#all of the above is hinted at but this one ain't official canon lol afaik

[mareenavee]

An Illusion of Competence

Hehehe. SURPRISE! Happy early birthday, @kookaburra1701! Chaos weekend here, and I channeled that energy into a chaos thief Orc, Luzrah gro-Shar. She's amazing, and I love her. Thank you for the brainwyrm! She didn't even have a tag, you know lol that's how much of a shell she was. We love a good shell NPC! I can't wait to see what you do with her in your fic universe!!!!!!! 🤩

without further ado:

An Illusion of Competence

Shit. No. This couldn’t be right! How could they possibly have found her already? Who would even think to go looking for her in this hellhole slum of the city, anyway? Damn it, but if she didn’t get out of this, Vex was going to be so pissed off at her for royally screwing up this job over almost nothing—you know, just like the last one. She couldn’t help herself—the opportunity was right there, and who cared if pickpocketing wasn’t supposed to be the task at hand? The Guild needed the gold desperately, didn’t it? Ugh. Distractions aplenty, unfortunately.

Luzrah gro-Shar snuck around the corner of the Grey Quarter, pulling the hood of her cloak up to cover her very obvious flame-red hair, trying and failing to blend in with a passing crowd of Dunmer. No matter where she went, she didn’t quite fit in, so this was nothing new. She was taller and stronger than most Nords, for one, and green, for another—which caused all kinds of people to stare at her in open disgust. That, and she was a bard, more or less. Or—she could be, given practice. She carried a lute around and everything. It wasn’t what Orcs were known for, generally speaking—she’d only ever met one other who also happened to be a bard, and he was…yeah, he was not a good singer, to put it bluntly. She could at least carry a tune in a bucket, but the bucket was, technically, rusty and full of holes—you can take that as you will. It certainly said a lot more about her thin cover story the closer anyone looked, but now was not the time for worrying over that—it had served its purpose perfectly fine. That is, until now.

She sighed as the sound of the guards clattering along in their Stormcloak blues echoed off of the ancient stone walls. Windhelm, as unforgiving and cold as ever, was nothing but a patch of clear ice over here in the Grey Quarter. Figures. Luzrah wasn’t any stranger to the weather this far north, but she was not dressed for this kind of sport. She struggled to keep her balance as she slid down a slight incline in boots made more for trudging through mud in the Strongholds rather than through all this abysmal weather. Malacath’s toenails, but she wished these imbecile guards would give up already! Her legs ached as she turned a corner and then another, ending up in the market outside of the Alchemist’s shop, mind racing and looking for an escape route. Did they need a bard? It was possible. If she slowed down and acted natural, maybe it would—no. Nope, it wasn’t—she’d tried that in Candlehearth, where it made sense at least, and look where it got her. You’d think she’d learn to work around the misfortune by now, but of course not, otherwise she wouldn’t be in this mess. She could, at least, attempt to lose them. As far as she’d known, they hadn’t seen her face yet.-> Read the rest on AO3!