Notes From New Vegas 26
Dec. 31st, 2011 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 26: SHUT UP, GOD, JUST SHUT UP.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had set off in search of a supermutant from the fountain where Father Jerkface had given her the initial briefing. She had a jumpsuit and a 'splodey-go-boom collar to her name, and a fistful of Sierra Madre chips she'd found in the immediate area. And the air was trying to kill her. The air. Screw chips and scraps of the Old World, Janice's survival of the Sierra Madre was going to be fueled entirely by fuming clouds of righteous indignation.
There was graffiti on the walls, most of it fairly stupid- MINE MINE MINE ALL MINE, or IF YOU FIND THIS I'M SO SORRY YOU'RE HERE. Janice kind of ignored it. She did, however, look a little more closely at places where there were huge clumps of red yuk on the walls or floor. It looked like what she'd found in the dead white dude's pockets, and Father Jerkface had told her something about the residue of the Cloud being useful. Apparently she was able to gather it. I don't know how. I mean, the game says that you get a 'jar' of Cloud Residue, but... where the hell is the jar coming from? You don't have to pick anything up or have anything in your inventory to carry the stuff. Are you just grabbing it off the wall with your hands and shoving it down your- no, okay, I think I've got it.
Your jumpsuit was designed by Rob Liefeld.
No, hear me out. If Liefeld designed your suit, then it's actually got dozens of minuscule pouches about big enough to hold two or three bullets each strapped to each of your major limbs. You gather Cloud Residue by taking one of the pouches off and scraping the red yuk into it, then snapping the pouch back on. The alternative's a little disgusting, so I'm just going to go with Liefeld-as-jumpsuit-designer and go on from there. And try not to think of what Janice's hands look like after scraping that stuff off the wall.
Although speaking of hands, shortly after gathering up some of that yuk she found a glowing handprint on the wall and a suitcase marked 'Dean's Secret Stash'. There was some good stuff in it- a decent pistol, some stimpaks, some booze, a little food. Alas, the gun was only a nine millimeter pistol and the food did not include any rock salt. Pity. Dean Winchester would've been interesting to see running around this place. Especially after finding the skeleton with the spear through its ribs. Said spear was a stick with a bunch of knives strapped to one end... not really the most efficient weapon design in the world, but MacGyver is as MacGyver does, and clearly it'd done its job to the poor dead guy. Having one of the Supernatural boys around in the face of people who do that would've been reassuring.
Alas, no such luck. Janice just found her way to the casino's police station and ducked inside, closing the door nice and tight behind her so the horrible burny red air couldn't get into her lungs. She got a little bit of transmission from Father Jerkface at that point, but it was staticky and incomplete. Something about there being interference from radio sources and don't get blown up. Whatever- oh, wait, the instant she stepped too close to the ham radio on the table in front of her, her collar started beeping. Great. Well, she couldn't find the off switch fast enough so she did the only sensible thing, which is to say she took that spear from before and stabbed the crap out of the radio. Which then exploded and essentially crippled her left arm and right leg.
No, seriously, the radio exploded and broke two separate limbs on two separate sides of her body. Or electrocuted her through the spear, but the shaft looked wooden, so I'm thinkin' the radio was just designed by the same crew that built the NCC-1701's computers or something. Maybe the US shut down Underwriters Laboratories and the Consumer Product Safety Commission sometime before the war. I don't know. All I know is, Janice now had a broken arm, a broken leg, and a big ol' unhappy mutant sitting in the police station's cell whimpering about the sound hurting, shut off the sound.
The sound hurts your head? Dude. Useless arm and semi-useless leg here, hello...
Anyway, the mutant didn't notice Janice and she couldn't pick the lock on the cell. No, even if her arms were whole she couldn't do it, that just wasn't an option. She sighed and did her best to splint up her leg with random room crap (the game lets you walk around on a crippled leg and just flashes messages at you about it, so I'm assuming Janice applied enough basic first aid to survive but not enough to fix the problem) while she looked for something more useful. She found some old police pistols, which were nice, and some casino security armor, which was nicer than Rob Liefeld's jumpsuit, and she found some holotapes to make the vending machines produce better things, and she found grenades in the toilet, which in the Fallout universe is kind of par for the course. But no doctor's bags and no stimpaks, and whenever she got too close to the door of the mutant's cell her collar started beeping AGAIN and her LEG hurt and her ARM hurt and there was ANOTHER radio on the police chief's desk and one AROUND THE CORNER that she had to shoot with a one-handed grip so the kickback from her gun didn't screw up her left arm WORSE and just... ARRRGH.
In the words of Mystery Men, "Her name is Janice Furious and her power comes from her BOUNDLESS RAGE." Well, at least the radio blowed up real good. And, hey, there were stairs going down. Maybe there was a room down there with a master key to the cells. She'd try that.
Nope. Workbench room, couple of other rooms, but no master key. Just a brand new creepy voice talking over the speakers to whoever came into the basement, about how he had to lock "Dog" in the cage because he kept significant pause disobeying. Mmmmyeah, call her crazy, but Janice didn't really think she was gonna like Mr. Creepy any better than Father Jerkface. The fact that his recorded voice claimed that if she took the holotape of him speaking and played it back for the mutant, she'd be able to speak to Mr. Creepy personally, did not reassure her either. She really, really didn't think she wanted to do that. Unfortunately, she didn't see much of an alternative. The mutant was too sobby and quiet to pay attention to her, and she had kinda, y'know, crippled herself by blowing up a radio. This was clearly not her day.
Mr. Creepy's recording turned out to be a snapped-out line of "Dog! Back in the cage!". The instant it played the mutant- who was a nightkin, by the way, not a regular ol' greenskin- stood up and started talking. Pretty smart, for a chupacabra, and really articulate, but still a jerk; I don't think he could get one full sentence out without being snide. He and the sobby mutant were alternate personalities; the mutant was named Dog (which turned out to be carved across his chest- ow), and the Mr. Creepy voice was named God. Dog had done the carving and the sticking his arm in a bear trap and any number of other unpleasant things to hurt himself enough to silence the God voice. God claimed he was doing anything he could to stay in control so that he could keep Dog from getting the two of them killed.
Which... kind of fascinating, and maybe Janice could've asked about that some more, but at that point she was just in a lot of pain and wanted to get the mutant to come with her back to the fountain. She was pretty sure she had enough chips to pay for some kind of healing agent at the vending machines and she needed God with her in case something jumped her while she was applying it. So, since he was bigger than her, stronger than her, and probably more prone to ripping arms off than her, she opted to try and reason with him.
Slight problem: God thought Father Elijah was going to be the one coming to face him. And just couldn't keep himself from speechifying at Janice. Bla bla bla, you're the same kind of greed as the Old Man, all the others said they wanted their freedom and then decided they wanted the Madre, she was no different, she'd never be able to let go and she'd want everything in there too, all you other people who show up here are exactly the same, snide snide snide, yadda yadda-
That would be the point where Janice flipped out at God. SHE. WANTED. A. VACATION. DAMMIT. That whole 'we've all heard the legend of the Sierra Madre' spiel? Well, she hadn't heard it. She'd just wanted someplace where she could go and sit and have a nice time and not worry about politics or scary dog hat men or platinum chips or killer plants or glowing tear-your-face-off security guards or being shot in the head again and now she was standing here with two mangled limbs so God could TAKE HIS SNIDE SMARMY SUPERIORITY AND SHOVE IT UP HIS BIG PURPLE CHUPACABRA ASS.
*pant* *pant* *wheeze*
(There wasn't an option for that in the game. But there totally should have been.)
Anyway, she eventually told God that she could get the Dog personality to surface and obey her by playing Father Elijah's voice back on her Pip-Boy, but she wasn't going to do that because she figured she could probably deal with the intelligent personality better than the one that tended to eat people. At which point God laughed and said that she really didn't belong there after all, if she wasn't going to go for the easily-controlled option, and produced the key to his cell from around the back of his neck. Dog and God didn't share all their memories, and Dog wasn't exactly the sharpest marble in the deck regardless, so...
Well, whatever. Janice just rolled her eyes and waited for him to unlock the door and follow her out. And tried not to think too hard about the fact that Dog had apparently somehow eaten his explosive collar, so it was sloshing around inside the big guy's stomach. Let him deal with the question of how it was going to come out...
... oh God she was going to have to break into the Sierra Madre before the mutant's digestive system killed them all.
Well. With THAT reassuring thought floating in her head, she limped out the door with God and his Horrifying Stomach Of Doom in tow. Which was good, because GHOST PEOPLE.
Yeah, I need to fill you in on that. The Ghost People are the inhabitants of the Madre area these days. They're humanoid and they shamble around in what looks like hooded suits of some kind with gas masks and glowy green eyes, and they're the ones responsible for the dead dude with the spear through his ribs. They attack with spears and with bear traps on their fists and they chitter and they fall down and look dead if you hit them enough, but unless you dismember or explode the corpse, they're probably just faking it and will get up and try to kill you once more. Apparently if you have Dog in tow instead of God, Dog's ravening hunger means that he'll eat any of the seemingly-dead Ghost People and you won't have to stab their corpses. Which has its advantages, but... I kinda didn't see Janice as being all that comfortable with the idea of being followed by a big purple scar-covered chupacabra who had to pick bits of Ghost People out of his teeth. Not to mention that the more he ate, the more active his digestive system was going to be, and the sooner they would all die. So, yeah. She let God punch the Ghost People to death and then stabbed the corpses with her spear until a head or an arm or whatever fell off, and then she took any of their weapons she could carry just to be on the safe side. And then God snarked at her that "It's your own fault you're here. Couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?"
I swear, she'd have given him the old Italian-American salute if she could've used both arms without screaming.
Anyway, she eventually found a vending machine and bought herself two Doctor's Bags with her fistfuls of chips, and used these to fix her arm and leg. (No, you can't just inject a stimpak into the site, not in Hardcore mode, which is what I generally play in.... I think I've said that in an earlier Note but hell if I remember where.) God snided at her again, something about how maybe he'd tear that Pip-Boy off her arm and wear it around his neck. She rolled her eyes and checked for the next collar's signal, which was apparently on the other side of a cloud of extra poisonous poison... well, that was fine with her. She'd just make God run through it with her. Maybe the coughing would shut him up.
Well, a girl can dream.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had set off in search of a supermutant from the fountain where Father Jerkface had given her the initial briefing. She had a jumpsuit and a 'splodey-go-boom collar to her name, and a fistful of Sierra Madre chips she'd found in the immediate area. And the air was trying to kill her. The air. Screw chips and scraps of the Old World, Janice's survival of the Sierra Madre was going to be fueled entirely by fuming clouds of righteous indignation.
There was graffiti on the walls, most of it fairly stupid- MINE MINE MINE ALL MINE, or IF YOU FIND THIS I'M SO SORRY YOU'RE HERE. Janice kind of ignored it. She did, however, look a little more closely at places where there were huge clumps of red yuk on the walls or floor. It looked like what she'd found in the dead white dude's pockets, and Father Jerkface had told her something about the residue of the Cloud being useful. Apparently she was able to gather it. I don't know how. I mean, the game says that you get a 'jar' of Cloud Residue, but... where the hell is the jar coming from? You don't have to pick anything up or have anything in your inventory to carry the stuff. Are you just grabbing it off the wall with your hands and shoving it down your- no, okay, I think I've got it.
Your jumpsuit was designed by Rob Liefeld.
No, hear me out. If Liefeld designed your suit, then it's actually got dozens of minuscule pouches about big enough to hold two or three bullets each strapped to each of your major limbs. You gather Cloud Residue by taking one of the pouches off and scraping the red yuk into it, then snapping the pouch back on. The alternative's a little disgusting, so I'm just going to go with Liefeld-as-jumpsuit-designer and go on from there. And try not to think of what Janice's hands look like after scraping that stuff off the wall.
Although speaking of hands, shortly after gathering up some of that yuk she found a glowing handprint on the wall and a suitcase marked 'Dean's Secret Stash'. There was some good stuff in it- a decent pistol, some stimpaks, some booze, a little food. Alas, the gun was only a nine millimeter pistol and the food did not include any rock salt. Pity. Dean Winchester would've been interesting to see running around this place. Especially after finding the skeleton with the spear through its ribs. Said spear was a stick with a bunch of knives strapped to one end... not really the most efficient weapon design in the world, but MacGyver is as MacGyver does, and clearly it'd done its job to the poor dead guy. Having one of the Supernatural boys around in the face of people who do that would've been reassuring.
Alas, no such luck. Janice just found her way to the casino's police station and ducked inside, closing the door nice and tight behind her so the horrible burny red air couldn't get into her lungs. She got a little bit of transmission from Father Jerkface at that point, but it was staticky and incomplete. Something about there being interference from radio sources and don't get blown up. Whatever- oh, wait, the instant she stepped too close to the ham radio on the table in front of her, her collar started beeping. Great. Well, she couldn't find the off switch fast enough so she did the only sensible thing, which is to say she took that spear from before and stabbed the crap out of the radio. Which then exploded and essentially crippled her left arm and right leg.
No, seriously, the radio exploded and broke two separate limbs on two separate sides of her body. Or electrocuted her through the spear, but the shaft looked wooden, so I'm thinkin' the radio was just designed by the same crew that built the NCC-1701's computers or something. Maybe the US shut down Underwriters Laboratories and the Consumer Product Safety Commission sometime before the war. I don't know. All I know is, Janice now had a broken arm, a broken leg, and a big ol' unhappy mutant sitting in the police station's cell whimpering about the sound hurting, shut off the sound.
The sound hurts your head? Dude. Useless arm and semi-useless leg here, hello...
Anyway, the mutant didn't notice Janice and she couldn't pick the lock on the cell. No, even if her arms were whole she couldn't do it, that just wasn't an option. She sighed and did her best to splint up her leg with random room crap (the game lets you walk around on a crippled leg and just flashes messages at you about it, so I'm assuming Janice applied enough basic first aid to survive but not enough to fix the problem) while she looked for something more useful. She found some old police pistols, which were nice, and some casino security armor, which was nicer than Rob Liefeld's jumpsuit, and she found some holotapes to make the vending machines produce better things, and she found grenades in the toilet, which in the Fallout universe is kind of par for the course. But no doctor's bags and no stimpaks, and whenever she got too close to the door of the mutant's cell her collar started beeping AGAIN and her LEG hurt and her ARM hurt and there was ANOTHER radio on the police chief's desk and one AROUND THE CORNER that she had to shoot with a one-handed grip so the kickback from her gun didn't screw up her left arm WORSE and just... ARRRGH.
In the words of Mystery Men, "Her name is Janice Furious and her power comes from her BOUNDLESS RAGE." Well, at least the radio blowed up real good. And, hey, there were stairs going down. Maybe there was a room down there with a master key to the cells. She'd try that.
Nope. Workbench room, couple of other rooms, but no master key. Just a brand new creepy voice talking over the speakers to whoever came into the basement, about how he had to lock "Dog" in the cage because he kept significant pause disobeying. Mmmmyeah, call her crazy, but Janice didn't really think she was gonna like Mr. Creepy any better than Father Jerkface. The fact that his recorded voice claimed that if she took the holotape of him speaking and played it back for the mutant, she'd be able to speak to Mr. Creepy personally, did not reassure her either. She really, really didn't think she wanted to do that. Unfortunately, she didn't see much of an alternative. The mutant was too sobby and quiet to pay attention to her, and she had kinda, y'know, crippled herself by blowing up a radio. This was clearly not her day.
Mr. Creepy's recording turned out to be a snapped-out line of "Dog! Back in the cage!". The instant it played the mutant- who was a nightkin, by the way, not a regular ol' greenskin- stood up and started talking. Pretty smart, for a chupacabra, and really articulate, but still a jerk; I don't think he could get one full sentence out without being snide. He and the sobby mutant were alternate personalities; the mutant was named Dog (which turned out to be carved across his chest- ow), and the Mr. Creepy voice was named God. Dog had done the carving and the sticking his arm in a bear trap and any number of other unpleasant things to hurt himself enough to silence the God voice. God claimed he was doing anything he could to stay in control so that he could keep Dog from getting the two of them killed.
Which... kind of fascinating, and maybe Janice could've asked about that some more, but at that point she was just in a lot of pain and wanted to get the mutant to come with her back to the fountain. She was pretty sure she had enough chips to pay for some kind of healing agent at the vending machines and she needed God with her in case something jumped her while she was applying it. So, since he was bigger than her, stronger than her, and probably more prone to ripping arms off than her, she opted to try and reason with him.
Slight problem: God thought Father Elijah was going to be the one coming to face him. And just couldn't keep himself from speechifying at Janice. Bla bla bla, you're the same kind of greed as the Old Man, all the others said they wanted their freedom and then decided they wanted the Madre, she was no different, she'd never be able to let go and she'd want everything in there too, all you other people who show up here are exactly the same, snide snide snide, yadda yadda-
That would be the point where Janice flipped out at God. SHE. WANTED. A. VACATION. DAMMIT. That whole 'we've all heard the legend of the Sierra Madre' spiel? Well, she hadn't heard it. She'd just wanted someplace where she could go and sit and have a nice time and not worry about politics or scary dog hat men or platinum chips or killer plants or glowing tear-your-face-off security guards or being shot in the head again and now she was standing here with two mangled limbs so God could TAKE HIS SNIDE SMARMY SUPERIORITY AND SHOVE IT UP HIS BIG PURPLE CHUPACABRA ASS.
*pant* *pant* *wheeze*
(There wasn't an option for that in the game. But there totally should have been.)
Anyway, she eventually told God that she could get the Dog personality to surface and obey her by playing Father Elijah's voice back on her Pip-Boy, but she wasn't going to do that because she figured she could probably deal with the intelligent personality better than the one that tended to eat people. At which point God laughed and said that she really didn't belong there after all, if she wasn't going to go for the easily-controlled option, and produced the key to his cell from around the back of his neck. Dog and God didn't share all their memories, and Dog wasn't exactly the sharpest marble in the deck regardless, so...
Well, whatever. Janice just rolled her eyes and waited for him to unlock the door and follow her out. And tried not to think too hard about the fact that Dog had apparently somehow eaten his explosive collar, so it was sloshing around inside the big guy's stomach. Let him deal with the question of how it was going to come out...
... oh God she was going to have to break into the Sierra Madre before the mutant's digestive system killed them all.
Well. With THAT reassuring thought floating in her head, she limped out the door with God and his Horrifying Stomach Of Doom in tow. Which was good, because GHOST PEOPLE.
Yeah, I need to fill you in on that. The Ghost People are the inhabitants of the Madre area these days. They're humanoid and they shamble around in what looks like hooded suits of some kind with gas masks and glowy green eyes, and they're the ones responsible for the dead dude with the spear through his ribs. They attack with spears and with bear traps on their fists and they chitter and they fall down and look dead if you hit them enough, but unless you dismember or explode the corpse, they're probably just faking it and will get up and try to kill you once more. Apparently if you have Dog in tow instead of God, Dog's ravening hunger means that he'll eat any of the seemingly-dead Ghost People and you won't have to stab their corpses. Which has its advantages, but... I kinda didn't see Janice as being all that comfortable with the idea of being followed by a big purple scar-covered chupacabra who had to pick bits of Ghost People out of his teeth. Not to mention that the more he ate, the more active his digestive system was going to be, and the sooner they would all die. So, yeah. She let God punch the Ghost People to death and then stabbed the corpses with her spear until a head or an arm or whatever fell off, and then she took any of their weapons she could carry just to be on the safe side. And then God snarked at her that "It's your own fault you're here. Couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?"
I swear, she'd have given him the old Italian-American salute if she could've used both arms without screaming.
Anyway, she eventually found a vending machine and bought herself two Doctor's Bags with her fistfuls of chips, and used these to fix her arm and leg. (No, you can't just inject a stimpak into the site, not in Hardcore mode, which is what I generally play in.... I think I've said that in an earlier Note but hell if I remember where.) God snided at her again, something about how maybe he'd tear that Pip-Boy off her arm and wear it around his neck. She rolled her eyes and checked for the next collar's signal, which was apparently on the other side of a cloud of extra poisonous poison... well, that was fine with her. She'd just make God run through it with her. Maybe the coughing would shut him up.
Well, a girl can dream.
