Oblivion: It's Coming For You



First off: If you’ve never played a game called “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion”, this might be a little hard to follow so I’ll give you the basic information you’ll need to understand this. Oblivion is a game created by Bethesda that focuses on a province called Cyrodiil. Cyrodiil faces a crisis in which portals to another dimension are opening and allowing Daedra, which are basically their version of demons, to invade the province. Most of the storyline doesn’t really matter to the story I’m telling you, just know that the game allows you to do lots of stuff aside from the main storyline. There’s also a program that lets people make “mods” which are plug-in files that alter the original game. I was working on a dungeon mod that I named “The Forbidden Caverns” when this all started. The dungeon was supposed to be filled with Daedra for the player to fight their way through.

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I was checking the size of the dungeon I had made to see if it needed to be expanded or not when I first saw it: a figure on the far side of a tunnel. The cave was too dark to see exactly what it was; all I know is it was humanoid in form and was wearing dark clothing. I found this odd because I hadn’t added any creatures or NPCs to the dungeon yet. I made my way over to where I saw the figure, taking a side path that would let me sneak up on it which I needed to check anyway, but nothing was there when I reached it. At first, I figured that I must have simply imagined it; that it was really just some illusion caused by the darkness of the cave.

I continued working on my mod, little by little, without incident for a few days when I decided to take a break and actually play the game for a while. Eventually I found myself in another cave, this one just containing monsters. I fought through it for a while with nothing unusual until I got to the last section. I was nearing the final room when again I saw a dark dressed figure just far enough away to hide its features. Once again I tried to get near it and once again there was nothing to find. I decided there must be something there, maybe a bad script or an altered AI was the cause. When I checked my mod, there was nothing that would have caused this figure to appear; no accidently altered scripts, no changes to any existing AI packages. I turned the mod off just in case I missed anything.

A week went by without anything unusual happening so I figured it must have been some problem with my mod; I decided to leave it inactive until I had time to look through it again. It wasn’t the mod! In game, I returned to the Imperial City after some heavy adventuring to sell some of the loot I’d picked up when I found a bandit NPC laying dead in the Market District for no apparent reason. Nothing else seemed out of the ordinary, there were the regular citizens of the city just doing what they normally do; no guards seemed out of place; and there were no other dead characters in sight.

I didn’t know what to tell myself this time, but I just figured that there must be a reason. I decided that I would check any mod that I had recently installed to see if I could find out the cause. After checking every mod I had installed in the last month, I still found nothing. “It can’t come from anything older than these, I would have seen all this strange stuff sooner if it were,” I told myself. I decided that somehow my save must be corrupt or something; I made a new character and started my adventure over.

Everything was normal again for three or four weeks; no dead NPCs or strange figures out of place. It wasn’t until I did “The Wandering Scholar” quest for the Fighters Guild that strange things started happening again. I had cleared out the first part of Brittlerock Cave and walked her to the ruined statue; I expected her to give her normal lines for this stage of the quest but instead she said something different, “It’s coming for you.” I didn’t know what to think at this point; the line was spoken with the same voice that’s used for every High Elf female line so it couldn’t have been added by a mod. At this point I turned the game off; I didn’t even care that I hadn’t saved it.

The next day I decided to get back on the game. I told myself that since it was pretty late and I was getting tired, I must have imagined it. I went back through the cave and cleared then escorted Elante back to the statue. This time she used her normal dialogue like she’s suppose to. As I always do, I went in and cleared the next part of the cave before returning to the town of Anvil to turn in my quest; nothing unusual occurred during this time.

I had to go to the town of Cheydinhal to get my next quest and that’s when things started getting weird again. In front of the Fighters Guild was a dead conjurer; at first, I thought he was the one from the Spell Tome DLC that seeks you out and tries to kill you but when I checked his inventory there was no spell tome.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">Telling myself it must have just been a glitch and it was in fact the conjurer from the DLC, I continued as if nothing happened. I took a trip to go see a friend a few hours away and spent the next week there. When I came back I got back on the game and what I saw shocked me: I was in the town of Bravil where I left off, but there were several dead NPCs gathered in front of the Mages Guild; not just enemy NPCs like the last two times either, actual characters with names and everything. I took a closer look to see who they were; one was Fetid Jofnhild, a beggar from Bruma; another was Fathis Ules, a Dark Elf from the Imperial City that Thieves can fence their stolen goods to; another one of them was Arquen, the High Elf woman from the Dark Brotherhood; two more were from the Mages Guild in Leyawiin, S’drassa and Agata; and the last one was Menien Goneld, the guard from Kvatch that the player is forced to abandon in the planes of Oblivion.

<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-ansi-language: EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">I looked through their inventories to see if there was anything else that didn’t make sense. The only thing I found was a note on Menien that said “It’s coming for you!” That was two weeks ago; I haven't gotten back on the game since.