One
One
The basement of the Bannered Mare smelled like spilled mead, old cheese, and the particular desperation of people who had seen things no therapist on Earth—or Nirn, for that matter—was qualified to handle.
I sat in a circle of mismatched chairs—three wooden stools, one actual chair with a wobble, and something that might have been a repurposed butter churn—and clutched my fourth tankard of watered-down ale. Not because I wanted it. Because holding something gave my hands something to do other than shake.
“Welcome,” said Delphine, our fearless leader, who had absolutely not asked to be our fearless leader. “Welcome to the Anonymous Isekai Survivors’ Circle. Who’s going first tonight?”
She said “isekai” like it was a disease. Which, fair. It kind of was.
Delphine had arrived in Skyrim seventeen years ago, back when the Oblivion Crisis was still fresh in everyone’s memory and the dragons were just a fun historical fact. She’d been a dental hygienist from Cincinnati. Now she ran a small farm near Rorikstead, grew the best potatoes in Whiterun Hold, and had killed exactly four bandits with a hoe. She didn’t like to talk about the hoe incidents.
“I’ll go,” said Thaddeus, raising his hand with the resigned air of a man who had long since accepted that his life was a cosmic joke.
Thaddeus had been a tax attorney from Delaware. Now he was an orc. Not “played an orc in a game” or “identified as an orc”—actually, physically, green-skinned, tusked, and seven feet tall. The universe, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that Thaddeus needed to experience life as a member of a species whose primary cultural value was hitting things very hard until they stopped moving.
He adjusted his reading glasses—wire-rimmed, utterly incongruous against his green face, held together with twine and prayer—and cleared his throat.
“Hi. I’m Thaddeus. I’m from Delaware, and I’ve been in Skyrim for eight years.”
“Hi, Thaddeus,” we chorused.
“I’ve been having... episodes again. With the cheese wheels.”
A sympathetic murmur rippled through the circle. We’d all had episodes with the cheese wheels.
“It started last Morndas,” Thaddeus continued, his massive green hands twisting together. “I was in Whiterun, just trying to buy some bread, and I saw this adventurer. Young Nord, fresh-faced, that look in his eyes like he’d just discovered he could carry three hundred pounds of stolen tableware without slowing down. And he started picking up cheese. Just... picking it up. All of it. Every wheel in the marketplace.”
He shuddered. The chair creaked alarmingly.
“I tried to stop him. I said, ‘Friend, you don’t need that cheese. You can’t possibly eat that cheese. That cheese represents someone’s livelihood, someone’s—’ but he just looked at me. This blank look. And he kept picking up cheese. And I remembered. I remembered what it was like. The compulsion. The need to take everything that wasn’t nailed down. I spent my first three months here filling my pockets with every loose object in Bleak Falls Barrow. I still have a drawer full of ancient Nordic pottery I can’t bring myself to throw away.”
He paused, breathing heavily.
“The guards came. They always come. But they didn’t arrest him. They never arrest them. They just watched him waddle away under four hundred pounds of dairy products, and I thought—” His voice cracked. “I thought, that was me. That was me, and nobody helped me. Nobody helped any of us.”
He sat down heavily. The butter churn made a sound like a dying animal.
“Thank you for sharing, Thaddeus,” Delphine said gently. “Does anyone have thoughts? Support?”
I raised my hand. I hadn’t planned to. The ale was definitely kicking in.
“I have a question,” I said. “Not support, exactly. Just... curiosity. The pottery. From Bleak Falls Barrow. Is it the kind with the snake symbol, or the whale?”
Thaddeus looked at me with something like gratitude. “Snake. All snake. I have seventeen identical snake pots.”
“I have twelve whale pots,” I admitted. “From my own... early period. I keep telling myself I’ll display them, but I think we all know that’s a lie.”
We did all know. We had all made similar promises to ourselves about our stolen goods.
“There’s a museum in Solitude,” offered Ysolda—no, not the Ysolda, a different Ysolda, which had caused no end of confusion when she arrived and discovered there was already a Ysolda in Whiterun. “The Ysolda in Whiterun, I mean. Not me. I’m Ysolda from Sacramento. Anyway, she—she—told me that the Bard’s College takes historical artifacts. For educational purposes.”
“Do they pay?” asked Thaddeus.
“Prestige,” said Sacramento Ysolda, with the hollow laugh of someone who had once worked in marketing. “They pay in prestige.”
