I moved my focus after that to archery and started actually turning a profit from my alchemical work. My stuff was adequate for selling according to Elgrim but nothing to write home about. I still failed more often than not but I tended to recoup my losses from those attempts with my successes. Most successful potions were after all worth usually double the value of their ingredients if not much more based on the purity and skill behind the brew. I still had trouble isolating the individual essences of the ingredients which meant some of my potions had side effects.-
Nothing lethal but redundant effects that took away from the overall potency was common. My most successful potion to date was a mix of blue mountain flower, wheat, tomato and charred Skeever hide. All incredibly cheap and common ingredients that all shared health restoration as a property. The potion had restore health, fortify health, resist poison and damage stamina regen effects. Three positive and one negative effects was really VERY good for a newbie in the field. I was still working on taking the negative effect out but I had been making progress there by trying to swap it with the restore stamina property that charred Skeever hide and tomato had.-
If I could manage that I would have my first "perfect" potion recipe. A milestone achievement for all alchemist according to Elgrim. Anyways with me no longer actively hemorrhaging money as fast as I got it I could start saving up finally. Archery was once again something I picked up from the holds guards that were required to learn it to a degree. They weren't sharpshooters or anything but they at least could use bows at an appropriate range of thirty yards semi-accurately.-
There wasn't much to archery training beyond how to knock and arrow, draw the bow without hurting yourself and retrieve the arrow after it was shot. After learning that it was mostly just aiming and figuring out how to hit something far away with angles. Not math exactly but more understanding how far an arrow will fly before hitting the ground at whichever position you hold the bow and then adjusting to hit the target. Usually it was just a matter of raising the bow slightly before releasing the arrow. Took me about six months of training to be able to semi-accurately hit a target with both hands from a twenty yard distance.-
That equated to a twenty six skill level in archery. Basic perhaps but I wasn't exactly planning on specializing with a bow so good enough. Finally I moved on to blacksmithing. I pestered Balimund to learn from him but he refused to teach me for free so I ended up paying for lessons there too. It was annoying to lose ninety percent of all my money learning but I choked it down while thinking about the future. I had plans to counter the dragons that required this knowledge in particular.-
I had looked into and it turned out for some inexplicable reason beyond the dwemer there was almost no attempts at making ballistae for city defense. I sort of understood why since magic was a thing and a large stationary weapon like that would be prime targets if an army moved on the city but at the same time it was so wasteful. Ballistae were phenomenal weapons for both siege defense and anti-aerial defense. Additionally unlike in the game where a dragon attack on a city might kill some people without destroying the city before the beast was taken down by arrows I knew reality would be VERY different.-
Why? Lore! Unlike the game dragons weren't stupid beasts that would carelessly attack in predictable patterns and could be fought off with mere normal bows and arrows. These were sentient things in reality and had scales so hard most arrows would ricochet off rather than actually do any damage. Also most of the buildings in Skyrim were made of wood so it should be easy to figure out what strafing runs of fire would accomplish. Ironically the most prepared city in Skyrim for a dragon attack was Markarth since it was literally all made of stone and metal.-
Also unlike the games dragons weren't limited in what shouts they could use with the exception of only two. Dragonrend, which was conceptually antithetical to dragons and Bend will, that was created by Hermaeus Mora supposedly and thus unknown to them. Other than those two they could use all the others and probably even more that weren't in the game because it was a game and had restrictions on it. The scary thing about dragons wasn't their ability to fly or their armored hides or brutal strength, it was that innate mastery of language they held.-
A clever dragon could use a shout to accomplish nearly whatever their hearts desired. They want to unleash and inferno? Done. How about a blizzard? No problem. Meteor storm? Barely any effort. And unlike almost anyone currently alive I understood this horror and that it IS coming. It was kinda debated whether or not Alduin(big bad in the game) resurrected dragons from outside Skyrim or if it was just the ones here he got but I was willing to bet he probably got the ones all over the world.-
The reason for this confidence was because it made sense. If the big black bastard was trying to reestablish his dominion over the world then it only makes sense he'd get as much of the world as he could covered with his kin. Skyrim might have been the seat of the dragons empire in the Merethic era(right after the dawn of time) but it supposedly covered the entire world. Maybe Alduin gets his shit rocked before he can leave Skyrim in the game because the Dragonborn is just that badass but since I live here now I wasn't going to gamble on one person.-
No one else was going to prep for the return of the dragons so it was up to me to do it, I had my work cut out for me to say the least. And as if that wasn't bad enough I had no idea if I was the dragonborn or not. I sincerely hoped not but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was true. Anyways that depressing thought aside learning metal work was not fun. First and foremost was that there were a BUNCH of different materials that went into it.-
There were alloys that changed appearances, flexibility, hardness and so on. Then you had your special tempering materials that made the finished products better somehow. Then you had your actually smelting, smithing and polishing processes. There was SO many details to keep track of that it was like learning all the alchemical ingredients and their uses all over again, metal edition.