Notes From New Vegas 56
Mar. 9th, 2013 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 56: The Worst Liar In The World. Also, Impending Elvis.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had helped Boone deal with some personal issues (and by 'some' I mean 'more of them than anybody who hadn't had their brain scooped out of their head and eventually reluctantly reinstalled has the right to have'), and he'd gone off to see about re-enlisting with his old NCR unit. She had no desire to get into Vegas proper and go after Benny- you remember, the actual A-plot of the game- because, well... because. Personally, I think that if you are not the kind of person who wants to actively pursue BLOODY AND HORRIFIC VENGEANCE, then making a point of avoiding anything to do with the man who shot you in the head and had you buried in a shallow grave outside a town in the middle of nowhere is a very sensible thing to do with your life. And since Janice was not, in fact, a Klingon, she had long since gotten tired of killing people. I mean, yeah, she engaged in some Legion-killing with Boone, but that had more to do with rescuing prisoners or freeing slaves than killing people. For her, anyway. *cough* The point: Janice was not a Klingon, an ancient Greek, a member of the Wayne family, Red Sonja, Boudicca of the Iceni, or a Trung sister. Vengeance could JOLLY WELL WAIT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
Buuuuut, that being said, there was that whole thing with the Mojave Wasteland being an excellent place for somebody with no backup to die horribly. Since she was much less likely to die if someone could accompany her to watch her back, she figured she'd go find someone who was similarly dissatisifed with their lot in life. Also she was pretty sure she owed the Followers of the Apocalypse some assistance for something or other (translation: I don't remember whether she'd picked up a particular mission from them or not and if she had I am blaming her inability to remember this fact on the whole brain-scoopey thing), so she decided to head for Freeside, check in at the Old Mormon Fort, and see if anybody who the Followers had patched up wanted to come with her into the wide, wide world of Not Even Close To Sports.
... I was kind of reaching there. I'm sorry.
Well, she got up to the gates of Freeside and encountered a couple of guys in black pompadours and sideburns and leather jackets. This was kind of impressive given that one of them was in fact African-American, which must have given his hairdresser fits. They didn't give her any trouble, though, so she waved to them and they nodded back and she walked into Freeside past the guys calling out their prices for bodyguarding and the other guys selling rat meat and radroach meat and OH RIGHT THE HOMICIDAL STUPIDS. She'd spent long enough away that she'd forgotten the little problem of conditions in Freeside being so desperate that pretty much any time at all that she stepped into the street, someone wearing the cheapest Brahmin-skin clothing imaginable and wielding a lead pipe or a cheap-ass knife or something would come running out of an alley to attack her. Personally I do not much understand this, since these people came after her in the middle of the street in broad daylight, quite often in sight of witnesses. You would think that some form of reputation would get spread around, especially in a game where there's an actual Reputation mechanic implemented to determine how certain factions react to you. But no, there's just an infinite supply of homicidal stupids willing to attempt to kill you no matter how heavily armed and armored you are. The chems around Freeside must be fantastically potent to drive people that far out of good judgment. Either that or a whole lot of people in town get so desperate they really want to commit suicide and can't bring themselves to do it on their own, so they all opt for suicide-by-Janice.
Anyway, Janice made her mandatory blood sacrifice to Bruno, Uncaring God of Failed Attempts At Urban Renewal, and headed into the Fort. There was some quick discussion with Julie Farkas, who asked her to please try to find two specific guys with addiction problems and bring them back for help, and a brief, rather pleasant reunion with the slaves Janice and Boone had freed from Cottonwood Cove. Then Janice ran across a worried-looking blond fellow in a lab coat and BCGs and started talking to him.
Said gentleman was named Arcade Gannon. He suggested that if she wanted a doctor she should find one of the others, as he wasn't a very good doctor- more of a researcher, really. "Looking for ways to synthesize stimpaks from desert plants and other ridiculous fantasies like that," was more or less how he put it. Which... fine, okay, I can understand the general gist of having a medical researcher trying to replicate the medicines of the pre-War world and not having much luck due to poor resources, but uh. If you have a certain amount of Survival skill, a xander root, a broc flower, and an empty syringe, all you have to do in-game is walk up to a campfire and fiddle around a bit and BAM. Stimpak. You can create a lot of useful medical chems with a high enough Survival skill, in fact. Personally, I handwave that he said something about anti-rad chems instead, because you can't concoct your own Rad-X or Rad-Away at a campfire despite there being a number of fungi that will help purge you of rads... anyway, he said he was trying to recreate the old chems WHATEVER chems they were, and then commented 'nihil novi sub sole'.
That there's Legion talk, college boy.
Arcade rather hastily said that Caesar wasn't the first to speak the language, and that he himself had personally learned it from other places- "Books, sheet music, gladiator movie holotapes..." Oh, and that Caesar had previously been a Follower of the Apocalypse himself before deciding to take up the whole 'recreate a completely failed society of the past so as to throttle humanity's future' thing. Janice thought this was fascinating, and was also getting a definite 'I would rather be anywhere other than here' vibe from Arcade, so after a bit of prodding and offering to make the situation in the Vegas area better overall on her part, he agreed to come with her.
For someone who said he was a bad doctor, the fact that he conferred a perk that made all of Janice's healing chems work 25 percent better was the first sign that glasses-boy might not be entirely truthful. Not that Janice cared all that much if it meant she'd be able to get patched up better than she could patch herself up. On the other hand, when she and Arcade started nosing around Freeside looking for those two addicts Julie mentioned, another member of the Homicidal Stupid clan came running at them- and before Janice could so much as draw her holorifle, Arcade whipped a plasma pistol out from under his lab coat and turned the numbskull into a pile of glowing green goo.
Uh huh.
Well, they found the first of the addicts holed up in a ruin near one of the gates out of Freeside; he told them about how somebody named Dixon had been selling him Jet (like coke + meth, but in an inhaler; there's an explanation of its manufacture in Fallout 2, and it involves Brahmin dung and an unpleasant fish-faced young man named Myron). Not just any Jet, though. Dixon's Jet was cheaper than the regular kind but gave him a much harder crash afterwards, and then it was much, much harder to get through the day without more. A little more poking around Freeside and they found Bill, who was having a horrible time of it because he'd taken to drinking booze that tasted like paint thinner and gave him awful hangovers but was even harder to kick than the usual post-apocalyptic hooch- and again, it was coming from someone named Dixon. Janice thanked him for the information and decided to go have Words with this Dixon gentleman before taking any further steps. Getting these guys into treatment wasn't likely to do them much good if there was a dealer around waving extra-cheap chems under their noses, after all.
Dixon, as it happened, was hanging out in the streets not too far from the guy who had a Jet problem. He was happy to talk about his wares, and freely said that yeah, he was selling these guys the crappiest Jet and booze he could come up with. Far as he was concerned, they were NCR squatters and they deserved all the agony they could get. Freeside didn't need NCR eggheads wandering around confusing things. Watching these addicts turn themselves inside out was funny, far as he was concerned.
Well, Janice was reasonably sure nobody would really miss this guy if she shot him on the spot after a statement like that. On the other hand, he probably had suppliers, and if she removed him from the human misery business word would probably get around to them and then there would be people more competent than the Homicidal Stupids Clan on her tail. There were witnesses around, after all. So the ideal thing to do at that point?
"OH, WOW. SO THE NCR IS SUPPLYING YOU WITH CHEAP CHEMS TO KEEP THE GHETTO- I MEAN FREESIDE- DOWN? YOU'RE TAKING NCR MONEY TO MAKE FREESIDE MISERABLE?"
Dixon very quickly agreed to stop selling chems and booze to those two guys if she would just shut up and stop saying things that would ruin his ability to operate in Freeside or piss off the NCR enough to investigate him. Janice figured that was probably enough, and went back to talk to the addicted guys again. Predictably they were upset about not being able to get their fixes, but Janice had been gathering a lot of chems from various sources in her travels, and with Arcade's help was able to set up some detox options for both of them. (Translation: you can either talk the two guys into going to the Fort for talk therapy to break their chem habits, or you can give them a bunch of chems and regular booze to wean themselves off the crap kind, or you can have a high enough Science skill to propose a combination of their usual chems and Fixer, which is a slow-acting addiction-removal chem, to get them clean. I went with the Science skill and the chems-and-Fixer combo, because the AA approach didn't seem like it would last very long under Freeside conditions.)
So yeah, there was that. Janice started heading back to the Fort to tell Julie about the two guys, and struck up a conversation with Arcade along the way to fill the void left by the unaccountable absence of a kamikaze attack by Homicidal Stupid Clan. Arcade said he didn't care to talk about himself, that he was really very boring, that she'd get better stories from a Freeside chem addict, etc. When she asked if he always evaded questions he told her he only did it "to obfuscate my past associations with a fascist paramilitary organization. I will deflect personal questions about myself at any opportunity," and gave her a Look.
Arcade, honey, the Harmless Medi-Nerd act combined with dry straightfaced sarcasm works better when we haven't seen you plasma-kill a man in less time than it takes to pull up your pants.
Anyway, Janice figured she'd leave it at that and moved on to asking him what he thought of the current political situation. He said it was pretty awful and that he wanted to make things better for Freeside and for all of New Vegas, and that he intensely disliked the Legion; beyond that anything was probably better and he would be happy to help her so long as she didn't get all Caesar-friendly on him. Which was an attitude she could respect, especially after what she'd seen with Boone, so she thanked him and wrapped up the conversation. They'd gotten to the Fort, anyway. Julie was really happy to hear about the guys, and Janice's reputation with the Followers was pretty much good as gold after that.
And as soon as she and Arcade stepped out of the Fort again- she wanted to go get him some armor, because really, lab coat?- they were greeted by that black guy with the pompadour. He asked if she was the person who'd been going around helping folks in Freeside, and when she said yes, he told her "the King says to keep up the good work" and handed her some caps before jogging off.
Huh.
Well, that seemed like the kind of thing that deserved investigation, so why not- it was better than going after Benny. Janice and Arcade were off to visit this King.
Okay, I thought I'd get to Elvis in this chapter originally, but I was wrong. So- next time, there will be Elvis, more or less.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had helped Boone deal with some personal issues (and by 'some' I mean 'more of them than anybody who hadn't had their brain scooped out of their head and eventually reluctantly reinstalled has the right to have'), and he'd gone off to see about re-enlisting with his old NCR unit. She had no desire to get into Vegas proper and go after Benny- you remember, the actual A-plot of the game- because, well... because. Personally, I think that if you are not the kind of person who wants to actively pursue BLOODY AND HORRIFIC VENGEANCE, then making a point of avoiding anything to do with the man who shot you in the head and had you buried in a shallow grave outside a town in the middle of nowhere is a very sensible thing to do with your life. And since Janice was not, in fact, a Klingon, she had long since gotten tired of killing people. I mean, yeah, she engaged in some Legion-killing with Boone, but that had more to do with rescuing prisoners or freeing slaves than killing people. For her, anyway. *cough* The point: Janice was not a Klingon, an ancient Greek, a member of the Wayne family, Red Sonja, Boudicca of the Iceni, or a Trung sister. Vengeance could JOLLY WELL WAIT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
Buuuuut, that being said, there was that whole thing with the Mojave Wasteland being an excellent place for somebody with no backup to die horribly. Since she was much less likely to die if someone could accompany her to watch her back, she figured she'd go find someone who was similarly dissatisifed with their lot in life. Also she was pretty sure she owed the Followers of the Apocalypse some assistance for something or other (translation: I don't remember whether she'd picked up a particular mission from them or not and if she had I am blaming her inability to remember this fact on the whole brain-scoopey thing), so she decided to head for Freeside, check in at the Old Mormon Fort, and see if anybody who the Followers had patched up wanted to come with her into the wide, wide world of Not Even Close To Sports.
... I was kind of reaching there. I'm sorry.
Well, she got up to the gates of Freeside and encountered a couple of guys in black pompadours and sideburns and leather jackets. This was kind of impressive given that one of them was in fact African-American, which must have given his hairdresser fits. They didn't give her any trouble, though, so she waved to them and they nodded back and she walked into Freeside past the guys calling out their prices for bodyguarding and the other guys selling rat meat and radroach meat and OH RIGHT THE HOMICIDAL STUPIDS. She'd spent long enough away that she'd forgotten the little problem of conditions in Freeside being so desperate that pretty much any time at all that she stepped into the street, someone wearing the cheapest Brahmin-skin clothing imaginable and wielding a lead pipe or a cheap-ass knife or something would come running out of an alley to attack her. Personally I do not much understand this, since these people came after her in the middle of the street in broad daylight, quite often in sight of witnesses. You would think that some form of reputation would get spread around, especially in a game where there's an actual Reputation mechanic implemented to determine how certain factions react to you. But no, there's just an infinite supply of homicidal stupids willing to attempt to kill you no matter how heavily armed and armored you are. The chems around Freeside must be fantastically potent to drive people that far out of good judgment. Either that or a whole lot of people in town get so desperate they really want to commit suicide and can't bring themselves to do it on their own, so they all opt for suicide-by-Janice.
Anyway, Janice made her mandatory blood sacrifice to Bruno, Uncaring God of Failed Attempts At Urban Renewal, and headed into the Fort. There was some quick discussion with Julie Farkas, who asked her to please try to find two specific guys with addiction problems and bring them back for help, and a brief, rather pleasant reunion with the slaves Janice and Boone had freed from Cottonwood Cove. Then Janice ran across a worried-looking blond fellow in a lab coat and BCGs and started talking to him.
Said gentleman was named Arcade Gannon. He suggested that if she wanted a doctor she should find one of the others, as he wasn't a very good doctor- more of a researcher, really. "Looking for ways to synthesize stimpaks from desert plants and other ridiculous fantasies like that," was more or less how he put it. Which... fine, okay, I can understand the general gist of having a medical researcher trying to replicate the medicines of the pre-War world and not having much luck due to poor resources, but uh. If you have a certain amount of Survival skill, a xander root, a broc flower, and an empty syringe, all you have to do in-game is walk up to a campfire and fiddle around a bit and BAM. Stimpak. You can create a lot of useful medical chems with a high enough Survival skill, in fact. Personally, I handwave that he said something about anti-rad chems instead, because you can't concoct your own Rad-X or Rad-Away at a campfire despite there being a number of fungi that will help purge you of rads... anyway, he said he was trying to recreate the old chems WHATEVER chems they were, and then commented 'nihil novi sub sole'.
That there's Legion talk, college boy.
Arcade rather hastily said that Caesar wasn't the first to speak the language, and that he himself had personally learned it from other places- "Books, sheet music, gladiator movie holotapes..." Oh, and that Caesar had previously been a Follower of the Apocalypse himself before deciding to take up the whole 'recreate a completely failed society of the past so as to throttle humanity's future' thing. Janice thought this was fascinating, and was also getting a definite 'I would rather be anywhere other than here' vibe from Arcade, so after a bit of prodding and offering to make the situation in the Vegas area better overall on her part, he agreed to come with her.
For someone who said he was a bad doctor, the fact that he conferred a perk that made all of Janice's healing chems work 25 percent better was the first sign that glasses-boy might not be entirely truthful. Not that Janice cared all that much if it meant she'd be able to get patched up better than she could patch herself up. On the other hand, when she and Arcade started nosing around Freeside looking for those two addicts Julie mentioned, another member of the Homicidal Stupid clan came running at them- and before Janice could so much as draw her holorifle, Arcade whipped a plasma pistol out from under his lab coat and turned the numbskull into a pile of glowing green goo.
Uh huh.
Well, they found the first of the addicts holed up in a ruin near one of the gates out of Freeside; he told them about how somebody named Dixon had been selling him Jet (like coke + meth, but in an inhaler; there's an explanation of its manufacture in Fallout 2, and it involves Brahmin dung and an unpleasant fish-faced young man named Myron). Not just any Jet, though. Dixon's Jet was cheaper than the regular kind but gave him a much harder crash afterwards, and then it was much, much harder to get through the day without more. A little more poking around Freeside and they found Bill, who was having a horrible time of it because he'd taken to drinking booze that tasted like paint thinner and gave him awful hangovers but was even harder to kick than the usual post-apocalyptic hooch- and again, it was coming from someone named Dixon. Janice thanked him for the information and decided to go have Words with this Dixon gentleman before taking any further steps. Getting these guys into treatment wasn't likely to do them much good if there was a dealer around waving extra-cheap chems under their noses, after all.
Dixon, as it happened, was hanging out in the streets not too far from the guy who had a Jet problem. He was happy to talk about his wares, and freely said that yeah, he was selling these guys the crappiest Jet and booze he could come up with. Far as he was concerned, they were NCR squatters and they deserved all the agony they could get. Freeside didn't need NCR eggheads wandering around confusing things. Watching these addicts turn themselves inside out was funny, far as he was concerned.
Well, Janice was reasonably sure nobody would really miss this guy if she shot him on the spot after a statement like that. On the other hand, he probably had suppliers, and if she removed him from the human misery business word would probably get around to them and then there would be people more competent than the Homicidal Stupids Clan on her tail. There were witnesses around, after all. So the ideal thing to do at that point?
"OH, WOW. SO THE NCR IS SUPPLYING YOU WITH CHEAP CHEMS TO KEEP THE GHETTO- I MEAN FREESIDE- DOWN? YOU'RE TAKING NCR MONEY TO MAKE FREESIDE MISERABLE?"
Dixon very quickly agreed to stop selling chems and booze to those two guys if she would just shut up and stop saying things that would ruin his ability to operate in Freeside or piss off the NCR enough to investigate him. Janice figured that was probably enough, and went back to talk to the addicted guys again. Predictably they were upset about not being able to get their fixes, but Janice had been gathering a lot of chems from various sources in her travels, and with Arcade's help was able to set up some detox options for both of them. (Translation: you can either talk the two guys into going to the Fort for talk therapy to break their chem habits, or you can give them a bunch of chems and regular booze to wean themselves off the crap kind, or you can have a high enough Science skill to propose a combination of their usual chems and Fixer, which is a slow-acting addiction-removal chem, to get them clean. I went with the Science skill and the chems-and-Fixer combo, because the AA approach didn't seem like it would last very long under Freeside conditions.)
So yeah, there was that. Janice started heading back to the Fort to tell Julie about the two guys, and struck up a conversation with Arcade along the way to fill the void left by the unaccountable absence of a kamikaze attack by Homicidal Stupid Clan. Arcade said he didn't care to talk about himself, that he was really very boring, that she'd get better stories from a Freeside chem addict, etc. When she asked if he always evaded questions he told her he only did it "to obfuscate my past associations with a fascist paramilitary organization. I will deflect personal questions about myself at any opportunity," and gave her a Look.
Arcade, honey, the Harmless Medi-Nerd act combined with dry straightfaced sarcasm works better when we haven't seen you plasma-kill a man in less time than it takes to pull up your pants.
Anyway, Janice figured she'd leave it at that and moved on to asking him what he thought of the current political situation. He said it was pretty awful and that he wanted to make things better for Freeside and for all of New Vegas, and that he intensely disliked the Legion; beyond that anything was probably better and he would be happy to help her so long as she didn't get all Caesar-friendly on him. Which was an attitude she could respect, especially after what she'd seen with Boone, so she thanked him and wrapped up the conversation. They'd gotten to the Fort, anyway. Julie was really happy to hear about the guys, and Janice's reputation with the Followers was pretty much good as gold after that.
And as soon as she and Arcade stepped out of the Fort again- she wanted to go get him some armor, because really, lab coat?- they were greeted by that black guy with the pompadour. He asked if she was the person who'd been going around helping folks in Freeside, and when she said yes, he told her "the King says to keep up the good work" and handed her some caps before jogging off.
Huh.
Well, that seemed like the kind of thing that deserved investigation, so why not- it was better than going after Benny. Janice and Arcade were off to visit this King.
Okay, I thought I'd get to Elvis in this chapter originally, but I was wrong. So- next time, there will be Elvis, more or less.
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Date: 2013-03-10 01:11 am (UTC)