Notes From New Vegas 41
Apr. 29th, 2012 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 41: Never Mind Oldman, Gary Busey Couldn't Play This Kind Of Crazy
When last we saw our heroine Janice was freaking out over the fact that she'd been given a nice, comfortable place to use as her base of operations and that said space
a) was the former residence of Dr. MOBIUS, the mad-even-by-disembodied-floating-brain-standards scientist whose current address of note was somewhere in the FORBIDDEN ZONE;
b) was full of appliances that wouldn't work unless she went out into the Big Mountain research facility's environs and found all of their programming tapes and installed them all; and OH YEAH
c) HAD HER HEART AND SPINE, HER ACTUAL BIOLOGICAL HEART AND SPINE, FLOATING HAPPILY IN JARS NEXT TO HER SUPPOSED BEDROOM.
You know, some days being shot in the head for a second time in your life is the least worst thing that could happen to you.
Well, once she finished the screaming and the frothing and the ranting and the kicking things, Janice calmed down enough to plan a few things out. Step one was to go out into Big MT and look through all the ruins of research facilities she could, partly for the missing activation codes for her room's appliances and partly for any funky experimental tech or weaponry she might be able to use should she get rid of that pacification field and have a crack at revenge on the floating brains. And, of course, to give her a chance to look for her ACTUAL brain, since she had no reason to believe that Dr. Mobius had it in the first place. (And, if we're being honest, she wanted to find a toilet, since there wasn't one in her rooms.) Step two was to activate all the systems in the room in the hopes that she could get some more information out of them about how to deal with her situation- no, wait, that was step three. Step two was to attempt to cross the so-called radar fence, just in case the brains were lying about that in order to trap her here.
So… yeah. She would do that.
It's not ever really a good sign when you step outside and the lawn is blue, but as far as unnatural horrors of the day went, completely blue grass was so far down the list that it didn't even remotely register. The brains had put a couple of locations to search for the technologies they wanted on her Pip-Boy, so Janice said screw that and set off for the first building she saw, a squatty sort of thing off to the right with a sign that read X-12.
Cue lobotomites. The real kind. People, basically, some of them in raggedy shapeless jumpsuits, some of them still in what looked like hospital gowns, all of them wearing either massive goggles or some form of hood or mask. Janice felt kind of sorry for them, since the brains had experimented on them too, but the ones who spotted her opened fire on her position with rifles and shotguns and that's kind of the point when pity goes flying out the window. For guys (and possibly girls- you'd have to get their clothes off to tell the difference, which, ew) who were missing a significant portion of their brains, if not all of their brains, they sure did seem to have a good handle on the use of cover and the need to keep moving while shooting in order to avoid being taken down via a scoped precision shot.
Janice had no pity whatsoever for the brainless wonders by the time it was all said and done. She may even have kicked one of the corpses out of annoyance on her way into the X-12 research facility, which... was not much help because it was basically one room with the stairs sealed off by glowing blue force fields. Whatever. She thought she could see things moving around below the force fields, but if she couldn't reach them they couldn't reach her, so they didn't really matter. She'd just have to come back if she ever managed to find the frequency that would let her use the sonic emitter to blow up force fields. Her next destination after that was an area with a sign that proclaimed it to be the X-7b "Boom Town" target zone, and that is not a combination of words you ever really want to see. The place looked like a former residential area and it set off her Geiger counter, and someone had painted what looked vaguely like the design of the Old World flag on one of the more intact bits of wall. Not really encouraging, yanno? And the big looming satellite dishy thing directly ahead of her wasn't really anything other than creepy either, although her Pip-Boy map indicated that it was X-8, where one of the technologies the brains wanted retrieved was probably stored- so she avoided that too. Perhaps that lumpy looking building to the south would be more interesting to explore.
That one had an Old World flag design painted on the door, too. In red. This should have been a sign.
Pretty much as soon as Janice walked in things started going to hell. This is what happens when a bunch of "Mr. Orderly" robots (Mr. Handy and Mr. Gutsy being the other two models of floating-metal-beach-ball-with-three-eyes-and-three-woogly-arms robot in the Fallout universe) are left alone in a medical research facility for two hundred years. The robots started shouting at her about having caused the mess and how they had to clean it up and how they'd strangle her if they just had hands, and then the plasma fire and the flamethrowers kicked in. You know. As these things do.
By the time the smoke cleared, the robots were dead and Janice had found a half-buried autodoc with an odd suit of recon armor on the floor nearby, holotapes for use with the autodoc back in the Sink, a room full of jail cells with mattresses on the floor that couldn't be reached because of a forcefield, and a terminal with entries about the 'Sierra Madre Test Case' and their autodoc and 'innovative toxins' research and OKAY JANICE IS GOING INTO THE CORNER TO HAVE A FLASHBACK OR TWELVE NOW.
The other terminal entry about 'the Y-17 trauma suits do more thinking than the people inside them' did not help at ALL. Nor did the comment about the harnesses being able to take over the motor functions of somebody injured and walk them back to home base. Or how the suits could record somebody's moves and use them in combat. Or how the Little Yangtze subjects could hardly protest once they were locked inside the harness. Or how if a base was undefined the suit would go into a wandering patrol pattern. Or how the suits could not tell if the person inside was dead.
Well, YOU can just rock Janice to sleep tonight.
There were cyberdogs outside, German Shepherd dogs with mostly-robotic bodies and glowing brains protected byglass domes and long-range sonic bark attacks. Nasty bastards. Janice shot at them as best she could and ran from them when she couldn't hit them, and in the process stumbled across a big hangar-type facility with an unlocked door. The area inside was... a rather nice simulation of a prewar small town, houses arranged in a large circle around a central town fountain, with grass and plants and trees and other signs of nature. Had Janice ever played Fallout 3 she would have recognized it as looking almost exactly like Tranquility Lane, but with a fountain where Dr. Braun's demented little playground had been. Also with no inhabitants; when Janice investigated the houses she mostly found prewar scientific equipment and ruined books, and in one particularly disturbing case a basement full of dog carriers and surgical equipment.
Allow me to note that for the induction of sheer dread, I really think that all a game with Evil Bad Scientists in it has to do is put an empty dog carrier where the player will find it. The presence of the dog carrier in such a game means that either someone has been experimenting on a defenseless animal, or someone has released a killer monster death animal, or both.
Anyway, Janice found some interesting holotapes in the houses, including one or two that gave her instructions on how to print out skill books, and one that was labeled 'Audio Sample - Giant Tarantula Attack', which apparently was intended for the sonic emitter gun. Don't know where they found a giant tarantula with a sonic attack. Maybe Jon Peters was involved somewhere. Janice pocketed the tapes and some of the other stuff she found in the houses, and then she left. Place gave her the creeps. Everywhere in Big MT gave her the creeps, but you know what I mean.
It wasn't far from there to the nearest bit of radar fence, so Janice decided to go test out what the brains had told her. She got intercepted along the way, though. Not by lobotomites or cyberdogs this time. No, remember those trauma harnesses the computer in the medical center talked about? Ayup. They looked like the shiny red spacesuits the ghouls at REPCONN had worn all those ages ago, and they had skeletons in them, because nobody had been around to turn the suits off. And even better, in the Invader Zim sense of the word 'better', was the fact that they had laser guns and plasma rifles and Gauss rifles and they were able to use them. WHEEEEEE.
Well, hell, at least they were something Janice could kill with absolutely no twinges of conscience at all. And get microfusion cells from after the oh GOD that one was carrying STILL SQUISHY HUMAN FLESH, WHYYYY....
(Seriously, the inventory of one of the harnesses, once killed, was 'drained microfusion cells, human flesh, microfusion cells, plasma rifle, surgical tubing'. Ewwww.)
So, um, yeah, once the boney bastards were all dead Janice ran for the radar fence. And, as promised, got knocked unconscious. And woke up in the Sink, once again. So, the brains had been accurate on that count. Best not to try it again in case the neural degradation was for realz, too. She grabbed her holotapes and such and began installing them in the appropriate devices around the room. The Auto-doc, for something that had been used to remove her brain and heart and spine, wasn't too bad. Very matter-of-fact, with a slight drawl to its words, and absolutely no memory of having worked on her before. It patched her up as a conciliatory gesture and told her it could do more than that if she brought it the rest of its programming tapes, and that it could heal her or fix addictions any time she needed. That... wasn't such a bad thing. She could live with that.
The jukebox was pretty friendly, too. She'd found the tape to activate that in the houses in the hangar along with the tarantula tape. The jukebox called itself Blind Diode Jefferson and talked like a Deep South blues singer, although it had more of the blues than it really wanted because Dr. Mobius had removed its ability to play actual music and stuffed it full of programming to rework the sonic emitters instead. It happily swapped out the baseline sonic sample in her emitter for the tarantula scream and noted that on a really good hit, the tarantula scream would cause its target to burst into flames, and offered to do more swaps with any other samples she might bring back.
The book chute, now.... When she activated it, it sang out, "Ah! Good day, citizen! Library processing unit 232.7 is on-line and ready to eradicate sedition!" And it really only went downhill from there. The chute seemed to think any book, regardless of its condition, was a potentially seditious item. It would happily chew up any book it was given and spit out a pristine, harmless blank book in return. Because blank books couldn't transmit dangerous ideas, you see. It noted that with the right mulching programming it could also destroy potentially dangerous idea transmitters like clipboards and even pencils and yield up much more useful resources like duct tape, scrap metal and lead instead. And it sadly noted that it had been meant to include an indoctrination module, but that had been scrapped due to budget concerns, so Janice would just have to do a self-indoctrination with a small cage over her head and a sack of mole rats...
ahahahahahahayeahno. Janice bid the book chute goodbye and got the hell out of there. She'd come back and stuff it full of unreadable books so she could get enough paper to print skill books later, but right then she needed to get the hell away from that thing and everything about it. Maybe head for the Botanical Gardens, to look for the tapes to activate the biological research station in the Sink instead. That had been hooked up to a bunch of planters and water pipes; surely it would be harmless?
.... except that its programming data was found in an area full of killer mutant spore plants, some more of the horrible green things from Vault 22, and one particularly fast and nasty spore carrier green thing that was apparently officially designated "Patient Zero". Great. JUST FRACKIN' GREAT. Hell, by comparison descending into the canyon full of huge red crystals to locate the Magneto-Hydraulics Complex and retrieve the programming for the sink was a freakin' walk in the park. At least there wasn't anything ethically horrifying in there, just a lot of potential to drown.
When last we saw our heroine Janice was freaking out over the fact that she'd been given a nice, comfortable place to use as her base of operations and that said space
a) was the former residence of Dr. MOBIUS, the mad-even-by-disembodied-floating-brain-standards scientist whose current address of note was somewhere in the FORBIDDEN ZONE;
b) was full of appliances that wouldn't work unless she went out into the Big Mountain research facility's environs and found all of their programming tapes and installed them all; and OH YEAH
c) HAD HER HEART AND SPINE, HER ACTUAL BIOLOGICAL HEART AND SPINE, FLOATING HAPPILY IN JARS NEXT TO HER SUPPOSED BEDROOM.
You know, some days being shot in the head for a second time in your life is the least worst thing that could happen to you.
Well, once she finished the screaming and the frothing and the ranting and the kicking things, Janice calmed down enough to plan a few things out. Step one was to go out into Big MT and look through all the ruins of research facilities she could, partly for the missing activation codes for her room's appliances and partly for any funky experimental tech or weaponry she might be able to use should she get rid of that pacification field and have a crack at revenge on the floating brains. And, of course, to give her a chance to look for her ACTUAL brain, since she had no reason to believe that Dr. Mobius had it in the first place. (And, if we're being honest, she wanted to find a toilet, since there wasn't one in her rooms.) Step two was to activate all the systems in the room in the hopes that she could get some more information out of them about how to deal with her situation- no, wait, that was step three. Step two was to attempt to cross the so-called radar fence, just in case the brains were lying about that in order to trap her here.
So… yeah. She would do that.
It's not ever really a good sign when you step outside and the lawn is blue, but as far as unnatural horrors of the day went, completely blue grass was so far down the list that it didn't even remotely register. The brains had put a couple of locations to search for the technologies they wanted on her Pip-Boy, so Janice said screw that and set off for the first building she saw, a squatty sort of thing off to the right with a sign that read X-12.
Cue lobotomites. The real kind. People, basically, some of them in raggedy shapeless jumpsuits, some of them still in what looked like hospital gowns, all of them wearing either massive goggles or some form of hood or mask. Janice felt kind of sorry for them, since the brains had experimented on them too, but the ones who spotted her opened fire on her position with rifles and shotguns and that's kind of the point when pity goes flying out the window. For guys (and possibly girls- you'd have to get their clothes off to tell the difference, which, ew) who were missing a significant portion of their brains, if not all of their brains, they sure did seem to have a good handle on the use of cover and the need to keep moving while shooting in order to avoid being taken down via a scoped precision shot.
Janice had no pity whatsoever for the brainless wonders by the time it was all said and done. She may even have kicked one of the corpses out of annoyance on her way into the X-12 research facility, which... was not much help because it was basically one room with the stairs sealed off by glowing blue force fields. Whatever. She thought she could see things moving around below the force fields, but if she couldn't reach them they couldn't reach her, so they didn't really matter. She'd just have to come back if she ever managed to find the frequency that would let her use the sonic emitter to blow up force fields. Her next destination after that was an area with a sign that proclaimed it to be the X-7b "Boom Town" target zone, and that is not a combination of words you ever really want to see. The place looked like a former residential area and it set off her Geiger counter, and someone had painted what looked vaguely like the design of the Old World flag on one of the more intact bits of wall. Not really encouraging, yanno? And the big looming satellite dishy thing directly ahead of her wasn't really anything other than creepy either, although her Pip-Boy map indicated that it was X-8, where one of the technologies the brains wanted retrieved was probably stored- so she avoided that too. Perhaps that lumpy looking building to the south would be more interesting to explore.
That one had an Old World flag design painted on the door, too. In red. This should have been a sign.
Pretty much as soon as Janice walked in things started going to hell. This is what happens when a bunch of "Mr. Orderly" robots (Mr. Handy and Mr. Gutsy being the other two models of floating-metal-beach-ball-with-three-eyes-and-three-woogly-arms robot in the Fallout universe) are left alone in a medical research facility for two hundred years. The robots started shouting at her about having caused the mess and how they had to clean it up and how they'd strangle her if they just had hands, and then the plasma fire and the flamethrowers kicked in. You know. As these things do.
By the time the smoke cleared, the robots were dead and Janice had found a half-buried autodoc with an odd suit of recon armor on the floor nearby, holotapes for use with the autodoc back in the Sink, a room full of jail cells with mattresses on the floor that couldn't be reached because of a forcefield, and a terminal with entries about the 'Sierra Madre Test Case' and their autodoc and 'innovative toxins' research and OKAY JANICE IS GOING INTO THE CORNER TO HAVE A FLASHBACK OR TWELVE NOW.
The other terminal entry about 'the Y-17 trauma suits do more thinking than the people inside them' did not help at ALL. Nor did the comment about the harnesses being able to take over the motor functions of somebody injured and walk them back to home base. Or how the suits could record somebody's moves and use them in combat. Or how the Little Yangtze subjects could hardly protest once they were locked inside the harness. Or how if a base was undefined the suit would go into a wandering patrol pattern. Or how the suits could not tell if the person inside was dead.
Well, YOU can just rock Janice to sleep tonight.
There were cyberdogs outside, German Shepherd dogs with mostly-robotic bodies and glowing brains protected byglass domes and long-range sonic bark attacks. Nasty bastards. Janice shot at them as best she could and ran from them when she couldn't hit them, and in the process stumbled across a big hangar-type facility with an unlocked door. The area inside was... a rather nice simulation of a prewar small town, houses arranged in a large circle around a central town fountain, with grass and plants and trees and other signs of nature. Had Janice ever played Fallout 3 she would have recognized it as looking almost exactly like Tranquility Lane, but with a fountain where Dr. Braun's demented little playground had been. Also with no inhabitants; when Janice investigated the houses she mostly found prewar scientific equipment and ruined books, and in one particularly disturbing case a basement full of dog carriers and surgical equipment.
Allow me to note that for the induction of sheer dread, I really think that all a game with Evil Bad Scientists in it has to do is put an empty dog carrier where the player will find it. The presence of the dog carrier in such a game means that either someone has been experimenting on a defenseless animal, or someone has released a killer monster death animal, or both.
Anyway, Janice found some interesting holotapes in the houses, including one or two that gave her instructions on how to print out skill books, and one that was labeled 'Audio Sample - Giant Tarantula Attack', which apparently was intended for the sonic emitter gun. Don't know where they found a giant tarantula with a sonic attack. Maybe Jon Peters was involved somewhere. Janice pocketed the tapes and some of the other stuff she found in the houses, and then she left. Place gave her the creeps. Everywhere in Big MT gave her the creeps, but you know what I mean.
It wasn't far from there to the nearest bit of radar fence, so Janice decided to go test out what the brains had told her. She got intercepted along the way, though. Not by lobotomites or cyberdogs this time. No, remember those trauma harnesses the computer in the medical center talked about? Ayup. They looked like the shiny red spacesuits the ghouls at REPCONN had worn all those ages ago, and they had skeletons in them, because nobody had been around to turn the suits off. And even better, in the Invader Zim sense of the word 'better', was the fact that they had laser guns and plasma rifles and Gauss rifles and they were able to use them. WHEEEEEE.
Well, hell, at least they were something Janice could kill with absolutely no twinges of conscience at all. And get microfusion cells from after the oh GOD that one was carrying STILL SQUISHY HUMAN FLESH, WHYYYY....
(Seriously, the inventory of one of the harnesses, once killed, was 'drained microfusion cells, human flesh, microfusion cells, plasma rifle, surgical tubing'. Ewwww.)
So, um, yeah, once the boney bastards were all dead Janice ran for the radar fence. And, as promised, got knocked unconscious. And woke up in the Sink, once again. So, the brains had been accurate on that count. Best not to try it again in case the neural degradation was for realz, too. She grabbed her holotapes and such and began installing them in the appropriate devices around the room. The Auto-doc, for something that had been used to remove her brain and heart and spine, wasn't too bad. Very matter-of-fact, with a slight drawl to its words, and absolutely no memory of having worked on her before. It patched her up as a conciliatory gesture and told her it could do more than that if she brought it the rest of its programming tapes, and that it could heal her or fix addictions any time she needed. That... wasn't such a bad thing. She could live with that.
The jukebox was pretty friendly, too. She'd found the tape to activate that in the houses in the hangar along with the tarantula tape. The jukebox called itself Blind Diode Jefferson and talked like a Deep South blues singer, although it had more of the blues than it really wanted because Dr. Mobius had removed its ability to play actual music and stuffed it full of programming to rework the sonic emitters instead. It happily swapped out the baseline sonic sample in her emitter for the tarantula scream and noted that on a really good hit, the tarantula scream would cause its target to burst into flames, and offered to do more swaps with any other samples she might bring back.
The book chute, now.... When she activated it, it sang out, "Ah! Good day, citizen! Library processing unit 232.7 is on-line and ready to eradicate sedition!" And it really only went downhill from there. The chute seemed to think any book, regardless of its condition, was a potentially seditious item. It would happily chew up any book it was given and spit out a pristine, harmless blank book in return. Because blank books couldn't transmit dangerous ideas, you see. It noted that with the right mulching programming it could also destroy potentially dangerous idea transmitters like clipboards and even pencils and yield up much more useful resources like duct tape, scrap metal and lead instead. And it sadly noted that it had been meant to include an indoctrination module, but that had been scrapped due to budget concerns, so Janice would just have to do a self-indoctrination with a small cage over her head and a sack of mole rats...
ahahahahahahayeahno. Janice bid the book chute goodbye and got the hell out of there. She'd come back and stuff it full of unreadable books so she could get enough paper to print skill books later, but right then she needed to get the hell away from that thing and everything about it. Maybe head for the Botanical Gardens, to look for the tapes to activate the biological research station in the Sink instead. That had been hooked up to a bunch of planters and water pipes; surely it would be harmless?
.... except that its programming data was found in an area full of killer mutant spore plants, some more of the horrible green things from Vault 22, and one particularly fast and nasty spore carrier green thing that was apparently officially designated "Patient Zero". Great. JUST FRACKIN' GREAT. Hell, by comparison descending into the canyon full of huge red crystals to locate the Magneto-Hydraulics Complex and retrieve the programming for the sink was a freakin' walk in the park. At least there wasn't anything ethically horrifying in there, just a lot of potential to drown.
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Date: 2012-04-30 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-30 04:48 am (UTC)