Notes From New Vegas 8
Nov. 10th, 2010 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 8: Come Fly With Me
Now, last time I wrote one of these I promised you a less depressing new installment, and I intend to make good on that promise. Our story for the evening begins with Janice in Novac and nobody apparently all that bothered by the sudden head-splodey death of the Dino Dee-Lite proprietor during the night. The words 'too good to be true' were kinda ringing in her ears the whole night she tried to sack out in her room in the motel. At least, I assume they were, because in the morning she got up and went to the local scrapyard and asked the proprietor- Old Lady Gibson, who was repairing her guns and her armor- if there was anything she could do to make things nicer around town. You know, ingratiate herself to the townsfolk before Jeannie May I Sold Your Wife And Unborn Child Into Slavery And Smiled At You The Whole Time Crawford turned out to have vengeful relatives. Old Lady Gibson mentioned that she used to do tech scavenging over at the REPCONN rocket testing facility to the west, but lately there'd been ghouls all over the place, causing trouble. Janice figured hey, all the ghouls she'd met so far had basically been zombies of the 'grr argh' persuasion rather than the head-shootey kind of people she was worried about. A decent set of light metal armor, as much ten millimeter ammo as she could afford, some stimpaks for good measure, and she was off to investigate what the deal was with the ghouls.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Fallout mythos and who didn't ask the question back when Janice was wandering along the edges of the mountains, a ghoul in the Fallout universe is a human who's been exposed to an ungodly amount of radiation and hasn't had the good fortune to die. They basically become biologically immortal cases of massive cutaneous radiation syndrome- they don't age, but their rad poisoning doesn't get any better. They tend to look like they're made from raw-to-rotting meat and, well, parts often come off. Many of them go insane and wind up your basic mindless 'grr argh' fast zombie, but they just want to kill anything that moves and have no particular interest in any particular part of the body. Some of them wind up being so irradiated that they glow in the dark and can give off massive pulses of radiation that sicken normal people and boost other ghouls' physical condition. Those are called Glowing Ones. There are ghouls who don't go insane, and they often form their own societies because regular humans- 'smoothskins', as they call them- tend to be unpleasant towards, well, people who look like they're made of rotting meat and who might in theory turn 'grr argh' at any giiven moment. It's not a fun life, being a ghoul.
Anyway, Janice's first clue that things were in a bad way up at REPCONN came about halfway between Novac and the facility, when she stumbled across a dead Glowing One on the road. Kind of hard to not suddenly go all cautious after running across a corpse like that, which is why she wound up creeping to the side of the road and investigating along the shoulder rather than staying in the middle. I only bring up her positioning because it meant that while she got to skip a couple of ordinary feral ghoul corpses, she also stumbled over another corpse entirely, and it did not make her happy at all: a dead Big Blue Thing. Yep. Looked like REPCONN not only had ghouls, it had chupacabras.
Yes, I know. Not the right name at all. But Janice is not particularly conversant with supermutants. The Master's army was long gone by the time she came along. If she'd ever seen a supermutant before her encounter with Evil Chandler Bing, it was probably at a very great distance and over with extremely quickly. Nightkin are not what you'd call common among mutants, at least not so far as I know. Expecting her to recognize a dead Nightkin when the defining trait of the Nightkin is to not be seen most of the time is like asking a sixty-year-old with no grandchildren whether a Hounddoom is a fire-type or a grass-type Pokemon. Not gonna happen.
Anyway, she kept creeping on towards the building, which had a jauntily angled fake rocket out front, and a welcoming committee of a good ten or so feral ghouls who all pretty much wanted to claw her face off. Or pulse her with radiation and then claw her face off. They're warm and welcoming like that. Fortunately feral ghouls have all the tactical sense you'd expect from somebody whose brain would have to be buried in a lead-lined container if they ever got a real funeral, so scampering around the premises hiding behind rocks and concrete barricades was all she really needed to survive a ten-on-one battle. (Well, that and a boatload of ammo. Them buggers is tougher than they look.) Once the ghouls were dead she checked 'em all for useful stuff, but did not pants them. I really don't think there's any power on Earth that could get her to wear pants that had formerly been on a ghoul. Why the mindless homicidal rotting zombies were carrying money or first aid meds she didn't know, but hey, not like they were gonna use it any more.
Pretty much as soon as she got into the building someone started yelling at her over the intercom. Ghouls in New Vegas and in Fallout 3 all have very distinctive voices. Non-fatal horrendous overdoses of radiation apparently leave you sounding like your voice is being pushed out through a Brillo pad or something.Whoever was on the intercom had that kind of a voice and demanded she come up to thus-and-such a room toot sweet. Frankly, she was kind of tempted to walk out just to spite him, but then again she'd just spent a lot of bullets to get into the place and find out why the ghouls were causing trouble to begin with, so... yeah, might as well put up with the jerk if it meant getting answers. So off she went through the building, merrily fending off periodic "GRAAAAAAAAAH!" moments from the rotting hamburger people.
The first real hint she had of what was going on came when she tripped over a dead ghoul in robes. Not long flowy clothing or anything, robes. Now, the game told me that she was looking at a Bright Follower corpse, but to be honest I don't know how Janice was supposed to know this was of any kind of significance. Unless the robes all came with little nametags saying Hello My Name Is Judy Marengo And I Am A Bright Follower, or something. She just sort of went 'huh, freaky' and kept on going. The ghoul was dead, after all. Not like she had bullets to waste on making it more dead. The second hint came when she got to the labs and opened the door to find a bald guy who was about as much a ghoul as she was Richard Nixon. Granted, he had the ghouly voice and he called her 'smoothskin' and said she was hideously ugly and yadda yadda, but other than the voice and the vocabulary he had jack doodly going for him. He did, however, tell her to head upstairs and talk to Jason, who'd explain everything that was going on.
Cue room full o' computers- working computers- and ghouls in robes.And cue the greeting from ...
Okay, pop quiz. You've just been slugging your way through a building full of homicidal rotting hamburger people whose entire vocabulary appears to consist of "GRAAAA!" and "HWOOAR!". More than a few of them have glowed brightly enough to read by, if you happen to be stupid enough to try to read by the light of a glowing rotting hamburger person who is actively trying to kill you. And you have just been greeted by a glowing rotting hamburger person in what appears to be the remains of a rather nice three piece suit, who addresses you in a pleasant, calm, nicely resonating voice to apologize for your troubles in getting there and express devout wishes to the Creator that you can help his people. He asks you if you are there to assist him and his followers in beginning the Great Journey. What do you do?
A) Make spluttering noises and shriek a bit;
B) Swallow, hard, and tell him you want to know what this Great Journey is first;
C) Tell him "Yes, of course! Praise the Creator!" and then ask what the Great Journey is, or
D) Throw down the controller and make real-life spluttering noises and shriek a bit, because you are a Halo fan and NO GREAT JOURNEYS FOR ANYONE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
(For those of you who don't play Halo, the Great Journey would have ended with all sentient life within three galactic radii wiped out of existence. Please play the games if you want more info than that.)
Anyway, once I picked up the controller and got back into the game, the conversation didn't get any easier. Jason Bright- yes, the Glowing One was in fact named Jason Bright, I'm assuming his mother was J. K. "Subtlety in naming is for OTHER PEOPLE" Rowling- was apparently the religious leader of these rather nice people. He did not explain the ferals and Janice didn't bother asking him to, since that would necessitate explaining the part where nearly all of them were dead, and she figured they might take that the wrong way. Jason's people were searching for the homeland promised them by the Creator, a place far away from the Mojave Wasteland's prejudice and hatred towards ghouls, somewhere they could live safely among their own kind. Only problem was, they recently developed a case of demons in the basement.
No, seriously, that's what he said: they got driven out of the basement by invisible demons. There was some slaughtering and then some yelling and one of the demons used the intercom to inform Jason and company that they were to stay out of the basement thank you very much, and so now all the ghouls were stuck up in these rooms and unable to start the Journey because the rocket facility was partly underground and they were going to get in the two hundred year old rockets and fly to their homeland and please please please could Janice make the demons go away? Please?
Let's see, now. Room full of religious rotting hamburger people who all want to just be anywhere else but here. Glowing guy who might be civilized but is still capable of, y'know, massively fatal pulses of atomic radiation. And a request to go look for demons in the basement. Without a combat flamethrower, a suit of T-51b power armor, and a whole lot of anti-radiation medicine, how could a girl say no? Janice agreed to do what the nice weirdoes asked and headed for the basement. She had a feeling that just turning and running for the front door wouldn't work well. If nothing else, sooner or later they'd cause trouble for Novac again and then it would all come back to her, so she might as well head down to the basement and get it over with now.
It's probably a good thing that she dealt with the chupacabra back in Novac, because otherwise she wouldn't have had the sense to turn on her Stealth Boy before going into the basement. The place was CRAWLING with chupacabras, who all seemed to be looking for something. She kind of wanted to turn and leave immediately, because all evidence to the contrary she did have a survival instinct, but that would just leave her with the ghouls to deal with. And anyway, the chupacabras hadn't noticed her yet. Maybe if she poked around enough she'd find a PA system she could use to appeal to their crazy- remember, she'd only ever met one before in her life and it was convinced the cows were plotting its demise. She kind of figured crazy went with the big blue package, so why not turn it on full force?
Thing is, she hadn't really met serious chupacabra crazy yet. THAT was waiting for her in a room she stumbled into, where she encountered an extra big blue dude who called himself Davison and said he was the Nightkin leader here. And that they had come here under Antler's orders, Antler apparently being a thoroughly empty, thoroughly dead Brahmin skull. Davison had found some kind of document saying that there were several hundred Stealth Boys delivered to this building, so they were there to find them and take them no matter what the squishy ghouls thought. Because you don't say no to Antler. Davison was pretty sure they were in a nearby room but there was one ghoul in there who was less squishy than the others and who kept killing Davison's kin, so maybe Janice could get in there and find the Stealth Boys if she wanted to get out and not die.
Yeeeeeah, that was kind of a critical mass of crazy building up in the building, Janice was pretty sure.
Anyway, saying no to the ghouls might've been dangerous, but Davison had a huge-ass sword about as long as he was tall, which while not really as dangerous as the possibility of a radiation pulse was probably a more immediate and real threat. Janice agreed to go look for the Stealth Boys and took the key Davison gave her and got the hell out of the room full o'loopy. She was half expecting to open the next room and find some kind of carnival display, since it would be kind of hard to top the crazy she'd already encountered any other way. Turned out it was just an extra large room with one very cranky ghoul in it, who'd been busy laying traps and setting himself up in a sniper perch. His name was Harland and he thought everyone else in the building was off their rocker, but he signed up with the group to meet "some fine looking ghoulettes", and if Janice wanted to look at the terminal with the shipping info in it she was gonna have to fill him in on what happened to his girlfriend....
Right about then Janice started wanting to bang her head on the wall. It would've been easier to just freakin' stay in Novac and take her chances with the locals. But, you know, in for a calf, in for a Brahmin, so she said okay and went off under cover of Stealth Boy to look for where the mutants might be keeping any ghoul prisoners. Long story short: pick-pocketing a Nightkin is not fun at all, and Janice learned to run very fast that day. Unfortunately Harland's girlfriend was already dead when she got there, but then she had to run some more because the jailer was after her and shooting him would've just pissed all the other Nightkin off. Fortunately he apparently had an exceptionally short attention span because she was able to get away from him rather than being pursued. Harland got his news, Harland made his sadface, Harland left the room, and Janice nearly got her leg mangled several times because Harland had left all his bear traps in the open and ready position. Bastard.
Well, it turned out that the shipping computer did have a record of several hundred Stealth Boys. They'd been shipped to the building by mistake. They'd also been sent back. About that point Janice started wondering whether she could get away with offering Davison a box of several hundred rocks or bricks or something and telling him they were stealth boys, then running, but she decided against it. One printout later she was back in the same room as him and Antler, doing her best to convince him that the Stealth Boys were gone and the human was not lying and he didn't need to cut off her head as a warning to the others. Davison eventually accepted that Antler believed her (although he told Antler that Antler was too trusting), and gathered up the other Nightkin and left.
When you've had to have a frontier surgeon with the voice of Saul Tigh (I looked it up) pull bullets out of your brainmeats less than a week ago and yet you are still somehow the sanest person in the building, you start wondering just whose god you offended. Also you start wondering where the whiskey is. Janice didn't have any, so she just poked halfheartedly around the room for a while and finally went back to tell Jason that the rest of the crazy people were free to leave. He thanked her effusively and asked her to come down to the basement with them so she could see them off on their journey, and wouldn't take no for an answer.
DAMMIT.
Turned out the reason they needed her was because the rockets were still not quite ready to go. They needed some radioactive fuel and some thrust control modules and Chris, the human with the ghoul voice, was needed on the premises for last minute fixing. Would Janice please be so kind as to leave the premises and go a very long way away to find something very dangerous that she might not come back from?
AHAHAHAHAHA FREEDOM SWEET FREEDOM yes sure okay she'd LOVE to help out the Great Journey like that....
Only, y'know, as she headed towards Novac- Chris had suggested checking the scrapyard for thrust control modules since the old lady who ran the place used to take stuff from REPCONN all the time- she started feeling a little sorry for the crazy rotting hamburger people. They all seemed so terribly earnest and were trying so very hard to just... not give anyone a hard time any more. And they'd all been polite, too. And nothing had tried to kill her on the way back so far- that part was important. By the time she got to Old Lady Gibson's scrapyard she'd decided what the hell, she'd help the Bright Followers get their rocket ride out of town. Not like she'd had to bleed for them, after all. Just run around trying not to scream.
The modules were easy enough to find. The ignition agent for the rockets required some nasty radioactive isotopes. Those turned out to be available in a bunch of souvenirs the REPCONN facility had distributed for sale in Novac and the surrounding area, because when you are a big Fallout corporation in a universe where the FDA allows strontium-laced soda onto the market, of COURSE you are going to hand out rocket-shaped souvenirs with radioactive isotopes in them. Janice bought a whole bunch of them from the guy in the Dinky the Dinosaur gift shop for maybe five caps total and took 'em back to REPCONN, where Chris made appropriately grateful noises and set to work using them.
(The opportunity did arise to try and convince Chris he wasn't a ghoul. Janice didn't bother. Chris seemed to be happy in his work and frankly, Janice didn't care enough to try.)
Jason made a deeply heartfelt speech over the PA thanking the Creator for sending two invaluable human friends and allies to help them on the Great Journey and show them all that humans could put aside prejudice and be selfless and helpful. The ghouls all got into skin-tight red and gold spacesuits with big bubble helmets just like on Captain Cosmos. Janice got a spacesuit of her own in case she ever needed it, even though she wasn't going on the Great Journey, and then got asked to go up to the launch control room so she could watch it all. Since you don't get to see a rocket launch every day she figured why not, and headed up there. The building's PA system started playing Ride of the Valkyries, the big dome over the rocket staging area slid open, and WHOOOM! Three rockets full of happy ghouls took off for God knows where.
And nobody, except for a couple of homicidal zombies, had had to die. It was a good day.
Now, last time I wrote one of these I promised you a less depressing new installment, and I intend to make good on that promise. Our story for the evening begins with Janice in Novac and nobody apparently all that bothered by the sudden head-splodey death of the Dino Dee-Lite proprietor during the night. The words 'too good to be true' were kinda ringing in her ears the whole night she tried to sack out in her room in the motel. At least, I assume they were, because in the morning she got up and went to the local scrapyard and asked the proprietor- Old Lady Gibson, who was repairing her guns and her armor- if there was anything she could do to make things nicer around town. You know, ingratiate herself to the townsfolk before Jeannie May I Sold Your Wife And Unborn Child Into Slavery And Smiled At You The Whole Time Crawford turned out to have vengeful relatives. Old Lady Gibson mentioned that she used to do tech scavenging over at the REPCONN rocket testing facility to the west, but lately there'd been ghouls all over the place, causing trouble. Janice figured hey, all the ghouls she'd met so far had basically been zombies of the 'grr argh' persuasion rather than the head-shootey kind of people she was worried about. A decent set of light metal armor, as much ten millimeter ammo as she could afford, some stimpaks for good measure, and she was off to investigate what the deal was with the ghouls.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Fallout mythos and who didn't ask the question back when Janice was wandering along the edges of the mountains, a ghoul in the Fallout universe is a human who's been exposed to an ungodly amount of radiation and hasn't had the good fortune to die. They basically become biologically immortal cases of massive cutaneous radiation syndrome- they don't age, but their rad poisoning doesn't get any better. They tend to look like they're made from raw-to-rotting meat and, well, parts often come off. Many of them go insane and wind up your basic mindless 'grr argh' fast zombie, but they just want to kill anything that moves and have no particular interest in any particular part of the body. Some of them wind up being so irradiated that they glow in the dark and can give off massive pulses of radiation that sicken normal people and boost other ghouls' physical condition. Those are called Glowing Ones. There are ghouls who don't go insane, and they often form their own societies because regular humans- 'smoothskins', as they call them- tend to be unpleasant towards, well, people who look like they're made of rotting meat and who might in theory turn 'grr argh' at any giiven moment. It's not a fun life, being a ghoul.
Anyway, Janice's first clue that things were in a bad way up at REPCONN came about halfway between Novac and the facility, when she stumbled across a dead Glowing One on the road. Kind of hard to not suddenly go all cautious after running across a corpse like that, which is why she wound up creeping to the side of the road and investigating along the shoulder rather than staying in the middle. I only bring up her positioning because it meant that while she got to skip a couple of ordinary feral ghoul corpses, she also stumbled over another corpse entirely, and it did not make her happy at all: a dead Big Blue Thing. Yep. Looked like REPCONN not only had ghouls, it had chupacabras.
Yes, I know. Not the right name at all. But Janice is not particularly conversant with supermutants. The Master's army was long gone by the time she came along. If she'd ever seen a supermutant before her encounter with Evil Chandler Bing, it was probably at a very great distance and over with extremely quickly. Nightkin are not what you'd call common among mutants, at least not so far as I know. Expecting her to recognize a dead Nightkin when the defining trait of the Nightkin is to not be seen most of the time is like asking a sixty-year-old with no grandchildren whether a Hounddoom is a fire-type or a grass-type Pokemon. Not gonna happen.
Anyway, she kept creeping on towards the building, which had a jauntily angled fake rocket out front, and a welcoming committee of a good ten or so feral ghouls who all pretty much wanted to claw her face off. Or pulse her with radiation and then claw her face off. They're warm and welcoming like that. Fortunately feral ghouls have all the tactical sense you'd expect from somebody whose brain would have to be buried in a lead-lined container if they ever got a real funeral, so scampering around the premises hiding behind rocks and concrete barricades was all she really needed to survive a ten-on-one battle. (Well, that and a boatload of ammo. Them buggers is tougher than they look.) Once the ghouls were dead she checked 'em all for useful stuff, but did not pants them. I really don't think there's any power on Earth that could get her to wear pants that had formerly been on a ghoul. Why the mindless homicidal rotting zombies were carrying money or first aid meds she didn't know, but hey, not like they were gonna use it any more.
Pretty much as soon as she got into the building someone started yelling at her over the intercom. Ghouls in New Vegas and in Fallout 3 all have very distinctive voices. Non-fatal horrendous overdoses of radiation apparently leave you sounding like your voice is being pushed out through a Brillo pad or something.Whoever was on the intercom had that kind of a voice and demanded she come up to thus-and-such a room toot sweet. Frankly, she was kind of tempted to walk out just to spite him, but then again she'd just spent a lot of bullets to get into the place and find out why the ghouls were causing trouble to begin with, so... yeah, might as well put up with the jerk if it meant getting answers. So off she went through the building, merrily fending off periodic "GRAAAAAAAAAH!" moments from the rotting hamburger people.
The first real hint she had of what was going on came when she tripped over a dead ghoul in robes. Not long flowy clothing or anything, robes. Now, the game told me that she was looking at a Bright Follower corpse, but to be honest I don't know how Janice was supposed to know this was of any kind of significance. Unless the robes all came with little nametags saying Hello My Name Is Judy Marengo And I Am A Bright Follower, or something. She just sort of went 'huh, freaky' and kept on going. The ghoul was dead, after all. Not like she had bullets to waste on making it more dead. The second hint came when she got to the labs and opened the door to find a bald guy who was about as much a ghoul as she was Richard Nixon. Granted, he had the ghouly voice and he called her 'smoothskin' and said she was hideously ugly and yadda yadda, but other than the voice and the vocabulary he had jack doodly going for him. He did, however, tell her to head upstairs and talk to Jason, who'd explain everything that was going on.
Cue room full o' computers- working computers- and ghouls in robes.And cue the greeting from ...
Okay, pop quiz. You've just been slugging your way through a building full of homicidal rotting hamburger people whose entire vocabulary appears to consist of "GRAAAA!" and "HWOOAR!". More than a few of them have glowed brightly enough to read by, if you happen to be stupid enough to try to read by the light of a glowing rotting hamburger person who is actively trying to kill you. And you have just been greeted by a glowing rotting hamburger person in what appears to be the remains of a rather nice three piece suit, who addresses you in a pleasant, calm, nicely resonating voice to apologize for your troubles in getting there and express devout wishes to the Creator that you can help his people. He asks you if you are there to assist him and his followers in beginning the Great Journey. What do you do?
A) Make spluttering noises and shriek a bit;
B) Swallow, hard, and tell him you want to know what this Great Journey is first;
C) Tell him "Yes, of course! Praise the Creator!" and then ask what the Great Journey is, or
D) Throw down the controller and make real-life spluttering noises and shriek a bit, because you are a Halo fan and NO GREAT JOURNEYS FOR ANYONE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
(For those of you who don't play Halo, the Great Journey would have ended with all sentient life within three galactic radii wiped out of existence. Please play the games if you want more info than that.)
Anyway, once I picked up the controller and got back into the game, the conversation didn't get any easier. Jason Bright- yes, the Glowing One was in fact named Jason Bright, I'm assuming his mother was J. K. "Subtlety in naming is for OTHER PEOPLE" Rowling- was apparently the religious leader of these rather nice people. He did not explain the ferals and Janice didn't bother asking him to, since that would necessitate explaining the part where nearly all of them were dead, and she figured they might take that the wrong way. Jason's people were searching for the homeland promised them by the Creator, a place far away from the Mojave Wasteland's prejudice and hatred towards ghouls, somewhere they could live safely among their own kind. Only problem was, they recently developed a case of demons in the basement.
No, seriously, that's what he said: they got driven out of the basement by invisible demons. There was some slaughtering and then some yelling and one of the demons used the intercom to inform Jason and company that they were to stay out of the basement thank you very much, and so now all the ghouls were stuck up in these rooms and unable to start the Journey because the rocket facility was partly underground and they were going to get in the two hundred year old rockets and fly to their homeland and please please please could Janice make the demons go away? Please?
Let's see, now. Room full of religious rotting hamburger people who all want to just be anywhere else but here. Glowing guy who might be civilized but is still capable of, y'know, massively fatal pulses of atomic radiation. And a request to go look for demons in the basement. Without a combat flamethrower, a suit of T-51b power armor, and a whole lot of anti-radiation medicine, how could a girl say no? Janice agreed to do what the nice weirdoes asked and headed for the basement. She had a feeling that just turning and running for the front door wouldn't work well. If nothing else, sooner or later they'd cause trouble for Novac again and then it would all come back to her, so she might as well head down to the basement and get it over with now.
It's probably a good thing that she dealt with the chupacabra back in Novac, because otherwise she wouldn't have had the sense to turn on her Stealth Boy before going into the basement. The place was CRAWLING with chupacabras, who all seemed to be looking for something. She kind of wanted to turn and leave immediately, because all evidence to the contrary she did have a survival instinct, but that would just leave her with the ghouls to deal with. And anyway, the chupacabras hadn't noticed her yet. Maybe if she poked around enough she'd find a PA system she could use to appeal to their crazy- remember, she'd only ever met one before in her life and it was convinced the cows were plotting its demise. She kind of figured crazy went with the big blue package, so why not turn it on full force?
Thing is, she hadn't really met serious chupacabra crazy yet. THAT was waiting for her in a room she stumbled into, where she encountered an extra big blue dude who called himself Davison and said he was the Nightkin leader here. And that they had come here under Antler's orders, Antler apparently being a thoroughly empty, thoroughly dead Brahmin skull. Davison had found some kind of document saying that there were several hundred Stealth Boys delivered to this building, so they were there to find them and take them no matter what the squishy ghouls thought. Because you don't say no to Antler. Davison was pretty sure they were in a nearby room but there was one ghoul in there who was less squishy than the others and who kept killing Davison's kin, so maybe Janice could get in there and find the Stealth Boys if she wanted to get out and not die.
Yeeeeeah, that was kind of a critical mass of crazy building up in the building, Janice was pretty sure.
Anyway, saying no to the ghouls might've been dangerous, but Davison had a huge-ass sword about as long as he was tall, which while not really as dangerous as the possibility of a radiation pulse was probably a more immediate and real threat. Janice agreed to go look for the Stealth Boys and took the key Davison gave her and got the hell out of the room full o'loopy. She was half expecting to open the next room and find some kind of carnival display, since it would be kind of hard to top the crazy she'd already encountered any other way. Turned out it was just an extra large room with one very cranky ghoul in it, who'd been busy laying traps and setting himself up in a sniper perch. His name was Harland and he thought everyone else in the building was off their rocker, but he signed up with the group to meet "some fine looking ghoulettes", and if Janice wanted to look at the terminal with the shipping info in it she was gonna have to fill him in on what happened to his girlfriend....
Right about then Janice started wanting to bang her head on the wall. It would've been easier to just freakin' stay in Novac and take her chances with the locals. But, you know, in for a calf, in for a Brahmin, so she said okay and went off under cover of Stealth Boy to look for where the mutants might be keeping any ghoul prisoners. Long story short: pick-pocketing a Nightkin is not fun at all, and Janice learned to run very fast that day. Unfortunately Harland's girlfriend was already dead when she got there, but then she had to run some more because the jailer was after her and shooting him would've just pissed all the other Nightkin off. Fortunately he apparently had an exceptionally short attention span because she was able to get away from him rather than being pursued. Harland got his news, Harland made his sadface, Harland left the room, and Janice nearly got her leg mangled several times because Harland had left all his bear traps in the open and ready position. Bastard.
Well, it turned out that the shipping computer did have a record of several hundred Stealth Boys. They'd been shipped to the building by mistake. They'd also been sent back. About that point Janice started wondering whether she could get away with offering Davison a box of several hundred rocks or bricks or something and telling him they were stealth boys, then running, but she decided against it. One printout later she was back in the same room as him and Antler, doing her best to convince him that the Stealth Boys were gone and the human was not lying and he didn't need to cut off her head as a warning to the others. Davison eventually accepted that Antler believed her (although he told Antler that Antler was too trusting), and gathered up the other Nightkin and left.
When you've had to have a frontier surgeon with the voice of Saul Tigh (I looked it up) pull bullets out of your brainmeats less than a week ago and yet you are still somehow the sanest person in the building, you start wondering just whose god you offended. Also you start wondering where the whiskey is. Janice didn't have any, so she just poked halfheartedly around the room for a while and finally went back to tell Jason that the rest of the crazy people were free to leave. He thanked her effusively and asked her to come down to the basement with them so she could see them off on their journey, and wouldn't take no for an answer.
DAMMIT.
Turned out the reason they needed her was because the rockets were still not quite ready to go. They needed some radioactive fuel and some thrust control modules and Chris, the human with the ghoul voice, was needed on the premises for last minute fixing. Would Janice please be so kind as to leave the premises and go a very long way away to find something very dangerous that she might not come back from?
AHAHAHAHAHA FREEDOM SWEET FREEDOM yes sure okay she'd LOVE to help out the Great Journey like that....
Only, y'know, as she headed towards Novac- Chris had suggested checking the scrapyard for thrust control modules since the old lady who ran the place used to take stuff from REPCONN all the time- she started feeling a little sorry for the crazy rotting hamburger people. They all seemed so terribly earnest and were trying so very hard to just... not give anyone a hard time any more. And they'd all been polite, too. And nothing had tried to kill her on the way back so far- that part was important. By the time she got to Old Lady Gibson's scrapyard she'd decided what the hell, she'd help the Bright Followers get their rocket ride out of town. Not like she'd had to bleed for them, after all. Just run around trying not to scream.
The modules were easy enough to find. The ignition agent for the rockets required some nasty radioactive isotopes. Those turned out to be available in a bunch of souvenirs the REPCONN facility had distributed for sale in Novac and the surrounding area, because when you are a big Fallout corporation in a universe where the FDA allows strontium-laced soda onto the market, of COURSE you are going to hand out rocket-shaped souvenirs with radioactive isotopes in them. Janice bought a whole bunch of them from the guy in the Dinky the Dinosaur gift shop for maybe five caps total and took 'em back to REPCONN, where Chris made appropriately grateful noises and set to work using them.
(The opportunity did arise to try and convince Chris he wasn't a ghoul. Janice didn't bother. Chris seemed to be happy in his work and frankly, Janice didn't care enough to try.)
Jason made a deeply heartfelt speech over the PA thanking the Creator for sending two invaluable human friends and allies to help them on the Great Journey and show them all that humans could put aside prejudice and be selfless and helpful. The ghouls all got into skin-tight red and gold spacesuits with big bubble helmets just like on Captain Cosmos. Janice got a spacesuit of her own in case she ever needed it, even though she wasn't going on the Great Journey, and then got asked to go up to the launch control room so she could watch it all. Since you don't get to see a rocket launch every day she figured why not, and headed up there. The building's PA system started playing Ride of the Valkyries, the big dome over the rocket staging area slid open, and WHOOOM! Three rockets full of happy ghouls took off for God knows where.
And nobody, except for a couple of homicidal zombies, had had to die. It was a good day.
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Date: 2010-11-12 12:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 01:18 am (UTC)