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Notes From New Vegas 6: OH GOD WHERE DID THE BLUE THING COME FROM
When last we saw her Janice had taken a nice little nap in the Wolfhorn Ranch farmhouse because let's face it, if you're in the middle of the Wasteland and you don't lock your door and you don't do whatever magic thing it is causes the player to be able to see that Touching That Gives You Bad Karma, sooner or later someone is going to sleep in your bed and eat all your food. Or walk off with all your food if they're not hungry just now. The point is that nobody was in the Ranch building and nothing appeared to have an owner, so Janice took the more valuable stuff (clean water and a couple of types of booze you need for recipes) from the fridge, harvested some good stuff off the plants growing out front, and got the hell out of town.
(A moment, here, to note that for some reason 'owned' objects have their status messages in red, and taking any of them constitutes stealing. You also cannot sleep in an owned bed. This persists even if you kill the owner. This has led me to believe that 'owned' objects are in fact infected with small itchy insects of some kind and you don't actually get bad karma for stealing them, you just get a whole lot of tiny new friends. It would explain why somebody who had cheerfully stolen all the food and shot everyone around through the head would refuse to sleep in the deceased's bed: it's not bad karma, they just don't want a new strain of lice.)
Wolfhorn Ranch is right near a bunch of ruined roads, so Janice had plenty of options open to her. She wound up heading north. Well, sort of north. Despite everything she'd been through already she figured hey, why not wander off the roads a bit here and there and see what else there is to see? It didn't seem like cazador territory, so how bad could it be?
I wish that I could say she was immediately punished by the cruel and capricious random number gods spontaneously spawning a Deathclaw invasion or something, but to be honest I wasn't taking notes at the time and this part of the game just doesn't stand out in my memory. I know some bad things happened to Janice in this part of the desert, but that's all I remember, so they can't have been very outstanding bad things. And frankly, the only reason I remember the bad things happening is because I remember Janice dragging herself towards a gas station sign in the distance and deciding she must've been going crazy because there appeared to be a big ol' dinosaur or something just past it.
Turns out she wasn't going crazy or hallucinating from bloodloss. Janice had found the town of Novac, which follows in the grand old tradition of Arefu and any number of other post-apocalyptic towns that name themselves after mutilated road signs. Novac is named that because those are the only letters on the motel sign that work- NO VAC. The town consists of the Dino Dee-Lite Motel, several farmhouses, a shack to the north, a scrapyard beyond the shack, a couple of Brahmin pens, that gas station, and the big damn concrete dinosaur, Dinky. I'd make fun of Dinky but I live in New Jersey and we've kind of got people advertising that tourists should "COME AND CLIMB THE WORLD'S LARGEST ELEPHANT", so I'm not in any kind of position to talk. (Her name's Lucy. She's in Margate. Look it up.)
At any rate, Janice sort of limped into town and threw herself at a woman in a bloodstained white shirt and cargo pants. Fortunately this turned out to be the town doctor, who patched her up. Janice then started looking around for anybody to question about the place in the hopes that she could settle in for a while and not get shot or exploded or bitten or any of those things. There was a rather nice rancher fellow whose major problem in life was that his brahmin herd kept dying, one animal at a time late at night. There was a nice old lady who ran the motel and said she had an available room. There was a guy who ran a store in the dinosaur's belly, he was interesting. There was the sniper who watched the town borders from the dinosaur mouth, that was Manny- Janice didn't talk to him much. There were a bunch of caravaners but they were mostly just stopping off for a rest rather than selling anything.
And then there was Noonan.
Oh, Noonan. No-bark Noonan. Mr. Noonan, you have no idea how much I love you. You just... you make my day, you know that? I thought No-Bark Noonan was going to be a source of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but he's BETTER than that. He's a source of Authentic Frontier CRAZY. Serious crazy. As in, when I asked him about Dusty's cattle going missing, he told me there was one animal that dropped dead every night, and it was clearly the work of the chupacabra, the livestock vampire. Only people said there were too many holes to be a chupacabra's fangs, and the holes had bullets in them. Which, says Noonan, means that clearly they are dealing with a chupacabra with an automatic weapon.
I'm just going to sit back and smile at that sentence for a while. There are few times in this life when you'll get to see a golden specimen like that.
Janice offered to check it out, because hey, she figured she could ingratiate herself to the locals and maybe find a safe place to stay here, away from the Goodsprings area and the robot that knew her and the giant scorpions and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man and the Vipers and the giant mantises. Chupacabras sounded like a step up, not being real or anything. Not that she mentioned that part to Noonan, because then he might stop telling her his authentic frontier CRAZY and she kind of liked it. So she set up camp outside the Brahmin pen, did her best to repair her 10mm submachine gun, and waited for the chupacabra to show up. Midnight eventually came.
There is a sound effect in this game that I cannot properly spell, a kind of ripping zap-crackle. I mention it because this is the point at which Janice heard it for the first time and she will remember it for EVER AND EVER AND EVER. And this is because the noise was the sound of a Stealth Boy switching off, and it heralded something HUGE and BLUE and KINDA HUMAN SHAPED and SNARLING and ANGRY and IT HAS A MINIGUN OH GOD IT HAS MORE GUN THA I HAVE EVER SEEN and it is HUGE and BLUE and WHY IS IT NOT DYING WHEN I SHOOT IT IN THE FACE.
Thaaat'd be Janice's introduction to the Nightkin. Remember how in Fallout 3 you had supermutants and they were big and green and stupid? Well, that's East Coast supermutants. Their strain of FEV eats the brain real fast. West Coast supermutants're a little different, and one variety is the Nightkin. They're commandoes. They use big guns or big blunt instruments or big swords, and they use Stealth Boys, and apparently this one had a burning and undying hatred for cattle. And for being shot in the face, but I can't really blame it for that. I mean, Janice didn't like it much when it happened to her. It's just that the mutant kinda took LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of bullets directly to the face and that just pissed it off, so Janice ran screaming.
I should mention that in addition to commando training and the whole invisible-at-will thing, Nightkin are really fast.
Anyway, Janice's Guns score was kind of in the pits, which is probably why firing into the mutant's face had about as much effect as running around in front of the A-Team. She got the bright idea of using explosives instead. Apparently the good people of Novac are spiritual descendants of New Yorkers, because not a man jack of 'em so much as peeked out the window, let alone stepped out their door to see why the newcomer to town was running around screaming like a girl and frantically hucking dynamite at the nine foot tall blue monster that was trying to pulp her with its fists even though it had a perfectly nice minigun. I don't remember how many sticks of dynamite Janice had to use before that thing finally went down, just that her inventory was a whoooooole lot lighter by the time she was done. When she checked the corpse to make sure it was dead she found a sheaf of rambling notes about how the voices of the brahmin were driving the Nightkin insane, which, never really a good sign. When she went into Dusty's house he thanked her profusely, gave her some money, and told her to take as many Brahmin steaks as she wanted from the freezer. Given that this game is in Hardcore mode, an offer of lots of food is actually a really sweet recompense, so Janice thanked him appropriately before wandering outside to hyperventilate.
Come on, the girl's a courier. Couriers are supposed to take things from place to place and that's that. Fighting giant blue moderately invisible clinically insane chupacabras with high caliber automatic weapons is not on their agenda. Maybe hitting dogs with sticks to make them go away or something. But not giant blue moderately invisible clinically insane chupacabras.
That was about the point when she wanted to go and have a nice lie-down. The motel sounded like a good place for it, but the lady who ran the place wasn't in the office, so she headed over to the dinosaur to look for the guy who ran the shop and ask him where to find her. Shop guy wasn't there either, so she went to see if Manny had any idea, only it wasn't Manny's shift. It was the shift of a cranky, short-spoken sniper named Boone instead. And after a little bit of talking, Boone asked her to do him a favor, because he only trusted people from out of town...
Now, if Janice had any sense at all she'd have said "tempting, but no" and gotten herself the hell out of there before anything else happened that might get her shot at. The only reason I can offer for her agreeing to stick around for whatever the scary man with the sniper rifle wanted was that she'd just spent ten minutes trying to kill a monster twice her size because it thought the cows were laughing at it, and an experience like that is not going to do your judgment any favors. Turned out Sniper Man's wife disappeared a while back. No, he didn't want Janice to find her for him. He knew she was dead. All he wanted was the person who did it, so he gave Janice a beret- he'd been in the NCR's First Recon unit before leaving the military- and told her to bring the guilty party in front of the dinosaur when he was on duty and wear the hat so he'd know to shoot the person with her.
At that point Janice's judgment was just fine, and it amounted to: snipers are specially trained in shooting people in the head from a very long way away. Perhaps I should not make this one upset if I want to avoid being shot in the head again.
So she agreed to help Sniper Man and went to see if anyone in town was awake that she could ask about his wife, and wondered exactly where the hell her life had gone completely wrong.
When last we saw her Janice had taken a nice little nap in the Wolfhorn Ranch farmhouse because let's face it, if you're in the middle of the Wasteland and you don't lock your door and you don't do whatever magic thing it is causes the player to be able to see that Touching That Gives You Bad Karma, sooner or later someone is going to sleep in your bed and eat all your food. Or walk off with all your food if they're not hungry just now. The point is that nobody was in the Ranch building and nothing appeared to have an owner, so Janice took the more valuable stuff (clean water and a couple of types of booze you need for recipes) from the fridge, harvested some good stuff off the plants growing out front, and got the hell out of town.
(A moment, here, to note that for some reason 'owned' objects have their status messages in red, and taking any of them constitutes stealing. You also cannot sleep in an owned bed. This persists even if you kill the owner. This has led me to believe that 'owned' objects are in fact infected with small itchy insects of some kind and you don't actually get bad karma for stealing them, you just get a whole lot of tiny new friends. It would explain why somebody who had cheerfully stolen all the food and shot everyone around through the head would refuse to sleep in the deceased's bed: it's not bad karma, they just don't want a new strain of lice.)
Wolfhorn Ranch is right near a bunch of ruined roads, so Janice had plenty of options open to her. She wound up heading north. Well, sort of north. Despite everything she'd been through already she figured hey, why not wander off the roads a bit here and there and see what else there is to see? It didn't seem like cazador territory, so how bad could it be?
I wish that I could say she was immediately punished by the cruel and capricious random number gods spontaneously spawning a Deathclaw invasion or something, but to be honest I wasn't taking notes at the time and this part of the game just doesn't stand out in my memory. I know some bad things happened to Janice in this part of the desert, but that's all I remember, so they can't have been very outstanding bad things. And frankly, the only reason I remember the bad things happening is because I remember Janice dragging herself towards a gas station sign in the distance and deciding she must've been going crazy because there appeared to be a big ol' dinosaur or something just past it.
Turns out she wasn't going crazy or hallucinating from bloodloss. Janice had found the town of Novac, which follows in the grand old tradition of Arefu and any number of other post-apocalyptic towns that name themselves after mutilated road signs. Novac is named that because those are the only letters on the motel sign that work- NO VAC. The town consists of the Dino Dee-Lite Motel, several farmhouses, a shack to the north, a scrapyard beyond the shack, a couple of Brahmin pens, that gas station, and the big damn concrete dinosaur, Dinky. I'd make fun of Dinky but I live in New Jersey and we've kind of got people advertising that tourists should "COME AND CLIMB THE WORLD'S LARGEST ELEPHANT", so I'm not in any kind of position to talk. (Her name's Lucy. She's in Margate. Look it up.)
At any rate, Janice sort of limped into town and threw herself at a woman in a bloodstained white shirt and cargo pants. Fortunately this turned out to be the town doctor, who patched her up. Janice then started looking around for anybody to question about the place in the hopes that she could settle in for a while and not get shot or exploded or bitten or any of those things. There was a rather nice rancher fellow whose major problem in life was that his brahmin herd kept dying, one animal at a time late at night. There was a nice old lady who ran the motel and said she had an available room. There was a guy who ran a store in the dinosaur's belly, he was interesting. There was the sniper who watched the town borders from the dinosaur mouth, that was Manny- Janice didn't talk to him much. There were a bunch of caravaners but they were mostly just stopping off for a rest rather than selling anything.
And then there was Noonan.
Oh, Noonan. No-bark Noonan. Mr. Noonan, you have no idea how much I love you. You just... you make my day, you know that? I thought No-Bark Noonan was going to be a source of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but he's BETTER than that. He's a source of Authentic Frontier CRAZY. Serious crazy. As in, when I asked him about Dusty's cattle going missing, he told me there was one animal that dropped dead every night, and it was clearly the work of the chupacabra, the livestock vampire. Only people said there were too many holes to be a chupacabra's fangs, and the holes had bullets in them. Which, says Noonan, means that clearly they are dealing with a chupacabra with an automatic weapon.
I'm just going to sit back and smile at that sentence for a while. There are few times in this life when you'll get to see a golden specimen like that.
Janice offered to check it out, because hey, she figured she could ingratiate herself to the locals and maybe find a safe place to stay here, away from the Goodsprings area and the robot that knew her and the giant scorpions and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man and the Vipers and the giant mantises. Chupacabras sounded like a step up, not being real or anything. Not that she mentioned that part to Noonan, because then he might stop telling her his authentic frontier CRAZY and she kind of liked it. So she set up camp outside the Brahmin pen, did her best to repair her 10mm submachine gun, and waited for the chupacabra to show up. Midnight eventually came.
There is a sound effect in this game that I cannot properly spell, a kind of ripping zap-crackle. I mention it because this is the point at which Janice heard it for the first time and she will remember it for EVER AND EVER AND EVER. And this is because the noise was the sound of a Stealth Boy switching off, and it heralded something HUGE and BLUE and KINDA HUMAN SHAPED and SNARLING and ANGRY and IT HAS A MINIGUN OH GOD IT HAS MORE GUN THA I HAVE EVER SEEN and it is HUGE and BLUE and WHY IS IT NOT DYING WHEN I SHOOT IT IN THE FACE.
Thaaat'd be Janice's introduction to the Nightkin. Remember how in Fallout 3 you had supermutants and they were big and green and stupid? Well, that's East Coast supermutants. Their strain of FEV eats the brain real fast. West Coast supermutants're a little different, and one variety is the Nightkin. They're commandoes. They use big guns or big blunt instruments or big swords, and they use Stealth Boys, and apparently this one had a burning and undying hatred for cattle. And for being shot in the face, but I can't really blame it for that. I mean, Janice didn't like it much when it happened to her. It's just that the mutant kinda took LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of bullets directly to the face and that just pissed it off, so Janice ran screaming.
I should mention that in addition to commando training and the whole invisible-at-will thing, Nightkin are really fast.
Anyway, Janice's Guns score was kind of in the pits, which is probably why firing into the mutant's face had about as much effect as running around in front of the A-Team. She got the bright idea of using explosives instead. Apparently the good people of Novac are spiritual descendants of New Yorkers, because not a man jack of 'em so much as peeked out the window, let alone stepped out their door to see why the newcomer to town was running around screaming like a girl and frantically hucking dynamite at the nine foot tall blue monster that was trying to pulp her with its fists even though it had a perfectly nice minigun. I don't remember how many sticks of dynamite Janice had to use before that thing finally went down, just that her inventory was a whoooooole lot lighter by the time she was done. When she checked the corpse to make sure it was dead she found a sheaf of rambling notes about how the voices of the brahmin were driving the Nightkin insane, which, never really a good sign. When she went into Dusty's house he thanked her profusely, gave her some money, and told her to take as many Brahmin steaks as she wanted from the freezer. Given that this game is in Hardcore mode, an offer of lots of food is actually a really sweet recompense, so Janice thanked him appropriately before wandering outside to hyperventilate.
Come on, the girl's a courier. Couriers are supposed to take things from place to place and that's that. Fighting giant blue moderately invisible clinically insane chupacabras with high caliber automatic weapons is not on their agenda. Maybe hitting dogs with sticks to make them go away or something. But not giant blue moderately invisible clinically insane chupacabras.
That was about the point when she wanted to go and have a nice lie-down. The motel sounded like a good place for it, but the lady who ran the place wasn't in the office, so she headed over to the dinosaur to look for the guy who ran the shop and ask him where to find her. Shop guy wasn't there either, so she went to see if Manny had any idea, only it wasn't Manny's shift. It was the shift of a cranky, short-spoken sniper named Boone instead. And after a little bit of talking, Boone asked her to do him a favor, because he only trusted people from out of town...
Now, if Janice had any sense at all she'd have said "tempting, but no" and gotten herself the hell out of there before anything else happened that might get her shot at. The only reason I can offer for her agreeing to stick around for whatever the scary man with the sniper rifle wanted was that she'd just spent ten minutes trying to kill a monster twice her size because it thought the cows were laughing at it, and an experience like that is not going to do your judgment any favors. Turned out Sniper Man's wife disappeared a while back. No, he didn't want Janice to find her for him. He knew she was dead. All he wanted was the person who did it, so he gave Janice a beret- he'd been in the NCR's First Recon unit before leaving the military- and told her to bring the guilty party in front of the dinosaur when he was on duty and wear the hat so he'd know to shoot the person with her.
At that point Janice's judgment was just fine, and it amounted to: snipers are specially trained in shooting people in the head from a very long way away. Perhaps I should not make this one upset if I want to avoid being shot in the head again.
So she agreed to help Sniper Man and went to see if anyone in town was awake that she could ask about his wife, and wondered exactly where the hell her life had gone completely wrong.
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I can't wait to see what meeting Lily does to your courier. Or how she handles hearing Black Mountain Radio for the first time.
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I submit that it's impossible to not like No-Bark. His crazy is like a soothing balm. And if you go into his shack and take a look around you'll instantly say to yourself 'Yes, this is where someone called No-Bark would live.'
Funny thing about that Nightkin is that he seems to hang out nearby all the time. You can pretty much go up by that rock not ten feet away from the pen and there's that shimmering effect muttering away to itself all day.
No wonder the mooing drove him insane.
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Speaking of which, I've reached Nipton in my second run and I think I'm going to just leave the Legion guy and his guys standing in front of the town hall while I just move on. I've heard he says something different if you meet him there after reaching a certain point in the Main Quest.
And then I'm going to turn him into a puddle of glowing goo, but that goes without saying.