Lynne Simpson

In the game of Oblivion, one of the Daedric quests involves playing a prank on Alessia Caro, the stuffy countess of Leyawiin. (I didn’t mind doing it to her — she tortures Argonians for fun, the bitch.) The quest involves casting the spell Stark Reality on the countess and her dinner guests, which causes them to lose all their clothes, down to their skivvies. They and the guards then try to kill you.

Someone has recorded a home movie of his/her experience with Sanguine’s quest and set it to a Breaking Benjamin song. The real action doesn’t get underway for about 80 seconds. I wish it was higher resolution — maybe I’ll do a version of my own with Fraps. A couple of highlights: the dreamy expression on the count’s face (he’s the balding guy in black), and the naked guy who hops over the table.

I ran through the quest a couple of times to test a quirk someone mentioned in the UespWiki walkthrough I already linked to. Basically, if you follow the countess back to her suite, she will forget to put her clothes on again, and she never does remember, for the rest of the game. You’ll see her walking around in the countryside, holding court in the main hall, and having dinner — in her bra and panties. I haven’t crawled deep enough into the scripts to figure out why this is. Another bizarre thing that happened during my tests was that the countess abruptly took an unplanned trip, bodyguard in tow, to her mother’s castle in Chorrol. She takes a monthly trip there, but this happened on a different date from her regularly scheduled visit. She is supposed to go on horseback, but in this case, she just took off walking, in the middle of the night in her underwear. I felt kind of bad (yes, games do this to you!) because she didn’t have her armor or weapons with her, and she and her bodyguard kept getting attacked by bandits and wild creatures. I ended up walking with them all the way from Leyawiin to Chorrol. If I didn’t go with them, they usually wound up dead.

Drat them — I saved their lives HOW many times, but her disposition toward me was zero, anyway! I still had a bounty at that time from having “attacked” the countess and her dinner party, so I couldn’t talk to her bodyguard at all without getting the “Stop right there, lawbreaker!” speech.

When you complete the quest, the spell is removed from your list, but I’m sure someone’s written a mod to add it back. One thing I did notice in the script for the quest is that the spell only affects the countess and her four guests. Everyone else is immune, apparently. Personally, I think it would be fun to change that. But then again, characters in Oblivion have no sense of their own nudity, so it’d only be fun for about thirty seconds before it got boring. That’s another nitpick I have with Oblivion — nobody notices if you’re walking around in your underwear. Oh, and nobody cares if you hop around like a bunny rabbit everywhere you go, either. You can increase your Acrobatics score by hopping as you run, but gads, must it ever look stupid!