Prologue

Stephen yawned and rubbed his eyes. Setting his cup of coffee down, he plopped down onto his office chair. Laying out a blanket on his lap he focused his tired eyes on the screen in front. Noticing the time, he wondered how the day had gone by so quickly. He’d taken the day off from work to give himself a long weekend, but with all he’d done today it hadn’t exactly been a restful lazy day.

He’d started the morning with a hearty breakfast. Grits and eggs, toast, sausages, and some fruit. Breakfast was something he usually forsook in favor of an extra hour of sleep in the morning, preferring to just down a thermos full of coffee on his commute into the office. He figured he had the time today though, and decided to indulge a little. He’d need the energy, especially with what he had planned for the day.

He’d been waiting over a month for all the parts to arrive and another week before he could take a day off and devote enough time to his little project. But today was the day and with a gleam in his eye he had settled in at his desk to tackle the work ahead.

His project for the day had been setting up his new gaming computer.

Initial OS setup had gone smoothly. He didn’t need, or, if he was being honest with himself, know how to set up anything truly cool. All he cared about was getting to the games. Lots of internal storage paired with an 8 TB external hard drive meant he had more than enough space, even for all those games he’d bought and never actually played before.

Like a lot of people Stephen would often buy a whole batch of games on sale, start one, forgot about the rest, and then never got around to playing them. One game that Stephen had bought and ignored for several years was Skyrim.

Sometimes fictional worlds just grab you. Skyrim, officially The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and by extension the rest of the Elder Scrolls universe, had reached out and grabbed Stephen by the throat and refused to let go for well over 5 years at this point. And he had loved every minute of it. He’d spent months online reading character bios, lore, walkthroughs, you name it. He’d spent even more months actually playing the game. Both a role player and a completionist by nature, he’d once spent an entire month on the Companion’s storyline alone.

He’d taken breaks, of course, at one point buying and playing through the entire Kingdom Hearts series because he’d seen it on sale and gotten nostalgic about playing the first one as a kid. But he always seemed to gravitate back to Skyrim.

But once he had finally slain Alduin, beaten the smugness out of Miraak, and put a stop to Harkon’s idiotic plans, Stephen didn’t think himself done with the game. Oh no, he had more builds he wanted to try and better ways of completing certain missions. At one point he’d even taken the time to learn much of the language of the Dragons, Dovah, so he could actually read the dragonwall inscriptions. Given the limited official vocabulary and grammar available it wasn’t quite like learning a full fantasy language, like Klingon or Tolkien’s elvish language Quenya. But he could read in-game inscriptions and he’d learned how to sing and play the opening theme song on his guitar, and that was good enough for him.

Then, he’d found the mods. What started as a couple of simple creature mods quickly ballooned into hundreds of mods designed to fundamentally change his game. Frostfall & Campfire to add temperature rules and camping. Hunterborn, so he could make better use of the wildlife. Ordinator to completely overhaul the perk system. Wintersun so he could finally worship the divines properly. INeed for food and water requirements. CACO & CCOR to overhaul Crafting, Alchemy, Cooking & Smithing. Not to mention the huge DLC sized mods that added entire storylines, new locations, and characters, like Legacy of the Dragonborn, Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, & Beyond Reach.

Not that Stephen would admit it to anyone who asked, but he had also added as many sex mods as he could get his hands on. He had gotten tired of pretending like he didn’t want to respond to Camilla Valerius’ obvious flirting, or bend over Lydia and make her “carry his burdens”. So, he grabbed some mods that would allow him to do just that.

It was actually these mods that had finally pushed Stephen over the edge on buying a new computer. In the past he’d used a laptop that had struggled to keep up with his ever-growing mod list. He was fine dealing with the occasional lag, crash or freeze when it only affected easy grinding or well-known story, but nothing quite killed the fun like his game crashing just as he was about to bed that tease Serana. And now that he’d finally upgraded, he’d spent all day redownloading his mods, along with a handful of new ones he’d had his eyes on.

When it comes to mods, the exact order in which the game loads them is extremely important, and resetting a load order in the hundreds is no easy task. He had a tool that processed his downloaded mods and gave him the optimal load order, but that was a baseline at best. He still needed to test the build for game breaking bugs and any obvious collision problems. He’d once spent well over 400 hours on a modded save file only to walk into Winterhold for the first time and have his game immediately crash. And then crash again the next time he tried to walk into the city from the other side. And the next time. And the next. At this point, he realized he was probably being overly cautious, but he figured spending a few hours testing for game killing bugs was better than spending a few months getting invested in a game, just to have to restart because of a faulty load order.

But as he blew on his steaming cup of coffee before taking a sip, he knew he was getting close to the finish line. He was pretty sure he’d checked everything, or at least everything he could think of. He just had one last mod to optimize.

Stephen had saved it for last, because he was a bit dubious about it. It was one of his new ones, and it was one he’d really only downloaded on a whim. Ultimate Access didn’t have a lot of details in its description page, just that it was designed as a framework mod, something to get all his disparate mods working together in a way that would cut down on crashes. It was surprisingly huge for what was essentially a background mod, but it had good reviews that testified to its efficacy so he was willing to take a chance on it.

He realized, of course, that if it actually did what it advertised, he had basically wasted his entire day. But he figured he’d just consider it doing his due diligence to make sure the game worked without it first, just in case it actually broke his game instead of stabilizing it.

“Alright, time to give this mess a try and hope for the best...” Stephen mumbled as he loaded his heavily modded version of Skyrim, ready to test his last mod of the day.

As the loading screen finished and the main menu opened, a text box popped up, a bouncing chibi version of the Daedric prince Sheogorath playing in the margins.

Hmmm ... That’s weird, Stephen thought. None of my mods should be starting this soon. He had actually downloaded a tool that stopped mods from initializing until after the cart scene to prevent the dreaded “wild cart ride” that was unavoidable if a couple of his mods were started before character creation.

He focused on the text box: Would you like to engage Ultimate Access?

I mean ... yeah, no shit Sherlock. I wouldn’t have downloaded it if I didn’t want to use it? What a weird message... Stephen thought to himself, taking another small sip of coffee as he clicked the Yes button in the text box.

Thank you. Enjoy your playthrough of Skyrim with Ultimate Access!

As soon as Stephen finished reading the pop-up message, he was struck with a piercing headache, his eyes slamming shut in pain, as the screen turned a blinding white in his darkened room. The sudden movement of his head away from the light made the pain worse tenfold as he slumped in his chair unconscious, the cup he’d been holding dropped to the ground, rolling away forgotten.

Consciousness came to Stephen slowly. His eyes were closed and his heartbeat thundered in his ears, drowning out all other noise. Feeling the cold first, it took him a moment to realize that he was laying on something hard. Groaning as he tried to open his eyes Stephen took a moment just to breathe, hoping it would ease the headache that had awakened with him.

“I distinctly remember telling you he was going to be knocked out cold! You can’t get impatient with him being passed out on the floor when you’re the one who put him there! You need to tone down the summoning power next time you stupid lunatic!”

“Tone it down! Tone it down! Ha! A little head trauma never hurt anyone! Well, except for poor Stanley. Lost his ability to talk, he did! I mean, that was the only interesting thing about that damn grapefruit! What’s the point of a grapefruit if it can’t talk!”

“Oh, shut up already ... Hey, do you have any more of that Cyrodilic Brandy? I seem to have run a little dry again.”

“Huh? Oh, oh, of course. HASKILL! Get this drunken sod another case of the good stuff!”

Struggling to a sitting position, Stephen slowly opened his eyes. He seemed to be sitting on a stone floor, in a room apparently lit by flickering candles based on the way the light bounced around the floor in front of him.

“Oh ho ho, look here Sam! LIFE! Magical, mystical, infuriating life! Now, let’s get you into one of these chairs, hmm?”

Stephen looked up to see a man standing on a short set of stairs that led to what appeared to be a throne. The man snapped his fingers and all of a sudden Stephen felt two sets of hands grab him roughly by the arms, standing him up and shuffling him towards a long banquet table set before the throne. Looking around the room with equal parts fear and wonder Stephen was unceremoniously dumped into one of the chairs at the table by the two women who’d picked him up off the ground.

Finally finding his voice Stephen barked at the women: “Jesus, no need to be so rough! I’ve got a hangover that could kill the dead and my body feels like it got ran over by a steamroller!” Rubbing his hands on his temples he looked around the table, noting only the man who seemed to be in charge and a large red skinned demon drinking directly from a bottle and holding what appeared to be a roasted leg of some sort.

Wait. Demon? He thought.

Stephen rubbed his eyes and stared at the demon across from him with mounting horror.

“What the fuck is that?” Stephen mumbled to himself.

“How rude! Haven’t you ever seen a Daedra before? Come on boy, know your place before your betters, apologize!”

Whipping his head towards the man who’d spoken he nearly jumped out of his chair when he noticed his glowing golden eyes. Dressed in an exquisitely tailored suit of purple adorned with silver swirls and designs, the man seemed young despite both his head and well-trimmed goatee being a striking silvery grey.