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Jun. 8th, 2010 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynFallout 3 general question, as I speculate to myself whilst waiting for a Blackberry to activate on the Blackberry Enterprise Server:
Why isn't there a Behemoth in Vault 87?
Seriously. According to the information we have from Bethesda, Capital Wasteland supermutants generally become larger, stronger, more homicidal, and less intelligent as they age. Behemoths are supposed to be the oldest and largest of the bunch. There are five of them in the game: the one at GNR Plaza, the one west of Jury Street Metro, the one at Takoma Industrial, the one held by the raiders at Evergreen Mills, and the one in the Capitol Building. I can sort of understand how each of them wound up where they are:
- The mutants've apparently been searching the Capitol Building ruins for some time now. One of them, long ago, must have decided that it would be a good idea to set up camp there and use it as a base to search for more green stuff, and forced the others to bring it food, and over time transformed slowly into an Overlord and then into a Behemoth, at which point it became too big to get out of the Rotunda. I'm assuming that one was originally pretty intelligent and probably responsible for ordering the fortification of the Mall.
- Takoma Industrial has all kinds of weird chemicals, plus the massive radioactive pool with all the ghouls and that idiot Isabella Proud's camp. (If you've never found it, there's a location within the Takoma Industrial campus where you can find a pair of slaughtered scientists with a bunch of equipment and a computer containing their notes. It's like Gorillas in the Mist, only the gorillas were feral savage gorillas who killed Dian Fossey themselves.) It's simple enough to assume that the mutants in the Takoma area aren't entirely clear on which green chemicals are which, and took over the ruins because they thought surely one of the buildings must contain the kind of goo they need to create more mutants. I'm considering the possibility that industrial chemicals in the Takoma area may have accelerated a mutant's transformation, because, well, it's Fallout and it runs on Science!, and that's the kind of thing that you get when Science! is involved. Establishment of a serious mutant base in Takoma Park to hold down the chemical source would also explain why Talon Company had artillery there. I'm privately convinced the Enclave was quietly paying the Talons through intermediaries to attack various mutant fortifications, with the goal of whittling down both of what they saw as the most dangerous problems in the Wasteland. They could've easily paid for the artillery knowing that sooner or later it would be overrun, but in the meantime they'd be keeping down the worst of what the mutants could do.
- GNR's Behemoth sort of comes out of nowhere. There's not a lot of call for one to exist in that area. It's not all that likely to have become trapped as a younger mutant. On the other hand, GNR Plaza is relatively close to Vernon Square, with the crashed Delta IX rocket. If you read the notes on the terminal in Reilly's Rangers headquarters, Butcher says that Vernon Square is very weird and that the mutants there are almost as numerous as they are at the Mall. The Wiki suggests that they're looking for Vault-Tec headquarters with the intention of finding purestrain humans to dunk in the FEV. When you get to Vault-Tec HQ you find a couple of mutants inside, but the robots've mostly held them off. I'm not sure if that's necessarily their motivation, although it'd be a good one.... what occurs to me as I write this is that it's just barely possible that the...
oh. Oh dear. That's... hm.
Here's something tenuous, but plausible. Let me know what you think.
Takoma Park and the Capitol are both extremely strategic places. GNR is very near an extremely strategic place. Evergreen Mills is a plausible possible strategic place due to its canyon structure and extensive cave network. Jury Street's the only one that's not all that strategic. Suppose, just suppose, that part of the reason Behemoths are so rare isn't just because Capital Wasteland supermutants are stupider and more prone to internecine warfare than Mariposa supermutants and therefore tend to kill each other before they reach the Behemoth stage. We know from Fallout 2 that actual successful mutant transformation requires lack of exposure to radiation and lack of exposure to FEV. Does Behemoth transformation require specific characteristics in existing mutants? Specific chemicals to trigger the basics- possibly accounting for the existence of Overlords in Broken Steel- and perhaps intelligence in the mutant to be changed?
I honestly can't see how the Capitol Behemoth wouldn't have wandered outside at some point in its lengthy existence if it was just 'survive to a certain age' that did it. It had to have been something more than that. The GNR Behemoth was originally behind the drive to take Vault-Tec HQ, not because of any drive to find purestrain humans, but to find another Vault like 87 and get more FEV. Exposure to the Delta-IX rocket in Vernon Square resulted in its Hulkification, depriving the mutants in the area of their primary leadership. It proceeded to wander out of Vernon Square and wound up assaulting the GNR Plaza and dying there. Takoma Park was a strategic location in the search for FEV, and the chemicals there turned the chief of the mutants into a Behemoth. I suspect there's an ungodly number of Overlords there as well. I'm not sure what the Capitol strategist mutant would've been exposed to. Possibly something unholy in the Capitol building basement, Lord knows it's Fallout and terrible things get hidden in places they shouldn't be all the time. Possibly it found something in one of the museums on the Mall and wound up swallowing it back at its 'throne room' in the Capitol and bam, Hulkification.
That leaves Jury Street and Evergreen Mills to account for. If Three Dog is to be believed, Evergreen Mills is probably not all that old. It's well established and appointed, though. I suspect a particularly cunning mutant attempted to investigate the valley some time after the raiders colonized it. A new concentration of humans probably meant a good place to kidnap new victims from, after all. The mutant got incapacitated by traps the raiders had set- land mines and so on- and some particularly unpleasant soul suggested walling it up behind electric fencing to see if they could torture it for fun. God only knows what kind of crap they dosed its food with, but it resulted in the thing growing to a size they couldn't kill and didn't dare get rid of… Jury Street I can't peg. I don't think it was created there, though. That's just a basic mutant encampment. It may have been wandering under escort from other supermutants, or something like that.
So. Behemoth transformation requires an intelligent mutant plus exposure to an unknown chemical cocktail and possibly quite a lot of radiation. In some cases it partially works, and you get Overlords, which may become full Behemoths over time (or may not, I don't know). In some cases it works perfectly and you get twenty foot tall monsters. And some mutants just don't have the neural pathways to do it, or are otherwise immune to the combination of chemicals necessary, which is why Uncle Leo was driven out rather than dosed up. There is no Behemoth in Vault 87 because they were hoping to make one out of Fawkes. Whether Fawkes was immune or simply hadn't been tried yet I don't know, but either way, Fawkes was going to be subjected to the Takoma treatment once they could get enough crap to dope him/her up with. (I realize Bethesda has said Fawkes was always meant to be male, but I like that the voice actor was under the impression Fawkes was originally female and played Fawkes that way, so I'm running with the voice actor's interpretation.)
So, okay, that answered the question. I feel better now.
Why isn't there a Behemoth in Vault 87?
Seriously. According to the information we have from Bethesda, Capital Wasteland supermutants generally become larger, stronger, more homicidal, and less intelligent as they age. Behemoths are supposed to be the oldest and largest of the bunch. There are five of them in the game: the one at GNR Plaza, the one west of Jury Street Metro, the one at Takoma Industrial, the one held by the raiders at Evergreen Mills, and the one in the Capitol Building. I can sort of understand how each of them wound up where they are:
- The mutants've apparently been searching the Capitol Building ruins for some time now. One of them, long ago, must have decided that it would be a good idea to set up camp there and use it as a base to search for more green stuff, and forced the others to bring it food, and over time transformed slowly into an Overlord and then into a Behemoth, at which point it became too big to get out of the Rotunda. I'm assuming that one was originally pretty intelligent and probably responsible for ordering the fortification of the Mall.
- Takoma Industrial has all kinds of weird chemicals, plus the massive radioactive pool with all the ghouls and that idiot Isabella Proud's camp. (If you've never found it, there's a location within the Takoma Industrial campus where you can find a pair of slaughtered scientists with a bunch of equipment and a computer containing their notes. It's like Gorillas in the Mist, only the gorillas were feral savage gorillas who killed Dian Fossey themselves.) It's simple enough to assume that the mutants in the Takoma area aren't entirely clear on which green chemicals are which, and took over the ruins because they thought surely one of the buildings must contain the kind of goo they need to create more mutants. I'm considering the possibility that industrial chemicals in the Takoma area may have accelerated a mutant's transformation, because, well, it's Fallout and it runs on Science!, and that's the kind of thing that you get when Science! is involved. Establishment of a serious mutant base in Takoma Park to hold down the chemical source would also explain why Talon Company had artillery there. I'm privately convinced the Enclave was quietly paying the Talons through intermediaries to attack various mutant fortifications, with the goal of whittling down both of what they saw as the most dangerous problems in the Wasteland. They could've easily paid for the artillery knowing that sooner or later it would be overrun, but in the meantime they'd be keeping down the worst of what the mutants could do.
- GNR's Behemoth sort of comes out of nowhere. There's not a lot of call for one to exist in that area. It's not all that likely to have become trapped as a younger mutant. On the other hand, GNR Plaza is relatively close to Vernon Square, with the crashed Delta IX rocket. If you read the notes on the terminal in Reilly's Rangers headquarters, Butcher says that Vernon Square is very weird and that the mutants there are almost as numerous as they are at the Mall. The Wiki suggests that they're looking for Vault-Tec headquarters with the intention of finding purestrain humans to dunk in the FEV. When you get to Vault-Tec HQ you find a couple of mutants inside, but the robots've mostly held them off. I'm not sure if that's necessarily their motivation, although it'd be a good one.... what occurs to me as I write this is that it's just barely possible that the...
oh. Oh dear. That's... hm.
Here's something tenuous, but plausible. Let me know what you think.
Takoma Park and the Capitol are both extremely strategic places. GNR is very near an extremely strategic place. Evergreen Mills is a plausible possible strategic place due to its canyon structure and extensive cave network. Jury Street's the only one that's not all that strategic. Suppose, just suppose, that part of the reason Behemoths are so rare isn't just because Capital Wasteland supermutants are stupider and more prone to internecine warfare than Mariposa supermutants and therefore tend to kill each other before they reach the Behemoth stage. We know from Fallout 2 that actual successful mutant transformation requires lack of exposure to radiation and lack of exposure to FEV. Does Behemoth transformation require specific characteristics in existing mutants? Specific chemicals to trigger the basics- possibly accounting for the existence of Overlords in Broken Steel- and perhaps intelligence in the mutant to be changed?
I honestly can't see how the Capitol Behemoth wouldn't have wandered outside at some point in its lengthy existence if it was just 'survive to a certain age' that did it. It had to have been something more than that. The GNR Behemoth was originally behind the drive to take Vault-Tec HQ, not because of any drive to find purestrain humans, but to find another Vault like 87 and get more FEV. Exposure to the Delta-IX rocket in Vernon Square resulted in its Hulkification, depriving the mutants in the area of their primary leadership. It proceeded to wander out of Vernon Square and wound up assaulting the GNR Plaza and dying there. Takoma Park was a strategic location in the search for FEV, and the chemicals there turned the chief of the mutants into a Behemoth. I suspect there's an ungodly number of Overlords there as well. I'm not sure what the Capitol strategist mutant would've been exposed to. Possibly something unholy in the Capitol building basement, Lord knows it's Fallout and terrible things get hidden in places they shouldn't be all the time. Possibly it found something in one of the museums on the Mall and wound up swallowing it back at its 'throne room' in the Capitol and bam, Hulkification.
That leaves Jury Street and Evergreen Mills to account for. If Three Dog is to be believed, Evergreen Mills is probably not all that old. It's well established and appointed, though. I suspect a particularly cunning mutant attempted to investigate the valley some time after the raiders colonized it. A new concentration of humans probably meant a good place to kidnap new victims from, after all. The mutant got incapacitated by traps the raiders had set- land mines and so on- and some particularly unpleasant soul suggested walling it up behind electric fencing to see if they could torture it for fun. God only knows what kind of crap they dosed its food with, but it resulted in the thing growing to a size they couldn't kill and didn't dare get rid of… Jury Street I can't peg. I don't think it was created there, though. That's just a basic mutant encampment. It may have been wandering under escort from other supermutants, or something like that.
So. Behemoth transformation requires an intelligent mutant plus exposure to an unknown chemical cocktail and possibly quite a lot of radiation. In some cases it partially works, and you get Overlords, which may become full Behemoths over time (or may not, I don't know). In some cases it works perfectly and you get twenty foot tall monsters. And some mutants just don't have the neural pathways to do it, or are otherwise immune to the combination of chemicals necessary, which is why Uncle Leo was driven out rather than dosed up. There is no Behemoth in Vault 87 because they were hoping to make one out of Fawkes. Whether Fawkes was immune or simply hadn't been tried yet I don't know, but either way, Fawkes was going to be subjected to the Takoma treatment once they could get enough crap to dope him/her up with. (I realize Bethesda has said Fawkes was always meant to be male, but I like that the voice actor was under the impression Fawkes was originally female and played Fawkes that way, so I'm running with the voice actor's interpretation.)
So, okay, that answered the question. I feel better now.
