Notes From New Vegas 42
Apr. 29th, 2012 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 42: No, Seriously, What The Hell Is Wrong With You People
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had activated several things in the Sink and gone out in search of holotapes to activate several more, rather than share the apartment with the insanely jingoistic book pulping device and the jars containing her heart and spine. Oh, how she longed for the days of being a simple courier. Oh, how the idea that the worst she would have to face on any given day was a bunch of guys with guns and a desire to splatter her and leave her dead by the side of the road and take whatever she was carrying and sell it on the open market. Weren't those days the loveliest things in memory. What had she done to annoy God. What.
Well, one of the things she now had to find was the activation code for an intelligence responsible for running one of the Sink's light switches, of all things. This, she did not understand, but whatever. Maybe the light switch was wired into the grid for the whole research area. She'd go find its code and get it up and running... although since the code was located in the X-2 transmitter antenna array, which was one of the places the brains wanted her to go, Janice was in no real hurry. For instance, there was an interesting rock formation between her and X-2. That seemed like something worth investigating. Rock formations were cool. Surrounded by lobotomites with guns and bad tempers, but cool.
There was a cavemouth leading into the rock formation, hidden amongst a bunch of junk and a cabinet with the old world flag painted on it in blue. Nobody inside, thank goodness. Just a reloading bench for working with guns, and several planters full of mutant cave fungus, and a bunch of other kinds of supplies. Also, oddly enough, a pair of holotapes. Janice sat down to listen to those; they were dialogue between a woman whose voice she didn't recognize- it turned out, later, to be Christine from the Sierra Madre- and a man whose voice sounded like a cross between the Old Spice man and Keith David. They talked about Father Elijah and his obsession, about history and the old America sleeping and the strange man carrying it until it waked, about the Brotherhood being just as obsessed and not having anything better than the Bear or the Bull to offer ideas-wise- and about the man having a meeting of his own, with 'that Courier' and making her walk the road west and see what happened in the Divide, where the Old World sleeps.
... ya huh. This.... was not going to end well.
Janice picked up the stuff in there that she could use and headed on out to investigate the rest of the general area. She found one spot where some very stupid people had gathered lawn chairs around a camp fire and stacked up what looked like nightstalker eggs; there was nothing left of the people now but bones. Not far from there she started finding more junk, which she tracked up a slope to a cave that smelled of really unspeakable things and was apparently inhabited by quite a lot of lobotomites. Enough that the inevitable happened and she had to wonder: exactly how many people had these brains mutilated? These were people who'd been screwed up recently, because they were actual human bodies, not ghouls or robots or anything... where were the brains getting these people from, and how many of them had they managed to slice and dice into brain-damaged monsters over the centuries?
Also, why had the brain-damaged monsters built a shrine to toasters? No, seriously, once the lobotomites were too dead to try to kill Janice and once she'd moved the corpsey bits she wasn't responsible for out of the way, Janice found a set of shelves on which black candles and human skulls and several other things were all arranged in a very reverent sort of manner around... a bunch of toasters. And a holotape with 'toaster' written on it, which implied to her that she'd found what she needed to get the toaster back in the Sink working, in that whole 'this is not going to end well' sort of creeptacular way. Well, she'd activate the toaster, but she'd do it with an energy weapon at the ready just in case it turned out to be the kind of toaster that grew legs and tried to eat your face, or something.
Which it wasn't, but given that its first words upon awakening were "Ahahaha! I am on-line once again! Tremble, world, before my heating coil of doom!", I can't really blame her for being on edge. At this point I can't really do much better than paste in several lines of the toaster's dialogue directly:
"You should be afraid! I am the scourge of all small appliances and the boogeyman that keeps lesser toasters awake at night!"
"Soon, pitiful worms! Soon I will rule, and your lives will have their doneness setting turned to... darkest!"
"A toaster is just a death ray with a smaller power supply! As soon as I figure out how to tap into the main reactors, I will burn the world!"
"Have you ever tried to indulge an all-consuming urge to kill when you don't have opposable thumbs? Or hands? Or anything other than a bread slot? You'd have a lot of pent-up anger too!"
... you get the idea.
Turned out the toaster was actually useful once Janice got past the omnicidal rage; it could break down toasters, cameras, irons, and hot plates into small energy cells and microfusion cells for energy weapons ammo, and occasionally scrap electronics as well. And if she brought it a Saturnite alloy power fist, it could superheat the thing so that it set its victims on fire on impact. So that was cool. And really, less disturbing than the damn book chute.
She did some more poking around after that, heading over to X-2 proper to find the next chunk of personality code she needed, and while she was at it to grab the X-2 antenna, because really, why come back to the place if she didn't have to. Yeah, the brains wanted it, but that didn't mean she had to give it to them.... oh, great, the instant she took the thing out of its housing, Mobius noticed somehow and started sending killer laser robot scorpions to attack her. Wonderful.
Oh, and they exploded upon deactivation. Just lovely. Well, at least she could hit them with the antenna and do some nice damage.
Once all the roboscorpions were dead, Klein boomed out over the PA that 'the Lobotomite' had retrieved one of the technologies. So much for not telling them. Janice made a face and kept going; there was still the other light switch's code to find (it was in a blocked railway tunnel up north), and Muggy the little robot's. Muggy's code was apparently somewhere near a facility dedicated entirely to taking apart RobCo Securitrons for whatever reason, so Janice set out towards that building. La la la, no wandering into the hazmat suit testing area, haven't got a hazmat suit, la la hm hm holy toLEDO that is the BIGGEST DAMN WRECK OF A ROBOT JANICE HAS EVER SEEN. Seriously, there were robot scorpion parts as tall as buildings sticking out of the ground. Dr. Mobius had blithered about leaving his giant roboscorpion running over the PA a few times; was this what he had been talking about? Geh. Geh. Creepy...
Muggy's code was lying in the back of a truck outside the plant. Janice poked her head into the decomissioning plant to see if there was anything interesting and got attacked by berserk Securitrons almost immediately. Some of them had missiles.
Janice began, at that point, to understand why Mr. House ruled the Strip with an iron fist; these were HIS robots. Almost out of morbid curiosity, she investigated the rest of the plant, and found that one of the robots she finally destroyed had hold of a code tape intended for Muggy- something about electronic parts production. Well, that could be useful; she'd bring it back to the Sink and install it in the little guy. Who turned out to be a neurotic, screaming wreck, deliberately designed by Dr. Zero to be obsessed with cleaning coffee mugs, to be aware of his obsession, to be unable to do anything about his obsession, and to be unable to clean any more mugs because he belonged to a damn brain in a jar who no longer drank coffee.
Wow. Thaddeus Venture looks positively well-adjusted and mellow by comparison.
Anyway, Janice got Muggy up and running and promised the little guy she'd bring him mugs so he wouldn't be quite so frustrated in future. Then she set out again, but this time to go visit the Think Tank. She had a few questions, especially since one of the AIs in the Sink had mentioned someone attacking the place; Zero seemed like the brain to talk to about that....
"I don't like to talk about it. 8... he can't talk about it. Wasn't all the visitors. Only one got out of control. He took control of Little Yangtze, our old human farm."
Any decently cinematic universe would've played a suitably disturbing musical sting at that point, but apparently this isn't a decently cinematic universe. Zero just went on talking about how the human broke out of the Think Tank in seconds, ran for Little Yangtze, got hold of some of the bomb collars there, and started practicing on the subjects. Not that Janice got the chance to ask what subjects he meant, but I"m not sure she was capable of speech at that point... Zero kept going and noted that they'd sent robots to bring the visitor down, but he cut through them like they were "cheese... paper... thing" with some kind of souped up laser gun. Dr. 8's voice module got fried when the guy hacked the mainframe. The guy plowed trains into the tunnels and then used another to punch his way out and escape.
Ladies and gentlemen, Father Elijah.
Anyway, Zero went on to say that there were two other human specimens. One showed up not long after the troublemaker. She was supposed to be lobotomized in Y-17. The other one ... no one knows when he came. Only that he showed up and asked questions, and that some of what he'd said they'd erased from their memories. And that he'd talked to Klein longest, which didn't sit well with Zero, because "Klein knows things we don't. I think he told some of those things to the last visitor. Dangerous things if they ever got out."
Yeeeeah, Janice wasn't gonna talk to Klein about it. Klein would just start demanding that she go find the other two technologies or something. Better to go see about supplemental programming upgrades for the Sink, since everything had multiple functions, like Muggy's parts production code. Appaarently at least one such code upgrade was in the X-13 research facility; perhaps she'd go there, it might be interesting....
Fun fact #1: X-13 is ass deep in nightstalker territory. Y-17 trauma harness territory, too, but mostly nightstalker territory. Fun fact #2: it's also a massive testing facility for the stealth suit the brains wanted Janice to retrieve. The suit wasn't actually functional when she found it- she needed to put it through synchronization and testing before it would work properly- but she had no urge to have more roboscorpions show up and attack her immediately, so she just shoved it into her backpack and kept going. Screw you, brains. She'd be back later....
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had activated several things in the Sink and gone out in search of holotapes to activate several more, rather than share the apartment with the insanely jingoistic book pulping device and the jars containing her heart and spine. Oh, how she longed for the days of being a simple courier. Oh, how the idea that the worst she would have to face on any given day was a bunch of guys with guns and a desire to splatter her and leave her dead by the side of the road and take whatever she was carrying and sell it on the open market. Weren't those days the loveliest things in memory. What had she done to annoy God. What.
Well, one of the things she now had to find was the activation code for an intelligence responsible for running one of the Sink's light switches, of all things. This, she did not understand, but whatever. Maybe the light switch was wired into the grid for the whole research area. She'd go find its code and get it up and running... although since the code was located in the X-2 transmitter antenna array, which was one of the places the brains wanted her to go, Janice was in no real hurry. For instance, there was an interesting rock formation between her and X-2. That seemed like something worth investigating. Rock formations were cool. Surrounded by lobotomites with guns and bad tempers, but cool.
There was a cavemouth leading into the rock formation, hidden amongst a bunch of junk and a cabinet with the old world flag painted on it in blue. Nobody inside, thank goodness. Just a reloading bench for working with guns, and several planters full of mutant cave fungus, and a bunch of other kinds of supplies. Also, oddly enough, a pair of holotapes. Janice sat down to listen to those; they were dialogue between a woman whose voice she didn't recognize- it turned out, later, to be Christine from the Sierra Madre- and a man whose voice sounded like a cross between the Old Spice man and Keith David. They talked about Father Elijah and his obsession, about history and the old America sleeping and the strange man carrying it until it waked, about the Brotherhood being just as obsessed and not having anything better than the Bear or the Bull to offer ideas-wise- and about the man having a meeting of his own, with 'that Courier' and making her walk the road west and see what happened in the Divide, where the Old World sleeps.
... ya huh. This.... was not going to end well.
Janice picked up the stuff in there that she could use and headed on out to investigate the rest of the general area. She found one spot where some very stupid people had gathered lawn chairs around a camp fire and stacked up what looked like nightstalker eggs; there was nothing left of the people now but bones. Not far from there she started finding more junk, which she tracked up a slope to a cave that smelled of really unspeakable things and was apparently inhabited by quite a lot of lobotomites. Enough that the inevitable happened and she had to wonder: exactly how many people had these brains mutilated? These were people who'd been screwed up recently, because they were actual human bodies, not ghouls or robots or anything... where were the brains getting these people from, and how many of them had they managed to slice and dice into brain-damaged monsters over the centuries?
Also, why had the brain-damaged monsters built a shrine to toasters? No, seriously, once the lobotomites were too dead to try to kill Janice and once she'd moved the corpsey bits she wasn't responsible for out of the way, Janice found a set of shelves on which black candles and human skulls and several other things were all arranged in a very reverent sort of manner around... a bunch of toasters. And a holotape with 'toaster' written on it, which implied to her that she'd found what she needed to get the toaster back in the Sink working, in that whole 'this is not going to end well' sort of creeptacular way. Well, she'd activate the toaster, but she'd do it with an energy weapon at the ready just in case it turned out to be the kind of toaster that grew legs and tried to eat your face, or something.
Which it wasn't, but given that its first words upon awakening were "Ahahaha! I am on-line once again! Tremble, world, before my heating coil of doom!", I can't really blame her for being on edge. At this point I can't really do much better than paste in several lines of the toaster's dialogue directly:
"You should be afraid! I am the scourge of all small appliances and the boogeyman that keeps lesser toasters awake at night!"
"Soon, pitiful worms! Soon I will rule, and your lives will have their doneness setting turned to... darkest!"
"A toaster is just a death ray with a smaller power supply! As soon as I figure out how to tap into the main reactors, I will burn the world!"
"Have you ever tried to indulge an all-consuming urge to kill when you don't have opposable thumbs? Or hands? Or anything other than a bread slot? You'd have a lot of pent-up anger too!"
... you get the idea.
Turned out the toaster was actually useful once Janice got past the omnicidal rage; it could break down toasters, cameras, irons, and hot plates into small energy cells and microfusion cells for energy weapons ammo, and occasionally scrap electronics as well. And if she brought it a Saturnite alloy power fist, it could superheat the thing so that it set its victims on fire on impact. So that was cool. And really, less disturbing than the damn book chute.
She did some more poking around after that, heading over to X-2 proper to find the next chunk of personality code she needed, and while she was at it to grab the X-2 antenna, because really, why come back to the place if she didn't have to. Yeah, the brains wanted it, but that didn't mean she had to give it to them.... oh, great, the instant she took the thing out of its housing, Mobius noticed somehow and started sending killer laser robot scorpions to attack her. Wonderful.
Oh, and they exploded upon deactivation. Just lovely. Well, at least she could hit them with the antenna and do some nice damage.
Once all the roboscorpions were dead, Klein boomed out over the PA that 'the Lobotomite' had retrieved one of the technologies. So much for not telling them. Janice made a face and kept going; there was still the other light switch's code to find (it was in a blocked railway tunnel up north), and Muggy the little robot's. Muggy's code was apparently somewhere near a facility dedicated entirely to taking apart RobCo Securitrons for whatever reason, so Janice set out towards that building. La la la, no wandering into the hazmat suit testing area, haven't got a hazmat suit, la la hm hm holy toLEDO that is the BIGGEST DAMN WRECK OF A ROBOT JANICE HAS EVER SEEN. Seriously, there were robot scorpion parts as tall as buildings sticking out of the ground. Dr. Mobius had blithered about leaving his giant roboscorpion running over the PA a few times; was this what he had been talking about? Geh. Geh. Creepy...
Muggy's code was lying in the back of a truck outside the plant. Janice poked her head into the decomissioning plant to see if there was anything interesting and got attacked by berserk Securitrons almost immediately. Some of them had missiles.
Janice began, at that point, to understand why Mr. House ruled the Strip with an iron fist; these were HIS robots. Almost out of morbid curiosity, she investigated the rest of the plant, and found that one of the robots she finally destroyed had hold of a code tape intended for Muggy- something about electronic parts production. Well, that could be useful; she'd bring it back to the Sink and install it in the little guy. Who turned out to be a neurotic, screaming wreck, deliberately designed by Dr. Zero to be obsessed with cleaning coffee mugs, to be aware of his obsession, to be unable to do anything about his obsession, and to be unable to clean any more mugs because he belonged to a damn brain in a jar who no longer drank coffee.
Wow. Thaddeus Venture looks positively well-adjusted and mellow by comparison.
Anyway, Janice got Muggy up and running and promised the little guy she'd bring him mugs so he wouldn't be quite so frustrated in future. Then she set out again, but this time to go visit the Think Tank. She had a few questions, especially since one of the AIs in the Sink had mentioned someone attacking the place; Zero seemed like the brain to talk to about that....
"I don't like to talk about it. 8... he can't talk about it. Wasn't all the visitors. Only one got out of control. He took control of Little Yangtze, our old human farm."
Any decently cinematic universe would've played a suitably disturbing musical sting at that point, but apparently this isn't a decently cinematic universe. Zero just went on talking about how the human broke out of the Think Tank in seconds, ran for Little Yangtze, got hold of some of the bomb collars there, and started practicing on the subjects. Not that Janice got the chance to ask what subjects he meant, but I"m not sure she was capable of speech at that point... Zero kept going and noted that they'd sent robots to bring the visitor down, but he cut through them like they were "cheese... paper... thing" with some kind of souped up laser gun. Dr. 8's voice module got fried when the guy hacked the mainframe. The guy plowed trains into the tunnels and then used another to punch his way out and escape.
Ladies and gentlemen, Father Elijah.
Anyway, Zero went on to say that there were two other human specimens. One showed up not long after the troublemaker. She was supposed to be lobotomized in Y-17. The other one ... no one knows when he came. Only that he showed up and asked questions, and that some of what he'd said they'd erased from their memories. And that he'd talked to Klein longest, which didn't sit well with Zero, because "Klein knows things we don't. I think he told some of those things to the last visitor. Dangerous things if they ever got out."
Yeeeeah, Janice wasn't gonna talk to Klein about it. Klein would just start demanding that she go find the other two technologies or something. Better to go see about supplemental programming upgrades for the Sink, since everything had multiple functions, like Muggy's parts production code. Appaarently at least one such code upgrade was in the X-13 research facility; perhaps she'd go there, it might be interesting....
Fun fact #1: X-13 is ass deep in nightstalker territory. Y-17 trauma harness territory, too, but mostly nightstalker territory. Fun fact #2: it's also a massive testing facility for the stealth suit the brains wanted Janice to retrieve. The suit wasn't actually functional when she found it- she needed to put it through synchronization and testing before it would work properly- but she had no urge to have more roboscorpions show up and attack her immediately, so she just shoved it into her backpack and kept going. Screw you, brains. She'd be back later....
