Chapter 18: Snow Elf
In vanilla-game Skyrim, he could only recall three books about the Falmer. One was Ghosts in the Storm, written by that guy in Windhelm who needed his latest epic, Olaf and the Dragon, delivered to the Bards College in Solitude. Another book was The Falmer: A Study lying on a table in The Frozen Hearth in Winterhold. And then Fall of the Snow Prince that he'd read while touring the Dwemer museum in Markarth. They were tough, eyeless, cannibalistic little goblins, the bane of every underground explorer.
Knight-Paladin Gelebor was no sickly pallid twisted goblin. He definitely was not one of Santa's elves, either. His albino-like complexion and ears were distinct from an Altmer. Curtis found it interesting that there was no pinkness tinting his skin. Face it, white folks were on the pink side or had blue or pink tracings if sickly pale and thin-skinned. Or, if not sunburnt pink, variations between brown and pink. Mer, he knew, still bled red. Gelebor was white as fresh snow with only the faintest pink in the inner corners of his eyes and, yeah, a pink tongue as he watched the mer eating. He was also certain this mer wouldn't tan no matter how much sunlight he was exposed to. Hm, and his hair was that fluffy, stand-up troll doll hair that only the mer races in the Game had.
The dinner was held in the archimage's quarters. Colette, Baladas, and Calcelmo had already met with the Falmer when he'd arrived in Winterhold days ago. This dinner introduced him to Curtis, Scouts-the-Deep, Drains-the-Swam, Fish-Breath, and the Morrowind engineers, Darylin Hlaselo and Sunalam Hlaadu. Aside from Curtis, the others had never been underground battling Falmer. Sorry, "The Betrayed." Well, in all honesty, Curtis could also count himself in that category of non-underground explorers; he was pretty sure virtual exploration and combat via computer screen didn't count as real-world experience.
Curtis kept his distance, letting the Argonians and the other two Dunmer do most of the questioning. He just wanted to observe the Snowmer. Guess that was to be their official name now — by Gelebor's choice — using the Nord tongue. "Falmer" was "snow elf" in Aldmeris. "Od-fahlil" was "snow elf" in Dovahzul. So Snowmer it is. He kept thinking over the Auriel's Bow Quest and the dead wayshrine priests. He observed the Knight-Paladin and tried to imagine nearly 5000 years of isolation and vigil. Talk about the Last Crusader of the first Indiana Jones movie (and that crusader knight was only, what, 400 to 500 years)! How the hell did one remain sane? How the hell does one keep faith that long?
Not total, absolute isolation. Curtis understood from Sadri's stories that occasional adventurers or refugees had entered Gelebor's lonely world. Still, the adventurers died adventuring. And the refugees that needed temporary shelter, if they tried to come back, may or may not find the Snowmer if he felt their return visit unnecessary or dangerous.
"You should talk to him," said Colette. "Why are you holding back? We'd all prepared him to be assaulted by your strange questions."
"Aw, hell, girl, shoulda told me before I got here I was supposed to be the heavy," he drawled, grinning. But his grin faded fast, and, more serious now, he asked her, "So, now that you've had a little time to observe our friend here, have you thought about giving him a thorough examination? You think about my theory about misdirected healing magic?"
That had been a conversation months ago. Curtis proposed that the Falmer had unknowingly contributed to their own mutation by instinctively using healing magic on each other after the Dwemer had blinded and enslaved them. The mushroom poisons were killing their babies, and the parents naturally responded by using their magic to stabilize and keep viable their children. And every generation had mutations.
The Dwemer helped the mutations strengthen by culling the ones too violent, too intelligent, too stupid, and too physically warped to be functioning slaves. Eventually, time and biological imperative found a "final form" that could dependably reproduce without too many mutations at steep costs to Falmer minds and souls. Little better than animals now. Intelligence had likewise mutated to — what? — an "instinctual intelligence" for lack of better words. What remained were creatures of minimal verbal language skills and no written skills. Yet they used enchantment and alchemy stations, built bridges and cliffside huts, tamed and trained chaurus. Even capture and enslave surface dwellers.
Colette had been repulsed when Curtis first explained his theory. But she reluctantly conceded that inducing such mutations with Restoration magic was possible. "Unfortunately, I have been thinking about it since," said Colette, looking faintly sick. "I've even gotten in contact with my teachers. They're as repulsed about the whole idea as I am." Colette's teachers in Kvatch had been Altmer priests of Aurie-El from Summerset. She must have really been bothered to look them up, Curtis concluded, because from what she'd told him, they'd gone into hiding since before the Great War. "But doing a study as you've suggested would require live Falmer subjects."
Curtis thought about the cages in the Midden. If they had to capture live mutant Falmer…
"Pay attention, Curtis. Here he comes."
Damn, the mer was tall. Curtis wondered if Gelebor was the typical build for the Falmer. Pale silver-blue eyes focused on him, and Curtis's heart twisted at the soul-deep weariness and desperate hope he saw therein.
"Champion, I've traveled so far to meet you and your god."
Fuck. Playground tutorial time was over. Time to get real and figure out the main quest.
X—X—X—X—X—X—X
Cleanup and repair of the lower levels were going well despite the good-natured grumblings of the engineers and researchers who found scraping away barnacles and patching and shoring up walls a touch beneath their skill level. But, since work crews were limited to an absolute minimum for security reasons…
At least he had persuaded Baladas to help with the grunt work, to use his magic to reinforce the ground structure and fast-dry the place. It was important to keep Baladas away in the initial stages. Curtis preferred Calcelmo's style of excavation, which followed the careful preservation and documentation practices that Curtis was more familiar with. Baladas was more the dig-right-in-and-start-manipulating-things and document after the fact. Curtis persuaded Baladas to accept compensation for his patience by having the first crack at interrogating Gelebor about Snow Elf wayshrine magic. Gelebor denied being any sort of competent mage. Still, as they wayshrine guardian, he had to learn specialized magic to better guard the shrines and repair them as needed.
One of the orders he'd recently brought back from Windhelm was an instrument to measure the power level in a soulgem. It was a Clockwork City portable adaptation of a part of a larger, immobile Dwemer soulgem extractor machine. This little device was designed only to measure the power left in a partially drained soulgem or if a soulgem was inadequately charged. It did not harvest souls. Once they had that, Darylin and Sunalam began testing the gems in the giant computer boards and repairing the inlay conduit lines once Curtis had explained what he knew of computer boards, which wasn't much. But since the engineers were merely following along prelaid traces and not laying new lines ("ley lines" — was that thing in Skyrim?), they did fine.
As they did that, Curtis focused on the HVAC system. Curtis started working on quick-patching damaged sections of the HVAC system in the rooms the researchers were working in.
"Oh, that's so much better," said Aicantar, Calcelmo's nephew. "Now it doesn't feel like we're working in the center of the hottest swamp in Black Marsh."
"Pretty hard to take notes when you're sweating on them," agreed Curtis. He stepped back from the ventilation pipe he'd finished welding patch plates onto.
He looked around at the inked whiteboards that Aicantar was copying and then through the stacks of notes (with Aicantar's permission, of course). The mer was a damn good quick-sketch artist. He'd gotten the room from different angles and items placed and with detailed notes of colors, what materials he could identify, and other stuff. Since meeting him, Curtis's respect for him was even a touch greater than he had for Calcelmo. Hey, photographic documentation was some of the best types of documentation. And if you didn't have a camera, you needed to get a quick-draw artist on your team.
"You got skills, man, a real gift," said Curtis as he tapped the notes back into a neat stack. "Which room are you tackling next? Now that we're getting the air system and power kinks worked out, I'd like to know which rooms get priority.
"Ah, I'll need to consult my uncle to make sure. I should think the terrarium room so Marat can start tidying up the plants prepare equipment for the alchemist Savela is bringing in. And the forge and tool rooms, where uncle is currently working, for certain."
"Got it. Anything else here I can do for you before I leave?"
"Thank you, no. Just being able to breathe comfortably is exactly what I needed."
He went to where Calcelmo and his assistants were working. "Patching pipes," he told the scholar. "I'm going to look the forge over next unless you've got something else you'd rather I look at."
"I need another assistant to take notes," grunted Calcelmo.
"Take notes, type 'em up, and keep 'em organized assistant?"
"A competent scribe, yes."
"You talk to Savela?"
"That little Dunmer girl you brought back? I thought you were setting her up to be some sort of money manager for this project."
"Money manager, people manager, and program administrator second to Master Tolfdir," Curtis clarified. "She got her business training under Steward Sadri of Windhelm. He's released her from apprenticeship so she could work with us."
Calcelmo paused from his work and straightened up to face Curtis. "Revyn Sadri's apprentice you say? I wonder. If she's even half as devious and resourceful as her master…" He nodded abruptly. "Good. I'll talk with her later then."
Curtis went back to examining the ventilation pipes. With all the broken pipes, the HVAC system was pretty much screwed. Right now, forging new pipes out of scavenged Dwemer metals or the local iron was impractical. They just didn't have enough experienced metal workers, but there were master bonemold smiths here and in Windhelm. Maybe subbing in bonemold pipes might limp the system along.