Notes From New Vegas 27
Jan. 2nd, 2012 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 27: O Hai, Fellow Screwed People
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had recruited the world's most irritating chupacabra: a Nightkin with two separate personalities, one of which was an apparently servile sort named Dog, one of which was a snidely superior jerk named God. Since Dog had eaten Dog and God's explosive collar somehow, she had also had the horrifying realization that her life depended on the mutant's digestive system not working too quickly. Given the mutant's attitude towards her and his comments about the Old Man, whom you know as Father Elijah and Janice privately called Father Jerkface when she wasn't using much more vulgar words, she had a feeling it was only a matter of time before Dog and God sought out a box of two hundred year old Raisin Bran, so she set her Pip-Boy to pick up the next collar's signal and took off at a run.
Here's the thing: the path to the next collar's signal is normally pretty complicated and requires all kinds of gyrations and travel through side routes to avoid being hurt any more than strictly necessary. Also there's a locked gate with an extremely difficult lock partway through. Janice had already taken that lock out and Janice was in no mood to take any longer than she absolutely had to, and despite the Cloud's best efforts to hurt her and the Ghost People's best efforts to kill her so far, she was in pretty decent shape now that the doctor bags she'd bought from the vending machines had put her leg and arm back on properly. She confirmed that she could see what looked like a staircase leading to somewhere clearer on the other side of the extra cloudy Cloud patch up ahead and took off at a dead run through it-
"Trying to lose me in the Cloud? I don't think so."
Oh, shut your yap, God. Not everything is about you, you big purple egotist.
Anyway, she made it through the toxic poisonous extra poison without taking too much harm. (I'm led to understand that in non-Hardcore mode, the atmosphere isn't actively trying to kill you, so those notices about 'you are being poisoned by a toxic cloud' when you hit heavy Cloud pockets make a little more sense.) She got up the stairs and into the building on the other side, and after some poking around found herself in the same room as a ghoul in a tuxedo and sunglasses who was chilling out in front of one of the fiesta holes. Had a lovely view of the plaza below him and an empty chair nearby, too.
Huh. Well, okay.
Janice plopped herself down in the chair and was promptly informed of two things. One, by her Pip-Boy, was that this was Dean Domino. Apparently the Dean of the Secret Stash was an Old World singer whose name appeared on quite a lot of old posters back in the Mojave. Two, by Dean himself, was that she shouldn't try anything funny or get up prematurely unless she wanted to be splattered. So the chair was wired for explosives. Great, just great. On the other hand, Dean laughed and congratulated her when she said he'd better have used a shaped charge if he didn't want to take himself out as well; he didn't seem to have much of an issue with her overall and had planted the explosives as a general precaution. Given what God had said other people dragged to the casino in the first place tended to be like, she supposed she couldn't entirely blame Dean for being paranoid. Not gonna lie, her opinion may also have been shaped by the fact that she wasn't being snided at.
Dean then went on to say that they were going to make a Deal, which Janice agreed to. It didn't seem politic to her to point out that bargaining required the other party to be acting from a position of strength, considering that she was sitting in a potentially explodey chair. (In-game, there was a possible Barter skill check here, but like I said, calling someone on not having the upper hand seemed a poor choice when Janice's butt was parked on top of a stack of C4. Not all Skill tests need to be passed.) Dean said something about taking orders from him and that the situation boiled down to 'you want to live, I want what's in the Madre- real simple'.
Well! Someone who actually acknowledges the situation as it stands! Thank you, Dean. Yes. Janice really and truly did not CARE about the treasure of the Sierra Madre. She wanted to get out of here alive and never see or hear of or think of the place again. Besides, Dean had probably been here way longer than her; taking orders from someone who knew the place and who was right there on the ground with her seemed like a better bet than taking orders from the floating head of Father Jerkface. She did mention the collar stuff but Dean waved it off in a not-to-worry kind of fashion; he understood about all that. Okay then. She was good with this, and so was he. They'd meet up at the Fountain.
Game mechanics note here: you can only have one companion at a time. When you meet Dean, if you tell him to meet you at the Fountain because you've got God and Dog with you, he makes unhappy noises about not wanting to put himself in danger alone. If you then tell him to come with you he tells you three's a crowd and he'll meet you at the Fountain. I love you, Obsidian and Bethesda, but could you think these things through a little better?
Anyway, Dean bolted for the Fountain and so did Janice and God. God bitched the whole way, sometimes about Janice, sometimes about how he almost got away but then the idiot's hunger screwed it up. That was enough for Janice to turn to him when they got to the Fountain and tell him to STAY THERE. She was gonna take Dean to go and look for the final companion, who was apparently somewhere in the medical district. Janice was not really sure why a casino and resort would need an entire medical district instead of just one clinic, but... whatever. The designers were long since dead and under other circumstances she might've been curious, but all things considered, she really and truly did not care.
She did talk to Dean a bit along the way, though. She'd spent long enough talking to the mutant, she figured Dean would be a nice change of pace. He was, in fact, Dean Domino, the pre-war King of Swing. He'd been at the Madre for a very long time now and seemed to know a good deal about the area. He didn't think much of the Old Man who'd given them all their explosive neckties. He'd been the one to put the stashes of supplies around the casino grounds, even- he might've been a two hundred year old ghoul, but as far as he knew, he still needed to eat and you never knew when the Ghost People would catch you out in the open. And according to him there were truly disturbing numbers of them around. Janice made a mental note never to open one of those caches while Dean was with her, just in case he got mad about having to share his stuff, and gave him some of the extra weapons she'd found along the way. Couldn't hurt, right?
Anyway, when they got to the medical area they had their first encounter with an angry hologram. The casino apparently had a police station and a bunch of holographic guards to supplement the cops, and if you got caught someplace a holo could see you, it pointed at you a la Donald Sutherland in that one Invasion of the Body Snatchers image, and then a few seconds later started shooting at you. Like, actual energy weapon beams that came from the hologram itself rather than from the projector. No, I don't know how that was supposed to work. No, I never found an explanation. All I know is, Janice did NOT like getting zapped, and when the thing started shooting at her she picked up that holorifle thing Father Jerkface had left her with and opened fire on the hologram in return. She missed the hologram, but hit the hologram projector on the wall past it, at which point the hologram derezzed and the place went quiet again.
Well, at least it didn't bleed pixels.
She did some more poking around through the building trying to find the other collar's signal. Didn't find it at first. Found a computer that used to belong to the chief physician, talking about how Dean Domino had brought somebody named Vera Keyes in for examination repeatedly- something about her vocal chords needing medical care. The doctor didn't like Dean and considered it skeevy that the man brought him both wine and the casino builder's girlfriend. Janice probably could've asked about that, but... you know, that was two hundred years ago. The woman was dead. The doctor was dead. The casino builder was dead. Dean was standing in the hallway smoking. Three out of four participants in whatever weird little drama it was, were no longer available for comment. She figured it probably didn't matter and moved on to WAH HEY HEY WHOA HEADLESS DUDES. Seriously, three or four of them on gurneys in the next room, all in the same kind of jumpsuit as Corpsey back in the bunker. And we're not talking nice clean Dr. Guillotin decapitations here, oh no. We're talking nasty burny splody-looking stumps where the necks used to be. Dean made some kind of comment about it but Janice didn't notice, because MULTIPLE HEADLESS DUDES, WHAT.
When you are confronted by a sight like that you generally don't want to stick around long. Janice kinda whipped around fast as she could and would've just bolted out of there if she hadn't spotted the pile of black armor along one wall. She grabbed that and ran and found herself a room to go hyperventilate in a little, and when the worst of it passed she got herself armored up in the stuff. It was nice and light and quiet and it fit her better than the stuff in the police station locker. (I am of the opinion that while every suit of armor in the game is coded to fit any individual who puts it on, narratively it ought to be different sizes, or at least slightly different shapes if it was designed for people of specific physical dimensions. This suit was originally worn by a woman, so I figure it fit Janice better.) She got Dean to put on the suit from the police station- no offense, but his tuxedo just would not stand up to Ghost People spears- and rooted around the room a bit before finding a key to the basement. Well, that seemed all right. Janice grabbed that and headed down the stairs, thinking maybe her third person was holed up down there out of the way. No such luck, but she did find an audio control terminal to shut down all the speakers in the building, and since that meant less chance of exploding her collar she was pretty happy with the find. On the way back up she and Dean took a different turn and found a corridor full of rooms with Auto-Docs in them. Not the old school kind of auto-doc with the screen and the robotic arms, like there'd been in Vault 34 (it was in their clinic but it wasn't working, so Janice had ignored it). No, these were shiny, still-functional steel phonebooths of awesome, where you could walk in and have your crippled limbs stapled (or whatever) back together, or 'adrenaline' injected to 'cure exhaustion'. I think that was code for 'if you're playing in hardcore mode, you probably haven't slept in way too long for fear of dying horribly from the killer air, so here, let us poke you'. Didn't much matter, really.
Dean was busy commenting about how they should just leave because they'd never find a doctor on call at that hour when Janice found the last Auto-Doc and realized there was somebody in it. When she popped it open she got a bald, heavily scarred woman in baggy pants and a blood-spattered white top and, dun dun dunnnnh, a bomb collar. Turned out it was a mute bald heavily scarred woman, but she was pretty good at communicating in signs, and Janice was a reasonably clever person. The woman had not been mute when she got stuck in the machine, and apparently had some form of brain injury that made writing an impossibility, but something had happened to her collar that meant that as long as she was close to Janice, the signal interference would protect Janice's collar a bit from other signal interference. A few extra seconds before the explosion countdown got underway, basically. Janice wanted to talk to her a bit more and try to figure out some of what she was gesturing, but a, Dean was right behind her making fidgety noises, and b, God was off somewhere digesting... so the faster they got whatever it was done, the better. Time to get everybody back to the fountain and consult the Floating Head of Father Jerkface to find out how the hell they were supposed to proceed from here.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had recruited the world's most irritating chupacabra: a Nightkin with two separate personalities, one of which was an apparently servile sort named Dog, one of which was a snidely superior jerk named God. Since Dog had eaten Dog and God's explosive collar somehow, she had also had the horrifying realization that her life depended on the mutant's digestive system not working too quickly. Given the mutant's attitude towards her and his comments about the Old Man, whom you know as Father Elijah and Janice privately called Father Jerkface when she wasn't using much more vulgar words, she had a feeling it was only a matter of time before Dog and God sought out a box of two hundred year old Raisin Bran, so she set her Pip-Boy to pick up the next collar's signal and took off at a run.
Here's the thing: the path to the next collar's signal is normally pretty complicated and requires all kinds of gyrations and travel through side routes to avoid being hurt any more than strictly necessary. Also there's a locked gate with an extremely difficult lock partway through. Janice had already taken that lock out and Janice was in no mood to take any longer than she absolutely had to, and despite the Cloud's best efforts to hurt her and the Ghost People's best efforts to kill her so far, she was in pretty decent shape now that the doctor bags she'd bought from the vending machines had put her leg and arm back on properly. She confirmed that she could see what looked like a staircase leading to somewhere clearer on the other side of the extra cloudy Cloud patch up ahead and took off at a dead run through it-
"Trying to lose me in the Cloud? I don't think so."
Oh, shut your yap, God. Not everything is about you, you big purple egotist.
Anyway, she made it through the toxic poisonous extra poison without taking too much harm. (I'm led to understand that in non-Hardcore mode, the atmosphere isn't actively trying to kill you, so those notices about 'you are being poisoned by a toxic cloud' when you hit heavy Cloud pockets make a little more sense.) She got up the stairs and into the building on the other side, and after some poking around found herself in the same room as a ghoul in a tuxedo and sunglasses who was chilling out in front of one of the fiesta holes. Had a lovely view of the plaza below him and an empty chair nearby, too.
Huh. Well, okay.
Janice plopped herself down in the chair and was promptly informed of two things. One, by her Pip-Boy, was that this was Dean Domino. Apparently the Dean of the Secret Stash was an Old World singer whose name appeared on quite a lot of old posters back in the Mojave. Two, by Dean himself, was that she shouldn't try anything funny or get up prematurely unless she wanted to be splattered. So the chair was wired for explosives. Great, just great. On the other hand, Dean laughed and congratulated her when she said he'd better have used a shaped charge if he didn't want to take himself out as well; he didn't seem to have much of an issue with her overall and had planted the explosives as a general precaution. Given what God had said other people dragged to the casino in the first place tended to be like, she supposed she couldn't entirely blame Dean for being paranoid. Not gonna lie, her opinion may also have been shaped by the fact that she wasn't being snided at.
Dean then went on to say that they were going to make a Deal, which Janice agreed to. It didn't seem politic to her to point out that bargaining required the other party to be acting from a position of strength, considering that she was sitting in a potentially explodey chair. (In-game, there was a possible Barter skill check here, but like I said, calling someone on not having the upper hand seemed a poor choice when Janice's butt was parked on top of a stack of C4. Not all Skill tests need to be passed.) Dean said something about taking orders from him and that the situation boiled down to 'you want to live, I want what's in the Madre- real simple'.
Well! Someone who actually acknowledges the situation as it stands! Thank you, Dean. Yes. Janice really and truly did not CARE about the treasure of the Sierra Madre. She wanted to get out of here alive and never see or hear of or think of the place again. Besides, Dean had probably been here way longer than her; taking orders from someone who knew the place and who was right there on the ground with her seemed like a better bet than taking orders from the floating head of Father Jerkface. She did mention the collar stuff but Dean waved it off in a not-to-worry kind of fashion; he understood about all that. Okay then. She was good with this, and so was he. They'd meet up at the Fountain.
Game mechanics note here: you can only have one companion at a time. When you meet Dean, if you tell him to meet you at the Fountain because you've got God and Dog with you, he makes unhappy noises about not wanting to put himself in danger alone. If you then tell him to come with you he tells you three's a crowd and he'll meet you at the Fountain. I love you, Obsidian and Bethesda, but could you think these things through a little better?
Anyway, Dean bolted for the Fountain and so did Janice and God. God bitched the whole way, sometimes about Janice, sometimes about how he almost got away but then the idiot's hunger screwed it up. That was enough for Janice to turn to him when they got to the Fountain and tell him to STAY THERE. She was gonna take Dean to go and look for the final companion, who was apparently somewhere in the medical district. Janice was not really sure why a casino and resort would need an entire medical district instead of just one clinic, but... whatever. The designers were long since dead and under other circumstances she might've been curious, but all things considered, she really and truly did not care.
She did talk to Dean a bit along the way, though. She'd spent long enough talking to the mutant, she figured Dean would be a nice change of pace. He was, in fact, Dean Domino, the pre-war King of Swing. He'd been at the Madre for a very long time now and seemed to know a good deal about the area. He didn't think much of the Old Man who'd given them all their explosive neckties. He'd been the one to put the stashes of supplies around the casino grounds, even- he might've been a two hundred year old ghoul, but as far as he knew, he still needed to eat and you never knew when the Ghost People would catch you out in the open. And according to him there were truly disturbing numbers of them around. Janice made a mental note never to open one of those caches while Dean was with her, just in case he got mad about having to share his stuff, and gave him some of the extra weapons she'd found along the way. Couldn't hurt, right?
Anyway, when they got to the medical area they had their first encounter with an angry hologram. The casino apparently had a police station and a bunch of holographic guards to supplement the cops, and if you got caught someplace a holo could see you, it pointed at you a la Donald Sutherland in that one Invasion of the Body Snatchers image, and then a few seconds later started shooting at you. Like, actual energy weapon beams that came from the hologram itself rather than from the projector. No, I don't know how that was supposed to work. No, I never found an explanation. All I know is, Janice did NOT like getting zapped, and when the thing started shooting at her she picked up that holorifle thing Father Jerkface had left her with and opened fire on the hologram in return. She missed the hologram, but hit the hologram projector on the wall past it, at which point the hologram derezzed and the place went quiet again.
Well, at least it didn't bleed pixels.
She did some more poking around through the building trying to find the other collar's signal. Didn't find it at first. Found a computer that used to belong to the chief physician, talking about how Dean Domino had brought somebody named Vera Keyes in for examination repeatedly- something about her vocal chords needing medical care. The doctor didn't like Dean and considered it skeevy that the man brought him both wine and the casino builder's girlfriend. Janice probably could've asked about that, but... you know, that was two hundred years ago. The woman was dead. The doctor was dead. The casino builder was dead. Dean was standing in the hallway smoking. Three out of four participants in whatever weird little drama it was, were no longer available for comment. She figured it probably didn't matter and moved on to WAH HEY HEY WHOA HEADLESS DUDES. Seriously, three or four of them on gurneys in the next room, all in the same kind of jumpsuit as Corpsey back in the bunker. And we're not talking nice clean Dr. Guillotin decapitations here, oh no. We're talking nasty burny splody-looking stumps where the necks used to be. Dean made some kind of comment about it but Janice didn't notice, because MULTIPLE HEADLESS DUDES, WHAT.
When you are confronted by a sight like that you generally don't want to stick around long. Janice kinda whipped around fast as she could and would've just bolted out of there if she hadn't spotted the pile of black armor along one wall. She grabbed that and ran and found herself a room to go hyperventilate in a little, and when the worst of it passed she got herself armored up in the stuff. It was nice and light and quiet and it fit her better than the stuff in the police station locker. (I am of the opinion that while every suit of armor in the game is coded to fit any individual who puts it on, narratively it ought to be different sizes, or at least slightly different shapes if it was designed for people of specific physical dimensions. This suit was originally worn by a woman, so I figure it fit Janice better.) She got Dean to put on the suit from the police station- no offense, but his tuxedo just would not stand up to Ghost People spears- and rooted around the room a bit before finding a key to the basement. Well, that seemed all right. Janice grabbed that and headed down the stairs, thinking maybe her third person was holed up down there out of the way. No such luck, but she did find an audio control terminal to shut down all the speakers in the building, and since that meant less chance of exploding her collar she was pretty happy with the find. On the way back up she and Dean took a different turn and found a corridor full of rooms with Auto-Docs in them. Not the old school kind of auto-doc with the screen and the robotic arms, like there'd been in Vault 34 (it was in their clinic but it wasn't working, so Janice had ignored it). No, these were shiny, still-functional steel phonebooths of awesome, where you could walk in and have your crippled limbs stapled (or whatever) back together, or 'adrenaline' injected to 'cure exhaustion'. I think that was code for 'if you're playing in hardcore mode, you probably haven't slept in way too long for fear of dying horribly from the killer air, so here, let us poke you'. Didn't much matter, really.
Dean was busy commenting about how they should just leave because they'd never find a doctor on call at that hour when Janice found the last Auto-Doc and realized there was somebody in it. When she popped it open she got a bald, heavily scarred woman in baggy pants and a blood-spattered white top and, dun dun dunnnnh, a bomb collar. Turned out it was a mute bald heavily scarred woman, but she was pretty good at communicating in signs, and Janice was a reasonably clever person. The woman had not been mute when she got stuck in the machine, and apparently had some form of brain injury that made writing an impossibility, but something had happened to her collar that meant that as long as she was close to Janice, the signal interference would protect Janice's collar a bit from other signal interference. A few extra seconds before the explosion countdown got underway, basically. Janice wanted to talk to her a bit more and try to figure out some of what she was gesturing, but a, Dean was right behind her making fidgety noises, and b, God was off somewhere digesting... so the faster they got whatever it was done, the better. Time to get everybody back to the fountain and consult the Floating Head of Father Jerkface to find out how the hell they were supposed to proceed from here.
