Deception, Domination, and Dragons (Skyrim Self-Insert)

As we come over the hill and finally lay eyes upon the Province’s central-most Hold, I can’t help but grin a little goofily. This was it. This was-
 
A loud roar shakes the very earth that we walk on, startling me out of my thoughts before I can even begin internally monologuing. And I was definitely about to, my Thalmor half LOVED to monologue to himself, and my human half wasn’t much better. Alas, such plans were put on hold because there in the distance, in the middle of a farm field between us and Whiterun, was a fucking Giant.
 
The thing was huge, even from this far away. But then, to be fair, its size was made a lot more apparent by the even smaller people flitting around it. From this distance it wasn’t easy to make them out, but there looked to be three or four individuals fighting the Giant in the field. This… this was another scripted encounter.

At this point, I was getting downright suspicious. First Lucan and his sister, and now the Companions and the Giant? That was beyond a little odd. One could wave away Lucan and Camilla’s argument by just assuming they’d been having it since the Claw was stolen in the first place. But this particular Giant fight happening right as Svanna and I arrived? Well, if I wasn’t sure that my companion was the Dragonborn before, I was sure now. Events were literally happening around her, just like in the game. As if, even if this world didn’t run on game physics, it DID run on the game’s narrative.
 
… Could that really be the case? And more importantly in the immediate… what were we going to do? A glance in Svanna’s direction shows the lithe Nord is fidgeting in place, her eyes wide as she takes in the Giant from afar. She looks like she’s very nearly ready to drop into a half crouch already, about to enter what I would term ‘stealth mode’, but really would just let her disappear into the tall grass nearby.
 
Clearing my throat, I draw her gaze sharply to me, before shrugging my shoulder.
 
“Shall we assist? The Companions are a tentpole of Whiterun culture. A good word from any of them might open doors for us…”
 
I phrase it specifically in that way because if there’s one thing, I’ve learned about Svanna since we started traveling together, its that she prefers to avoid danger where possible. And indeed, when the Nord looks between me and the Giant, I can see the indecision warring in her features. She’s not too sure about this… maybe she’s only even considering it because of the Charm Magic I already cast on her?
 
“… Don’t want to get too close…”
 
Her response, when it finally comes, draws a laugh from me as I shake my head.
 
“No, I suppose not. Neither do I But then, that’s what that bow and the arrows on your back are for, hm? And I’m more than ready to help your aim.”
 
Raising my hand, showing her the glow of my magic, I watch her eyes dance over the sparks for a moment… before she finally nods. With that, we move forward carefully, watching the battle from afar. The Companions are holding their own for the time being. Whether they’re winning or not… well, if this encounter really is scripted, then they will always finish off the Giant, even if we fail to interfere. But if its not, the Giant could kill them all. And considering one of them is the smoking hot, supremely fine Aela the Huntress, well…
 
Svanna finds a hill quickly enough and drops to a knee as she pulls her bow from her back and notches an arrow. The way she holds the bow all but confirms my suspicions. The Last Dragonborn isn’t just canonically a Nord… she’s a Stealth Archer.
 
Sighting down the sideways held bow, Svanna breathes in deeply, and before she can pull back on the drawstring, I reach out and cast Rally on her. The Illusion Magic fills her, and her eyes widen as her pupils shrink to pinpricks, a temporary strength suddenly pulsing through her body.
 
Before my eyes, Svanna draws back and looses an arrow. Then another. Then a third. Before I can even blink, she’s fired five arrows at the Giant. Two miss… but three strike true, and whether she hits some incredibly critical spots in the massive creature’s body, or the Companions had just weakened it for her… she delivers the killing blow to the thing all the same.
 
As the Giant topples over, I laugh in wonder that I do not have to feign, legitimately impressed. Of course, that’s the human me speaking. The Thalmor half of my mind is already considering how best to use Svanna in future plans. The human half is just boggling over her skill. Seriously, there’s no way she’s level one, right? Or… well, at this point she might be level three to five. But at the same time… those were some fucking stellar shots.
 
Pushing up to our feet, we begin making our way down to where the Companions stand surrounding the felled Giant. As expected, Aela herself is the one to step forward once we’re within speaking distance.
 
“That was some solid shooting. It’s nice to see a fellow Nord with an interest in the bow. A Giant is certainly no easy foe to take down with just arrows.”
 
She doesn’t so much as look at me, and… yeah, that kind of stings. Aela is one of the game’s biggest waifus, and as is becoming the pattern, she’s even more gorgeous here in this world I find myself in, then she ever was in the games. She’s smoking hot, for all that I know she’s also capable of turning into a massive hulking werewolf monster at the drop of a hat.
 
Still, it irks a little, the way she completely disregards my contribution. Not that she knew I had contributed, but its obvious from the way she has eyes only for Svanna that she doesn’t even think it possible that I could. Racism towards Altmer, more than likely? Interestingly enough, Svanna picks up on it as well, and after a moment, shrugs her shoulder in my direction.
 
“Couldn’t have done it without… without my companion here.”
 
I blink, both in appreciation at her giving me some credit, and the realization that I’ve literally never told her my name. To be fair, she hadn’t either. I only knew it because she’d told Hadvar her name and where she was from, right before we were both about to die. And in all fairness, my name was a bit of an odd thing for me at the moment. Who was I, really? Was I the Thalmor Agent Vayral now? Or was I Cambrian, the smut writer?
 
It wasn’t so simply decided, even if I was leaning more towards Vayral than Cambrian at this point, if only because Vayral was the body I was inhabiting, Tamriel the world I was now living in. There was barely anyone who actually knew me in all of Skyrim, to be fair, but those few who did would know me as Vayral.
 
Regardless, Aela’s brow raises slightly at that, and she finally pays me the time of day, her eyes flickering over to me… and clearly filled with disdain as she assesses me and finds me wanting in her warrior-like world view. Smiling thinly, the Thalmor in me wanting nothing more than to put this Nord bitch in her place, I incline my head, confirming her suspicions for her.
 
“I am a traveling mage. When my companion here wanted to step in and assist you, I assisted her with a bit of magical enhancement. All I did was give her the ability to fire faster. The aim… that was all her.”
 
For a long moment, silence falls as all the present Companions assess us. In the end, Aela just nods at me, the very tiniest bit of respect in her eyes.
 
“It is good that you know your contribution, mage.”
 
Then, she immediately turns back to Svanna, who is quietly bristling on my behalf, to my amusement and surprise. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be able to tell if I hadn’t spent the last day and a half traveling with her. I’m beginning to pick up on the Dragonborn’s little tells. As is, Aela clearly doesn’t detect anything, from the way she smiles warmly at the other Nord.
 
“As for you, you would do well with the Companions. We operate out of the Jorrvaskr over in Whiterun. Feel free to come and see about joining up. For now, we need to get this Giant cleared away.”
 
Svanna makes a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat, even as I file away that last bit as a curiosity. Indeed, corpses tended to… hang around for a while in the game, before disappearing while you were in a load screen elsewhere. Certainly, none of the Companions ever cleared away the Giant’s body during the game’s scripted encounter, but as Svanna and I step away, that’s exactly what Aela and the other three with her are preparing to do.
 
Its incredibly easy to put the entire encounter out of my mind however, as we finally make our way over to Whiterun, traveling up the winding defensive path that goes back and forth before finally delivering us to the city gates. When the guards stop us, I’m not surprised… but I am a little impatient, admittedly.
 
“Halt. The city is currently in lockdown with reports of a Dragon out near Helgen.”
 
Smiling thinly, keeping my impatience and irritation under wraps as best as I possibly can, I nod confidently.
 
“That’s why we’re here. The two of us are survivors of Helgen… the Dragon Attack was very real, and we were tasked by the Imperial Legion to deliver a detailed report to Jarl Balgruuf immediately.”
 
Technically true. Hadvar WAS part of the Legions, as far as I knew. And he had asked us to deliver the news. Honesty, as always, is the best policy hands down.
 
The gate guards both startle at that, glancing at the two of us, and then at each other for a moment before standing aside.
 
“Very well.”
 
And like that, the last barrier between me and the city of my dreams is gone. Hah, okay so maybe that was a little overly dramatic. Whiterun was probably one of my two most visited cities… Riften being the other one on account of preferring to use the Fence there and what not. Whiterun, meanwhile, was the very first city you ended up traveling to, so of course I used it a lot.
 
But it wasn’t REALLY the city of my dreams. More accurately, it was the city that contained the barrel that contained all of my hopes and dreams in it. And as Svanna and I enter the city proper and the gate closes behind us, I waste no time stepping off of the beaten path. Up behind the blacksmith, along the edge of the wall was where it should… there!
 
Svanna follows after me, no doubt curious, but I don’t pay her any mind in the moment. All of my attention is on the barrel that’s pressed up against the wall, a barrel that would not be there in any unmodded version of the game. The fact that it was here, in this world… it meant that all of my dreams were possible.

That is, so long as the books were inside of it. For a moment, I am the definition of tension as I reach the barrel and pull it open. There’s always the possibility that someone else has noticed this random new barrel and actually checked it out. Like a guard, for instance.
 
… But no. They’re there. I quickly add every single one of the Spell Books to my inventory, and just as Svanna is stepping up beside me to peer into the barrel, visibly intrigued, I’m pulling up my menu, freezing her and the rest of the world in place around me as I quickly learn every single one of the spell books without hesitation.
 
It was a simple mod, at the end of the day. I’d always been a filthy cheater, when it came to Skyrim. As soon as I found out you could cheat, I’d done so to varying degrees in ALL of my playthroughs. In all fairness, part of it was because I discovered the joys of Loverslab, and in order to properly set up any number of smutty, pornographic encounters within the game, I’d used cheats to get myself where I needed to go.
 
The console had been my friend on quite a few of my more heavily modded playthroughs, that was for sure. But as time went on and Bethesda released more and more versions of Skyrim, and Nexus Mods got a little bit more confusing with every new iteration each time I went back and had to redownload it and all my favorite mods… I’d eventually gotten lazy.
 
In fact, in my last two playthroughs of Skyrim, the one I’d been doing before I woke up here included, I hadn’t downloaded a single Sexlab mod. I hadn’t used Nexus Mods at all. Instead, I’d simply used the in-game mod database for my modding needs. A much smaller catalog to be sure, and I’d probably missed out on all sorts of cool overpowered stuff that I was kicking myself for not having access to now… but it was what it was, in the end.
 
And even in the in-game mod database, there were still cheat mods. The one I’d used extensively in my last two playthroughs was this barrel. Titled ‘XP Spells’ and made by a guy called The-Nerdy_Dragon, it was a small mod. Nothing too extensive at all. All it did… was add XP Spell books to a barrel in Whiterun. THIS barrel in Whiterun.
 
The spells multiplied the XP that the player character gained from doing activities by certain amounts. On the low end, you could multiply your XP gain by one times the amount, making for double the amount of XP you would normally earn from doing activities that advanced your Skills. It went up from there, from one and half times, to two times, to two and a half times… and so on and so forth.
 
But where it was slow at first, with the first fourteen out of nineteen spell books covering one to ten times XP multipliers, after that was when it got… better. Twenty five times. Fifty times. One hundred times… and finally, one thousand times the normal experience gain.
 
Normally, I restricted myself to either the ten times multiplier, or the twenty five times multiplier. In truth, I just wanted a moderately faster leveling experience, nothing too silly. I wanted to be able to level Alchemy to one hundred in one session at the table, and then Prestige it immediately after I was done. If you went much higher than twenty five times the normal experience gain, then you would end up hitting One Hundred Alchemy within one or two potions.
 
But this wasn’t the game. And as much as I was a Gamer, I still felt significantly out of my depth in this world. The knowledge that this version of Skyrim was my modded version, that I had the modded map and even a modded inventory and that meant this mod was probably here too… it was the only thing that had kept my human half sane these past two days. My Thalmor side was doing a lot of the heavy lifting there too, to be fair… but even the Thalmor me was shaken by the revelations my human self had to share, and the fact that we’d survived an encounter with Alduin the World-Eater.
 
I don’t even hesitate to ‘equip’ the 1000x XP power, and as I come out of my menu and immediately activate it, I have a broad smile on my face. Svanna glances from the barrel to me curiously, her nose wrinkling as the smart girl realizes whatever was in there had already disappeared into my pocket dimension before she got a chance to look. As she sees the flash of energy from the 1000x XP effect swirl around me, her eyes flash with something like greed.
 
“… What was it?”
 
Grinning, I step away from her for a moment in lieu of answering. Naught but a few feet away from the barrel are a grouping of wild Blue Mountain Flowers. I pluck one from the lot and looking back at Svanna, I bring it to my mouth… and bite down.
 
As I eat the flower, it tastes… well, it tastes like a fucking flower. But it also takes like victory, because I get the notification that I’ve just jumped from fifteen to one hundred Alchemy immediately. Maxed out Alchemy, and another two levels, all because I tasted a plant I hadn’t tasted before. And since most people didn’t go around eating everything that they got their hands on, there were a LOT of alchemy ingredients out there I hadn’t tasted yet.
 
But alchemy was only one of my options. Every skill in my menu, I could now level up near-instantly, and then Prestige so I could do so again. All of the experience, all of the levels, all of the Magicka and Health and Stamina in the world… was mine.
 
Svanna, of course, is looking at me like I’m crazy. Feeling a bit mad with power, I chuckle as I step up to her, Charm Magic bursting from my fingertips.
 
“Don’t fret, darling. I’m on top of the world… but I’ve already decided to take you with me.”
 
I croon as I begin to cast another Charm Spell on her. Now that I have the ability to become all powerful, I don’t have to hold back in corrupting and twisting her mind into service to me anymore. I can take her right here in the backstreets of Whiterun and make the Dragonborn mine and mine alo-
 
I blink, as I look down and see her hands have closed over mine, interrupting the spell and stopping me before I could get the Charm Spell off. For a moment, icy fear fills my veins as I realize how badly I’ve fucked up… but then I look up into her eyes, and to my surprise… she’s smiling. It’s a small thing, but there’s a smile on the young Nord’s face as she shakes her head.
 
“You don’t… you don’t have to do that. It didn’t work on me the first time anyways. Just like it didn’t work on me last night, when you were with the Imperial Woman. I watched the whole time… I watched as you fucked her in that spell of silence, bringing her to the heights of ecstasy all the while.”
 
Well, fuck.

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