Here's an observation, though, for what it's worth: With Michael so underpowered, and any kind of power up slow and expensive, he's effectively railroaded to stay in civilized areas and means of transport. His only asset is his knowledge of the game, which becomes more obsolete every game day, and which he has to be careful not to share too much. If I was playing this forum game, I'd wonder exactly how I was supposed to make a difference in the world.
To be honest, after reading the whole thread, it seems clear to me that Michael was not meant to power up, especially considering the GM's desired time scale: he was meant I think to use his knowledge of the game to track and influence events, to maybe clue in one side or the others to better change their fate.
While leveling for us is more difficult than a normal Morrowind character, the issue isn't that we're incapable, it's that we've never tried.
I mean, think of what we did on arriving. Faffed about with some mushrooms, realized we're not an alchemist, and then went straight to Vivec to blather at him about everything we know. From there, we went back to Seyda Neen, stole some stuff, faffed about with trying to complete quests we knew of, and eventually gave up and joined the Legion. Then we got to blather about the genocide at Khuul, which led to us blathering at Cosades, which got us out of the Legion, which led to us blathering at Fyr.
We have tried a
few combat quests, and battled or at least been struck by a few things on the road, but for the most part our game plan has consisted of running around talking to people and using our game knowledge like a truncheon. The only skills we've had an interest in have been either from automated Legion training or problematically magical in nature.
If we'd tried to be a normal Morrowind character, we'd have had it rough owing to our abysmal starting skills and attributes. But we'd still have been able to improve, and that would have made further improvement easier. That's what I'd like us to try now- going out and fighting rats or whatever to improve so future rats aren't so dangerous to us.
As we have found out, our knowledge is useless as nobody in a position of power who could actually do anything useful with it is willing to listen to the ramblings of a poor, low skill, mad outsider. We need a powerful and open minded ally to manage that, and short of.... erm, Aryon or Diviath Fyr, there aren't really any. I suppose we could always try our luck with the gods, but that would probably end badly, other than Azura, but contacting her would be a major pain in the ass at this stage.
This isn't the issue either. Plenty of people have listened to us, and really most of them believed us. The issue is that we've been using it because when all we have is a hammer, not because we thought it would produce an effective result.
Consider Vivec. We told him all about
everything. Why? If the answer was "he's a good guy and so might be able to stop horrible things from happening," then I guess it probably worked. If the answer is "oh man yeah we should totally use our knowledge," uh. We did indeed say the things to the guy, so mission accomplished. If the plan was "it'll help us," I guess it kind of succeeded anyway, but that's not actually a plan.
Or the Balmora murderer. We knew who had done it, but we didn't really have a coherent plan for taking advantage of the fact. We tried anyway, and so unsurprisingly were butchered like a pig.
We've had plenty of partial successes or neat side benefits to using our knowledge, but we've had some difficulty benefiting from or affecting anything with it because we've seldom had a plan to do so. It's like if we had maxxed combat stats coming in here, and so decided to take advantage of that fact by killing everything in sight. Would that make things better? Probably, at least in a few cases... but you wouldn't have much sympathy for someone wandering around the grazelands one-shotting everything while complaining that stats really don't help much.
Again, we're not quite equipped to get to Azura's shrine right now. There's a lot of swimming and climbing, not to mention a trip through Malog Amur.
Yeah, this. Plus, why would we want to talk to Aryon again? The shrine at least has
some potential for Azura to say "Michael what are you doing, go to Balmora and talk to Clover." Other than being Sexy's patron, I don't see what Aryon's got to offer us, nevermind how we're going to
get to him. Telvanni, remember.
On that note, I'll officialize my vote as
teleport back to Balmora and start meandering to Pelagiad. Stop by the side of the road to empty your magicka casting Fleabite, then fight anything along the way that won't murder us. Also collect alchemy reagents. Return to Balmora to rest if sufficiently injured. DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!