Artei's Adventures

This is a character from my new TES IV: Oblivion session started on February 22nd, 2009. This time I'm not going to do the main quest, instead just role-playing and travelling here and there until the character is "ready" to slay the Daedra.

This session features quite a number of mods as well as my own manual tweaks. Yesterday after some intense research I finally managed to get him to become a true contortionist, something that was like my dream since last summer! xD

So I thought I'd show off a little as it's related to my speciality on DA, lol. You can tell I'm a screenshot whore though! I must have made almost a thousand Oblivion screenshots overall... omg...

Though some caps may be sorta "pixely" as I've just recently figured how to enable both HDR lighting and antialiasing!

I love making up stories, so since the game says nothing about the character's past, I thought I must make something up on my own, ^-^ so here we go:

The Story

Artei is an orphan raised by wandering jugglers who found him as a little poor Breton kid hiding under the bridge. They fed him and the boy told them his parents were killed by the monsters that attacked their village, but he managed to escape. The troupe offered him to join and he followed them. They became his new family and helped him to master the art of juggling.

The boy had a rather odd habit of stretching in the morning, raising his arms and arching the torso until his spine produced a series of soft popping sounds, while his body demonstrated an unusual degree of flexibility. The man who was his teacher asked him about this habit and Artei told him that his dad and mom would often make theirs spines crack while working in the garden and then they'd laugh and say it felt like they only just started working. And the man figured that Artei was secretly trying to copycat his old parents but it took a lot more effort for his young joints to produce said sounds, so he was unconsciously working hard on increasing his spine's flexibility.

The man encouraged Artei to try grabbing his foot and pulling it to his head from behind, and it wasn't much surprising that while doing so the boy was perfectly capable of getting his heel beyond his own collarbone. Next, with a little help from his teacher, he was able to lay on his chest while having both of his feet standing on the ground next to his shoulders (so called "cheststand"). It suprised even the boy himself as he'd never have thought of doing something like this.

Needless to say, Artei's newly discovered talent took the form of acrobatic stunts and was immediately incorporated into their juggling performances and not without success, as their daily income nearly doubled. Artei was encouraged to work harder and in a few months was capable of folding his body backwards in half, while at the same time standing on his hands, something that always made the crowd gasp in awe!

Soon the war with Daedra renewed and for the second time Artei had lost his entire family as they were slaughtered by the Daedric soldiers right in front of his eyes while he hid himself in a tiny niche under some building and managed to survive. After a few weeks of living as a beggar, the boy was noticed by a priest who brought him to his priory, saying that he was given a sign about the boy and that Artei's destiny is now in the hands of the Nine. Artei was trained to handle the sword as well as taught everything from the ancient scriptures.

After turning 20, Artei left the priory and joined a few guilds to help him practice the skills most important for his quest to destroy Daedra. While practicing his sword fighting and healing magic, he didn't forget about acrobatics and his flexibility still served him well during the hard days, as his morals kept him from stealing and killing innocent people or animals.