Chapter One: In Which I Arrive Through Sheer Stupidity (and Mods)
I arrived in Skyrim through a loading screen.
Not metaphorically. Literally. I was modding my game — 147 plugins, a message saying “incompatible scripts may cause unexpected behavior,” and my brilliant thought: “Well, I’ll check for five minutes what’s broken.”
The screen went black. Then white. Then that particular shade of gray that means either enlightenment or system crash.
I said: “No, no, no, I didn’t save—”
And fell.
Not through the floor. Through reality. Through the texture of my bedroom, through the void beneath the world, through the waterfall of pixels and hope. I was screaming until I remembered: “Tcl” — toggle collision. The console command for flying and walking through walls.
I thought it. Hard. Desperately.
And phased through my own existence.
When I stopped falling, I was in a cart. Not the famous one with Ralof and the execution — a different cart. With chickens. And a man who smelled of onions and looked at me like I was a glitch in his reality.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Fell from sky. Into hay. Chickens panicked.”
I sat up. Looked down. Leather armor had replaced my pajamas. And in the bottom left corner of my vision — floating, translucent, impossible — was a menu.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Semi-transparent, with options: “Inventory,” “Map,” “Magic,” “Settings.” And at the bottom, pulsing ominously: “~ Console.”
“Oh god,” I whispered. “I didn’t just arrive. I arrived with the interface.”
“What?” the man frowned.
“Nothing. Um. What time is it?”
I pressed “M” mentally — and the world froze, becoming a map. Whiterun, Riften, Solstheim... all there, marked “undiscovered.” I panicked, pressed “Esc,” and the world returned. The man blinked, not noticing the missing time.
Perfect, I thought. I’m in the game. With cheats. No idea how to use them. And apparently with slightly... altered physics.
I raised my hand. Typed mentally: “player.additem 0000000f 1000.”
Gold didn’t appear.
Instead, a message: “Error: insufficient magicka.”
“WHAT?!” I squeaked. “That’s a CONSOLE COMMAND, not a SPELL!”
A chicken looked at me. Judged me. Ran away.
I understood the main thing: here, cheats worked... strangely. Like magic. Required something — energy, concentration, belief? Or I just didn’t know how to use them?
Meanwhile, I sat in hay, burning Whiterun giving me a head start. I needed to move.
I walked. Not to Riverwood — toward the nearest city, according to the map. Whiterun. There was a house there. A quiet quest. There was...
There was a giant I didn’t notice because I was looking at the floating menu.
The first blow sent me into the stratosphere. Literally. I flew, screaming, watching the world become a dot, and thought: “So that’s where the space giant bug came from.”
I landed in a lake. Climbed out. Did push-ups. Checked health — the corner bar showed “red sector,” but I was alive.
And then I understood the second main thing: I couldn’t die permanently. The health bar dropped, but never emptied. I was in some kind of... what? Essential NPC mode? Protagonist mode? Or just bugged?
“Fine,” I told the lake, the distant giant, and the universe in general. “New rules. No saves. No reloads. Just me, my wonky cheats, and a world clearly not ready for my presence.”
I walked toward Whiterun. On the way, I found a flower. Picked it — and heard the familiar sound: “Item added to inventory.”
At least something worked normally.
