Elysana's First Quest

Let's get one little item straight right from the get-go. You're dealing with Tamriel's most dysfunctional family, here. Morgiah is willing to trade her first to be Queen of Firsthold, Helseth is blackmailing one of his father's counselors in order to advance his little agenda, Barenziah is completely oblivious to all of this and Eadwyre is unscrupulous in the extreme. What makes you think Elysana is going to be any different? In spite of her rather innocent appearance, don't turn your back on this babe or you'll get something pointy stuck in it.

If you are at least 6th level and have some positive rep in Wayrest Court, Elysana will send you a letter asking you to come see her. When you click on her, she will ask you to deliver a robe to Lord Castillian (why does everyone have it in for this guy?). On the surface, it's a pretty straightforward quest. Simply deliver the robe. But the robe, as you've no doubt guessed by this point, is booby trapped and you're the booby. As soon as Lord Castillian gets the robe, you'll get to fight some Daedra Seducers. There should be three of them and it can be quite a fight for a 6th level character. In one of the earlier versions of the game you could use the robe a couple of times so you would only have to fight one when you actually delivered the robe. Not so with the v.213 patch – either done’t deliver the robe or fight all three (plus a few knights who ride to Castillian’s rescue).

An “Invisibility True” spell or potion makes this fight much easier since you only have to deal with one fight at a time while the others just stand around wondering what’s going on.

Interestingly enough, when you report back to Elysana to collect your reward (a miscellaneous item of some sort), you get a comment from Helseth that Elysana’s actions made his blackmail unnecessary. Oh, well.

From a game perspective, this quest is entirely optional. You do not have to do it. But if you blow the Underking's quest, Elysana is going to be your only legitimate route to Lysandus' Tomb.

Elysana’s Second Quest

If you haven't got the picture yet, this babe is trouble with a capital "T". At some point after completing her first quest (usually about the time you hit 7th or 8th level), you'll receive a letter from her inviting you to come to Wayrest to take care of another little matter for her. The second little matter is escorting her "cousin" somewhere.

This is very straightforward. Once you accept the quest, the cousin's face will appear on your screen. Go to the designated town, find the designated person and deliver the cousin. You are supposed to deliver the cousin to a random NPC in a random town.

You might be surprised by who you get to deliver her to. I've delivered the cousin to Gortwog, Brisienna and even Elysana, herself. Some of these had all sorts of interesting quest implications since they jumped the gun and started me off on other quests a little early.

In any event, if you have not completed the Blades quest, you should start running into thugs fairly soon. One of them is supposed to have a piece of paper that will mark Lysandus' Tomb on your overland map. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.

This is probably the buggiest of the Main Quests. Although I cannot confirm this, I suspect the quest originally involved an unimplemented feature of overland travel that would generate random encounters while traveling (perhaps something along the same lines as the "Climate Survival" advantage in the character generation process). I say this because of comments that your passenger is supposed to make at various points as the quest progresses.

If the quest were to play out the way it appears it should, you should have to fight three or four sets of thugs: one set when you first pick up your passenger and leave Wayrest Castle, another set when you arrive at your destination and a third set at or about the time that you deliver your passenger to your contact. At each of these points, your passenger is supposed to make comments that would clue you in to the fact that you have been set up.

In actual fact, these comments pop up when Lord Woodborne's assassins start disturbing your rest after you locate the emperor's letter and return it to Mynisera. If you are lucky, you'll get your reward and a little extra gold for delivering your passenger safely. If you're unlucky, you'll find that the "quest from hell" won't terminate and you'll have minor problems with thugs for the rest of the game.

The only reason to take this quest is if you don't know where Lysandus is actually buried or if you get your jollies out of being hounded by people who want to kill you. If you're sitting around with nothing to do, you might want to take it just for the occasional excitement of having random assassins pop up. If you don't feel like messing with all of this, either take the Blades quest or cheat to get the location of the tomb.