![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 18: Possibly Not The Best Overlap Ever
When last we saw our heroines Janice and Veronica were setting out for Hidden Valley with ED-E the Eyebot in tow. I will not bother going over everything that happened on their trip except to say that OH MY GOD SCORPIONS. Seriously, they managed to approach the Brotherhood hidden bunker in such a way that SCORPIONS EVERYWHERE. Mostly just the slightly squishy bark kind but the regular radscorpions appeared in serious numbers as well. Just. Scorpions. Yfgh.
Anyway, Hidden Valley was basically a lot of rolling landscape with a couple of bunker doors sticking out of a few hillsides, all of them decorated with anti-war graffiti. The bunker interior looked to be just a flight of stairs down into a storage room with a locked door at the far end, but really, since when was anything in this stupid universe what it looked like? Janice sat back while Ronnie found the intercom and placed an order for an atomic shake and brahmin burgers, and was not the least bit surprised when the answer came in the most exasperated voice she'd heard all week. Shortly thereafter they were talking to a man in serious power armor who was carrying a big damn gun- Janice had no way of recognizing it, but I went 'Gauss rifle! SQUEE!', as that was just about my favourite weapon in Fallout 3. He introduced himself as Paladin Ramos, head of security, and said very firmly that Janice and Ronnie were to go and see the elder now plzkthx. Given that, you know, big damn gun and big damn armor outweigh quite a lot of other arguments, Janice decided to do what the nice man said.
First things first: Elder McNamara was a very calm, very level-headed fellow who made it clear that he did not like outsiders in the bunker. As a matter of fact the bunker had been on lockdown for years because he did not want outsiders messing with things and he feared what the forces of other factions might wind up doing. However, he felt that the Brotherhood needed some help with things and wanted to contract with Janice to get certain services accomplished on the surface; would she be willing to help? Janice said sure, why not, figuring that it was probably better to be on the side of the people with the big guns even if they did put their supreme leader in robes. Considering that Ronnie wore robes and turned out to be capable of making things explode when she punched them, Janice was not about to make fun of a guy in a dress.
However, the fourth wall shortly started to bulge and get strained, because Veronica's quest kinda conflicts in tone with what McNamara was saying. Veronica walked up to the Elder and told him that her mission on the surface was going okay but seriously dude we need to talk there's so much going on there's so many things we need to know and interact with and participate in plz plz plz you have to see reason and open up and change and ARGH why are you not LISTENING we need to LIFT THE LOCKDOWN okay you know what you suck.
So... first McNamara asks an outsider to lend a hand, and then because Ronnie is the one doing the asking, he says the outside and its people hold nothing that the Brotherhood is interested in. Ya-huh. No offense, Bethesda or Obsidian or whoever programmed that part, but one of y'all needs to rethink the quest path a bit. Anyway. The best reconciliation I could do involved McNamara being really hard up for supplies and reluctantly contracting with an outsider to get them in the hopes that filching from the outside world would mean not having to sustain any kind of real contact with it, and then being pressed on his stance made him grouchier and more hardline when he talked to Ronnie.
At any rate Janice and Ronnie left the Elder, Janice trying to figure out how to tell Veronica that she'd agreed to do some scutwork for the Elder. Before she could open her mouth Veronica pulled her into a side corridor. She said she would've punched the man, but he stood at her parents' wedding, and that he meant well but he just didn't see reason. She wanted to try and convince McNamara that the outside world had tech and development that the Brotherhood really needed to see and that she knew how to start. Before McNamara, their Elder had been a man named Father Elijah, who was seriously obsessed with tech- he'd been the one to lead the Brotherhood at HELIOS One. He'd never been seen after the NCR battle for the solar plant but he'd been like a father to Veronica before that and he'd left some notes and she was just sure they could use them to find something that would force McNamara to open his eyes. Could they go find his terminal pleeeeeez?
.... okay, well, why not. The errand McNamara wanted Janice to run involved finding some Brotherhood patrols that had gone missing; maybe they could do a sweep to look for them in the process. That sounded as good as anything else.
On their way out the door the two of them got jumped by another guy in armor. Paladin Hardin didn't really like outsiders roaming around loose but he wanted to talk to Janice anyway. He didn't like the way McNamara was leading the bunker's people and he wanted to find a way to oust him for the good of the Brotherhood and couldn't really do it himself because people would notice but nobody really blamed outsiders for asking questions and would Janice help him yadda yadda etc. Janice did not want to get into Brotherhood internal politics, but also wanted to get out and get the hell away from this man who just assumed she'd fall into line with his wonderful wonderfulness, so she told him yes, sure, if she got the chance she'd ask about how you went about getting rid of elders, could she please go now. He thanked her, and she and Ronnie headed on out.
Father Elijah's terminal full of notes, it turned out, was in a shack outside the scrapyard in Novac. He'd left three incredibly promising technology leads on it. Unfortunately, the first one was 'HELIOS One- I bet it is WEPON!', which, ahahaha, no. And the second was 'Vault 22! INCREDIBLE FARMING TECH!', which, again, ahahaha, no. So they were stuck with pursuing option #3: something called a pulse gun. Apparently it was a handheld EMP generator that could kill most robots in a single hit and disable power armor like you wouldn't believe. Given that the Brotherhood's signature technology is power armor, this would obviously be a matter of interest. Right, then. Pulse gun it was. Father Elijah's notes indicated the pulse gun was last seen at Nellis Air Force Base, away up north. That was kind of useful given that McNamara had said one of the Brotherhood patrols they'd lost had gone towards Nellis. Janice was glad there was that much overlap, at least.
However, the other two patrols they had to find were closer than that, so they were just going to have to look for them first. The first one was lost somewhere near Black Mountain- home of the crazypants radio signal. At least it gave them something to home in on.... and at least the Brotherhood guys weren't actually up the mountain. That was the last good thing about that trip. For one, the paladins' last known location turned out to be in the middle of a massively irradiated crater of ick. For another, the area was chock full of centaurs, which are just about the skeeviest thing FEV has ever done to a human (other than Richard "The Master" Grey) and left them alive.
I will now pause to describe the centaurs, because some of y'all haven't played Fallout 1 or 2 and others haven't played any of these games. Remember that history lesson on the Brotherhood of Steel and how they were Army guys who revolted upon finding out about live human experiments? The experiments were 'What happens if we dunk people in this massively icky batch of a virus that was developed as a biowar countermeasure? .... ooh, they get BIG AND GREEN AND DANGEROUS. Suh-weeet.' They had previously been done with animals, producing critters that were bigger and smarter and tougher, but also stood a chance of freakish deformation and other unpleasant things. At some point someone started hucking multiple test subjects, animals and humans alike, into the vats at the same time. A lot of test subjects died. Sometimes they wound up getting physically merged together. Please don't ask me how, they never explained it and I really don't want to have to think it through. In Fallout 1 and 2 the centaurs were the result of sticking humans and dogs in the vats at the same time, and they still had both heads. In Fallout 3, the centaurs were more nightmarish- upright human torso with no arms and three massive tongues and teeth growing out of the chest, jammed at a 90 degree angle into a second torso, which had no legs but walked on four arms. Oh, and they spit, and it is radioactive and awful.
These are what was swarming the site where Janice and Veronica found the dead paladins. Guh. I don't think Janice was ever so glad to kill things in her life, because if killing any enemy in the Wasteland is more of a mercy kill than just an act of violence, it's killing a centaur. They scrambled into the crater, grabbed the paladins' dog tags, mission notes, and guns and armor, and ran. Burial was just not an option, not with the way Janice's Geiger counter was going off, and neither of them had energy weapons to ash the guys' bodies with. On the other hand, the armor could be useful once it was decontaminated. Janice didn't have the training to wear power armor without breaking her own limbs, but Veronica did, and the paladins' laser rifles were pretty nice in case Veronica ever needed to shoot something rather than punch it.
It didn't seem like a good idea to go back to Hidden Valley just yet, so Janice figured they'd head on up to the next place a patrol had been lost- REPCONN corporate headquarters, on the fringes of the New Vegas area.
When last we saw our heroines Janice and Veronica were setting out for Hidden Valley with ED-E the Eyebot in tow. I will not bother going over everything that happened on their trip except to say that OH MY GOD SCORPIONS. Seriously, they managed to approach the Brotherhood hidden bunker in such a way that SCORPIONS EVERYWHERE. Mostly just the slightly squishy bark kind but the regular radscorpions appeared in serious numbers as well. Just. Scorpions. Yfgh.
Anyway, Hidden Valley was basically a lot of rolling landscape with a couple of bunker doors sticking out of a few hillsides, all of them decorated with anti-war graffiti. The bunker interior looked to be just a flight of stairs down into a storage room with a locked door at the far end, but really, since when was anything in this stupid universe what it looked like? Janice sat back while Ronnie found the intercom and placed an order for an atomic shake and brahmin burgers, and was not the least bit surprised when the answer came in the most exasperated voice she'd heard all week. Shortly thereafter they were talking to a man in serious power armor who was carrying a big damn gun- Janice had no way of recognizing it, but I went 'Gauss rifle! SQUEE!', as that was just about my favourite weapon in Fallout 3. He introduced himself as Paladin Ramos, head of security, and said very firmly that Janice and Ronnie were to go and see the elder now plzkthx. Given that, you know, big damn gun and big damn armor outweigh quite a lot of other arguments, Janice decided to do what the nice man said.
First things first: Elder McNamara was a very calm, very level-headed fellow who made it clear that he did not like outsiders in the bunker. As a matter of fact the bunker had been on lockdown for years because he did not want outsiders messing with things and he feared what the forces of other factions might wind up doing. However, he felt that the Brotherhood needed some help with things and wanted to contract with Janice to get certain services accomplished on the surface; would she be willing to help? Janice said sure, why not, figuring that it was probably better to be on the side of the people with the big guns even if they did put their supreme leader in robes. Considering that Ronnie wore robes and turned out to be capable of making things explode when she punched them, Janice was not about to make fun of a guy in a dress.
However, the fourth wall shortly started to bulge and get strained, because Veronica's quest kinda conflicts in tone with what McNamara was saying. Veronica walked up to the Elder and told him that her mission on the surface was going okay but seriously dude we need to talk there's so much going on there's so many things we need to know and interact with and participate in plz plz plz you have to see reason and open up and change and ARGH why are you not LISTENING we need to LIFT THE LOCKDOWN okay you know what you suck.
So... first McNamara asks an outsider to lend a hand, and then because Ronnie is the one doing the asking, he says the outside and its people hold nothing that the Brotherhood is interested in. Ya-huh. No offense, Bethesda or Obsidian or whoever programmed that part, but one of y'all needs to rethink the quest path a bit. Anyway. The best reconciliation I could do involved McNamara being really hard up for supplies and reluctantly contracting with an outsider to get them in the hopes that filching from the outside world would mean not having to sustain any kind of real contact with it, and then being pressed on his stance made him grouchier and more hardline when he talked to Ronnie.
At any rate Janice and Ronnie left the Elder, Janice trying to figure out how to tell Veronica that she'd agreed to do some scutwork for the Elder. Before she could open her mouth Veronica pulled her into a side corridor. She said she would've punched the man, but he stood at her parents' wedding, and that he meant well but he just didn't see reason. She wanted to try and convince McNamara that the outside world had tech and development that the Brotherhood really needed to see and that she knew how to start. Before McNamara, their Elder had been a man named Father Elijah, who was seriously obsessed with tech- he'd been the one to lead the Brotherhood at HELIOS One. He'd never been seen after the NCR battle for the solar plant but he'd been like a father to Veronica before that and he'd left some notes and she was just sure they could use them to find something that would force McNamara to open his eyes. Could they go find his terminal pleeeeeez?
.... okay, well, why not. The errand McNamara wanted Janice to run involved finding some Brotherhood patrols that had gone missing; maybe they could do a sweep to look for them in the process. That sounded as good as anything else.
On their way out the door the two of them got jumped by another guy in armor. Paladin Hardin didn't really like outsiders roaming around loose but he wanted to talk to Janice anyway. He didn't like the way McNamara was leading the bunker's people and he wanted to find a way to oust him for the good of the Brotherhood and couldn't really do it himself because people would notice but nobody really blamed outsiders for asking questions and would Janice help him yadda yadda etc. Janice did not want to get into Brotherhood internal politics, but also wanted to get out and get the hell away from this man who just assumed she'd fall into line with his wonderful wonderfulness, so she told him yes, sure, if she got the chance she'd ask about how you went about getting rid of elders, could she please go now. He thanked her, and she and Ronnie headed on out.
Father Elijah's terminal full of notes, it turned out, was in a shack outside the scrapyard in Novac. He'd left three incredibly promising technology leads on it. Unfortunately, the first one was 'HELIOS One- I bet it is WEPON!', which, ahahaha, no. And the second was 'Vault 22! INCREDIBLE FARMING TECH!', which, again, ahahaha, no. So they were stuck with pursuing option #3: something called a pulse gun. Apparently it was a handheld EMP generator that could kill most robots in a single hit and disable power armor like you wouldn't believe. Given that the Brotherhood's signature technology is power armor, this would obviously be a matter of interest. Right, then. Pulse gun it was. Father Elijah's notes indicated the pulse gun was last seen at Nellis Air Force Base, away up north. That was kind of useful given that McNamara had said one of the Brotherhood patrols they'd lost had gone towards Nellis. Janice was glad there was that much overlap, at least.
However, the other two patrols they had to find were closer than that, so they were just going to have to look for them first. The first one was lost somewhere near Black Mountain- home of the crazypants radio signal. At least it gave them something to home in on.... and at least the Brotherhood guys weren't actually up the mountain. That was the last good thing about that trip. For one, the paladins' last known location turned out to be in the middle of a massively irradiated crater of ick. For another, the area was chock full of centaurs, which are just about the skeeviest thing FEV has ever done to a human (other than Richard "The Master" Grey) and left them alive.
I will now pause to describe the centaurs, because some of y'all haven't played Fallout 1 or 2 and others haven't played any of these games. Remember that history lesson on the Brotherhood of Steel and how they were Army guys who revolted upon finding out about live human experiments? The experiments were 'What happens if we dunk people in this massively icky batch of a virus that was developed as a biowar countermeasure? .... ooh, they get BIG AND GREEN AND DANGEROUS. Suh-weeet.' They had previously been done with animals, producing critters that were bigger and smarter and tougher, but also stood a chance of freakish deformation and other unpleasant things. At some point someone started hucking multiple test subjects, animals and humans alike, into the vats at the same time. A lot of test subjects died. Sometimes they wound up getting physically merged together. Please don't ask me how, they never explained it and I really don't want to have to think it through. In Fallout 1 and 2 the centaurs were the result of sticking humans and dogs in the vats at the same time, and they still had both heads. In Fallout 3, the centaurs were more nightmarish- upright human torso with no arms and three massive tongues and teeth growing out of the chest, jammed at a 90 degree angle into a second torso, which had no legs but walked on four arms. Oh, and they spit, and it is radioactive and awful.
These are what was swarming the site where Janice and Veronica found the dead paladins. Guh. I don't think Janice was ever so glad to kill things in her life, because if killing any enemy in the Wasteland is more of a mercy kill than just an act of violence, it's killing a centaur. They scrambled into the crater, grabbed the paladins' dog tags, mission notes, and guns and armor, and ran. Burial was just not an option, not with the way Janice's Geiger counter was going off, and neither of them had energy weapons to ash the guys' bodies with. On the other hand, the armor could be useful once it was decontaminated. Janice didn't have the training to wear power armor without breaking her own limbs, but Veronica did, and the paladins' laser rifles were pretty nice in case Veronica ever needed to shoot something rather than punch it.
It didn't seem like a good idea to go back to Hidden Valley just yet, so Janice figured they'd head on up to the next place a patrol had been lost- REPCONN corporate headquarters, on the fringes of the New Vegas area.
