You’re not panicking… yet, at least. Sure, this was unexpected, and you think you may have nearly lost your tail under the edge of that cage, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the break-in failed and you’re going to die painfully and horribly. At least not yet.
There’s still nobody around. Your cloak has a good amount of invisibility left. All you have to do is puzzle your way out of this trap, and you have plenty of ideas.
You place the ash yam on the pedestal. Despite weight being restored to the pressure plate, the cage does not retract back up. You aren’t actually sure why you expected it to, but that was pretty much your best idea and its failure increments your panic level by about 10%.
First off, you’re not a cat. Second, flexibility only helps you bend. When it comes to fitting through tight spaces, all that matters are the thickest parts of your body. Which is to say, your head, hips and chest.
Well okay, really it’s more just your head and hips.
It’s your head.
Try to learn what that red thing can do, maybe it can help you out of the trap! C’mon little kitten, I believe in you! |
Still not panicking! However, thinking about how justified it would be to panic right now pushes you a little closer toward full-on panic. It’s probably better to focus on solutions.
You take a look at the-
Whoops, hold on.
You stretch your arms and hold the red orb far away from you, squinting at it as best you can. From what you can tell, it’s just a bowling ball. It has three holes, no ominously-swirling auras inside, and weighs exactly as much as a bowling ball. It apparently had only two jobs: look important, and weigh down a pressure plate until some idiot decided to take it.
In your defense, you didn’t expect there to be a baited trap in an otherwise-empty locked room inside a locked building. If this whole room is part of an elaborate trap, it probably means the incriminating-looking chained door was even more bait, and this entire thing was designed specifically to catch people like you who wanted to take Sigrid down.
So much for any hope of hiding your intentions. You can’t even remember if you checked the second floor before grabbing the rusty key and careening down here.
Thankfully, the cage seems to be made of regular steel, meaning it doesn’t block your magic the way living things or silver seem to. Less thankfully, a steel cage still weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds.
You have no problem altering the gravity on a couple bars, panels or rivets, but you can’t seem to get a magical grip on the entire cage – or lift it with the parts you can control. At most, you’re reducing its weight by a two-digit number, and even that may be giving your telekinesis a little too much credit.
Somehow, coming face-to-face with the ineffectiveness of your skills is building your panic more than being stuck in the cage.
Chewing up a single alchemical ingredient outside of a properly-mixed potion isn’t going to give you super intelligence, even if the book said they were used in that kind of potion. Best case scenario, tediously grinding the entire yam to a fine pulp with your very non-grinding Khajiit teeth will make you a tiny bit smarter for a couple minutes, and then it’ll be gone.
But… you’re running out of options, and you need to get out of here before Sigrid finds you or the invisibility wears off. Maybe a little extra intelligence is what you need?
You don’t feel any different, but you aren’t sure what a minute gain of intelligence even feels like.
Alright, think. You need an idea. Some brilliant, intelligent idea that can get you out of here.
You are going to die in a cage.
