![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Notes From New Vegas 58
Notes From New Vegas 58: Brains? Seriously?
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had earned one favor from the King for making peace between the Kings and the NCR, and that was a good thing. The man may have been an Elvis impersonator who didn't know Elvis Presley's name, but he was possibly the most sensible and decent political figure she'd come across in the New Vegas area yet. She had no intention of calling in the favor immediately, of course, not without thinking about it. But she'd think of something, eventually.
First, though, there was the little matter of the dog.
See, the King had a dog with him, and it was a cyberdog, a la the half-mechanized beasts with glowing biogel domes full o' brain that she'd encountered in Big Mountain. It wasn't trying to kill her, which she generally figured was a good thing, but... dog. With glowing brain. Outside of Big Mountain. The hell. You get your own brain scooped once and you start wondering a LOT about that kind of thing, which is why Janice asked the King about the dog. Turns out his name was Rex, and the King didn't know where he'd come from, but he'd had the dog a long time and the dog wasn't exactly feeling his best any more. The Followers checked him out and said his brain was going bad and that they couldn't help him out.
….
JUST A TINY BIT OF A SENSITIVE SUBJECT, that. I can only assume morbid curiosity caused her to ask if she could help somehow, possibly in the hopes of hearing 'I can't bring myself to shoot him, can you do it for me'. Show of hands, how many people think this is what the King asked her? Of course not. He told her he was glad to see someone else taking an interest in poor Rexie's welfare! He suggested she go talk to Julie Farkas at the Old Mormon Fort, because maybe she could help. Or something.
Oy.
Okay, fine, whatever, she'd go talk to the Followers about the dog, if only because it'd keep the King happy, and it's nice to keep mostly sane people happy. She did want to pick up a few things first, though, and by 'a few things' we mean 'the kind of things that go zap'. That holorifle she picked up in the Sierra Madre didn't run on self-renewing microfusion breeders, after all. Off to the Silver Rush!
(There are maybe three storefront businesses in Freeside in this game, if you don't count the Kings or the Followers as a business. One is a particularly skanky casino, one is a highly questionable general store with a twelve-year-old kid standing outside doing their advertising, and one is an energy weapons seller called the Silver Rush. There's a couple of street vendors, too, if you don't mind buying irradiated water and/or radroach meat. If it weren't for the casino I'd say it was Newark.)
I have to give the folks at the Silver Rush credit. When you're weapons sellers in a violent part of town, it's a good idea to have an armored guy with a plasma rifle confiscating potential customers' weaponry at the door and another set of armored guards inside the door. Players who want to rob the Silver Rush are not going to be able to do it by shooting the place up, unless they've got some kind of ability to conceal weapons. Janice had no such ability, so she left her guns and Arcade's guns with the guard and walked in. The guards inside stopped her from going any farther, as the proprietor, Ms. Van Graff, was dealing with another customer. That's when Arcade- who, you may recall, insisted that he was really a very boring and harmless individual who was best off working in the background where he wouldn't bother any of the patients with his lack of people skills- chirped, "That's a lot of energy weapons. Brings back some interesting memories."
… ya-huh. Correct me if I'm wrong, Arcade, but I I seem to recall that the Followers were big on rebuilding and not so big on things that go boom. Janice gave him a side-eye so hard it's a wonder she was able to see straight afterward and politely inquired as to whether the Followers used many energy weapons; he said no, no, of course not, they just studied a lot of science and technology so you got familiar with- look, Arcade, just leave off on the lying, okay? You're not good at it and it's embarrassing to everybody involved.
Not that Janice got to tell him that, because right about then Ms. Van Graff and her bodyguards started shooting a guy's body into a little pile of smoking gray ash for his failing to pay his bill on time. That kind of thing tends to grab one's attention, especially when one had been hoping for a nice quiet bit of shopping. Fortunately Ms. Van Graff had all the emotional holdover of a lizard and made not so much as the slightest reference to the fact that her next set of customers were literally standing in the ashes of the- okay, that's not so fortunate, that's really fucked up even by the standards of somebody whose brain had been both inside and outside her skull in the past six months. But it's better than her being in some kind of killing-induced semi-orgasmic state? Ish? Janice basically grabbed all the MF cells she could afford, threw some bottlecaps at the scary dead-eyed gun lady, and ran out the door as fast as her feet would allow.
When they got to the Fort, Julie was happy to talk about the dog. Apparently the King had gone to the Followers for help in the past, but when they told him it was beyond their ability to handle he got mad and started shouting and raging and such before they could tell him who could be of assistance. She recommended somebody named Dr. Henry, up in a place called Jacobstown, and marked out the location on Janice's Pip-Boy before sending her on her way.
Not gonna lie, when the Fort gates closed behind her Janice gave some serious thought to turning right instead of left and heading out of Vegas for good. Between helping the abomination of science or going in search of a guy she frankly never ever wanted to see again, Vegas was starting to have a few too many reasons for her to be anywhere else in the world. Maybe if she started walking right now she could get all the way to Zion and find the Dead Horses again before anybody came looking for her.
But, yanno... Rex might be a horrifying abomination of science, but he was Elvis's abomination of science, and Elvis was a pretty reasonable guy. Somebody ought to encourage the reasonable people of the world instead of the nutburgers, for once. And Elvis had all his little tributary Elvi; they'd probably be able to handle things from here. She'd go tell him what had to be done, and then go visit the nice people of Novac again so she could pick up her things, and then she'd run away to Utah and never come back.
(Spoiler: no she wouldn't.)
She got back to the King and told him how the situation stood. He admitted he had some vague memories of possibly flipping a few tables the last time he talked to the Followers, and he listened carefully to the rest of what Janice had to say, and then he got down on the floor so he could talk very solemnly to his dog about the situation. Which was great and all, except for the part where he skipped right over deputizing any of the tributary Elvi and basically handed Rex off to Janice on the condition that she go get his brain fixed.
… uh.
You can't actually walk up to a wall and bang your head into it in this game, but Janice sure as heck wanted to, I know that much. I can only assume that she waited until she and Arcade were out of sight of the Elvi and somewhere in the outer ruins of town to find a place where she could properly thump her head. I don't know what she had ever planned to do with her life, but this? Wasn't it.
On the other hand, unless she wanted to start running for Utah right now, there wasn't a whole lot she could do about it. Not unless she wanted to move to the Big Empty and hang out with the artificial intelligences in the Sink for the rest of her life, which, no. And just parking herself in Novac and trying to keep out of sight wouldn't go very well either, because Caesar's Legion was on the move and they all kinda hated her guts and they had no compunctions about doing horrible things to townspeople if they thought they could do it without getting shot to death by someone more skilled than them. Goodsprings probably wasn't a great idea either, since Mr. New Vegas mentioned them on the radio every so often, and Primm was on its way back to being a tourist town, so somebody would probably mention her where other people could hear about it if she tried to hide there. So really, other than 'run to Utah', 'hide in Big Mountain', or 'suicide by *insert horrible desert creature here*', her best option was to just keep doing what she was doing and see how it shook out.
At least it was pretty nice country north of town. There were some farms up there, nothing spectacular, but at least they seemed to be functional- maize producers, mostly... well, former maize producers; there were Fiends in the area and a corpsey smell in a couple of areas. Janice took it upon herself to deal with the animal-skull-hat weirdoes before continuing on her way, on the grounds that if she didn't do it then, she'd just run into the damn nutjobs on her way back. Arcade didn't seem to object too much, although that might have been him not wanting to talk in case he got asked personal questions, and Rex, for all that his brain was getting old and mushy, was perfectly happy to make like all the dogs of all the Fallout games before him and rip the Fiends to shreds. And the Legionary assassins to shreds, too, because the damn Legion managed to track Janice down on the road and started speechifying at her about how THE CAESAR HAS MARKED YOU FOR DEATH AND THE LEGION URRRK.
(In-game you have to let the guy finish his little speech before you can start combat with him; the only way you can shut a legionary assassin up is to snipe him from a distance before he gets close enough to begin dialogue. But I like to think that Janice takes an Indiana-Jones-Versus-The-Swordsman approach to these guys.)
There were some other interesting things along the road as well, including the remains of a caravan- dead Brahmin, scattered goods, a plasma rifle in bad condition. Janice took the good stuff from the corpses and kept moving. Apparently that was supposed to be part of a personal quest for one of the companions I've never bothered picking up. Janice mostly just broke the stuff down for parts and kept moving, and stayed on the road. Generally if the game doesn't throw up some stupid invisible wall or damage my character with killer terrain I go for the straightest shots I can, but Jacobstown is up in the mountains beyond Vault 22, and trying to find a route straight over them would have taken forever. At least things started getting lively and green after a bit, and not the horrifying kill-you-with-spores kind of green, either.
Well, maybe kill-you-with-giant-mantises, but at least they weren't infectious.
Anyway, that's it for this session; tune in next time for Lieutenant Worf.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had earned one favor from the King for making peace between the Kings and the NCR, and that was a good thing. The man may have been an Elvis impersonator who didn't know Elvis Presley's name, but he was possibly the most sensible and decent political figure she'd come across in the New Vegas area yet. She had no intention of calling in the favor immediately, of course, not without thinking about it. But she'd think of something, eventually.
First, though, there was the little matter of the dog.
See, the King had a dog with him, and it was a cyberdog, a la the half-mechanized beasts with glowing biogel domes full o' brain that she'd encountered in Big Mountain. It wasn't trying to kill her, which she generally figured was a good thing, but... dog. With glowing brain. Outside of Big Mountain. The hell. You get your own brain scooped once and you start wondering a LOT about that kind of thing, which is why Janice asked the King about the dog. Turns out his name was Rex, and the King didn't know where he'd come from, but he'd had the dog a long time and the dog wasn't exactly feeling his best any more. The Followers checked him out and said his brain was going bad and that they couldn't help him out.
….
JUST A TINY BIT OF A SENSITIVE SUBJECT, that. I can only assume morbid curiosity caused her to ask if she could help somehow, possibly in the hopes of hearing 'I can't bring myself to shoot him, can you do it for me'. Show of hands, how many people think this is what the King asked her? Of course not. He told her he was glad to see someone else taking an interest in poor Rexie's welfare! He suggested she go talk to Julie Farkas at the Old Mormon Fort, because maybe she could help. Or something.
Oy.
Okay, fine, whatever, she'd go talk to the Followers about the dog, if only because it'd keep the King happy, and it's nice to keep mostly sane people happy. She did want to pick up a few things first, though, and by 'a few things' we mean 'the kind of things that go zap'. That holorifle she picked up in the Sierra Madre didn't run on self-renewing microfusion breeders, after all. Off to the Silver Rush!
(There are maybe three storefront businesses in Freeside in this game, if you don't count the Kings or the Followers as a business. One is a particularly skanky casino, one is a highly questionable general store with a twelve-year-old kid standing outside doing their advertising, and one is an energy weapons seller called the Silver Rush. There's a couple of street vendors, too, if you don't mind buying irradiated water and/or radroach meat. If it weren't for the casino I'd say it was Newark.)
I have to give the folks at the Silver Rush credit. When you're weapons sellers in a violent part of town, it's a good idea to have an armored guy with a plasma rifle confiscating potential customers' weaponry at the door and another set of armored guards inside the door. Players who want to rob the Silver Rush are not going to be able to do it by shooting the place up, unless they've got some kind of ability to conceal weapons. Janice had no such ability, so she left her guns and Arcade's guns with the guard and walked in. The guards inside stopped her from going any farther, as the proprietor, Ms. Van Graff, was dealing with another customer. That's when Arcade- who, you may recall, insisted that he was really a very boring and harmless individual who was best off working in the background where he wouldn't bother any of the patients with his lack of people skills- chirped, "That's a lot of energy weapons. Brings back some interesting memories."
… ya-huh. Correct me if I'm wrong, Arcade, but I I seem to recall that the Followers were big on rebuilding and not so big on things that go boom. Janice gave him a side-eye so hard it's a wonder she was able to see straight afterward and politely inquired as to whether the Followers used many energy weapons; he said no, no, of course not, they just studied a lot of science and technology so you got familiar with- look, Arcade, just leave off on the lying, okay? You're not good at it and it's embarrassing to everybody involved.
Not that Janice got to tell him that, because right about then Ms. Van Graff and her bodyguards started shooting a guy's body into a little pile of smoking gray ash for his failing to pay his bill on time. That kind of thing tends to grab one's attention, especially when one had been hoping for a nice quiet bit of shopping. Fortunately Ms. Van Graff had all the emotional holdover of a lizard and made not so much as the slightest reference to the fact that her next set of customers were literally standing in the ashes of the- okay, that's not so fortunate, that's really fucked up even by the standards of somebody whose brain had been both inside and outside her skull in the past six months. But it's better than her being in some kind of killing-induced semi-orgasmic state? Ish? Janice basically grabbed all the MF cells she could afford, threw some bottlecaps at the scary dead-eyed gun lady, and ran out the door as fast as her feet would allow.
When they got to the Fort, Julie was happy to talk about the dog. Apparently the King had gone to the Followers for help in the past, but when they told him it was beyond their ability to handle he got mad and started shouting and raging and such before they could tell him who could be of assistance. She recommended somebody named Dr. Henry, up in a place called Jacobstown, and marked out the location on Janice's Pip-Boy before sending her on her way.
Not gonna lie, when the Fort gates closed behind her Janice gave some serious thought to turning right instead of left and heading out of Vegas for good. Between helping the abomination of science or going in search of a guy she frankly never ever wanted to see again, Vegas was starting to have a few too many reasons for her to be anywhere else in the world. Maybe if she started walking right now she could get all the way to Zion and find the Dead Horses again before anybody came looking for her.
But, yanno... Rex might be a horrifying abomination of science, but he was Elvis's abomination of science, and Elvis was a pretty reasonable guy. Somebody ought to encourage the reasonable people of the world instead of the nutburgers, for once. And Elvis had all his little tributary Elvi; they'd probably be able to handle things from here. She'd go tell him what had to be done, and then go visit the nice people of Novac again so she could pick up her things, and then she'd run away to Utah and never come back.
(Spoiler: no she wouldn't.)
She got back to the King and told him how the situation stood. He admitted he had some vague memories of possibly flipping a few tables the last time he talked to the Followers, and he listened carefully to the rest of what Janice had to say, and then he got down on the floor so he could talk very solemnly to his dog about the situation. Which was great and all, except for the part where he skipped right over deputizing any of the tributary Elvi and basically handed Rex off to Janice on the condition that she go get his brain fixed.
… uh.
You can't actually walk up to a wall and bang your head into it in this game, but Janice sure as heck wanted to, I know that much. I can only assume that she waited until she and Arcade were out of sight of the Elvi and somewhere in the outer ruins of town to find a place where she could properly thump her head. I don't know what she had ever planned to do with her life, but this? Wasn't it.
On the other hand, unless she wanted to start running for Utah right now, there wasn't a whole lot she could do about it. Not unless she wanted to move to the Big Empty and hang out with the artificial intelligences in the Sink for the rest of her life, which, no. And just parking herself in Novac and trying to keep out of sight wouldn't go very well either, because Caesar's Legion was on the move and they all kinda hated her guts and they had no compunctions about doing horrible things to townspeople if they thought they could do it without getting shot to death by someone more skilled than them. Goodsprings probably wasn't a great idea either, since Mr. New Vegas mentioned them on the radio every so often, and Primm was on its way back to being a tourist town, so somebody would probably mention her where other people could hear about it if she tried to hide there. So really, other than 'run to Utah', 'hide in Big Mountain', or 'suicide by *insert horrible desert creature here*', her best option was to just keep doing what she was doing and see how it shook out.
At least it was pretty nice country north of town. There were some farms up there, nothing spectacular, but at least they seemed to be functional- maize producers, mostly... well, former maize producers; there were Fiends in the area and a corpsey smell in a couple of areas. Janice took it upon herself to deal with the animal-skull-hat weirdoes before continuing on her way, on the grounds that if she didn't do it then, she'd just run into the damn nutjobs on her way back. Arcade didn't seem to object too much, although that might have been him not wanting to talk in case he got asked personal questions, and Rex, for all that his brain was getting old and mushy, was perfectly happy to make like all the dogs of all the Fallout games before him and rip the Fiends to shreds. And the Legionary assassins to shreds, too, because the damn Legion managed to track Janice down on the road and started speechifying at her about how THE CAESAR HAS MARKED YOU FOR DEATH AND THE LEGION URRRK.
(In-game you have to let the guy finish his little speech before you can start combat with him; the only way you can shut a legionary assassin up is to snipe him from a distance before he gets close enough to begin dialogue. But I like to think that Janice takes an Indiana-Jones-Versus-The-Swordsman approach to these guys.)
There were some other interesting things along the road as well, including the remains of a caravan- dead Brahmin, scattered goods, a plasma rifle in bad condition. Janice took the good stuff from the corpses and kept moving. Apparently that was supposed to be part of a personal quest for one of the companions I've never bothered picking up. Janice mostly just broke the stuff down for parts and kept moving, and stayed on the road. Generally if the game doesn't throw up some stupid invisible wall or damage my character with killer terrain I go for the straightest shots I can, but Jacobstown is up in the mountains beyond Vault 22, and trying to find a route straight over them would have taken forever. At least things started getting lively and green after a bit, and not the horrifying kill-you-with-spores kind of green, either.
Well, maybe kill-you-with-giant-mantises, but at least they weren't infectious.
Anyway, that's it for this session; tune in next time for Lieutenant Worf.