Notes From New Vegas 32
Jan. 21st, 2012 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 32: Okay, I Get It, Letting Go Is Important
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was on her way through the Executive Suites at the Sierra Madre in search of Christine, and I was annoyed because the Suites area is pointlessly difficult to navigate. Also it's one of two areas inside the Casino with a workbench for crafting stuff out of all the old world crap you've been carrying around, which is about its only redeeming feature since it has pockets of Cloud and lots of hologram emitters and radios to set your collar off, and angry holograms, some of which stay angry even after you find the terminal that lets you recalibrate the holograms' friend-or-foe recognition.
There's no point to me going into any more detail than that about this level except to say that it began with Father Jerkface demanding that Janice deal with 'the mute' and then being followed up by Christine talking to Janice over the radio. Guess that autodoc thing Dean did to her worked after all. After quite a lot of wandering around, and finding some relatively neat stuff like a suit of reinforced Madre body armor (the strongest armor classified as 'light' in the game, it turns out- which is good, because Janice's perks were aimed at wearing light armor and running like hell) and a way of making the bizarrely sharp Cosmic brand knives in the kitchen into superheated bizarrely sharp knives, she found her way to a really swank set of rooms. There was a bar to one side with a lot of boozeahol and a chemistry set, which Janice mostly ignored, and a locked door with a computer terminal next to it instead of a key or something else a sane person might be expected to use. The terminal didn't seem to ask for a password, for whatever reason, but the instant Janice used it to open the door, Father Jerkface informed her that the door to the vault was voice activated and that they'd need recordings of 'the starlet's' voice.
Okay, first things first, Lije. People? Have names. You should use them. Or at least nicknames instead of disparaging nouns. Seriously, Elijah is constitutionally incapable of referring to people by names. 'The mute'. 'The ghoul'. 'The FEV reject'. 'The starlet'. As amusing as assuming that he's actually a deranged Gallifreyan who thinks that everybody he's lured into the casino grounds is a renegade Time Lord might be, it's pretty clear that he doesn't bother using anyone's name because he doesn't respect any of them any farther than he could spit. I'd say it got Janice thoroughly annoyed, but she was already in frothing rage mode, so annoyance at this point would have been the equivalent of dipping a habanero in Tabasco sauce.
Anyway, since she didn't really fancy trying to string together audio clips from old holotapes, Janice went to check the rest of the suite area for Christine. Sure enough, she found her, talking and everything. Christine wasn't thrilled about her new voice, but she did indicate that these rooms were Vera Keyes'- and that Vera herself was dead in the corner, having been trapped by security all those years ago. Janice checked- yup, skeleton in a really nice women's dress, surrounded by spent syringes- and then asked Christine what was going on. Christine said she'd been hunting Elijah for years, that he'd done so much worse than just what he'd done at the Madre, and that he would never let them out alive so they'd have to lure him somewhere like down in the Vault to kill him. Janice... frankly agreed. Some people, she figured, needed to be put down before they could hurt anyone else.
And when she found out that the autodoc in the room couldn't heal Christine because when she'd been hunting Elijah in a place called the Big Empty, he'd trapped her in a medical center there and that had been where they jammed the electrodes into her skull and electrified her brain so she couldn't write and could just barely manage to read and could virtually only think in numbers... eheheheh. 'Put down' was probably too kind. There was a speech option for 'There's a chance he'll see reason' but honestly, between what Ronnie had told Janice back in the Mojave, and what Elijah had done so far, and what Christine was telling her now, the only way Janice would have said that would be if Reason was the name she'd given her holorifle.
Yes, I've read Snow Crash. Hush.
Anyway, Janice had to do.... something I really don't understand the reasoning for, involving going back to the lobby with a holotape and adding one last sound sample to the overall system for Jerkface's use. Given that she had Christine right there with Vera Keyes' voice I'm kind of handwaving that she didn't bother going back to the lobby at all, because it's pointless, stupid, and only there to allow the player to handle dealing with all three companions in any order they like. The trip also, once again, involves fighting Ghost People, because that's apparently what you do to keep the player engaged instead of thinking about how pointless certain activities are. (Kind of like the way an old GM of mine used to throw random ninjas at our party if he didn't have actual plot ready for us.) All I know is, as far as I'm concerned she continued her discussion with Christine rather than turning around and doing anything else.
Christine wondered why the vault would be keyed to Vera's voice, since she didn't build it. Janice, frankly, didn't think the place felt like a casino at all- more some kind of deranged fortress- and christine agreed. There was some serious obsession juju going on there, after what she'd heard from Dean and what she'd seen in the computers. Based on the sheet music she'd found in the theater- which had some words scribbled on it that hadn't been of any real interest to Janice until she found out the vault opened for Vera's voice- she told Christine the opening sequence was 'Begin' 'Again' 'Let' 'Go'. The 'begin again' part kind of made sense, since if she squinted at the Madre's logos on the vending machines it was apparently the casino's old motto, but the 'let go ' part was a bit of a surprise... not that she really cared. She just wanted to make Elijah die and get out of her collar at that point, so she asked Christine to come over and let her downstairs. Christine, however, suddenly wibbled and wanted to know if Janice was absolutely ready, because Elijah would follow her down there and she was positive he'd never let them leave...
Oh. Christine wanted the opportunity to kill Elijah when he showed up trying to find Janice after Janice went down to the vault.
Well, Janice didn't really mind the idea of letting Christine do that, but after some thought she realized that this probably wasn't a good idea. Mostly because Elijah was the only person on the premises who had clue one about how to disengage the damn collars. Janice had to do some fast talking to convince Christine not to kill him. Mostly it amounted to 'look, let him through and then follow me, so if he escapes, you can wait for him and blow his head off when he's not expecting it'. Yeah, yeah, given that whole 'let go' thing she was probably supposed to talk her into letting go of her obsession and all, but Janice really wanted Elijah dead at that point. 'Wait to kill him until he's done' was as close as she would get to saying 'let go'.
Christine finally agreed and spoke the words into the control terminal, and Janice went down the elevator, and... well. The elevator brought her to a room with a very nice view of the vault entrance. Which was surrounded by Cloud. And guarded by laser death turrets, albeit inactive ones. And on the far side of an energy field. There was a terminal in the room but it didn't let her deactivate the energy fields, only open up a maintenance door, so she kind of sighed and went along with that... and of course, of COURSE, her collar started beeping at that point.
PURE. FROTHING. HATRED.
She did, however, note one thing on the terminal before she started running. Apparently the elevator to this level was set to return to the suites area and lock in place if a) the security on the vault was disabled and b) somebody breached the terminal in the vault. As long as nobody screwed with the important stuff on the terminal inside that vault, the elevator could be operated from the suites level. This was done by Mr. Sinclair's order.
Huh.
Well, anyway, there was beeping, so Janice ran. She'd worry about the elevator thing later. She had to not die first. Turned out to be harder than it looked, because the casino architect apparently hated the maintenance people. Seriously, the maintenance route was threaded through several rooms full of pipes and Cloud and speakers and- okay, I guess it's not entirely fair to say the architect hated the janitors, the Cloud wasn't there in the beginning and the speakers only mattered to people wearing bomb collars of horrible splodey death. Janice didn't care about fairness, though. She cared about the walkways being missing huge chunks due to inexplicable damage. She cared about toxic red crap in the air. She cared about having to waste microfusion cells on blowing up speakers at a distance before they could kill her. And she cared about the ROOM FULL OF HOLOGRAMS WHY OH GOD WHY.
Seriously, there was a room that was absolutely CRAWLING with security holograms, with all of their emitters either on top of booths or stuck to the ceiling, and where you had to run and hide like hell to get to the terminal that didn't even let you shut them off, just change their patrol routes. And it was a room where you were running around on catwalks at least fifty feet off the ground, possibly more, so that if you tripped when you were running or misjudged your jump over a gap or what have you, you plummeted to your inevitable death no matter WHAT you did. Also there was Cloud down there just in case your Courier happened to be descended from Juliane Koepcke or Joseph Kittinger or something. It was pretty much just a Gratuitous Room of Gratuitous Death and after the first few attempts to get through it I had to wonder where Sinclair found so many obvious sociopaths to work on his construction project. Eventually, through a combination of running like hell, shooting anything glowy that didn't shoot back, and slapping computer terminals into submission, Janice finally managed to eke her way through it alive.
She had to deliberately turn off the vault security to get any further, of course, which meant the elevators were going back up without her, but she kinda knew that was gonna happen so whatever. Once she got to the other side she found a holotape near the entrance, not far from the bones of somebody who apparently fell and broke their neck. The tape turned out to be a fairly nasty note from Sinclair to Vera Keyes about how he knew what she and Dean had been planning all along, and how if she was reading the note on the vault terminal now she was locked in for pretty much ever in return for her betrayal. Janice winced a bit at that but honestly, that was a soap opera from two hundred years ago, and all she wanted was to get into the vault, get Elijah to come down there, put him out of the world's misery, get the collar control device out of his pockets, and get out of there alive. So she left the bones where they were and went to the terminal next to the-
You know, it is never a good sign when 'open the door' is met with 'Warning: only the trustworthy may enter my Vault. F. S.' Never. Ever.
Well, whatevs. Janice opened the door anyway, at which point the laser turrets in the room- remember those? From when she first got down there?- started firing on her. She ran into the vault and the door closed behind her, at which point she sat down and put her head between her knees and tried not to hyperventilate too much. When she finally pulled herself together she got a look around at the place. It was one room, with medical and scientific stuff, a cabinet full of guns and armor and ammo, and a table stacked with gold bars. And I do mean stacked. Thirty-seven of them. That table must've been reinforced clear from hell to breakfast to hold up that much gold- the stuff's heavy. There was also a huge pile of pre-war money and a bunch of Casino chips, a vending machine- Janice guessed so that whoever got stuck in there could live on Pringles and Med-X until the door got opened somehow- and oh, yeah, three terminals. One to control the lasers outside, which Janice couldn't operate (not enough Science score). One to switch security on or off. And one sitting in front of a big, big version of the Casino emblem. Really, it might as well have had an arrow pointing to it labeled ACTUAL PHYSICAL PLOT DEVICE RIGHT HERE.
Well, she switched the security off again, because it was getting on her nerves, and then she went to the plot device terminal. It had two entries listed, one that said 'Vera Keyes' and one that said 'Vera'. The entry for 'Vera Keyes' was missing, but the other one... turned out to be an apology. Apparently Sinclair had managed to speak to Vera before things went to hell, and that holotape was there because he didn't want her to ever have to read what he'd written in rage. He forgave her for not having loved him, he knew she never meant him any harm or malice, he thanked her for coming forward to confess voluntarily to her and Dean's scheme to rob him, and he understood the tapes Dean had in his possession- that he had been blackmailing her into it all. And he had built the casino to protect her, and he had gone nasty and dark when he realized Dean was planning to rob him, and he'd set everything up in the vault to be a trap because he knew Dean would get there first, and... yeah. Soap opera. Love, obsession, drugs, nuclear war, it was all there, along with a warning not to attempt to access the personal accounts entry because accessing THAT would be the trigger for sealing the door and returning the elevator to the surface and tripping the failsafe to prevent anyone from getting in there ever again.
Okay! Good to know.
Janice would've backed away from the computer immediately, but that was the instant when the logo split open and revealed, once again, the floating head of Father Jerkface. Who gloated a bit, and then admitted that he had managed to unlock the casino door- with other people's hands- only to get trapped in the place until her Pip-Boy signal lit things up. Well, that might explain a little bit; you'd go crazy too if you had to live any length of time in that place with nothing but the vending machines to sustain you...
Janice decided, what the hell, might as well get him to monologue. She asked him what he wanted from the Madre. He didn't mention the gold- he wanted the Madre as a fortress, as a weapon, as a place to use as a base of operations to carve the Mojave up into any way he chose and 'begin again'. Apparently the Cloud over the Sierra Madre could be used to protect and cleanse Old World stuff, and the holograms were unique- even the Big Empty researchers, whoever they were, never really got them to work properly. He loved the idea of dumping an emitter in a battle and letting everybody in the area die because they couldn't kill the hologram attacking them. (Never mind that Janice had destroyed several emitters without being slaughtered herself. This was Father Jerkface we were talking about here.) He also wanted the vending machines. He figured he could reprogram them to provide real food, more medical supplies, ammunition, currency, splodey-go-boom collars, weapons- even make a nation. The cloud would let him wipe the world clean, the collars would ensure people's compliance, and the vending machines would provide anything else.
Janice probably could have asked him a lot more at that point, or called him a killer who aspired to mass murder- the options were there on the dialog screen- but the guy was creeping her right the hell out. She asked him if he was planning to come down. Of course, he said no, since she was down there and was too resourceful for his liking. She thought about it for a bit, and then invoked Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, one more time- and threatened to find a way to destroy the vault and all the secrets in it. When he laughed at her and offered to detonate her collar instead, she calmly informed him she'd have enough time to wire her Pip-Boy and her collar to the intercom and void his signal, so he decided okay, he was going to have to come down and deal with her personally.
There is an option in the game at this point to escape the area and let Elijah seal himself in the vault for great poetic justice. Janice did not trust poetic justice. She grabbed all the medical supplies in the room, the reinforced armor in the closet, and two gold bars- she figured she could wing them at Elijah's head and break his skull if she had to- and stepped out to wait for him with her holorifle ready.
The fact that a properly modded holorifle- which she had- at full repair- which hers was at- in the hands of someone with a reasonably high energy weapons skill- which she had- with luck on her side- which she had, in the form of Better Criticals and Finesse perks- meant that a headshot was a one-hit kill on a human... well, I'd say the battle with Elijah was anti-climactic, but given that she couldn't find the 'shut my collar off' signal device on his body and the damn thing had started beeping? that was enough climax for anyone. Also, he was apparently a load-bearing boss, because things started exploding the instant he died. It might've been because her allies were trying to shut security down upstairs rather than let her get killed, I don't know. All I know is that Janice killed Jerkface with one good shot to the skull, grabbed all his things, and ran like all the legions of Hell were on her tail. Between the smoke and the fire and the splodey and the beeping, she just- JUST- managed to reach the elevator before the dead-man's-switch aspect of her collar reached its final countdown, and when the elevator doors opened, she was out in the plaza again, and her collar fell off.
Well. Huh.
She did her best to leave some kind of a note for the others, but she didn't really have anything to write with, so her note amounted to scratching things on concrete surfaces with a bit of loose rubble. After that, there really wasn't much else to do except leave. Or go back into the casino and steal stuff before leaving, if you were that kind of person, but at that point all Janice wanted to do was get the hell out of there and never, ever see or hear or think anything that had to do with the Madre ever again.
(There were then a couple of screens explaining what had happened to each of the survivors, since the collars didn't kill them. The information was interesting, and continued to hammer home the fact that obsession was bad and letting go was good, but Janice had no way of knowing about any of it. Other than, possibly, the bit that indicated that Dean Domino realized Vegas was still there and casinos still needed entertainers, so he set off to find the place and begin again. There was also a lot of talk about how something was going to happen at 'the Divide', between Janice and some other Courier. That part interested me, but Janice had no way of knowing that was coming either. She would just have to deal with the horrible surprises as they came. Because oh, yes, they were coming...)
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was on her way through the Executive Suites at the Sierra Madre in search of Christine, and I was annoyed because the Suites area is pointlessly difficult to navigate. Also it's one of two areas inside the Casino with a workbench for crafting stuff out of all the old world crap you've been carrying around, which is about its only redeeming feature since it has pockets of Cloud and lots of hologram emitters and radios to set your collar off, and angry holograms, some of which stay angry even after you find the terminal that lets you recalibrate the holograms' friend-or-foe recognition.
There's no point to me going into any more detail than that about this level except to say that it began with Father Jerkface demanding that Janice deal with 'the mute' and then being followed up by Christine talking to Janice over the radio. Guess that autodoc thing Dean did to her worked after all. After quite a lot of wandering around, and finding some relatively neat stuff like a suit of reinforced Madre body armor (the strongest armor classified as 'light' in the game, it turns out- which is good, because Janice's perks were aimed at wearing light armor and running like hell) and a way of making the bizarrely sharp Cosmic brand knives in the kitchen into superheated bizarrely sharp knives, she found her way to a really swank set of rooms. There was a bar to one side with a lot of boozeahol and a chemistry set, which Janice mostly ignored, and a locked door with a computer terminal next to it instead of a key or something else a sane person might be expected to use. The terminal didn't seem to ask for a password, for whatever reason, but the instant Janice used it to open the door, Father Jerkface informed her that the door to the vault was voice activated and that they'd need recordings of 'the starlet's' voice.
Okay, first things first, Lije. People? Have names. You should use them. Or at least nicknames instead of disparaging nouns. Seriously, Elijah is constitutionally incapable of referring to people by names. 'The mute'. 'The ghoul'. 'The FEV reject'. 'The starlet'. As amusing as assuming that he's actually a deranged Gallifreyan who thinks that everybody he's lured into the casino grounds is a renegade Time Lord might be, it's pretty clear that he doesn't bother using anyone's name because he doesn't respect any of them any farther than he could spit. I'd say it got Janice thoroughly annoyed, but she was already in frothing rage mode, so annoyance at this point would have been the equivalent of dipping a habanero in Tabasco sauce.
Anyway, since she didn't really fancy trying to string together audio clips from old holotapes, Janice went to check the rest of the suite area for Christine. Sure enough, she found her, talking and everything. Christine wasn't thrilled about her new voice, but she did indicate that these rooms were Vera Keyes'- and that Vera herself was dead in the corner, having been trapped by security all those years ago. Janice checked- yup, skeleton in a really nice women's dress, surrounded by spent syringes- and then asked Christine what was going on. Christine said she'd been hunting Elijah for years, that he'd done so much worse than just what he'd done at the Madre, and that he would never let them out alive so they'd have to lure him somewhere like down in the Vault to kill him. Janice... frankly agreed. Some people, she figured, needed to be put down before they could hurt anyone else.
And when she found out that the autodoc in the room couldn't heal Christine because when she'd been hunting Elijah in a place called the Big Empty, he'd trapped her in a medical center there and that had been where they jammed the electrodes into her skull and electrified her brain so she couldn't write and could just barely manage to read and could virtually only think in numbers... eheheheh. 'Put down' was probably too kind. There was a speech option for 'There's a chance he'll see reason' but honestly, between what Ronnie had told Janice back in the Mojave, and what Elijah had done so far, and what Christine was telling her now, the only way Janice would have said that would be if Reason was the name she'd given her holorifle.
Yes, I've read Snow Crash. Hush.
Anyway, Janice had to do.... something I really don't understand the reasoning for, involving going back to the lobby with a holotape and adding one last sound sample to the overall system for Jerkface's use. Given that she had Christine right there with Vera Keyes' voice I'm kind of handwaving that she didn't bother going back to the lobby at all, because it's pointless, stupid, and only there to allow the player to handle dealing with all three companions in any order they like. The trip also, once again, involves fighting Ghost People, because that's apparently what you do to keep the player engaged instead of thinking about how pointless certain activities are. (Kind of like the way an old GM of mine used to throw random ninjas at our party if he didn't have actual plot ready for us.) All I know is, as far as I'm concerned she continued her discussion with Christine rather than turning around and doing anything else.
Christine wondered why the vault would be keyed to Vera's voice, since she didn't build it. Janice, frankly, didn't think the place felt like a casino at all- more some kind of deranged fortress- and christine agreed. There was some serious obsession juju going on there, after what she'd heard from Dean and what she'd seen in the computers. Based on the sheet music she'd found in the theater- which had some words scribbled on it that hadn't been of any real interest to Janice until she found out the vault opened for Vera's voice- she told Christine the opening sequence was 'Begin' 'Again' 'Let' 'Go'. The 'begin again' part kind of made sense, since if she squinted at the Madre's logos on the vending machines it was apparently the casino's old motto, but the 'let go ' part was a bit of a surprise... not that she really cared. She just wanted to make Elijah die and get out of her collar at that point, so she asked Christine to come over and let her downstairs. Christine, however, suddenly wibbled and wanted to know if Janice was absolutely ready, because Elijah would follow her down there and she was positive he'd never let them leave...
Oh. Christine wanted the opportunity to kill Elijah when he showed up trying to find Janice after Janice went down to the vault.
Well, Janice didn't really mind the idea of letting Christine do that, but after some thought she realized that this probably wasn't a good idea. Mostly because Elijah was the only person on the premises who had clue one about how to disengage the damn collars. Janice had to do some fast talking to convince Christine not to kill him. Mostly it amounted to 'look, let him through and then follow me, so if he escapes, you can wait for him and blow his head off when he's not expecting it'. Yeah, yeah, given that whole 'let go' thing she was probably supposed to talk her into letting go of her obsession and all, but Janice really wanted Elijah dead at that point. 'Wait to kill him until he's done' was as close as she would get to saying 'let go'.
Christine finally agreed and spoke the words into the control terminal, and Janice went down the elevator, and... well. The elevator brought her to a room with a very nice view of the vault entrance. Which was surrounded by Cloud. And guarded by laser death turrets, albeit inactive ones. And on the far side of an energy field. There was a terminal in the room but it didn't let her deactivate the energy fields, only open up a maintenance door, so she kind of sighed and went along with that... and of course, of COURSE, her collar started beeping at that point.
PURE. FROTHING. HATRED.
She did, however, note one thing on the terminal before she started running. Apparently the elevator to this level was set to return to the suites area and lock in place if a) the security on the vault was disabled and b) somebody breached the terminal in the vault. As long as nobody screwed with the important stuff on the terminal inside that vault, the elevator could be operated from the suites level. This was done by Mr. Sinclair's order.
Huh.
Well, anyway, there was beeping, so Janice ran. She'd worry about the elevator thing later. She had to not die first. Turned out to be harder than it looked, because the casino architect apparently hated the maintenance people. Seriously, the maintenance route was threaded through several rooms full of pipes and Cloud and speakers and- okay, I guess it's not entirely fair to say the architect hated the janitors, the Cloud wasn't there in the beginning and the speakers only mattered to people wearing bomb collars of horrible splodey death. Janice didn't care about fairness, though. She cared about the walkways being missing huge chunks due to inexplicable damage. She cared about toxic red crap in the air. She cared about having to waste microfusion cells on blowing up speakers at a distance before they could kill her. And she cared about the ROOM FULL OF HOLOGRAMS WHY OH GOD WHY.
Seriously, there was a room that was absolutely CRAWLING with security holograms, with all of their emitters either on top of booths or stuck to the ceiling, and where you had to run and hide like hell to get to the terminal that didn't even let you shut them off, just change their patrol routes. And it was a room where you were running around on catwalks at least fifty feet off the ground, possibly more, so that if you tripped when you were running or misjudged your jump over a gap or what have you, you plummeted to your inevitable death no matter WHAT you did. Also there was Cloud down there just in case your Courier happened to be descended from Juliane Koepcke or Joseph Kittinger or something. It was pretty much just a Gratuitous Room of Gratuitous Death and after the first few attempts to get through it I had to wonder where Sinclair found so many obvious sociopaths to work on his construction project. Eventually, through a combination of running like hell, shooting anything glowy that didn't shoot back, and slapping computer terminals into submission, Janice finally managed to eke her way through it alive.
She had to deliberately turn off the vault security to get any further, of course, which meant the elevators were going back up without her, but she kinda knew that was gonna happen so whatever. Once she got to the other side she found a holotape near the entrance, not far from the bones of somebody who apparently fell and broke their neck. The tape turned out to be a fairly nasty note from Sinclair to Vera Keyes about how he knew what she and Dean had been planning all along, and how if she was reading the note on the vault terminal now she was locked in for pretty much ever in return for her betrayal. Janice winced a bit at that but honestly, that was a soap opera from two hundred years ago, and all she wanted was to get into the vault, get Elijah to come down there, put him out of the world's misery, get the collar control device out of his pockets, and get out of there alive. So she left the bones where they were and went to the terminal next to the-
You know, it is never a good sign when 'open the door' is met with 'Warning: only the trustworthy may enter my Vault. F. S.' Never. Ever.
Well, whatevs. Janice opened the door anyway, at which point the laser turrets in the room- remember those? From when she first got down there?- started firing on her. She ran into the vault and the door closed behind her, at which point she sat down and put her head between her knees and tried not to hyperventilate too much. When she finally pulled herself together she got a look around at the place. It was one room, with medical and scientific stuff, a cabinet full of guns and armor and ammo, and a table stacked with gold bars. And I do mean stacked. Thirty-seven of them. That table must've been reinforced clear from hell to breakfast to hold up that much gold- the stuff's heavy. There was also a huge pile of pre-war money and a bunch of Casino chips, a vending machine- Janice guessed so that whoever got stuck in there could live on Pringles and Med-X until the door got opened somehow- and oh, yeah, three terminals. One to control the lasers outside, which Janice couldn't operate (not enough Science score). One to switch security on or off. And one sitting in front of a big, big version of the Casino emblem. Really, it might as well have had an arrow pointing to it labeled ACTUAL PHYSICAL PLOT DEVICE RIGHT HERE.
Well, she switched the security off again, because it was getting on her nerves, and then she went to the plot device terminal. It had two entries listed, one that said 'Vera Keyes' and one that said 'Vera'. The entry for 'Vera Keyes' was missing, but the other one... turned out to be an apology. Apparently Sinclair had managed to speak to Vera before things went to hell, and that holotape was there because he didn't want her to ever have to read what he'd written in rage. He forgave her for not having loved him, he knew she never meant him any harm or malice, he thanked her for coming forward to confess voluntarily to her and Dean's scheme to rob him, and he understood the tapes Dean had in his possession- that he had been blackmailing her into it all. And he had built the casino to protect her, and he had gone nasty and dark when he realized Dean was planning to rob him, and he'd set everything up in the vault to be a trap because he knew Dean would get there first, and... yeah. Soap opera. Love, obsession, drugs, nuclear war, it was all there, along with a warning not to attempt to access the personal accounts entry because accessing THAT would be the trigger for sealing the door and returning the elevator to the surface and tripping the failsafe to prevent anyone from getting in there ever again.
Okay! Good to know.
Janice would've backed away from the computer immediately, but that was the instant when the logo split open and revealed, once again, the floating head of Father Jerkface. Who gloated a bit, and then admitted that he had managed to unlock the casino door- with other people's hands- only to get trapped in the place until her Pip-Boy signal lit things up. Well, that might explain a little bit; you'd go crazy too if you had to live any length of time in that place with nothing but the vending machines to sustain you...
Janice decided, what the hell, might as well get him to monologue. She asked him what he wanted from the Madre. He didn't mention the gold- he wanted the Madre as a fortress, as a weapon, as a place to use as a base of operations to carve the Mojave up into any way he chose and 'begin again'. Apparently the Cloud over the Sierra Madre could be used to protect and cleanse Old World stuff, and the holograms were unique- even the Big Empty researchers, whoever they were, never really got them to work properly. He loved the idea of dumping an emitter in a battle and letting everybody in the area die because they couldn't kill the hologram attacking them. (Never mind that Janice had destroyed several emitters without being slaughtered herself. This was Father Jerkface we were talking about here.) He also wanted the vending machines. He figured he could reprogram them to provide real food, more medical supplies, ammunition, currency, splodey-go-boom collars, weapons- even make a nation. The cloud would let him wipe the world clean, the collars would ensure people's compliance, and the vending machines would provide anything else.
Janice probably could have asked him a lot more at that point, or called him a killer who aspired to mass murder- the options were there on the dialog screen- but the guy was creeping her right the hell out. She asked him if he was planning to come down. Of course, he said no, since she was down there and was too resourceful for his liking. She thought about it for a bit, and then invoked Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, one more time- and threatened to find a way to destroy the vault and all the secrets in it. When he laughed at her and offered to detonate her collar instead, she calmly informed him she'd have enough time to wire her Pip-Boy and her collar to the intercom and void his signal, so he decided okay, he was going to have to come down and deal with her personally.
There is an option in the game at this point to escape the area and let Elijah seal himself in the vault for great poetic justice. Janice did not trust poetic justice. She grabbed all the medical supplies in the room, the reinforced armor in the closet, and two gold bars- she figured she could wing them at Elijah's head and break his skull if she had to- and stepped out to wait for him with her holorifle ready.
The fact that a properly modded holorifle- which she had- at full repair- which hers was at- in the hands of someone with a reasonably high energy weapons skill- which she had- with luck on her side- which she had, in the form of Better Criticals and Finesse perks- meant that a headshot was a one-hit kill on a human... well, I'd say the battle with Elijah was anti-climactic, but given that she couldn't find the 'shut my collar off' signal device on his body and the damn thing had started beeping? that was enough climax for anyone. Also, he was apparently a load-bearing boss, because things started exploding the instant he died. It might've been because her allies were trying to shut security down upstairs rather than let her get killed, I don't know. All I know is that Janice killed Jerkface with one good shot to the skull, grabbed all his things, and ran like all the legions of Hell were on her tail. Between the smoke and the fire and the splodey and the beeping, she just- JUST- managed to reach the elevator before the dead-man's-switch aspect of her collar reached its final countdown, and when the elevator doors opened, she was out in the plaza again, and her collar fell off.
Well. Huh.
She did her best to leave some kind of a note for the others, but she didn't really have anything to write with, so her note amounted to scratching things on concrete surfaces with a bit of loose rubble. After that, there really wasn't much else to do except leave. Or go back into the casino and steal stuff before leaving, if you were that kind of person, but at that point all Janice wanted to do was get the hell out of there and never, ever see or hear or think anything that had to do with the Madre ever again.
(There were then a couple of screens explaining what had happened to each of the survivors, since the collars didn't kill them. The information was interesting, and continued to hammer home the fact that obsession was bad and letting go was good, but Janice had no way of knowing about any of it. Other than, possibly, the bit that indicated that Dean Domino realized Vegas was still there and casinos still needed entertainers, so he set off to find the place and begin again. There was also a lot of talk about how something was going to happen at 'the Divide', between Janice and some other Courier. That part interested me, but Janice had no way of knowing that was coming either. She would just have to deal with the horrible surprises as they came. Because oh, yes, they were coming...)
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Date: 2012-01-22 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-22 05:14 am (UTC)