Notes From New Vegas 20
Nov. 25th, 2010 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 20: Jamie Want Big Boom
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was running like a... never mind, I used that simile already. Janice and Veronica were running for their lives, and ED-E was floating for its life, from a bunch of Mr. Handys who were about to turn hostile because the humans had poked into a secure area of a pre-war technology company without appropriate clearance. They made it out alive, and they had one more goal: go north to Nellis Air Force Base. Well, two more goals. Nellis just happened to be where both of them could be found.
The trek was kind of a long one and passed through some interesting fringe territory around Vegas, but most of it would be better described later on. Suffice it to say that as they started approaching the area where Nellis had once been, they encountered a guy pacing back and forth along an access road. Apparently Nellis was occupied by a seriously dangerous tribe of weirdos. Not dangerous in the sense of chemmed-up maniacs, or in the sense of pretending to be Mongol warriors. Dangerous in the sense of guarding the approach to their territory with howitzers. Approaching Nellis on foot was pretty much a guarantee of being splodey-go-boomed, although the man claimed to have some old book with notes in it on how to elude the guns....
Well, great. Just great.
Janice spent some time thinking about whether all of this crap was worth it. Not being shot was pretty high on her personal agenda, but not being KA-SPLODINATED was up there as well. She didn't have much personal stake in the Brotherhood getting their dead guys' stuff back. Not like they'd ever done anything for her. Honestly, she could probably have pretty easily justified saying 'screw this' and leaving.
On the other hand, she did kind of promise Veronica....
Janice made a few grouchy faces and went back to talk to the guy about his book. He offered to give her the notes in exchange for a three hundred cap wager. "If you live, I'll give you double your money back, and if you die it's not like you were going to use those caps anyway! :) :) :)" was basically his take on it. Janice handed over the caps, calling him filthy names in her head all the while, and took his notes. Mostly they amounted to 'stay to the high cover along the northwest as far as you can, and then run from house to house eastward until you see the front gate; they generally stop shooting once you reach the front gate area'. That seemed all right, but Janice didn't like to take chances, so she told Ronnie and ED-E to wait for her until she'd run the gauntlet.
She kind of wished she still had that Turbo she used in Vault 22. Outrunning artillery fire was not really something that couriering for a living prepared you for. By the time she reached the front gates she was about ready to puke up her spleen, but the opportunity never arose; the guy at the gate demanded to know how she got through alive, because he'd never seen anybody run so fast. Janice started to answer and then went 'gwerp?'. Everybody at the gates was wearing what looked like Vault suits and heavily decorated military coats and necklaces made of bullet casings. Oh, and they were all carrying missile launchers, grenade rifles, and other very, very large guns.
... huh boy.
Five minutes later Janice was presented to Mother Pearl, the head of the tribe of Boomers. (As if they could be called anything else.) Mother Pearl smiled and told her they'd been waiting for someone like her for a long, long time. No, not a prophecy or anything; this was more a case of hoping that someone from the outside world would be clever enough to reach them and wise enough not to do anything savage or stupid in the process. The Boomers had lived in isolation for a very long time and Mother Pearl wanted to start introducing them to the outside world, even though it was full of savages; they needed someone to get used to, someone who they could handle- potentially someone like Janice. Perhaps she could help them with this goal?
Well, hell, Janice had just run their gauntlet in an effort to get other technofetishists to open their eyes and join the rest of the world. She'd be a hypocrite if she said 'sod off'. Not to mention that Nellis was an entire air force base and they really needed to find both the Paladins and the pulse gun and it would be a lot easier of they had permission to do so. Janice said yes, sure, she'd love to make herself some new friends, and asked how best to go about doing this. Mother Pearl made some suggestions, and Janice said okay, but she had to go get her friend and her robot. Mother Pearl was all right with that and gave her the Boomer ceremonial farewell of "Don't get yourself blown up."
huh boy.
Janice retrieved Veronica and ED-E and set to work looking for ways to be useful enough to get the Boomers to talk about the pulse gun and maybe talk about finding some paladins. First step: go and check out their museum of history, because she figured that it was probably a quick, harmless way to ingratiate herself with these people. The Museum turned out to be a Quonset-hut-type building kept by a boy of about ten, who indicated that the keeper before him had been a much older man doing a very good job until he mixed whiskey and land mines. Pete, the mini-Boomer, then offered to tell the Boomers' story with the help of the mural they'd painted along the wall. Sounded good to Janice, so she said all right.
The Boomers, it happened, had originally lived in Vault 34, a Vault with many guns. The Overseer, however, didn't let them use any of the really good guns or explode any of the big devices, and they really wanted to, so they left to seek a new home in the Wasteland. They brought their guns and their explosives with them and they fought the savages of the desert. For every 43.2 savages they overcame, one of their own people died. This was unacceptable. They needed a safer home- they needed Nellis. So they found a way into the base and they found another military base somewhere that had the massive guns they needed and they dragged the artillery all the way to Nellis and established themselves and they found the virtual reality training pods that had been used to teach pilots how to fly in the days before the War and they established their farms and they guarded their resources and they had a great and wondrous dream of one day flying again and RAINING EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE ON IGNORANT SAVAGES and in the meantime they were here and working towards the future, thank you very much for listening.
It was an entirely self sufficient tribe founded on the principle of 'we need bigger boom'. It was an entire tribe of Jamie Hyneman.
Anyway. Janice managed to get through a conversation with the kid about the details of his story, being appropriately complimentary as she went, and Pete was practically squeeing at her by the end of it. He thought she was much better than a Wasteland savage, and if there were people like her out there, then it must be really interesting to interact with the outside world. He told her to go and speak to Mother Pearl and he would tell all the other Boomers about her. (In OOC terms, the conversation with Pete after he tells the museum story allows for a lot of skill checks, each of which increases your fame and reputation with the Boomers; if you're appropriately skilled you can get enough fame just by talking to Pete that you don't have to deal with all the other missions around the base. I figure this means Pete goes and talks to everyone about how wonderful you are.)
So, Janice stumped back over to Mother Pearl's bunker, and she was joyful about how her people were learning to accept outsiders, savage or no. She encouraged Janice to go and talk to someone named Loyal about the Boomers' fondest dream, and told her that her people would be grateful beyond words. Janice thanked her and raised the possibility of the pulse gun, but unfortunately Mother Pearl couldn't think of a weapon answering to that description, which was very sad because honestly, what kind of Boomer would she be if she weren't sad about not knowing something weapon-related? She did indicate some files Janice could check, though. So Janice checked, and found orders dated sometime in 2077ish to move the item in question to Vault 34, and went out of the building to do some quality swearing.
(That doesn't actually happen in the game. In the game, you can search all of Nellis until your fingers fall off, but you won't find the pulse gun. You will, however, eventually open a filing cabinet in Mother Pearl's quarters and find notes from some prewar military types ordering that the pulse gun be moved to Vault 34, along with a key. You have to do this when Pearl is not looking or you'll piss her off. I figure that asking about the gun is more narratively appropriate.)
She figured that she might as well talk to Loyal before she and Veronica left. Whatever this fondest dream of the Boomers was, it probably involved things exploding, and Janice didn't really want to find out that they were about to drop it on her because she left without helping them. Turned out it did- but only indirectly. Loyal was an old guy who had notes about a B-29 that crashed into Lake Mead centuries ago and was almost certainly intact. He had ballast that could be attached under the wings, and his assistant could work up a rebreather device. Could she please help them raise the bomber from the lake so they could send their robots to go and pick the plane up and drag it back to Nellis?
.... bzuh?
Well, that explained the RAINING FIRE ON IGNORANT SAVAGES part of the museum. Frankly, Janice didn't think it was possible. She did, however, go and talk to the assistant about the rebreather. The way she saw it, the bomber had been down there a long time. It wasn't getting any wetter. They couldn't really give her trouble for taking her sweet time about it, or, y'know, not doing it ever. Best to just agree to their plans and then go do what she needed to do. So she got the rebreather, and the Boomers were all very nice to her as she and the others headed out the front gate, and wouldn't you know it, the dead guys were on the other side of the road that she'd never gotten to because, well, howitzer fire. She and Veronica grabbed their stuff, including their orders and their armor, and trotted off to find a certain gentleman who owed Janice six hundred caps for failure to die. From there, it would be time to go find Vault 34.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was running like a... never mind, I used that simile already. Janice and Veronica were running for their lives, and ED-E was floating for its life, from a bunch of Mr. Handys who were about to turn hostile because the humans had poked into a secure area of a pre-war technology company without appropriate clearance. They made it out alive, and they had one more goal: go north to Nellis Air Force Base. Well, two more goals. Nellis just happened to be where both of them could be found.
The trek was kind of a long one and passed through some interesting fringe territory around Vegas, but most of it would be better described later on. Suffice it to say that as they started approaching the area where Nellis had once been, they encountered a guy pacing back and forth along an access road. Apparently Nellis was occupied by a seriously dangerous tribe of weirdos. Not dangerous in the sense of chemmed-up maniacs, or in the sense of pretending to be Mongol warriors. Dangerous in the sense of guarding the approach to their territory with howitzers. Approaching Nellis on foot was pretty much a guarantee of being splodey-go-boomed, although the man claimed to have some old book with notes in it on how to elude the guns....
Well, great. Just great.
Janice spent some time thinking about whether all of this crap was worth it. Not being shot was pretty high on her personal agenda, but not being KA-SPLODINATED was up there as well. She didn't have much personal stake in the Brotherhood getting their dead guys' stuff back. Not like they'd ever done anything for her. Honestly, she could probably have pretty easily justified saying 'screw this' and leaving.
On the other hand, she did kind of promise Veronica....
Janice made a few grouchy faces and went back to talk to the guy about his book. He offered to give her the notes in exchange for a three hundred cap wager. "If you live, I'll give you double your money back, and if you die it's not like you were going to use those caps anyway! :) :) :)" was basically his take on it. Janice handed over the caps, calling him filthy names in her head all the while, and took his notes. Mostly they amounted to 'stay to the high cover along the northwest as far as you can, and then run from house to house eastward until you see the front gate; they generally stop shooting once you reach the front gate area'. That seemed all right, but Janice didn't like to take chances, so she told Ronnie and ED-E to wait for her until she'd run the gauntlet.
She kind of wished she still had that Turbo she used in Vault 22. Outrunning artillery fire was not really something that couriering for a living prepared you for. By the time she reached the front gates she was about ready to puke up her spleen, but the opportunity never arose; the guy at the gate demanded to know how she got through alive, because he'd never seen anybody run so fast. Janice started to answer and then went 'gwerp?'. Everybody at the gates was wearing what looked like Vault suits and heavily decorated military coats and necklaces made of bullet casings. Oh, and they were all carrying missile launchers, grenade rifles, and other very, very large guns.
... huh boy.
Five minutes later Janice was presented to Mother Pearl, the head of the tribe of Boomers. (As if they could be called anything else.) Mother Pearl smiled and told her they'd been waiting for someone like her for a long, long time. No, not a prophecy or anything; this was more a case of hoping that someone from the outside world would be clever enough to reach them and wise enough not to do anything savage or stupid in the process. The Boomers had lived in isolation for a very long time and Mother Pearl wanted to start introducing them to the outside world, even though it was full of savages; they needed someone to get used to, someone who they could handle- potentially someone like Janice. Perhaps she could help them with this goal?
Well, hell, Janice had just run their gauntlet in an effort to get other technofetishists to open their eyes and join the rest of the world. She'd be a hypocrite if she said 'sod off'. Not to mention that Nellis was an entire air force base and they really needed to find both the Paladins and the pulse gun and it would be a lot easier of they had permission to do so. Janice said yes, sure, she'd love to make herself some new friends, and asked how best to go about doing this. Mother Pearl made some suggestions, and Janice said okay, but she had to go get her friend and her robot. Mother Pearl was all right with that and gave her the Boomer ceremonial farewell of "Don't get yourself blown up."
huh boy.
Janice retrieved Veronica and ED-E and set to work looking for ways to be useful enough to get the Boomers to talk about the pulse gun and maybe talk about finding some paladins. First step: go and check out their museum of history, because she figured that it was probably a quick, harmless way to ingratiate herself with these people. The Museum turned out to be a Quonset-hut-type building kept by a boy of about ten, who indicated that the keeper before him had been a much older man doing a very good job until he mixed whiskey and land mines. Pete, the mini-Boomer, then offered to tell the Boomers' story with the help of the mural they'd painted along the wall. Sounded good to Janice, so she said all right.
The Boomers, it happened, had originally lived in Vault 34, a Vault with many guns. The Overseer, however, didn't let them use any of the really good guns or explode any of the big devices, and they really wanted to, so they left to seek a new home in the Wasteland. They brought their guns and their explosives with them and they fought the savages of the desert. For every 43.2 savages they overcame, one of their own people died. This was unacceptable. They needed a safer home- they needed Nellis. So they found a way into the base and they found another military base somewhere that had the massive guns they needed and they dragged the artillery all the way to Nellis and established themselves and they found the virtual reality training pods that had been used to teach pilots how to fly in the days before the War and they established their farms and they guarded their resources and they had a great and wondrous dream of one day flying again and RAINING EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE ON IGNORANT SAVAGES and in the meantime they were here and working towards the future, thank you very much for listening.
It was an entirely self sufficient tribe founded on the principle of 'we need bigger boom'. It was an entire tribe of Jamie Hyneman.
Anyway. Janice managed to get through a conversation with the kid about the details of his story, being appropriately complimentary as she went, and Pete was practically squeeing at her by the end of it. He thought she was much better than a Wasteland savage, and if there were people like her out there, then it must be really interesting to interact with the outside world. He told her to go and speak to Mother Pearl and he would tell all the other Boomers about her. (In OOC terms, the conversation with Pete after he tells the museum story allows for a lot of skill checks, each of which increases your fame and reputation with the Boomers; if you're appropriately skilled you can get enough fame just by talking to Pete that you don't have to deal with all the other missions around the base. I figure this means Pete goes and talks to everyone about how wonderful you are.)
So, Janice stumped back over to Mother Pearl's bunker, and she was joyful about how her people were learning to accept outsiders, savage or no. She encouraged Janice to go and talk to someone named Loyal about the Boomers' fondest dream, and told her that her people would be grateful beyond words. Janice thanked her and raised the possibility of the pulse gun, but unfortunately Mother Pearl couldn't think of a weapon answering to that description, which was very sad because honestly, what kind of Boomer would she be if she weren't sad about not knowing something weapon-related? She did indicate some files Janice could check, though. So Janice checked, and found orders dated sometime in 2077ish to move the item in question to Vault 34, and went out of the building to do some quality swearing.
(That doesn't actually happen in the game. In the game, you can search all of Nellis until your fingers fall off, but you won't find the pulse gun. You will, however, eventually open a filing cabinet in Mother Pearl's quarters and find notes from some prewar military types ordering that the pulse gun be moved to Vault 34, along with a key. You have to do this when Pearl is not looking or you'll piss her off. I figure that asking about the gun is more narratively appropriate.)
She figured that she might as well talk to Loyal before she and Veronica left. Whatever this fondest dream of the Boomers was, it probably involved things exploding, and Janice didn't really want to find out that they were about to drop it on her because she left without helping them. Turned out it did- but only indirectly. Loyal was an old guy who had notes about a B-29 that crashed into Lake Mead centuries ago and was almost certainly intact. He had ballast that could be attached under the wings, and his assistant could work up a rebreather device. Could she please help them raise the bomber from the lake so they could send their robots to go and pick the plane up and drag it back to Nellis?
.... bzuh?
Well, that explained the RAINING FIRE ON IGNORANT SAVAGES part of the museum. Frankly, Janice didn't think it was possible. She did, however, go and talk to the assistant about the rebreather. The way she saw it, the bomber had been down there a long time. It wasn't getting any wetter. They couldn't really give her trouble for taking her sweet time about it, or, y'know, not doing it ever. Best to just agree to their plans and then go do what she needed to do. So she got the rebreather, and the Boomers were all very nice to her as she and the others headed out the front gate, and wouldn't you know it, the dead guys were on the other side of the road that she'd never gotten to because, well, howitzer fire. She and Veronica grabbed their stuff, including their orders and their armor, and trotted off to find a certain gentleman who owed Janice six hundred caps for failure to die. From there, it would be time to go find Vault 34.
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Date: 2010-11-26 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-26 06:57 am (UTC)LOL. I can totally see that now. I wonder how the Mythbusters would take to living in the Fallout Universe.