Notes From New Vegas 7
Nov. 9th, 2010 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 7: AUGH ROBOT WTF
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was trying to round up some information on the person responsible for the town sniper's wife's death as quickly as possible. Because, you know, the faster you get the man with the long-range gun the information he wants, the sooner he puts the gun away and the safer your head is. Or something like that, anyway. We are talking about someone who had to have a frontier surgeon yoink several bullets out of her skull a day or two prior to this. Janice's judgment might very well have been a teensy bit impaired.
Anyway. Most of the people she talked to in town weren't much use. Boone's late wife had been pretty and used to nicer territory than the town, and seemed very happy with Boone but unhappy with the town itself. A few people suggested she ran off. The people who actually knew Boone didn't seem to be of that particular opinion. Either way, she wasn't getting a whole lot of anything useful, and wound up doing what any intrepid Wasteland investigator would do: find the nearest doors and start opening 'em all at random until someone yelled at her, so that she'd find someone else to ask.
This was how she met Ranger Andy. Andy was an NCR Ranger, and I do mean that past tense. He had a medical retirement; apparently at some point in his past he was part of a group of Rangers sweeping Caesar's Legion forces out of a building. They found a child in one room, hiding in the closet and looking terrified, and Andy was trying to get him out of there when the kid dropped a grenade at the man's feet and then locked himself back in the closet. Apparently the Legion uses kids for that kind of thing a lot, since it makes the other side hesitate just long enough for the kids to cause trouble.
So let's see. So far the Legion does enslavement, mutilation of captured enemies, crucifixion, use of child bombers... I'd wonder why anyone would even think of joining their character up with these guys, but I've seen Grand Theft Auto's sales numbers. The mentality's out there.
At any rate, Janice tried to be encouraging and friendly with Andy, because the poor guy seemed pretty depressed about not being able to be a soldier any more and just helping keep order in town. He thanked her for being nice and gave her a good deal of information about Boone and his wife and then asked her if she would consider checking up on Ranger Station Charlie a few miles down the road if she got the chance, since he hadn't heard from them in a few days. She agreed, since she figured if she got Boone angry she'd at least have an excuse to get out of rifle range, and kept looking around town. And then screamed like a girl. Because the damn robot was there.
Seriously. Victor the cowboy robot was happily bouncing up and down on his one wheel just outside the Dino Dee-Lite. You do NOT want a shape like that calling out "Well, HOWDEE, pardner!" at you from out of the shadows. Pure heart attack from surprise potential aside, it was following her. It knew where she was. And it was happily informing her that she should really ask around and find out about the guy who shot her in the head AUGH OKAY ROBOT WHAT DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU TO MAKE YOU GO AWAY. Janice did a lot of nodding and smiling to get Vic to go away. I'm pretty sure she'd have signed over a couple of fingers or something by that point. Major creepitude, here.
After being robo-stalked by a folksy cheerful HOWDEE PARDNER robot for a couple of days, a woman needs to hear something reassuring. No-Bark Noonan was it. If you can't rely on the town crazyman to be exactly what you expect of him, who can you rely on? And it just so happens that when she started talking to No-Bark, he said something which I think a lot of us should take to heart:
"I don't trust a man that doesn't have something strange going on about him, cause that means he's hiding it from you. If a man's wearing his pants on his head or says his words backwards from time to time, you know it's all laid out there for you. But if he's friendly to strangers and keeps his home spick-and-span, more often than not it means he's done something even his own ma couldn't forgive."
Well spoken, No-Bark. Well spoken.
That wasn't all No-Bark had to say, either. He'd seen a fellow in a black and white checkered coat heading through town a few days ago, although he didn't know where he'd gone, just that he was running from extraterrestrials. (Obviously. Because the jacket was a disguise, since the aliens couldn't see that pattern. But he was just asking for trouble because he hadn't disguised his face too. See, it all makes sense.) Oh, and he'd also seen strange figures at the motel a while ago, creeping in and out in the dead of night like they knew exactly what they were going for. When they left the room one of them went into the lobby for some reason, and then left again. Who knew why? (Because they were mole-men. They coveted our women's long luxurious hair and wanted to seduce them away with riches and the latest in home appliances. Again, it all makes sense once you know!)
Well, the Benny stuff just made Janice want to run screaming into the southern Wastes and never be seen from again, but the stuff about the figures creeping into the hotel at night made her think, you know, maybe someone left something in the hotel lobby. Why not go have a look when no one was around? There wasn't anything there that really seemed to suggest anything unusual, but there was a big ol' safe in the floor...
Now, understand, Janice isn't the kind of person who normally does much stealing. Taking food from an unlocked house with no sign of ownership isn't stealing, it's using stuff before it goes bad. The way she saw it, if there was something in the safe that belonged to Boone's wife, she was allowed to get it out as long as she didn't take anything else. Or if there was proof in there of something that happened to Boone's wife. Or something. The point is that privacy and Janice go together about as well as Brahmins and chupacabras. It's a thing. More importantly, it's a thing that led her to get to work trying to crack the safe, which wasn't really all that hard because it was a two hundred year old piece of crap.
Aaaaand it had a bill of sale in it for Boone's wife, and for her unborn baby. The buyer was some Caesar's Legion muckety-much, and the seller was Jeannie May Crawford, also known as the nice old lady who ran the motel.
Biiiiiiiiiiiiitch.
Let's face it. Janice might've had qualms before about the whole 'bring someone out so I can kill them' request from Boone, but once you've read a document like that you're just itching to trot someone in front of the first sniper you can find. Janice didn't even flinch when Boone popped Jeannie May's head like a grape. It's like I said a few posts back: some folks just need killin'.
Once that was all done she went back to talk to Boone to make sure all was well and she wasn't going to get shot herself. That's the in-character reason. The out of character reason is because once this job is done you can recruit Boone to be your companion and follow you around the desert and shoot things before you even realize they're there and give you all the XP and he is AWESOME. However, I'd already played through the game with Boone once and I wanted to try something else, so instead of recruiting him Janice just told him she hoped he found some peace and went on her way. Out of town. Away from the place where one of the town's more respected citizens had just been murdered in the dead of night shortly after a total stranger arrived on the scene. Granted, running the hell away from something like that doesn't make you look good either, but when you're in a post-nuclear southwestern desert anarchy that hasn't felt the hand of a centralized government yet, leaving town is totally your best survival option. What're they going to do, leave their doors open and chase after you?
I'd go into detail about the trip to Ranger Station Charlie, but looking back on what I've got so far here it's really just kind of depressing, and the thing with Boone's wife and the slavers doesn't need any extra material to drag this whole entry down. Let's just say that Janice got there and found a lot of dead Rangers and some very nasty audiotapes from Caesar's Legion. Which she brought back to Ranger Andy immediately, because between "There was all of one witness to Jeannie May's death and he's not likely to finger me" and "Homicidal slaver maniacs who stuck proximity mines under corpses to mutilate any investigators were here a little while ago and might come back to check out their handiwork", she figured she'd take her chances with small town justice.
Or small town something, anyway; other than Cliff, the guy who ran the gift shop in the dinosaur, nobody seemed particularly perturbed about what had happened to Jeannie May. And Cliff only said anything because he took over the motel. I don't know. Like I said, nobody looked outside when Janice was running around throwing dynamite at a Nightkin. Maybe they figured they'd better just hide when they heard gunfire, and Boone gave them a story when they got up. All I know is nobody wanted to lynch Janice, which was just fine with her. Heck, Cliff gave her a room key and told her she could stay free in the room at the top of the stairs as long as she wanted, and Ranger Andy thanked her for risking her neck to bring him news and gave her some money and taught her an unarmed combat move the Rangers used to take down their enemies. So... yeah. Things worked out okay all around.
Well, except for Jeannie May, but dude, you sold an ex-Special Forces guy's pregnant wife into slavery and kept documentation to prove it. That's pretty much attempted suicide. No sympathy for you.
Anyway, you have my apologies for this entry not being particularly funny, but it did in fact play out like this. Tomorrow's entry involves ROCKETS!, however, and it's hard to go wrong with ROCKETS!. So... have patience, and things will be better tomorrow.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was trying to round up some information on the person responsible for the town sniper's wife's death as quickly as possible. Because, you know, the faster you get the man with the long-range gun the information he wants, the sooner he puts the gun away and the safer your head is. Or something like that, anyway. We are talking about someone who had to have a frontier surgeon yoink several bullets out of her skull a day or two prior to this. Janice's judgment might very well have been a teensy bit impaired.
Anyway. Most of the people she talked to in town weren't much use. Boone's late wife had been pretty and used to nicer territory than the town, and seemed very happy with Boone but unhappy with the town itself. A few people suggested she ran off. The people who actually knew Boone didn't seem to be of that particular opinion. Either way, she wasn't getting a whole lot of anything useful, and wound up doing what any intrepid Wasteland investigator would do: find the nearest doors and start opening 'em all at random until someone yelled at her, so that she'd find someone else to ask.
This was how she met Ranger Andy. Andy was an NCR Ranger, and I do mean that past tense. He had a medical retirement; apparently at some point in his past he was part of a group of Rangers sweeping Caesar's Legion forces out of a building. They found a child in one room, hiding in the closet and looking terrified, and Andy was trying to get him out of there when the kid dropped a grenade at the man's feet and then locked himself back in the closet. Apparently the Legion uses kids for that kind of thing a lot, since it makes the other side hesitate just long enough for the kids to cause trouble.
So let's see. So far the Legion does enslavement, mutilation of captured enemies, crucifixion, use of child bombers... I'd wonder why anyone would even think of joining their character up with these guys, but I've seen Grand Theft Auto's sales numbers. The mentality's out there.
At any rate, Janice tried to be encouraging and friendly with Andy, because the poor guy seemed pretty depressed about not being able to be a soldier any more and just helping keep order in town. He thanked her for being nice and gave her a good deal of information about Boone and his wife and then asked her if she would consider checking up on Ranger Station Charlie a few miles down the road if she got the chance, since he hadn't heard from them in a few days. She agreed, since she figured if she got Boone angry she'd at least have an excuse to get out of rifle range, and kept looking around town. And then screamed like a girl. Because the damn robot was there.
Seriously. Victor the cowboy robot was happily bouncing up and down on his one wheel just outside the Dino Dee-Lite. You do NOT want a shape like that calling out "Well, HOWDEE, pardner!" at you from out of the shadows. Pure heart attack from surprise potential aside, it was following her. It knew where she was. And it was happily informing her that she should really ask around and find out about the guy who shot her in the head AUGH OKAY ROBOT WHAT DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU TO MAKE YOU GO AWAY. Janice did a lot of nodding and smiling to get Vic to go away. I'm pretty sure she'd have signed over a couple of fingers or something by that point. Major creepitude, here.
After being robo-stalked by a folksy cheerful HOWDEE PARDNER robot for a couple of days, a woman needs to hear something reassuring. No-Bark Noonan was it. If you can't rely on the town crazyman to be exactly what you expect of him, who can you rely on? And it just so happens that when she started talking to No-Bark, he said something which I think a lot of us should take to heart:
"I don't trust a man that doesn't have something strange going on about him, cause that means he's hiding it from you. If a man's wearing his pants on his head or says his words backwards from time to time, you know it's all laid out there for you. But if he's friendly to strangers and keeps his home spick-and-span, more often than not it means he's done something even his own ma couldn't forgive."
Well spoken, No-Bark. Well spoken.
That wasn't all No-Bark had to say, either. He'd seen a fellow in a black and white checkered coat heading through town a few days ago, although he didn't know where he'd gone, just that he was running from extraterrestrials. (Obviously. Because the jacket was a disguise, since the aliens couldn't see that pattern. But he was just asking for trouble because he hadn't disguised his face too. See, it all makes sense.) Oh, and he'd also seen strange figures at the motel a while ago, creeping in and out in the dead of night like they knew exactly what they were going for. When they left the room one of them went into the lobby for some reason, and then left again. Who knew why? (Because they were mole-men. They coveted our women's long luxurious hair and wanted to seduce them away with riches and the latest in home appliances. Again, it all makes sense once you know!)
Well, the Benny stuff just made Janice want to run screaming into the southern Wastes and never be seen from again, but the stuff about the figures creeping into the hotel at night made her think, you know, maybe someone left something in the hotel lobby. Why not go have a look when no one was around? There wasn't anything there that really seemed to suggest anything unusual, but there was a big ol' safe in the floor...
Now, understand, Janice isn't the kind of person who normally does much stealing. Taking food from an unlocked house with no sign of ownership isn't stealing, it's using stuff before it goes bad. The way she saw it, if there was something in the safe that belonged to Boone's wife, she was allowed to get it out as long as she didn't take anything else. Or if there was proof in there of something that happened to Boone's wife. Or something. The point is that privacy and Janice go together about as well as Brahmins and chupacabras. It's a thing. More importantly, it's a thing that led her to get to work trying to crack the safe, which wasn't really all that hard because it was a two hundred year old piece of crap.
Aaaaand it had a bill of sale in it for Boone's wife, and for her unborn baby. The buyer was some Caesar's Legion muckety-much, and the seller was Jeannie May Crawford, also known as the nice old lady who ran the motel.
Biiiiiiiiiiiiitch.
Let's face it. Janice might've had qualms before about the whole 'bring someone out so I can kill them' request from Boone, but once you've read a document like that you're just itching to trot someone in front of the first sniper you can find. Janice didn't even flinch when Boone popped Jeannie May's head like a grape. It's like I said a few posts back: some folks just need killin'.
Once that was all done she went back to talk to Boone to make sure all was well and she wasn't going to get shot herself. That's the in-character reason. The out of character reason is because once this job is done you can recruit Boone to be your companion and follow you around the desert and shoot things before you even realize they're there and give you all the XP and he is AWESOME. However, I'd already played through the game with Boone once and I wanted to try something else, so instead of recruiting him Janice just told him she hoped he found some peace and went on her way. Out of town. Away from the place where one of the town's more respected citizens had just been murdered in the dead of night shortly after a total stranger arrived on the scene. Granted, running the hell away from something like that doesn't make you look good either, but when you're in a post-nuclear southwestern desert anarchy that hasn't felt the hand of a centralized government yet, leaving town is totally your best survival option. What're they going to do, leave their doors open and chase after you?
I'd go into detail about the trip to Ranger Station Charlie, but looking back on what I've got so far here it's really just kind of depressing, and the thing with Boone's wife and the slavers doesn't need any extra material to drag this whole entry down. Let's just say that Janice got there and found a lot of dead Rangers and some very nasty audiotapes from Caesar's Legion. Which she brought back to Ranger Andy immediately, because between "There was all of one witness to Jeannie May's death and he's not likely to finger me" and "Homicidal slaver maniacs who stuck proximity mines under corpses to mutilate any investigators were here a little while ago and might come back to check out their handiwork", she figured she'd take her chances with small town justice.
Or small town something, anyway; other than Cliff, the guy who ran the gift shop in the dinosaur, nobody seemed particularly perturbed about what had happened to Jeannie May. And Cliff only said anything because he took over the motel. I don't know. Like I said, nobody looked outside when Janice was running around throwing dynamite at a Nightkin. Maybe they figured they'd better just hide when they heard gunfire, and Boone gave them a story when they got up. All I know is nobody wanted to lynch Janice, which was just fine with her. Heck, Cliff gave her a room key and told her she could stay free in the room at the top of the stairs as long as she wanted, and Ranger Andy thanked her for risking her neck to bring him news and gave her some money and taught her an unarmed combat move the Rangers used to take down their enemies. So... yeah. Things worked out okay all around.
Well, except for Jeannie May, but dude, you sold an ex-Special Forces guy's pregnant wife into slavery and kept documentation to prove it. That's pretty much attempted suicide. No sympathy for you.
Anyway, you have my apologies for this entry not being particularly funny, but it did in fact play out like this. Tomorrow's entry involves ROCKETS!, however, and it's hard to go wrong with ROCKETS!. So... have patience, and things will be better tomorrow.
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Date: 2010-11-10 05:24 am (UTC)Words to live by. There are exceptions of course. Take those nice folks in Andale, for example!
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Date: 2010-11-10 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-10 09:32 am (UTC)