Notes From New Vegas 34
Feb. 11th, 2012 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 34: UTAH. WHAT.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was dealing with a deep and burning desire to avoid having to gratuitously kill people. This is harder than you might think given that apparently she could not set foot outside in the Freeside neighborhood for more than about two blocks' distance without the dumbest thugs in town showing up to attack her. They had to have been the dumbest because they went after her with lead pipes and baseball bats, and they were wearing Brahmin-skin outfits, while she was wearing a Sierra Madre Casino body armor suit and carrying a big damn sniper rifle and accompanied by the girl with the Punch of Kill Everything. Janice decided that while raising the average IQ of Freeside two thugs at a time might eventually pay off, she'd really rather not have a kill tally that had to be marked on her arm in grease pencil because the gun wasn't long enough for all the marks, and she headed north to track down the Happy Trails Caravan Company outside town and maybe get hired for a while.
Well, she found them, and they were legit. Unfortunately, they were also in iffy financial straits and could only hire one more person. Also, that person could only carry seventy-five pounds of stuff or less. They were going to be heading into Utah and the slot canyons and narrow trails wouldn't allow for big packs. I'm not sure why they couldn't take ED-E but they didn't want her to bring the robot either. Given that she'd just gotten both her companions back this made her an unhappy person, but Janice finally just made a grumpyface and apologized to both of them. Ronnie was okay with it and promised to take care of the robot while she was gone.
(Actually, this is not how it was coded in the game, since you essentially only have the option of telling people 'Go home and stop following me' unless you've reached a point at which you can say 'Go to the fancy hotel room and stop following me'. But it sounds better this way.)
Janice did have a few other questions, of course. One was why Jed seemed so interested in her Pip-Boy. Simple enough- he wanted someone who could use said device's mapping capabilities and use them well, in case they needed to find a different route to or from their destination, a mission of the New Canaanites in what was once Zion National Park. There was already a guy with a PIp-Boy in the party, technically, but Jed din't really trust him.
Janice wandered over to have a word with him. His name was Ricky. And he was a jerk. A loud jerk, in a Vault 22 suit- remember Vault 22? The one where all the inhabitants were turned into horrible shambling plant zombie monsters that would rip your face off? Yup. And this guy claimed to have gotten his suit from there along with his Pip-Boy. Only he said it was Vault Two-Two and the device was a Pit-Boy and FUCK YOU WHO TOLD YOU MY HOSTILITY WAS A SIGN OF ME BEING ADDICTED TO PSYCHO. SHUT UP BITCH I'M TOTALLY CLEAN.
... yuh huh.
Well, after some more questioning it turned out he got the suit and the device off a dead prospector who'd come from Zion, so that's how he knew there was good loot there. Unfortunately that appeared to be the extent of his cleverness or usefulness, unless his claim that he had a third testicle that glowed in the dark was true. Why did you tell Janice that, Ricky. WHY. I CAN'T UN-KNOW THAT. Janice kind of shuddered and suggested strongly he consider leaving now, before the chems ran out and left him high and dry in the middle of nowhere, and the next thing she knew Ricky was gone and Jed was breathing a fair deal easier.
So, you know, time to ask questions and find stuff out before going anywhere. The New Canaanites, for one thing. She'd never heard of them. Well, it turned out they were an old pre-war religious group, used to be the Mormons. They controlled Ogden and had a presence around Salt Lake City, and there used to be the city of New Canaan, but no one'd heard from there in a while. Traveling in Utah was easily one of the most dangerous things to do in the southwest, full of raiders (crazy and chemmed up like any others), tribals (such as groups like the 80s, who apparently lived along an old highway of that number, and a group called the White Legs) and petty local warlords. Hence the guards on the caravan.
Now, Janice was, as you may have noticed, not a big fan of being shot in the head. And this sounded like a prime opportunity to be shot in the head. On the other hand, there were other people on this trip, so it wasn't as if she'd be alone and defenseless. Plus, Janice was not a fan of constantly having to kill people; at least on this trip it sounded like she wouldn't have to shoot people all the time. Which put it a step up from Freeside. So ultimately... yeah. A trip through the most dangerous part of the Southwest was better than Janice's everyday life at that point.
Hear that faint little voice screaming "hey! Hey! Over here, you forgot meeeee!"? That's the A-plot. God, I love sandbox games.
So Janice told Jed that she'd do it, and Jed asked her if she was absolutely sure. His specific words were: "I don't want no whining about 'oh, Mr. Masterson, I left my one-of-a-kind plasma cannon back at base, can we go back for it?'." Practical man, Mr. Masterson, and a decent in-universe way of letting you know that once you start this DLC you are not going ANYWHERE until it is done. Janice said yes, of course, because otherwise what was the point, and the Loading screen came up.
Remember how there was an opening slideshow for the Sierra Madre stuff back at the start of Dead Money? Same deal here. Which I didn't object to, because in this case it made a fair amount of sense. The opening cinematic for this one was essentially a handwave of Jed Masterson filling in the new hire on what they were doing on this trip. Considering how long they were traveling, it only made sense for him to tell the story of New Canaan in Northern Utah. He said most folk didn't really know much about them except that they were religious and that they sent missionaries to the local tribals. The New Canaanites got themselves a reputation as honest traders and decent fighters ("they might be religious, but they're no pacifists" was how Jed put it). Kind of hard to go wrong with them, really... And then the Legion showed up in Arizona. And their first war chief was a New Canaanite named Joshua Graham- the meanest, toughest SOB in the Legion, Caesar's second in command. Unfortunately ol' Josh lost the battle of Hoover Dam to the NCR, so Caesar made an example of him, as you do when you're, you know, pretending to be the son of freakin' Mars. Caesar had him covered in pitch, lit on fire, and thrown into the Grand Canyon.
And in a move calculated to win him a slot on Badass of the Week, the stories all say that Joshua didn't even so much as scream on the way down.
Some time after that, Jed said, people started talking and saying Graham wasn't dead... which, y'know, didn't really look good for Caesar. Making an example of someone kind of requires your horrible punishment to have actually worked. Caesar tried to win the reputation war by forbidding anybody in his empire from speaking Joshua Graham's name. So Joshua Graham disappeared, and legends of the Burned Man walking the wastes began instead... and while Jed didn't know for sure and figured Graham was probably dead, maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe Graham crawled out of the canyon and finally found his way back home.
DUN DUN DUNNNH.
So, yeah, that was the intro section, and when it was over the camera came up on Janice and the rest of the group in Zion National Park. Everybody looked like they'd made it through okay. One of the other caravaneers was busy bitching about the slot canyons and getting back, and Jed told her not to worry about it, and the other caravaneer went into sarcasm mode about their withdrawal plans, and AUGH TRIBAL AMBUSH. WITH MACHINE GUNS.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it went. Bla bla bla welcome to Zion, bla bla bla bitchcakes, bla bla bla EVERYBODY ELSE BUT ME IS DEAD.
Janice fought back, of course, along with everybody else in the caravan, but the others all died and she was left fighting a bunch of White Legs. White Legs are tribals with pale skin which may or may not be painted that color, dreadlocked hair, face paint or tattoos, and ridiculously overpowered firearms for people who give the impression of not understanding how to work a can opener. There's good reason for that, but since the dead dudes and ladies didn't exactly have +2 Notecards of In-Universe Exposition on their corpses Janice was left wondering what the hell she'd just run into. So she gathered up as much stuff as she could that seemed like it might be useful to her survival and sat down to think about her situation:
1. I'm in UTAH.
2. Everybody else but me is dead.
3. I am alone. In UTAH.
4. I've got a Pip-Boy's worth of maps of the route between New Vegas and UTAH.
5. And absolutely nobody else to accompany me back.
6. And only about enough supplies to get me a third of the way there, water-and-foodwise.
7. The New Canaanites are supposed to have a mission in Zion somewhere, and they're traders.
8. Perhaps I should find them and buy some food and water so I can get the hell out of UTAH.
Or food, anyway, since there was a river nearby. A big river. Like, actual swimmy depth kind of river. So water wasn't going to be that hard to come by. Just food- anyway, yeah, it sounded like a good idea to go and find the New Canaanites so that she could get what she needed to turn around and go home, so Janice set out for the bridge across the AUUUGH MORE AMBUSH.
Which would have been a lot worse if it hadn't suddenly been interrupted by a nearly naked dude in a loincloth and a lot of tattoos and a baseball cap creeping up behind the gunners and beating the gunners to death with a stick. A big stick. A very pretty stick. A stick that also happened to be accompanied by a .45 automatic pistol for dealing with the last few White Legs who were out of stick range. BEST. STICK. EVER.
*cough* Anyway. Loincloth tattooed guy turned out to be pretty friendly once he was done killin' White Legs; he said his name was Follows-Chalk and that Janice must've been some kind of lucky to make it this far, because White Legs didn't often leave survivors. Considering how far she'd come, he said, she should talk to Joshua, and he could take her there if she wanted.
Um.
Yes, he meant that Joshua. Hoo, boy.
Well, y'know, at this point Janice was starting to wonder just exactly what god or ancestor or law of probability she'd offended to have a life like this. It wasn't quite a BOUNDLESS RAGE situation like the Sierra Madre had been, but being asked to come and talk to a legendary terror of the Southwest was not really her idea of a sign of fortune's favor, either, y'know? She did, however, have the so-rare-it's-a-goddamn-superpower ability of Common Sense, and so she agreed to come and talk to Joshua. Someone like that, it was best to know where you stood. She also asked Follows-Chalk if there was anything she could do to be of use to him and his people as long as she was there- he had saved her life, after all. He indicated they were having some trouble with the local Bighorner herd and a lost calf and asked if she could help find it before the animals decided to either invade the camp or move on and force the hunters to go to a lot more trouble.
Janice nearly cried at being asked to do something so harmless.
She agreed, and then started fishing for information as they traveled. Apparently New Canaan had been wiped out. Great, just great. So much for the caravan trip and the supplies... oh, the White Legs were the ones who wiped out the New Canaanites? Bloody great. There was arguing in Follows-Chalk's tribe about whether to stand and fight the White Legs or evacuate the Zion valley? Oy. Well, maybe Janice could get out of Utah before that happened... ahahahano, but still, she could hope, right? A little more fishing got the information that his tribe was called the Dead Horses and that they came up from 'the land of the Dead Horse', although he had no idea why it was named that. (It's because it was Dead Horse State Park in pre-War Utah.) His tattoos were a tribal tradition- each time a Dead Horse participated in a big successful hunt or battle, they got a tattoo to commemorate it. Considering how much ink that boy had, he must've been keeping pretty busy...
Oh, yes, and then there was the Joshua part. Joshua was the leader of the Dead Horses these days, but he hadn't always been. Turned out that according to Follows-Chalk, Joshua had originally been the servant of a man named Caesar. He came to them and taught them about serious weapons and warfare, and they would've followed him to battle, but then he got called away to lead his master's armies at a battle for some kind of dam. Which Chalk didn't understand, because dams were little things, weren't they? (Janice indicated that this was not the case with THIS particular dam.) Huh. Wow. Okay, well, anyway, Joshua lost the battle to a tribe called Enseeyar, the Sunset People, and his master got mad. When Joshua came back he was burned all over and broken and changed, and essentially said Caesar could cram it, he wasn't taking the Dead Horses ANYWHERE. They were going to live RIGHT HERE. In Zion. And Joshua was going to protect them, not destroy things with them.
Huh.
Understand that this was being relayed as they traeled through the canyons and hiking paths of Zion, which was so far from being a target during the Great War that it was practically GREEN. I mean, yeah, desert landscapes and majestic bare rocky rock and all, but compared to the Mojave? There were agave plants everywhere, and banana yucca plants (Follows-Chalk said Bighorners particularly liked to eat those), and little green plants with white flowers that were apparently datura plants, and xander roots and broc flowers growing all over the place, and honey mesquite bushes galore, and OH GOD IT'S BIGGER THAN A TRUCK WHAT THE HELL yao guai, and AUGH NOW THE GECKOS HAVE PROJECTILE POISON SPITTLE green-skinned geckos, and SOMEWHERE THE SQUARE-CUBE LAW IS CRYING LIKE A BABY giant cazadors, and WELL THESE COULD BE WORSE SO I AM NOT GOING TO COMPLAIN mantises- you get the point. Zion was full of life, particularly plant life, but also full of all the kinds of animals that you expect in a place with both a functioning ecosystem and a horrible sense of humor. At least the giant ants were just standard giant ants and not the fire-breathers from Ivanpah. And at least the giant scorpions didn't get to the size of Corvegas. When you're Janice, you have to take your blessings where you can find them.
I have to admit, as much as I appreciate bleak, open, empty landscapes of devastation like the Capital Wasteland back in Fallout 3, the vitality of Zion was a wonderful thing to see. I really didn't like the Sierra Madre at all; the unrelenting grimness was just more than anyone should've been asked to take. Getting a piece of DLC in which the world was at least partly green and alive, and in which there were indicators of people actually being sane despite horrible things having happened to them, and in which the game creators allowed for the possibility that at least one pre-War social institution might have survived without going completely pants-on-head crazy... I was predisposed to like this story from the very start, and the scenery made me even happier. It leaked through to the character, I think. But really, I can think of worse IC/OOC bleeds.
Anyway, I'll pick up at Janice and Follows-Chalk reaching the Dead Horses' camp next time, and that's when we'll cover her meeting the Angriest Mormon Alive.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was dealing with a deep and burning desire to avoid having to gratuitously kill people. This is harder than you might think given that apparently she could not set foot outside in the Freeside neighborhood for more than about two blocks' distance without the dumbest thugs in town showing up to attack her. They had to have been the dumbest because they went after her with lead pipes and baseball bats, and they were wearing Brahmin-skin outfits, while she was wearing a Sierra Madre Casino body armor suit and carrying a big damn sniper rifle and accompanied by the girl with the Punch of Kill Everything. Janice decided that while raising the average IQ of Freeside two thugs at a time might eventually pay off, she'd really rather not have a kill tally that had to be marked on her arm in grease pencil because the gun wasn't long enough for all the marks, and she headed north to track down the Happy Trails Caravan Company outside town and maybe get hired for a while.
Well, she found them, and they were legit. Unfortunately, they were also in iffy financial straits and could only hire one more person. Also, that person could only carry seventy-five pounds of stuff or less. They were going to be heading into Utah and the slot canyons and narrow trails wouldn't allow for big packs. I'm not sure why they couldn't take ED-E but they didn't want her to bring the robot either. Given that she'd just gotten both her companions back this made her an unhappy person, but Janice finally just made a grumpyface and apologized to both of them. Ronnie was okay with it and promised to take care of the robot while she was gone.
(Actually, this is not how it was coded in the game, since you essentially only have the option of telling people 'Go home and stop following me' unless you've reached a point at which you can say 'Go to the fancy hotel room and stop following me'. But it sounds better this way.)
Janice did have a few other questions, of course. One was why Jed seemed so interested in her Pip-Boy. Simple enough- he wanted someone who could use said device's mapping capabilities and use them well, in case they needed to find a different route to or from their destination, a mission of the New Canaanites in what was once Zion National Park. There was already a guy with a PIp-Boy in the party, technically, but Jed din't really trust him.
Janice wandered over to have a word with him. His name was Ricky. And he was a jerk. A loud jerk, in a Vault 22 suit- remember Vault 22? The one where all the inhabitants were turned into horrible shambling plant zombie monsters that would rip your face off? Yup. And this guy claimed to have gotten his suit from there along with his Pip-Boy. Only he said it was Vault Two-Two and the device was a Pit-Boy and FUCK YOU WHO TOLD YOU MY HOSTILITY WAS A SIGN OF ME BEING ADDICTED TO PSYCHO. SHUT UP BITCH I'M TOTALLY CLEAN.
... yuh huh.
Well, after some more questioning it turned out he got the suit and the device off a dead prospector who'd come from Zion, so that's how he knew there was good loot there. Unfortunately that appeared to be the extent of his cleverness or usefulness, unless his claim that he had a third testicle that glowed in the dark was true. Why did you tell Janice that, Ricky. WHY. I CAN'T UN-KNOW THAT. Janice kind of shuddered and suggested strongly he consider leaving now, before the chems ran out and left him high and dry in the middle of nowhere, and the next thing she knew Ricky was gone and Jed was breathing a fair deal easier.
So, you know, time to ask questions and find stuff out before going anywhere. The New Canaanites, for one thing. She'd never heard of them. Well, it turned out they were an old pre-war religious group, used to be the Mormons. They controlled Ogden and had a presence around Salt Lake City, and there used to be the city of New Canaan, but no one'd heard from there in a while. Traveling in Utah was easily one of the most dangerous things to do in the southwest, full of raiders (crazy and chemmed up like any others), tribals (such as groups like the 80s, who apparently lived along an old highway of that number, and a group called the White Legs) and petty local warlords. Hence the guards on the caravan.
Now, Janice was, as you may have noticed, not a big fan of being shot in the head. And this sounded like a prime opportunity to be shot in the head. On the other hand, there were other people on this trip, so it wasn't as if she'd be alone and defenseless. Plus, Janice was not a fan of constantly having to kill people; at least on this trip it sounded like she wouldn't have to shoot people all the time. Which put it a step up from Freeside. So ultimately... yeah. A trip through the most dangerous part of the Southwest was better than Janice's everyday life at that point.
Hear that faint little voice screaming "hey! Hey! Over here, you forgot meeeee!"? That's the A-plot. God, I love sandbox games.
So Janice told Jed that she'd do it, and Jed asked her if she was absolutely sure. His specific words were: "I don't want no whining about 'oh, Mr. Masterson, I left my one-of-a-kind plasma cannon back at base, can we go back for it?'." Practical man, Mr. Masterson, and a decent in-universe way of letting you know that once you start this DLC you are not going ANYWHERE until it is done. Janice said yes, of course, because otherwise what was the point, and the Loading screen came up.
Remember how there was an opening slideshow for the Sierra Madre stuff back at the start of Dead Money? Same deal here. Which I didn't object to, because in this case it made a fair amount of sense. The opening cinematic for this one was essentially a handwave of Jed Masterson filling in the new hire on what they were doing on this trip. Considering how long they were traveling, it only made sense for him to tell the story of New Canaan in Northern Utah. He said most folk didn't really know much about them except that they were religious and that they sent missionaries to the local tribals. The New Canaanites got themselves a reputation as honest traders and decent fighters ("they might be religious, but they're no pacifists" was how Jed put it). Kind of hard to go wrong with them, really... And then the Legion showed up in Arizona. And their first war chief was a New Canaanite named Joshua Graham- the meanest, toughest SOB in the Legion, Caesar's second in command. Unfortunately ol' Josh lost the battle of Hoover Dam to the NCR, so Caesar made an example of him, as you do when you're, you know, pretending to be the son of freakin' Mars. Caesar had him covered in pitch, lit on fire, and thrown into the Grand Canyon.
And in a move calculated to win him a slot on Badass of the Week, the stories all say that Joshua didn't even so much as scream on the way down.
Some time after that, Jed said, people started talking and saying Graham wasn't dead... which, y'know, didn't really look good for Caesar. Making an example of someone kind of requires your horrible punishment to have actually worked. Caesar tried to win the reputation war by forbidding anybody in his empire from speaking Joshua Graham's name. So Joshua Graham disappeared, and legends of the Burned Man walking the wastes began instead... and while Jed didn't know for sure and figured Graham was probably dead, maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe Graham crawled out of the canyon and finally found his way back home.
DUN DUN DUNNNH.
So, yeah, that was the intro section, and when it was over the camera came up on Janice and the rest of the group in Zion National Park. Everybody looked like they'd made it through okay. One of the other caravaneers was busy bitching about the slot canyons and getting back, and Jed told her not to worry about it, and the other caravaneer went into sarcasm mode about their withdrawal plans, and AUGH TRIBAL AMBUSH. WITH MACHINE GUNS.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it went. Bla bla bla welcome to Zion, bla bla bla bitchcakes, bla bla bla EVERYBODY ELSE BUT ME IS DEAD.
Janice fought back, of course, along with everybody else in the caravan, but the others all died and she was left fighting a bunch of White Legs. White Legs are tribals with pale skin which may or may not be painted that color, dreadlocked hair, face paint or tattoos, and ridiculously overpowered firearms for people who give the impression of not understanding how to work a can opener. There's good reason for that, but since the dead dudes and ladies didn't exactly have +2 Notecards of In-Universe Exposition on their corpses Janice was left wondering what the hell she'd just run into. So she gathered up as much stuff as she could that seemed like it might be useful to her survival and sat down to think about her situation:
1. I'm in UTAH.
2. Everybody else but me is dead.
3. I am alone. In UTAH.
4. I've got a Pip-Boy's worth of maps of the route between New Vegas and UTAH.
5. And absolutely nobody else to accompany me back.
6. And only about enough supplies to get me a third of the way there, water-and-foodwise.
7. The New Canaanites are supposed to have a mission in Zion somewhere, and they're traders.
8. Perhaps I should find them and buy some food and water so I can get the hell out of UTAH.
Or food, anyway, since there was a river nearby. A big river. Like, actual swimmy depth kind of river. So water wasn't going to be that hard to come by. Just food- anyway, yeah, it sounded like a good idea to go and find the New Canaanites so that she could get what she needed to turn around and go home, so Janice set out for the bridge across the AUUUGH MORE AMBUSH.
Which would have been a lot worse if it hadn't suddenly been interrupted by a nearly naked dude in a loincloth and a lot of tattoos and a baseball cap creeping up behind the gunners and beating the gunners to death with a stick. A big stick. A very pretty stick. A stick that also happened to be accompanied by a .45 automatic pistol for dealing with the last few White Legs who were out of stick range. BEST. STICK. EVER.
*cough* Anyway. Loincloth tattooed guy turned out to be pretty friendly once he was done killin' White Legs; he said his name was Follows-Chalk and that Janice must've been some kind of lucky to make it this far, because White Legs didn't often leave survivors. Considering how far she'd come, he said, she should talk to Joshua, and he could take her there if she wanted.
Um.
Yes, he meant that Joshua. Hoo, boy.
Well, y'know, at this point Janice was starting to wonder just exactly what god or ancestor or law of probability she'd offended to have a life like this. It wasn't quite a BOUNDLESS RAGE situation like the Sierra Madre had been, but being asked to come and talk to a legendary terror of the Southwest was not really her idea of a sign of fortune's favor, either, y'know? She did, however, have the so-rare-it's-a-goddamn-superpower ability of Common Sense, and so she agreed to come and talk to Joshua. Someone like that, it was best to know where you stood. She also asked Follows-Chalk if there was anything she could do to be of use to him and his people as long as she was there- he had saved her life, after all. He indicated they were having some trouble with the local Bighorner herd and a lost calf and asked if she could help find it before the animals decided to either invade the camp or move on and force the hunters to go to a lot more trouble.
Janice nearly cried at being asked to do something so harmless.
She agreed, and then started fishing for information as they traveled. Apparently New Canaan had been wiped out. Great, just great. So much for the caravan trip and the supplies... oh, the White Legs were the ones who wiped out the New Canaanites? Bloody great. There was arguing in Follows-Chalk's tribe about whether to stand and fight the White Legs or evacuate the Zion valley? Oy. Well, maybe Janice could get out of Utah before that happened... ahahahano, but still, she could hope, right? A little more fishing got the information that his tribe was called the Dead Horses and that they came up from 'the land of the Dead Horse', although he had no idea why it was named that. (It's because it was Dead Horse State Park in pre-War Utah.) His tattoos were a tribal tradition- each time a Dead Horse participated in a big successful hunt or battle, they got a tattoo to commemorate it. Considering how much ink that boy had, he must've been keeping pretty busy...
Oh, yes, and then there was the Joshua part. Joshua was the leader of the Dead Horses these days, but he hadn't always been. Turned out that according to Follows-Chalk, Joshua had originally been the servant of a man named Caesar. He came to them and taught them about serious weapons and warfare, and they would've followed him to battle, but then he got called away to lead his master's armies at a battle for some kind of dam. Which Chalk didn't understand, because dams were little things, weren't they? (Janice indicated that this was not the case with THIS particular dam.) Huh. Wow. Okay, well, anyway, Joshua lost the battle to a tribe called Enseeyar, the Sunset People, and his master got mad. When Joshua came back he was burned all over and broken and changed, and essentially said Caesar could cram it, he wasn't taking the Dead Horses ANYWHERE. They were going to live RIGHT HERE. In Zion. And Joshua was going to protect them, not destroy things with them.
Huh.
Understand that this was being relayed as they traeled through the canyons and hiking paths of Zion, which was so far from being a target during the Great War that it was practically GREEN. I mean, yeah, desert landscapes and majestic bare rocky rock and all, but compared to the Mojave? There were agave plants everywhere, and banana yucca plants (Follows-Chalk said Bighorners particularly liked to eat those), and little green plants with white flowers that were apparently datura plants, and xander roots and broc flowers growing all over the place, and honey mesquite bushes galore, and OH GOD IT'S BIGGER THAN A TRUCK WHAT THE HELL yao guai, and AUGH NOW THE GECKOS HAVE PROJECTILE POISON SPITTLE green-skinned geckos, and SOMEWHERE THE SQUARE-CUBE LAW IS CRYING LIKE A BABY giant cazadors, and WELL THESE COULD BE WORSE SO I AM NOT GOING TO COMPLAIN mantises- you get the point. Zion was full of life, particularly plant life, but also full of all the kinds of animals that you expect in a place with both a functioning ecosystem and a horrible sense of humor. At least the giant ants were just standard giant ants and not the fire-breathers from Ivanpah. And at least the giant scorpions didn't get to the size of Corvegas. When you're Janice, you have to take your blessings where you can find them.
I have to admit, as much as I appreciate bleak, open, empty landscapes of devastation like the Capital Wasteland back in Fallout 3, the vitality of Zion was a wonderful thing to see. I really didn't like the Sierra Madre at all; the unrelenting grimness was just more than anyone should've been asked to take. Getting a piece of DLC in which the world was at least partly green and alive, and in which there were indicators of people actually being sane despite horrible things having happened to them, and in which the game creators allowed for the possibility that at least one pre-War social institution might have survived without going completely pants-on-head crazy... I was predisposed to like this story from the very start, and the scenery made me even happier. It leaked through to the character, I think. But really, I can think of worse IC/OOC bleeds.
Anyway, I'll pick up at Janice and Follows-Chalk reaching the Dead Horses' camp next time, and that's when we'll cover her meeting the Angriest Mormon Alive.
