Skyrim player mourns loss of his virtual companion

Rock Paper Shotgun has a funny, heartwarming story of a Skyrim player accidentally killing a member of his party, and then throwing her up a hill and into a coffin, and then burying her after unsuccessfully trying to revive her. The entire thing is great, but here’s the death in question:

I returned to the site of the fight, a very steep mountain slope with a ruin at the top and bottom. The fight had started at the top, but it seemed likely Lydia would be somewhere near the base. Jenassa, in her actually-more-useless-than-Lydia status, couldn’t even figure out a path from the lower ruin to the slope, so left me alone for most of the search. And at this point I realised that I genuinely cared. Which was ridiculous.

Well, returning to the scene of a fight where a pointlessly unhelpful companion might have died to find her body was pretty bloody ridiculous. So I guess caring about it, even feeling a chill when I spotted a corpse, running up to it and realising it was a bandit, and then feeling relief – well, I’d already gone far too far down that road to be finding this especially troubling.

Mid-search I was attacked by a chancer group of punk-haired Bandits, who didn’t understand the solemnity of the occasion, and only added to the numbers of false corpses that made me gasp. I was gulping, running over, and feeling relief, each time the hope that maybe she was fine. Is that…? No, it’s okay. Is that…?

I saw yet another bandit body, went down to double-check, andohmygod.

There she was. Dead. At the bottom of the slope. I’d killed her.

To be honest, I had a similar experience in Fable 3 where I had to either kill my in-game girlfriend or sacrifice an entire village. I killed the girl. I still haven’t gotten over it.

-Drew Millard

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