I then headed into Anvil, a city of decent size with stone buildings that seemed to mix stark Grecian columnar designs with more ornate bits of architecture. I found the Fighters Guild not too far inside the walls, and signed up immediately. Some guy named Azzan declared me an Associate, and I took on my first quest assignment. It seemed simple enough: find Arvena Thelas in Anvil and take care of her rat problem. Pretty standard rat kill quest, I thought.
Back on Anvil's cobblestone streets, I checked the compass in the bottom center of my screen to figure out what direction Arvena's house was. In Oblivion, the location of whatever quest you've selected as active in the journal is marked on your map. It's also marked on your compass, and even color coded. A red arrow on your compass means the objective is indoors. In order to reach them, you'll need to first enter a building. If it's green, however, you'll know the target is outside. This should prove immensely helpful in larger cities and crowded forests.
Arvena's house wasn't far from the Guild. I found her upstairs, crying about her rats. Specifically, she was crying about how her beloved rats were being mauled by some creature in the basement. In the basement, I found Arvena's rats were being carved up by a gigantic mountain lion, who I promptly dispatched with my still-useful claymore. Arvena then tasked me with eliminating the source of the lions. I had to track down a hunter named Pinarus Inventius, who led me a little way outside the city. There, we battled against a pack of mountain lions, and were decidedly victorious. But the questline wasn't over.
Upon returning to Arvena's house to tell her the threat was eliminated, I found yet another mountain lion in her basement. After slaughtering it, Arvena told me she'd seen a neighbor, Quill-Weave, snooping around her house at night. I headed back to the streets and found the intrepid lurker. I tailed her until dark, and in the process witnessed Quill-Weave engage in several random NPC conversations, evidence of Oblivion's Radiant AI system at work. In the course of a couple hours of Oblivion game time (a few minutes in the real world), she managed to hit on a town guard and I overheard another conversation trashing Arvena for having rats in her basement. Eventually Quill-Weave snuck behind Arvena's house, placing a piece of meat near an entrance to the basement.
When I approached her, Quill-Weave explained she had no intention of luring mountain lions in, but rather thought the meat would lure the rats out. However, she offered me a bonus to my acrobatics skill if I kept it quiet. When I returned to tell Arvena I'd solved the problem, I neglected to mention Quill-Weave and got a cash reward anyway.
