I speak to a member of the College called Mirabelle - she showed me round when I first arrived, in fact - and she suggests I seek out a group of wizards who may know more about the glowing orb thing which is connected to something called the Staff of Magnus. They're called the Synod and were last seen heading into a Dwemer ruin called Mzulft. Finally, a proper Dwemer expedition! I trek across to the impressive ruin, which lies to the east.
At last, I shall delve into the unknown depths of this ancient and mysterious civilization, to discover their forgotten mysteries and harness their astonishing power.
The journey through Mzluft is interesting and fairly difficult (although, everything eventually succumbs to my skeleton horde. It is inevitable). I pick up some impressive treasures (weirdly, the most lucrative is a particular poisoned Falmer bow, which fetches over 800 gold with my Dremora merchant). The Dwemer automatons guarding the ruins are fairly easy to overcome, and eventually the sprawling tunnels lurch deeper underground and I enter the foul habitat of the loathsome Falmer and their tame Chaurus monstrosities.
After a relentless assault, I eventually find myself back in the main Dwemer ruins and in something called the Oculory, where I meet a Synod mage called Paratus Decimius. The only problem is, he's in 'attack stance' and won't engage me in conversation except to say "yes?" and "hmmm?":
I clearly need to talk to him to progress with the quest, but I can't. I search online and discover that yes, there's a bug where Paratus won't talk to you and you can't carry on with the Revealing the Unseen quest. And so, after an hour battling through Mzulft, the next hour of my quest begins - how to get past this glitch.
After reading a few opinions online I have a few options to try. My last save before I met him is, somehow, all the way back at the end of Fellglow Keep, so I don't want to have to re-do the last two hours of the game. I start with the least time-consuming ideas, and engage him in combat until he's 'beaten', then hide and meet him again when he recovers. No joy. I punch him and then lower my fists. He just attacks me (and kills me pretty quickly with his spells). I surround him with skeletons and keep on 'defeating' him over and over, but he never snaps out of it. I then leave the dungeon (via the nearby exit) and wait 10 days, then re-enter; he's still there with his fists clenched in rage. I try again and wait 30 days this time (a very tedious exercise)... still no change.
Right, one more suggestion to try before I reload. I travel to Whiterun and grab the most powerful Calm spell from the secret spell chest (it "works on absolutely anyone"). I don't want to have to run all the way back through the whole dungeon, so I climb the rocky mountain back up to the 'secret hidden entrance' at the top of the ruins. This proves to be exceptionally difficult and time-consuming with lots of trial and error, and it would probably have been quicker to just run through the dungeon from the start, but I'll admit it was quite satisfying to finally get to the top by climbing.
I enter again and try the charm spell on him. It doesn't work (well, technically the spell 'works' insofar as the spell does its spell effect thing on him, and it doesn't say he's too powerful for it like it does with lower-level calm spells - but he's still in attack-stance and I still can't talk to him).
So, that's that. With all other options exhausted, I curse the name of Paratus and reload from Fellglow Keep, and just try to get back to Mzulft as quickly as possibly, breezing my way through the Midden again, and steamrolling through Mzulft with an army of summoned Frost Atronachs this time. When I reach the end, I make sure to have no summoned minions with me (in case that's what spooked him the first time) and thankfully I'm able to proceed with the quest.
I have to fix some sort of Dwemer machine with a crystal I found, which I do. Paratus turns out to be a paranoid (although, in his case, rightly so), belligerent, insufferable fool, so I kill him as soon as the quest's complete:
Good riddance to an idiotic wizard who wasted 2 hours of my life
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