I’m not sure whether I should be feeling like a cheat or congratulating myself on my cunning and skill.

I did a mission a couple of nights ago that was pretty much beyond my capabilities. Enemies that I could just about kill one-on-one, but more than one and I was dead.

No spoilers, but it was just a “get item and get out mission”, though, so I found a way.

First up, part of the mission involved swimming through an underground passage. Just after it I ran into some horrible great bastard with a great big sword and eyes like a hawk. I ran. He followed me back to the underwater passage.

He followed me into it.

He didn’t follow me out. I used a Detect Life spell and couldn’t see him. So I gingerly edged forwards as slowly as I could with a diminishing oxygen bar and found his corpse floating by the ceiling. Seems he needs to breathe, too.

So the next few minutes involved me waving at enemies and then running away and diving into the water laughing to myself as they followed. Killed a couple more that way, but after that the enemies wouldn’t follow me back that far.

So I ran past them. I ran and I ran and got to the end, where the item I needed to steal was. Up some stairs, hammering my heal spell, a huge leap over a massive gap, into a room, picked up the item I needed, leapt on to a desk, back over the heads of the enemies that had followed me in and all the way back through the “dungeon” and out into the open air.

All that practice jumping over the rooftops of Brauma and the Waterfront paid off.

After that it was an easy matter to find my way back to my contact. I was torn between feeling cunning and cool (and some of that jumping was just excellent) in a Zorro type way and feeling like I’d somehow done it “wrong” and should have killed all the enemies like in a normal RPG. Even the “boss” was still alive, probably wondering what the hell had just happened.

But my very, very favourite so far was stealing an item from someone’s bedroom while they were asleep and then causally picking up an apple from their fruit bowl on the way to the door. I just felt so much like a movie-style cheeky kind of rogue.

I fell asleep on the train on the way home from London and dreamt about Oblivion. And I’m dreaming about it every night.