Notes From New Vegas 61
Apr. 3rd, 2015 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 61: 'Lucky' 38, My Ass
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just entered the Strip, met Victor the Creepy Robot Cowboy, and been told to report to the top floor of the Lucky 38 Casino to meet with Mr. House. As it 's been a long time since I started writing these things, I don't remember how much I may have said about the Strip or the setting in that regard; my apologies if I repeat anything you already know.
The New Vegas Strip, apparently, has a total of three operational casinos on it (the Atomic Wrangler doesn't count, it's in Freeside). Gomorrah, the House of Skank I mentioned briefly last time around, is one of them. The other two are the Tops and the Ultra-Luxe. Lucky 38 appears in some in-game advertising left over from before the War, and its tower is visible for miles as you approach New Vegas, but it's not operational. Nobody ever gets to go in. It isn't a thing like the gate to the Strip, where people try but get shot in front of you; they just don't get in. I'm guessing there've probably been people who got shot making the attempt in the past. This is Fallout. People try stupid things all the time. Mr. House, according to various sources of information including some of the loading screens, is the Mysterious Proprietor of the Lucky 38 who Nobody Living Has Ever Seen.
Now, if you're like me, you're kind of looking at this and looking at the history of the Fallout series and you're eyeballing the Enclave really damn hard, especially given that House only communicates through Securitron robots that come bearing his dictates and missives. Janice, however, is not someone with access to the history of the Fallout series. All she has to go on is the word of one of said Securitrons, and whatever rumor she might have picked up along the way. So when Victor told her the guy wanted to see her and she had to leave her friends outside, she said okay, but opted to take as many weapons as she could carry with her. You know, just in case. Not that that had done her much good with the Sierra Madre situation, but... well, it was a security blanket, okay?
Here's the thing: when she stepped past Victor and into the Lucky 38, the place was empty. I mean, it was fully furnished and decorated and all, and the lights were on and there was a robot beside the elevator at the middle of the casino floor, but there was no sign that anyone human had ever been there. By this point in her career Janice had been to a lot of empty places- Vaults, ghost towns, formerly owned houses, the Madre- but this... Nothing had been used, so far as she could see. Or if it had, the 'bots had cleaned it up long ago and put it back the way it was supposed to be. There were no skulls or inexplicably still-articulated bones in the chairs. There were no carelessly scattered chips on the floor. Even the Madre had had scattered chips and out-of-place drinking glasses. This place? Nothing of the kind. The Madre might've been preserved in one moment of time by the Cloud, but it had been touched by the bombs and the years of Ghost People habitation. The Lucky 38 gave the impression of having been set up and then shrinkwrapped and hermetically sealed. There wasn't even dust. Serious case of the creeps, here.
The robot at the elevator sent Janice up to the topmost floor, where she was met by... well, another robot, but this one had a woman's face on its TV screen and a woman's voice to match. It introduced itself as "Jane", and giggled as it said it was one of Mr. House's 'girls'. "We keep him … entertained. We don't get many guests lately. Perhaps we can entertain you as well."
… NYAAAAAH NGH HNNNN *cough* now, now, no reason to wig out, nobody's said anything about brains...
Well, Janice decided the fastest way to get over the weirdness was to talk to the robot and pump it for information. So, she asked for information about Mr. House. The answer? "He's the Maximum Utmost! He's just the smartest, most wonderful man there ever was! Did you know he singlehandedly reclaimed New Vegas from all those nasty tribes? … well, he singlehandedly sent in his Securitrons, but that counts in my book." That got a funny look, but since Jane was apparently built on a neuro-computational matrix that was an exact copy of Mr. House's favorite girl, it was probably only to be expected that she'd be a slightly ditzy sycophant. Okay, whatever. What else could she tell Janice about the place, since- here we are ignoring any of Ulysses' blither about her origins- Janice honestly didn't know much about New Vegas and the Strip?
Well, aside from Mr. House, the Strip is run by the Three Families. Jane considered the Omertas, who run the House of Skank, "awful brutes". The Chairmen and the White Glove Society 'pretend to have culture', so they're a little better in Jane's book. The Chairmen run The Tops; the White Gloves run the Ultra-Luxe. There's an NCR embassy somewhere on the Strip, and the Vault 21 Hotel and Gift Shop with its Vault-Tec memorabilia for sale, and a place where somebody named Michael Angelo has a neon sign shop. (WOO I SMELL SIDE QUEST WOOOO). Janice would have rooms available to her here in the Lucky 38 as long as she needed them, and would be allowed to bring her friends and companions up there too for as long as she liked, but she needed to be aware that none of them would be allowed to come up to this level with her. This was Mr. House's territory and nobody came in without his say-so.
Oh, and also apparently he was a passionate collector of pre-War snowglobes and would pay her lots of cash if she brought them back to him, or at least back to Jane. Ohhhh-kay.
Theoretically she probably could've kept asking the robot for information, but the needle on Janice's weird-o-meter was starting to climb upwards at an alarming rate, so she figured she'd better find this Mr. House and get it all over with. Jane sent her off into the next room with a happy wave of one woogly clawed robot arm. For exactly three seconds Janice was able to breathe easy, and then that needle flat-out pegged, because Mr. House was apparently a floating head vaguely resembling WW 2-era Howard Stark, on a giant green CRT screen hanging on the majority of one wall.
DID SHE OR DID SHE NOT ALREADY DO THE WIZARD OF OZ GOES TO HELL.
*cough*
On the bright side, House was reasonably polite, for a talking head on a TV screen with a room full of security robots. Also he was voiced by Rene "Odo" Auberjonois, which helped a little. He greeted Janice and asked her, now that she'd reached her destination, what did she make of what she saw, which... yanno, if she'd been just a little more articulate of a person, that would've been a terribly unwise question to ask. Fortunately Janice had long since gone past the point of YOUR CITY IS WEIRD AND YOUR ROBOTS ARE CREEPY AND YOUR NEIGHBORS MAKE MY SKIN CRAWL AND THE MUSIC IS LOUD AND THE COWBOY ROBOT FREAKS ME THE HELL OUT and straight into the disturbingly calm lands on the other side, so all she said was that she'd never seen anything like that place. Which seemed to be the right answer; Odo Stark took it as a testament to his ability, since he'd been the one to reclaim Vegas from the howling savages and force the three tribes under his command to civilize up and become the Three Families so that Vegas could once again become a city like nowhere else on Earth. Apparently he had been alive before the War, and gone to a lot of trouble at the time t prevent the city's total destruction by the missiles, and he'd made a number of sacrifices and taken extraordinary measures to stay alive as long as possible; he had Plans, rebuildy ones, and he intended to pursue them full force if he could just clear out the threats to his city. And if he could just get his former protege out of the way, since Benny had taken it into his head to become a problem.
There was some more talk than that but given that part of it involved "you'd make a pretty good replacement for Benny" and "one day I may make the same measures that kept me alive avaiable to others, potentially yourself", Janice could not possibly get herself out of that room fast enough. She stuck around long enough for House to tell her that Benny had shot her for the Platinum Chip she was supposed to deliver to House and that she should get it from Benny and bring it back to the Lucky 38 so she could get paid, and left with a promise of future discussions. Unfortunately she did not get to bang her head against the wall outside, because pretty much as soon as she stepped out of the Lucky 38 a soldier in NCR gear came running up with a message from Ambassador Crocker asking her to visit the Embassy as soon as possible. Also there were people staring, and that damned creepy robot watching. Add in Arcade and Rex the Abomination of Science, and the best she could do was promise the soldier she'd be along shortly. She needed to go talk to someone first, and that someone was gonna be- where did Mr. House say Benny came from? Oh, right, the Chairmen...
The Tops. Janice had to go to the Tops first.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just entered the Strip, met Victor the Creepy Robot Cowboy, and been told to report to the top floor of the Lucky 38 Casino to meet with Mr. House. As it 's been a long time since I started writing these things, I don't remember how much I may have said about the Strip or the setting in that regard; my apologies if I repeat anything you already know.
The New Vegas Strip, apparently, has a total of three operational casinos on it (the Atomic Wrangler doesn't count, it's in Freeside). Gomorrah, the House of Skank I mentioned briefly last time around, is one of them. The other two are the Tops and the Ultra-Luxe. Lucky 38 appears in some in-game advertising left over from before the War, and its tower is visible for miles as you approach New Vegas, but it's not operational. Nobody ever gets to go in. It isn't a thing like the gate to the Strip, where people try but get shot in front of you; they just don't get in. I'm guessing there've probably been people who got shot making the attempt in the past. This is Fallout. People try stupid things all the time. Mr. House, according to various sources of information including some of the loading screens, is the Mysterious Proprietor of the Lucky 38 who Nobody Living Has Ever Seen.
Now, if you're like me, you're kind of looking at this and looking at the history of the Fallout series and you're eyeballing the Enclave really damn hard, especially given that House only communicates through Securitron robots that come bearing his dictates and missives. Janice, however, is not someone with access to the history of the Fallout series. All she has to go on is the word of one of said Securitrons, and whatever rumor she might have picked up along the way. So when Victor told her the guy wanted to see her and she had to leave her friends outside, she said okay, but opted to take as many weapons as she could carry with her. You know, just in case. Not that that had done her much good with the Sierra Madre situation, but... well, it was a security blanket, okay?
Here's the thing: when she stepped past Victor and into the Lucky 38, the place was empty. I mean, it was fully furnished and decorated and all, and the lights were on and there was a robot beside the elevator at the middle of the casino floor, but there was no sign that anyone human had ever been there. By this point in her career Janice had been to a lot of empty places- Vaults, ghost towns, formerly owned houses, the Madre- but this... Nothing had been used, so far as she could see. Or if it had, the 'bots had cleaned it up long ago and put it back the way it was supposed to be. There were no skulls or inexplicably still-articulated bones in the chairs. There were no carelessly scattered chips on the floor. Even the Madre had had scattered chips and out-of-place drinking glasses. This place? Nothing of the kind. The Madre might've been preserved in one moment of time by the Cloud, but it had been touched by the bombs and the years of Ghost People habitation. The Lucky 38 gave the impression of having been set up and then shrinkwrapped and hermetically sealed. There wasn't even dust. Serious case of the creeps, here.
The robot at the elevator sent Janice up to the topmost floor, where she was met by... well, another robot, but this one had a woman's face on its TV screen and a woman's voice to match. It introduced itself as "Jane", and giggled as it said it was one of Mr. House's 'girls'. "We keep him … entertained. We don't get many guests lately. Perhaps we can entertain you as well."
… NYAAAAAH NGH HNNNN *cough* now, now, no reason to wig out, nobody's said anything about brains...
Well, Janice decided the fastest way to get over the weirdness was to talk to the robot and pump it for information. So, she asked for information about Mr. House. The answer? "He's the Maximum Utmost! He's just the smartest, most wonderful man there ever was! Did you know he singlehandedly reclaimed New Vegas from all those nasty tribes? … well, he singlehandedly sent in his Securitrons, but that counts in my book." That got a funny look, but since Jane was apparently built on a neuro-computational matrix that was an exact copy of Mr. House's favorite girl, it was probably only to be expected that she'd be a slightly ditzy sycophant. Okay, whatever. What else could she tell Janice about the place, since- here we are ignoring any of Ulysses' blither about her origins- Janice honestly didn't know much about New Vegas and the Strip?
Well, aside from Mr. House, the Strip is run by the Three Families. Jane considered the Omertas, who run the House of Skank, "awful brutes". The Chairmen and the White Glove Society 'pretend to have culture', so they're a little better in Jane's book. The Chairmen run The Tops; the White Gloves run the Ultra-Luxe. There's an NCR embassy somewhere on the Strip, and the Vault 21 Hotel and Gift Shop with its Vault-Tec memorabilia for sale, and a place where somebody named Michael Angelo has a neon sign shop. (WOO I SMELL SIDE QUEST WOOOO). Janice would have rooms available to her here in the Lucky 38 as long as she needed them, and would be allowed to bring her friends and companions up there too for as long as she liked, but she needed to be aware that none of them would be allowed to come up to this level with her. This was Mr. House's territory and nobody came in without his say-so.
Oh, and also apparently he was a passionate collector of pre-War snowglobes and would pay her lots of cash if she brought them back to him, or at least back to Jane. Ohhhh-kay.
Theoretically she probably could've kept asking the robot for information, but the needle on Janice's weird-o-meter was starting to climb upwards at an alarming rate, so she figured she'd better find this Mr. House and get it all over with. Jane sent her off into the next room with a happy wave of one woogly clawed robot arm. For exactly three seconds Janice was able to breathe easy, and then that needle flat-out pegged, because Mr. House was apparently a floating head vaguely resembling WW 2-era Howard Stark, on a giant green CRT screen hanging on the majority of one wall.
DID SHE OR DID SHE NOT ALREADY DO THE WIZARD OF OZ GOES TO HELL.
*cough*
On the bright side, House was reasonably polite, for a talking head on a TV screen with a room full of security robots. Also he was voiced by Rene "Odo" Auberjonois, which helped a little. He greeted Janice and asked her, now that she'd reached her destination, what did she make of what she saw, which... yanno, if she'd been just a little more articulate of a person, that would've been a terribly unwise question to ask. Fortunately Janice had long since gone past the point of YOUR CITY IS WEIRD AND YOUR ROBOTS ARE CREEPY AND YOUR NEIGHBORS MAKE MY SKIN CRAWL AND THE MUSIC IS LOUD AND THE COWBOY ROBOT FREAKS ME THE HELL OUT and straight into the disturbingly calm lands on the other side, so all she said was that she'd never seen anything like that place. Which seemed to be the right answer; Odo Stark took it as a testament to his ability, since he'd been the one to reclaim Vegas from the howling savages and force the three tribes under his command to civilize up and become the Three Families so that Vegas could once again become a city like nowhere else on Earth. Apparently he had been alive before the War, and gone to a lot of trouble at the time t prevent the city's total destruction by the missiles, and he'd made a number of sacrifices and taken extraordinary measures to stay alive as long as possible; he had Plans, rebuildy ones, and he intended to pursue them full force if he could just clear out the threats to his city. And if he could just get his former protege out of the way, since Benny had taken it into his head to become a problem.
There was some more talk than that but given that part of it involved "you'd make a pretty good replacement for Benny" and "one day I may make the same measures that kept me alive avaiable to others, potentially yourself", Janice could not possibly get herself out of that room fast enough. She stuck around long enough for House to tell her that Benny had shot her for the Platinum Chip she was supposed to deliver to House and that she should get it from Benny and bring it back to the Lucky 38 so she could get paid, and left with a promise of future discussions. Unfortunately she did not get to bang her head against the wall outside, because pretty much as soon as she stepped out of the Lucky 38 a soldier in NCR gear came running up with a message from Ambassador Crocker asking her to visit the Embassy as soon as possible. Also there were people staring, and that damned creepy robot watching. Add in Arcade and Rex the Abomination of Science, and the best she could do was promise the soldier she'd be along shortly. She needed to go talk to someone first, and that someone was gonna be- where did Mr. House say Benny came from? Oh, right, the Chairmen...
The Tops. Janice had to go to the Tops first.
