flaw their security had, and what did we get out of it? A common drink-spiller!"

"Hey, I don't remember asking for your help in the first place! Even if I was some war hero, what makes you think I'd want anything to do with this sorry excuse of a rebellion you have here? Just look at you all!" All seven people in the tattered command center went silent. "A bunch of shopkeepers, thieves and arsonists in the same room isn't a resistance, it's a Nord drinking gang! I could round up a bunch of beggars on the street more capable of taking down a tyrant than you!"

"Xak, this isn't as bad as it sounds. You can still help us." begged Belethor.

"Forget it!" Xak turned his back on the group, curtly marching up the stairs to the shop floor. "You want a revolution, call Ulfric Stormcloak. You want a whiskey on the rocks, you call me." Without looking back, he stormed up the steps and left the rebels to their own bickering.

"Xak, listen to me. You don't know what you're – oh shit!" Karliah stormed into the shop's restroom to find him stark naked. The wet trousers he arrived in lay in a jumbled heap and he had just unfolded the clean clothes she had prepared for him earlier. She averted her gaze, but Xak was too pissed off to care.

"Well I know what you're doing. You stopped me from becoming their lapdog just to turn me into yours." He growled as he tugged on the blue denim pants. They kept falling down to his hips. "Just what the hell are these..."

"They're called jeans. You have to pull up the zipper." She indicated with her finger the metal teeth between Xak's groin. She waited to hear the zip before looking back at him. "In case you haven't noticed, every single person in this building dedicated the last two-hundred and sixteen hours to getting you out of Telvanni hands. We should have told you sooner, but we couldn't risk what would happen if the Ceph recaptured you."

"Listen, I owe you my life. I won't deny that for a second. But keeping me on this moon, with these abominations under my skin, and asking me to help you topple a regime is too much." Xak found much less difficulty throwing on the black t-shirt he had been given. The overall outfit was plain, even if the materials were exotic by Tamriel's standards. Good enough to walk the streets, and that was all Xak needed. "When I find a way back to Nirn, I'll come back for all of you, I promise."

"Oh, so the Nirnwalker who just learned how to zip up his pants is going to achieve space travel and set us all free." She folded her arms sarcastically. "And to think I had just about given up hope."

Xak sighed heavily and approached her, mere inches from her midnight skin. Karliah had been like a childhood hero to him. Through uncle Brynjolf, her legend gave him something to aspire to. Now here he was face to face with the legendary thief herself, and disappointing her in every way imaginable. Still, there was no turning back. "Look, I'm sorry Karliah, I really am." He looked her in the eyes and could see her burning desire to slap him. "I wish you could have had a warrior or a general or the Dragonborn himself standing here instead of me. I'll find some way to make this right, but it isn't happening now. Until then, just don't follow me."

He brushed past her out the bathroom door, taking nothing but the clothes on his back with him. Karliah seemed to honor his request. The door stayed shut behind him. As he marched through the shop floor toward the front door he could still feel the rumbling of the arguments taking place beneath his feet. Shaking his head, Xak resigned himself to the fact that he may never see any of these people again as he pushed past the plastic red closed sign.