Last time Fault found herself completely broke and stuck on a tiny island. Fortunately since Alteration was one of our starting skills we began the game with “Water walk” and several repeated casts let Fault reach the mainland. Unfortunately the part of the mainland she reaches is volcano territory and infested with Cliff Racers, one of which has fantasy rabies and manages to infect her. Fault is really in no shape to cross a volcano in search of town so instead she carves one teleport spell worth of alchemy ingredients from the corpses of the cliff racers and then water walks back to the island town.
The one bit of good news is that all that water walking finally bumped her alteration score up to 40! She can rank up at the mages guild now and tries to do so when she first teleports into Balmora.
Except it turns out that to reach the next level she has to pay 200 gold worth of dues. Considering that the last person to skip out on dues had a murderous protagonist sent after them we put that on the top of our list of things to do.
So, still suffering from a horrible disease, Fault stumbles back to the cleared out dwarven ruins and loads her pockets up with all the heavy but semi-valuable gears and chunks of scrap she ignored on her first trip. It’s not worth terribly much but she only needs a few hundred gold to get her disease cured at the local temple and then pay for her advancement.
That said it’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for poor Fault, having to hike several miles with two hundred pounds of scrap metal thrown over her back and a bad case of fantasy flu.
Or possibly a marine if half the stories they tell are true.