The Dockworker's Epilogue 2: Beasts of the Southern Wild

• Posted by Clement Bilhorn February 11, 2013 - 852 views

  I'm not quite ready to throw myself into another civil war, so I decide instead to attend to a very interesting problem one of the other Khajit mentioned. It seems there is a Sload in the jungle, causing some very big trouble, so I absolutely have to see this.

  

  While fighting through hordes of my degenerate cousins, it occurs to me that I don't know what a Sload is. I've never heard of them. Erid'or suggested they're a bad sort, known for indiscriminate abuse of local populations, but that just puts them somewhere between Alduin and Daedric Lords. 

  So I give it half odds I end up working for the guy.

  

  But the Pahmar scout who points me to the Sload's lair merely reiterates how foul and disgusting these creatures are, whatever they may be. She says she can't get into the lair herself, so I'm assuming it must have a small entrance.

  Hopefully not too small that I can't find it--this jungle is dense. 

  

  The entrance to the lair is indeed small. It also features a ladder, which lets me forgive the Pahmar's unwillingness to enter. I don't want to judge the physical dissimilarities of other races more than I have to.

  

  But as I amble silently through, the underground passage echoes with what can only be enormous footsteps. How big is this thing?

  Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

  

  Good heavens.

  

  But grotesque girth aside, I have to admire his mind. Malsato, as he calls himself (many, many times), wastes no time informing me that I must do his bidding and serve him tasty food, or he will kill the entire jungle with a foul plague.

  See, that's the kind of straight-talking businessman I like to work with, even if his tastes in food are alarmingly indiscriminate.

  

  Given his capacity for bending people to his will, I'm surprised the only other fellows in attendance are mindless shades.

  

  So I return to Erid'or suitably chastened, and tell him of the Sload's plan to blackmail all of northern Elsweyr. Fortunately, the Khajit has a plan, and says if I bring him the right ingredients, he can make a potion that will let us track the plague vector the Sload's hiding. 

  Unfortunately, the ingredients include hyena meat and I haven't seen a hyena in days, so I instead divert myself with the only humans in camp.

  

  Neither of them give me any indication as to where I might find hyenas, so I figure I might as well stop dragging my feet on it and go see to the other Khajit who wanted me present at a Thalmor meeting. 

  It seems in my absence, a fight has brok--is that a gorilla?

  

  I must see this new marvel. I blaze past Thalmor and Pahmar alike, swatting aside the hapless elves.

  

  Sometimes rather more literally. Being a dragon has its advantages.

  

  He survives the fall, actually, and I have to end him at range.

  But the item of real interest is the dead...well, Imga, they call it...lying at the feet of my Khajit liaison. 

  

  For all their refinement and sniffing foppery, these Altmer certainly keep strange company.