camwyn | Fallout 3, Part the Third: EEEH HHH EEEH HHH

When last we saw our heroine, she'd stumbled into spoiler territory. You've been warned.

Okay. So. Ellen Park, daughter of the scientist and physician James Park, has just found her way out of the Vault she's spent her entire life in up until now. She's made it to the open air and is standing on a rocky hillside on a fine and sunny day in August or so (I forgot to check the in-game start date). Her father's gone somewhere, she doesn't know where, and she's been told all her life that the surface is completely uninhabitable and prone to making people die horribly. She's just stepped over a bunch of skeletons with protest signs demanding that they be let into the Vault. She's also just read files in the Overseer's computer indicating that the whole 'the surface is death' thing is a lie and that there are GIANT ANTS up here and that there are PEOPLE and somewhere around here is a town called Megaton. And she's been shot at and hit with sticks, and she had to beat up security guards and steal their pants.

And now she's outside. Where there is no ceiling. Where there are no walls. Where she has absolutely no fricking goddamn clue what to do next.

Oh, and it's her nineteenth birthday.

I figure Ellen made the mistake of looking up at that point, saw the distance between where she stood and the sky, and had a fit of hyperventilating that lasted for a while. That or running in circles and screaming about the ceiling being gone. One of the two. Either way she had her fit, and then she sat down on a rock and tried to figure out what to do next. The files said Megaton was nearby, and that the Vault had left someone there for a while as a liaison. Maybe that's where Dad went. She should try to find it.

Operative word being try. You live in an environment not much different from a Typhoon-class submarine for nineteen years, it's not gonna equip you for navigating in an area without pipes that lead from one place to another or signs that you can read. Ellen had a compass built into her Pip-Boy, yeah, but without a compass heading she was kinda screwed. I don't remember if Megaton's location was mentioned in the Overseer's files. I figured even if it were, Ellen only had a very brief time to look at the file and was probably too spooked to read it closely. Also, I didn't know how to read the compass's "this is where your next quest goal is" system, which would've pointed me straight at Megaton. Thus, Ellen headed in the most logical direction I could think of, namely, towards the most artificial-looking structures she could find in the landscape. Like a water tower, not that I think she recognized it as such. And, hey, there were houses. She'd seen houses in Mr. Brotch's history classes, in the pictures of pre-war America, right?

Well, there used to be houses in the area. What Ellen found was a series of gutted buildings that were lucky to have one or two semi-intact walls standing, and everything else about them burned or crashed or torn apart. They were neatly organized once, along… it would've taken Ellen a while to recognize what she was walking on as a street, I think. Again, she'd only ever seen them in books, and they weren't nearly so ruined and blasted from years of post-nuclear weathering when the history books got made. Heck, I'm not even sure they'd've bothered to show streets in her history texts other than the Roman roads and the superhighways. It's not like anyone would've taken a structural or civil engineering textbook into Vault 101.

She got distracted from the shattered asphalt pretty quickly by the sound of music in the distance, and the sight of something moving. Apparently Sputnik was roaming the streets- no, seriously, it was a flying robot a little larger than her head shaped more or less like Sputnik, with the trailing spikes and all. And it was playing a John Phillip Sousa recording, which gave way pretty quickly to the sound of a man's voice proclaiming himself to be 'President John Henry Eden'. More specifically, the sound of Malcolm McDowell's voice.

Malcolm McDowell has a bad case of Christopher Lee Syndrome. No one has ever said, while watching a movie, "Oh, look! It's Christopher Lee! Those children are sure to get home okay now!", and it's exactly the same for Mr. McDowell. If he's claiming to be President then OH GOD RUN FOR THE HILLS, I figure.

Ellen, alas, did not have the benefit of a lifetime spent watching the same movies I do, so she just gave the flying thing an odd look. President Eden's recording went on to ramble about how the Enclave was working night and day towards the time when it could restore America's greatness. Which, nice goal, but come on! MALCOLM MC DOWELLVOICE! Ellen decided the 'bot was some prewar leftover that wasn't aware of everything having been destroyed- Andy, the robot down in the Vault, wasn't always as bright as one might hope either- and let it go on its way. She'd just started exploring the ruins in earnest when she caught sight of something else moving, and went looking for it. And hey, it turned out to be a person! Hooray! Two people! More hooray! And a . . . wah. . . uh, why does your cow have two heads, mister?

That was Ellen's introduction to wandering trade caravans. She'd encountered Doc Hoff and his caravan guard, and their pack Brahmin. Brahmin being, well, cows approximately the size of a 1973 Pontiac LeMans, only with two heads and an udder so large it reminded me of the Gonarch. Doc Hoff didn't seem to have any options for asking him about her father, but he did mention that he carried fine medications and compounds for the discriminating consumer. Ellen having been raised by a doctor, she asked to check some of his stock out, which is how she learned that up on the surface they still used money. Bottlecaps, apparently. Which she didn't have, and since she wasn't about to sell off the contents of her room's first aid kit (anything could happen up here!), she wound up not buying anything. Doc Hoff went on his way, the guard went on his way, and the giant two-headed cow went on its way.

There was a lot of 'giant two headed cow, wtf' on Ellen's part after that. Because: giant two-headed cow. SO not a pre-war thing. I'm not even sure Ellen really noticed having to pulp a radroach with a baseball bat after that. Giant, two-headed cow: your ticket to quality distraction.

Ellen snapped out of it eventually and went looking for… well, anything, really. There was one house that wasn't completely gutted- pretty intact, in fact- so she started poking around there. And when she went inside, there was light, and there were a few appliances, and there was a radio, and AAAH BLONDE WOMAN RIGHT IN MY FACE I'M SO SORRY DON'T UNLEASH A TWO HEADED COW ON ME wait what? Who's Moriarty, ma'am? For that matter, who're you?

That'd be Silver, who doesn't seem to realize that you might not have visited things in the correct order. She's all "grr Moriarty" and "I didn't steal the money, I was entitled" and "I'm tired of being a whore, I want to live without bothering anyone" and meanwhile I'm all "but… but… lady, seriously, I don't know what the hell you're talking about!". There weren't even dialogue choices for 'clueless newbie, fill me in', so I just went with the politest stuff I could. What did it matter if I promised not to tell Moriarty I'd found her? I had no freaking clue who Moriarty was! There, easy promise. All good. She was very very happy about me promising that, and she went away and I had Ellen leave the house, and I gained good karma and still no freaking clue about anything whatsoever, thank you so much Mr. Karma Meter.

Anyway, Ellen kept moving, and as she poked around town she happened to glance upwards. At which point she realized that the big blue room was quickly becoming the big black room. With tiny sparkly bits. SO profoundly not like anything in Ellen's experience. Bad faraway invisible ceiling. BAD. No biscuit. Ellen ran for the nearest building that still had walls and didn't have a crazy blond ex-prostitute in it, which was the former Springvale Elementary School. Several floors tall, good and sturdy- so what if the windows were broken? It was made of brick and looked like she'd at least not be out in the horrifying open under the inexplicably color-changing faraway invisible ceiling. Yay brick! Yay walls! Yay good solid doors!

. . . and then she walked in and the place was decorated with TORSOS. Like, human torsos. With no heads. And no arms. And chopped-off legs. HANGING FROM THE CEILING. On HOOKS. And they- it- yeah, you can safely assume Ellen had another AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I HATE THE SURFACE WORLD SO MUCH moment right about there.

But the really fun part is that it wasn't even the worst nineteenth birthday in the world yet, because shortly after Ellen panicked and ran the wrong way (I had some trouble justifying her exploring the building, but running away in panic and forgetting that you are standing in front of a door sounded good) she heard voices. Nasty ones. I won't say she didn't try to hide, because she surely did, but there really wasn't much cover. Hiding took the form of leaning up against a wall and crouching to make herself as unobtrusive as possible. Didn't work, of course. The extras from The Road Warrior showed up and started shooting at her. She had the gun Amata gave her back when she escaped, of course, and some stuff from the guards, so she shot back, but she got hurt quite a lot during that fight. It'd been a bad day, after all, and she'd been fighting that morning, too.So profoundly not fun…

This bunch got killed, not knocked unconscious. They were, after all, trying to kill her, and even if she'd been inclined to cut them any slack, the body parts hanging from the ceiling were kind of a large factor in assuming that they were Extremely Bad People. She took what she could use from the corpses, like ammo and a somewhat bigger gun, and kept trying to hide. (She didn't pants the Thunderdome gang, by the way. Their idea of armor involved spikes and covering, like, one shoulder and both legs. Or the breast zone and both legs, on women. Either way, not nearly enough to be practical.)

They were everywhere, as it happened. I think there must have been ten of them in the building, so every time Ellen thought she'd finally made it safe and could collapse there was the sound of "Quit hiding and come out and fight!", or something similar. At one point she got chased into the area where she'd entered the school- but on the upper floor, so she had no option but try and jump to the top of a cage that took up most of the center of the room. She landed safely next to this weird glowing purple bottle, which was something called Nuka-Cola Quantum, which she grabbed before shimmying down the cage and oh god there were child-sized skeletons in the middle of the cage and there were still parts on the wall and the raiders were still coming and, um, it still wasn't the worst nineteenth birthday ever, because when she fled downstairs this time she found a door leading into a tunnel under the school. And a note a good way down the tunnel indicating that they'd been trying to dig into Vault 101, but weren't having much luck. And that somebody had been eaten by the ants.

Remember those? The giant ants from the Overseer's terminal? The ones making the scuttling noises right behind Ellen as she finished reading the note? Yeah.

About four ants and one nervous breakdown later it was officially the worst nineteenth birthday ever. And that would be where we leave off for the moment, I think; in our next post we'll discuss what happened when she found her way back to the surface and made it to Megaton.