So... should I try respawning this NPC through "placeatme"?

[HelloStranger]

So this has happened to nearly everyone at some point, I fast traveled to Winterhold and a dragon and vampire attack triggered at the same time, joy. So as you can probably guess a few NPCs got killed, luckily there isn't much in Winterhold so only Birna and Ranmir died. No biggy, it was easy to find them and resurrect them through clicking on them and entering into the console "resurrect 1". So I go join the college which was the reason I went there in the first place so I could get access to the higher level restoration and alteration spells. I come back and wait a few hours till Birna should've opened her shop and at around 10am with it still locked I was able to figure out something was wrong. So I used the "player.moveto" command for Birna and found her corpse around the back of the shop. I have nooo idea how she died again. So I use the "resurrect 1" on her again and she goes and stands outside her shop. I assume she was standing there since her script wanted her to have the conversation with Ranmir that they should have when you first show up at Winterhold (and this was the first time I went to Winterhold on this character.) So I'm like alright I'll go and find Ranmir then. So I use the same "player.moveto" command and I get moved to just outside the inn, and there's no Ranmir there. So I try prid his refid and use the "moveto player" command and I know it did try to move him to me, but again I couldn't see him. So I go inside the inn because who knows, maybe he's in there? And yep he isn't in there. So to test I tried to move him to me again to no avail, I leave the inn and try moving myself to him and sure enough it moved me to where I tried to move him to me.

 

So long story short Ranmir got killed somehow shortly after I resurrected him without me noticing and now his body is gone. It's still pretty sketchy to me how he died again in the first place, so I'm wondering if I should try the "placeatme" command which should summon a new copy of him. I've never used this command before because if he for some reason is still magically around somehow (I wouldn't put that nonsense past this game haha) then there'd be two of him running around with the same script and that'd be all sorts of bad. So is there another way to get him back? Or should I try doing it with the placeatme?

 

EDIT: Alright what I just tried was enabling him and then using the resurrect 1 command on him. He's back and now he and Birna are just standing there looking at eachother. I tried disabling and enabling both of them and waiting for a few hours and fast traveling to Winterhold again but they're still standing there doing nothing. Any ideas?

 

EDIT 2: So what I tried doing was reloading the save I took just as I entered Winterhold and was able to set them both as essential just before they died. However, after the battle was done they went back and just stood there staring at each other again. Wonderful, it seems that it's a one time script that happens and they can't do anything if it gets interrupted. (And with the vampire attack and dragon attack system in I honestly can't believe that it was set up like that.) So what I did was spawn a new instance of Birna in the shop and Ranmir in the inn. Turns out I can't do any of their quests if I kill off their glitched version since it registers them as dead. So now I have two of Birna and Ranmir. One pair stuck outside the shop forever. So my genius plan is to do the couple of quests associated with them asap and then kill off their duplicates and live with them being "dead."

Edited November 27, 2012 by HelloStranger