Gelur had managed to get in a surprising amount of scouting before we ran across her. To the south, there’s a vile laboratory (probably actually named the Vile Laboratory, seeing as this is Coldharbour) where a couple of people from the Mages Guild ran into trouble and got stuck together somehow. Having no way of helping them herself, Gelur told them to conserve their strength and promised she’d bring someone (i.e. probably me) to help when she found them.

  “There was also a weird Nord tavern I was leery of drinking at, but this seems more urgent,” Gelur says.

  “We can stop by there next,” I say. “They probably made some dumb deal with Molag Bal for better mead or something, if the places we’ve run into so far are any indication.”

  “Do you want me to bet that you’re just being stereotypical of Nords and that it was actually a dumb deal for fine wine?” Eran says.

  Gelur shows us the way to a small camp that includes a fairly large Khajiit-style tent someone must have brought in their pocket, and we meet up with the hapless mages in question. A Dunmer named Gadris and a Khajiit named Zur have been… “soul melded” somehow. This is just weird. They keep switching back and forth between forms, which is even weirder.

  “I’m going to beat the shit out of whoever felt the need to do something so ridiculous,” I say, gritting my teeth.

  “I do hope so,” Gadris says, as they’re being Gadris at the moment. “Good to see you back, Gelur, and glad you brought help.”

  The place in question is a Dwemer ruin, of all things, that had wound up inside Coldharbour. I have to wonder if any Dwemer survived here or were taken as Soul-Shriven, but any Dwemer Soul-Shriven would be at least as old as me and probably wouldn’t have managed to stay themselves after all that time. (I’m not always entirely convinced that I stayed myself, either, for that matter.)

  While still on Nirn, the Dwemer were, of course, experimenting with souls, because that’s just the sort of thing the Dwemer did. Once their laboratory wound up in Coldharbour, the Daedra showed up and continued their experiments using the stolen Dwemer machinery.

  Near the lab, there’s a rather large Dwemer Centurion who makes for a fun warm-up fight to beating up some more Dremora. It has a few cool moves Centurions don’t normally have, but still predictable once I figure out its rotation. (I don’t mean its spinny bits, although those also count. The Dwemer referred to a series of actions taken in a loop as a “rotation”. Their combat constructs are very easy to predict once you’ve figured out which couple moves they make.)

  Inside one of the buildings, I come upon a book titled A Life of Strife and Struggle. (Summary: King Dynar had nothing better to do with his time but to write his memoirs. In great detail.) Not sure how that wound up on this side of the Hollow City when he was stuck in that tower over there. According to the dates, we were contemporaries, for a while. I hadn’t heard of him, I don’t think, but my memories of the time are still quite fuzzy and it’s not like I was paying much attention to what was going on in western Tamriel. I had enough on my platter in Resdayn as it was.

  Zur is an alchemist and wants me to help make a potion that will let me shrink down so I can get inside, because they accidentally (?) collapsed the entrance to the ruin when they escaped. He lost his notes and reagents, however, so he sends me to find them.

  I make certain to memorize his alchemy notes (by which I mean that it goes into my Library of the Mind as soon as I glance at the papers). I hope he wasn’t intending on keeping proprietary secrets here, but I’m sure he’d be more than happy to share his alchemical knowledge with me anyway in exchange for saving his soul.

  We need to get inside the ruin and craft some rods for the machinery that can reverse the soul-meld. At this point, I wish we did have a Dwemer around who could help with this. As I fight past Daedra, I imagine a Dwemer following me around complaining about what a mess the Daedra have made of their shit.

  Zur’s potion temporarily turns me into a monkey and it’s absolutely, insanely fun. So much so that I accidentally spent too much time running around bouncing off pipes and it wears off. I almost get stuck when I return to my normal size while still in a spot a bit too small for my normal size. Oops. Shit. I spend the next several minutes squeezing myself through gaps to get myself the rest of the way through the partially-collapsed tunnel.

  I finally manage to slip inside (mostly slipping) and start looking for the materials and notes that the mages wanted me to find.

  I wonder if it might not have been easier to just send Gelur or Farry in with me in a bag. That’s absolutely ridiculous. And probably would have worked fine. I just hadn’t thought of it at the time. Okay, I’m not actually very keen on being turned to stone even temporarily, although I’m sure it would be fine, so I’d need to carry them in a bag… no wait, Merry would need to de-stone them and he’d not be able to do that if he were stone. I haven’t actually tested full-sized intelligent beings inside the spatial storage yet but Jingles doesn’t seem to mind (hi Jingles). Say, Jingles could have carried us all inside in a bag! That still leaves the issue of getting out of the bag and back in action again, but–

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  “Neri?” Eran says, emerging from a portal and interrupting my train of thought. “Gadris was able to target a portal at you and get us inside.”

  Okay, that works too. Maybe Jingles could have just carried an anchor stone to aim a portal at instead. That would have been simpler. Are portable wayshrines a thing?

  There’s quite a bit of Coldharbour inside this ruin. Jagged blue-black rocks rip through walls here and there, and the Daedra have hung up chains and installed torture equipment because it’s Coldharbour and there has to be torture equipment literally everywhere. You’d think torture would eventually get old.

  We collect the materials needed for the rods we need and craft them. Gadris notes that they don’t have two separate bodies to return to and that undoing the soul-meld will kill one of them rather than both of them.

  “What, exactly, happened to the other body?” I wonder.

  “We’re not sure,” Gadris admits. “Parts of the entire ordeal are still foggy to both of us.”

  “Couldn’t we just supply another body?” I ask. “The way you two keep shifting to one another’s forms, it’s likely the same would happen with a new body, especially if I shove in a dead Daedra’s creatia. That stuff’s malleable. Especially considering that your own body is being incredibly malleable if you keep switching back and forth like you’ve been doing.”

  (Sometimes I wonder why I haven’t turned into an Orc yet, but I don’t think it works that way. It’s not like Orcs are the only ones who worship Malacath.)

  “Would that even work?” Gadris asks.

  “Alternatively, one of these Dwemer constructs would probably work, too. That may have been what the machinery was intended for in the first place. The Dwemer were more likely sticking souls into constructs rather than living bodies. It would probably have been much less problematic to be merged into a construct.”

  “This one does not think he wishes to be a Dwemer Centurion,” Zur says, being Zur now. “We do not have time to experiment, though. Likely we will only get one shot at this.”

  There’s a Light of Meridia inside the lab. The melded mages think it’s just a power crystal but I recognize it as the same thing as the others I’ve found.

  The overseer in charge of the facility is a Xivilai, and definitely a Xivilai and not a Dremora. I don’t feel the need to point out the mistake to Gadris/Zur at the moment since it’s an easy mistake to make for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time around either. They can read up on the inhabitants of Oblivion once we know whether either of them will survive this. The Xivilai in question is in lab room we need to get into, and disinclined to let us stroll by and use the equipment.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” I say, and continue at the look of confusion on his face. “I really need to have a word with you, and by a word I mean an axe. What you did to these two mages was weird and stupid and you need to knock this shit off because it’s annoying.”

  “You put a cat in that poor mer’s head,” Merry says.

  “And a mer in that poor cat’s head,” Eran adds.

  “Surely you could have found less convoluted ways to torture people to death?” Gelur says.

  We kill the Xivilai without fanfare. He doesn’t even have much chance to taunt us with stupid cliche lines.

  “Alright, let’s get this body over to the machinery before it starts to dissolve,” I say.

  Merry floats it over with a telekinesis spell. “How long does that take?”

  “Not generally very long,” I say.

  We set up the equipment to try to remove Gadris from the body he and Zur are unwittingly sharing, and put him into the Xivilai’s body. Between us all, we put together our best guesses on the correct configuration and power up the equipment with the Light of Meridia.

  “What would have happened had they tried to merge you with a living Daedra?” I wonder. “Or melded two Daedra together? Is this where Xivkyn came from?”

  “I’d rather not think about this right now,” Gadris says, getting into their own position. “Is everything set up? Let’s get this over with. Either I will be in that Daedra’s body or I will be in Aetherius shortly, regardless.”

  “Alright,” I say. “I apologize in advance if something else stupid happens because of this stupid equipment.” I put a hand on one of the levers. “Eran, get over at that other lever and pull it on three.”

  Eran nods and gets in position. I count down, and we throw the levers simultaneously. The machinery pulses to life and gives a good light show before it’s done.

  “Is everyone alright?” I ask.

  “Zur is well,” the Khajiit says. “Is Gadris…?”

  The dead Xivilai’s features have warped into the shape of a Dunmer. He groans softly and straightens. “I… yes. I feel very odd, but I seem to have survived, at least.”

  Gelur goes over to run some diagnostic spells over him. “I don’t know much about the soul, but his body seems to be alright. Improving by the minute, even.”

  “I’m not undead, am I?” Gadris asks. “No, I seem to have a heartbeat. Do I have a Daedra heart? This is so strange. Where is my notebook? I need to start making notes recording my observations.”

  I pass it over to him. “Good luck. You can at least be glad that you’re no longer a were-Khajiit.”

  “What should we go with the machinery?” Eran wonders, looking around. “If we just leave this here, will the Daedra come back and start doing horrible things again?”

  I retrieve the Light of Meridia and shove it into my pack. “They’ll need to find a new power source, if they do.”

  “It would be useful to have the equipment intact if we ever need to do something so absurd again,” Merry comments. “Normally, I would say that it’s highly unlikely that we should need it, but recent experiences suggest that it is almost guaranteed.”

  “We can’t really secure the facility though, can we?” Eran says. “It’s not far from the Hollow City but it wouldn’t make much sense to post guards here, and the equipment is hardly portable.”

  I look over the machinery consideringly. “Gadris, any chance you could just shove the whole thing through a portal? It’s not like it’s much bigger than Zur’s tent, unless there’s parts of it hidden in the walls.”

  “There’s no guaranteed that it would still work if it’s moved,” Gadris says. “But now that we’re no longer dying from a soul-meld, we can regroup with any surviving mages and see what we can do. More of us did survive, didn’t they? Our group did not fare well, but I don’t know what happened to the others. If Vanus Galerion is around, he could probably do this by himself.”

  “Some of them made it, at least,” Gelur says. “Haven’t seen any sign of Vanus Galerion, though.”

  “Maybe he stopped in to get a drink at that tavern,” Eran jokes.

  “Wherever he is, Zur is certain the Daedra will not be happy about it,” Zur says.