New Dream Adventures of Raven Knight

I opened a portal back to the biodome, to the location beside the koi pond, figuring I would check there again before moving on to my next goal.

I wasn't sure how much of the dream I had left, so I thought I had better extend the dream before it was too late. I focused on using Allura's method of time dilation, condensed the time on the clock in my mind's eye. I didn't notice much of a change, not really anything I could clearly identify, i thought maybe that was because I hadn't been losing the dream when I did it. With that done it was time to figure out what to do next.

I waited for a short time at the koi pond, but no one showed up, and then I thought it was time to continue to my next goal, which was to share an Oblivion dream with Tigress. As we had agreed upon earlier, I opened a portal while focusing on getting to the battle arena in Imperial City, Tamriel. A portal opened and I went through it, wondering If Tigress would be waiting for me on the other side or if I might just go ahead and have an Oblivion dream on my own if she wasn't. As I emerged into Imperial City I saw that I needn't have worried about it. I spotted Tigress right away… picking the lock on the chest containing the money from people's wagers? What did she want with money? I also spotted a guard heading our direction, he would surely see her. While I had no doubt that she could handle anything the guards could bring, I didn't really want to waste the whole dream fighting off stupid Imperial guards instead of looking for an Oblivion gate to close. So I went over to the guard and asked him a typical Oblivion type question, what was going on lately. He asked if I had been living under a rock, everyone was worried about the Oblivion gate that had opened up right in front of the city. He said it was just a matter of time before the daedra came through and attacked… Tigress came over to us and said she had heard about the Oblivion gate, and we were going to close it. The guard laughed and said if it was that easy the guard would have already done it.

So Tigress and I ignored the guard laughing and headed towards the front of the city, towards the main entrance. There were guards there, and they didn't want to let us leave, they said it wasn't safe out there due to the Oblivion gate being so close to the city, so no one was being allowed to enter or leave. Tigress and I just headed for another of the exits, that one was guarded, too, it looked like they had sealed the entire city off. This wasn't a problem, Tigress and I just climbed up the side of one of the buildings, we didn't really want to start flying from the ground where it might be noticed, and then we flew over the walls to the city and landed outside.

There was no wondering where the Oblivion gate was, the eerie red light and the wilted and dying foliage clearly indicated where the gate could be found. We followed the light from that, I saw some daedra out in the distance, the Flame Atronach were clearly seen against the darker landscape, but they didn't seem to have seen us. Before long Tigress and I found ourselves at the base of a massive Oblivion gate. There were several scamps milling around, they didn't even know what had hit them before they were dead. I had my Witchblade sword. Without any hesitation we went right into the Oblivion gate, leaving Tamriel behind.

On the other side of the gate was the planes of Oblivion, which look just like I remember seeing them in the video games, although the layout of things was a bit different. There were three primary towers that were situated around the Oblivion gate, and there was a beam of energy coming from the top of each tower and feeding into the Oblivion gate. I wondered if all of those had to be stopped in order to close the gate, or would getting rid of one of them set the gate off balance and force it to close? There wasn't a lot of time to consider that, Tigress and I were attacked by more daedra, this time it was a group of Flame Atronach around us, throwing fireballs at us, Tigress and I quickly dispatched the enemies with our swords, then we headed for the nearest tower.

The interior of the tower also looked familiar, there was a winding stairway going up the tower, then there was a pillar in the middle where I could see numerous daedra stationed there to watch the stairway up. Those were sitting ducks for Tigress, she picked them off one by one with her arrows perfectly hitting their mark, piercing the necks of the daedra for the instant kill. I went ahead of Tigress, so the daedra were noticing me first, and I was fighting the ones that were actually on the stairway, I found a key on one of them that I knew we would eventually need. We made our way to the top of the tower where we found a cage with a man in it, the man was very badly burned, and when I looked closer I saw he was already dead. There was a hole in the ceiliing with a glowing light visible through it. There were also doors at both sides of the room, I checked the one closest to us and found it was locked. Sure enough, the key I had gotten off of the daedra fit the lock and the door swung open… to reveal an ambush of daedra summoners, and they summoned an ambush of scamps, and soon we found we were completely surrounded. Time to fight, run my sword through a scamp, behead a daedra summoner, slice a daedra summoner open from his left shoulder to his right hip, hit another daedra summoner with a bolt of lightning as I ran my sword through another scamp… Tigress and I fought our way through the room, killing all of the daedra in our path.

Tigress and I exited through the far side and went up another ramp to the top chamber of the tower. Reaching the top of the tower proved to be actually rather anti-climatic, there weren't even more of the usual daedra enemies let alone something that would qualify as a boss. The sigil stone was there, however, and there was a beam of energy shooting out of one of the windows towards the Oblivion gate down below. Tigress reached over and grasped the sigil stone, pulling it out of its place. The beam of energy to the Oblivion gate ceased, but the other two remained, seeming to be unaffected. I was looking at the energy from the Oblivion gate when it started going unstable, but before I could say anything about it Tigress had already spoken, saying the gate was going to explode if the other beams weren't stopped. That could either successfully close the gate or it might blast a permanent hole in the dimensional fabric and give the daedra a permanent access to Tamriel. So to make sure it didn't lead to that, I flew towards one of the other towers while Tigress flew towards the other one.

I reached the tower rather quickly by flying, entering through the same opening the energy beam was coming out of. The daedra must have seen me flying towards the tower, as there were a bunch of them in the top chamber waiting for me. I didn't want to take the time for all of them, however, the gate was getting more unstable all the time, so I used Enter Sandman in the room, the spiral pulled all of the daedra into it and then exploded, destroying the daedra in a large blast of dark and light flames. I hurried in and grabbed the sigil stone, causing the stream of energy from it to cease. I looked out of the tower at the Oblivion gate just in time to see the other beam also cease, and now the gate collapsed. I wondered if this gate wasn't so nice as to deposit people from Tamriel back in Tamriel, not that it would be a problem for Tigress and me, but it could be annoying for anyone trying to fight the daedra… A wave of energy came from the gate and washed over everything, a blinding light, and then Tigress and I were both in mid air… but for some reason we lowered to the ground slowly and landed gently on the ground. Nothing was left of the Oblivion gate but a hole in the ground, and I could see a lot of amazed Imperial guards standing around staring at us. I was going to say something to Tigress, but she disappeared. My time to go, too. I opened a portal back to the koi pond, not sure how much longer the dream would last, I just didn't want to try to explain things to the guards. I got back in time to take one more look to see if anyone was waiting for me at the koi pond before I woke.