Joy

Skyrim is one of the best games in the world, in my opinion. There’s so much to do and lots of quests to go on. I think it’s better than Oblivion, and that is saying something, because like Skyrim, Oblivion is one of my favorite games. I like to write down my Skyrim adventures whenever something amazing happens. I made note of what happened a few months ago too, though it wasn’t so amazing as much as odd.

I started a new game on Skyrim for the hundredth time. I’ll skip to the odd part without giving too many details. I started the game as usual and decided to play as an orc, mainly because I like hand-to-hand combat. The intro in which the town Helgen is destroyed by a giant dragon who’s killed later in the game if you follow the story line. However, most of the male characters and at least 60 percent of the females seemed to be moving and talking slower. I thought this was due to my PC starting to get old, but oddly, anything that wasn’t a humanoid seemed to be functioning fine and at its normal pace.

After escaping Helgen with Ulfric Stormcloak, I wondered for a moment whether to just go postpone the main story line, or follow it. After a minute or so, I decided to do the story quest. I went toward Riverwood to warn the NPCs about the dragon. My next step was going the Whiterun to warn Jarl Balgruuf, but first, I decided to go to the forgery to make an iron dagger. Alvor, the NPC who uses the forgery regularly, was standing in the corner of the room, giggling his head off. It was a little creepy, but not very disturbing.

Before making my dagger, I decided to complete a short quest you get from Alvor that involves making another dagger and sharpening it. I walked up to him, but he ran into his house before I could talk to him and slammed the door. I went to open it only to find it locked. I checked my inventory and saw I had 3 lock picks. I unlocked the door and opened it. When I entered, everything was a mess. There were smashed bottles all over the floor. Alvor’s wife and his kid were nowhere in sight. But Alvor was in his bed, sleeping. This didn’t make sense as it was still afternoon. I woke him up to talk to him. The first time I tried to talk to him, he said “Go away. It’s night.” Like I said earlier, it wasn’t night.

Confused, I tried to talk to him again. This time, he got up in a strange way. He leaned up, shook his head as if trying to get water off of it. Alvor paused, turned to my character and said “Are you waking me up to talk? This better be very important!” A few dialogu options came up. I chose the one asking if I could help Alvor at the forgery He stared at me steadily, as if trying to figure something out. He smirked then burst into laughter, as if that was the silliest thing he ever heard.

I was getting more confused than ever. At this point, I didn’t want to continue without knowing what was going on. I searched almost every variation of what I was looking for, from “In Skyrim, why is Alvor laughing,” to “What is causing Alvor to act differently in Skyrim?” Nothing. I didn’t find so much as anything slightly similar to what was happening in my game. I continued with my game, but I decided to be more cautious for anything else out of the ordinary.

I skipped the forgery and went straight to Whiterun. Going there was easy as there was a flat road that went straight to the stables outside of the city. My next reminder that something was wrong was that when I entered the city, I noticed everyone was wearing masks. The mask was purple with no facial features other than a smiling mouth and 2 holes for eyes. I was considering quitting, but as nothing was particularly scary yet, there wasn’t any fear to battle my curiosity.

Suddenly, a man who was also a mask stood up and a pyramid of barrels and said “Grab a drink, everyone!” Text appeared in the corner of my computer that said “drink added.” The man said “3…2…1, drink your joy!” The man then said “Why are you not drinking it?!? Everyone else is!” I looked around to see he was right. Everyone around me was drinking from bottles. I saw that each bottle was labeled “Joy.” A few seconds later, a quest was added that said “Drink your joy.” I still didn’t want to. Then it occurred to me. Maybe if I follow along with this “quest,” I could get out of it and return to my normal game. It felt a little unlikely, but was worth trying.

I looked through my inventory and found a bottle labeled joy. Curious, I drank it, hoping following with the quest would end it. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Suddenly, the screen became brighter and there was epic music playing. It seemed like everyone else was seeing the same thing, because they started dancing. After another few minutes, the colors went back to normal and the music stopped. I paused my game and called my friend to say what happened. He said that there was some mod that did something similar, but it was a mod for Oblivion, not Skyrim. I said I never downloaded that mod, but did download another mod. My friend said that some mods for Skyrim secretly have other mods on them to surprise the players.

After our brief phone call, I hung up and was excited to get back to the normal game. I walked toward the house of the Jarl to warn about the dragon. As soon as I got about three fifths of the way up, textures on the buildings began to stretch as the camera titled slightly clockwise. The world began to get brighter again and it distorted. I wasn’t scare, but I was more determined than ever to figure out what was going on. As I went back down again to figure out what was going on, the world distorted so much I could not making out what I was looking at. The sound around my character began to distort too. It bounced between high-pitched and low-pitched.

After what seemed like hours, my character’s vision went back to normal. I saw one of the masked men staring at me saying “You didn’t take your joy, did you?” I got 2 dialogue options. One said “I did,” and one said “No I did not.” I chose yes. The man said “You liar! Let’s teach this man a lesson.” Several other masked men stared at me and then circled me like hyenas around a zebra. One said “You don’t belong here,” then hit me in the head. My character fell down and just watched as the men slowly lowered his health and when it was almost gone, walked away. After the men were out of sight, my health dropped to zero.

I didn’t play with the file for days until I decided I conquered my fear of that continue file enough to see if it would happen again. It never did.