Being Driven Crazy The Skyrim Way

All right, I admit it. I’ve got this thing about “noise” when I’m trying to concentrate. When I was a kid, my brother would drive me insane every morning at breakfast. There I was, sitting at the table with a big bowl of Fruit Loops, minding my own business and reading the back of the cereal box when my brother would plop down next to me and start mowing through his cereal like a grazing cow. He’d take heaping spoonfuls of cereal and crunch and munch with his mouth partially open, a deranged look in his eyes. When he wasn’t chewing loudly, he was rattling his spoon against the sides of the bowl. When he wasn’t rattling his spoon, he was slurping his orange juice. I’ve never known a person who could slurp orange juice like my brother. For him, slurping was an art form and he was a master. He could draw out a single slurp longer than the closing credits of a foreign film. No, make that two foreign films — he was that good. Even writing about it now brings back a lot of bad memories that make my skin crawl…

Like I said, I’ve got a thing for “noise,” so imagine my surprise when I recently went to Dragonsreach to do a little enchanting. There are quite a few enchanting tables I’ve found during my Skyrim adventures, but I like the one at Dragonsreach the best simply because I find it convenient to get to. I have a house in Whiterun after all, so it just makes sense to do most of my crafting within the city. So anyway, I enter the main hall, walk up a few steps towards the Jarl’s throne (careful not to make eye contact with the Jarl or his steward — I don’t want to get into a long, drawn out conversation about dragons), and then take a hard right to the wizard’s quarters. As usual, I make with the small talk with the court wizard, Farengar Secret-Fire. I’ve always found Farengar to be a fairly decent chap. He’s awfully young to be a court wizard, but he seems to have a decent head on his shoulders “preferring his books and his spells” over all the political garbage that engrosses Skyrim these days. Sure, it’s a little annoying when he keeps telling me that I should join the Wizard’s College in Winter Hold if I have the aptitude, and I’m like “Dude! I’ve already joined so quit asking me for the umpteenth million time,” but that’s nothing compared to what happened…

It was the breakfast table all over again.

There I was, hunched over the enchanting table and getting ready to lay a serious Frost enchantment on a Falmer sword I acquired when suddenly, Farengar Secret-Fire sits down across from me and starts munching on a hard piece of bread. At first, I didn’t know what the grating sound was. I looked around in horror, thinking that I might have broken the enchanting table somehow. As I searched, it slowly dawned upon me that the noise was coming from Farengar himself as he shoved bread into his mouth. I couldn’t believe it! Farengar was my brother incarnate! I really wanted to enchant the sword, so I gritted my teeth and tried my best to go back to work. The crunching continued. And continued. And continued. Until finally, I couldn’t take the noise any longer and stormed out of the room, my work left unfinished. How could one wizard have made so much noise? He sounded like a troop of Stormcloak soldiers shuffling their feet across a field of crushed gravel and broken Honningbrew mead bottles.

Later, after dark, I crept back to the wizard’s quarters and found Farengar Secret-Fire fast asleep in the adjoining bedroom. I carefully closed the bedroom door, and quickly got to work with my enchantment before he decided to wake up and grab a midnight snack. I was still irritated with Farengar, and before I left I ripped off everything he had of value in the room, stuffing my pockets with soul gems and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. Typically, I don’t steal things when I play Skyrim, but I made an exception in this case. I was ticked off and wanted to teach Farengar a lesson. I felt that he owed me somehow for wasting my time earlier and besides, even if the Jarl’s guards caught me stealing, I could always plead insanity. Insanity caused from the crunching and munching of a hard crust of bread.