Notes From New Vegas 9
Nov. 13th, 2010 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 9: The Other New Vegas, Only... Not
When last we saw our heroine Janice was on her way back from the REPCONN facility to Novac, having sent a bunch of religious ghouls off to Creator alone knows where. She didn't know what happened to Chris, the human who was helping them, and if we are being honest she didn't really care. Either he went with them or he didn't and either way his business was none of hers. She just wanted to get a good night's rest and figure out what to do in the morning.
Only thing is, she was going back to the motel, and while the motel was pretty nice and Cliff even gave her a room for free for as long as she needed in thanks for helping the town with so many things, there was still that !&*!(&) robot. Grateful as Janice was to Victor for having dug her out of the graveyard, she kinda got the bahoogies from the thought of that thing following her around half the freakin' Mojave. It seemed like a good idea to her to find something else to do so that it would get bored and go back to Goodsprings or something, so after she slept she decided it was time to... *sigh*... go and check up on her, y'know, job. The one that got her shot in the head. Maybe if she went back to Primm, which was the nearest town with a Mojave Express office, she could find out where the people who shot her went so that she could go as far away from that direction as possible, and bore the robot into leaving her alone. Or something, anyway.
Now, there are mountains between the roads that lead through both Novac and Primm. I don't know if those are really near the real-world town of Primm or if they were put there by game developers or what, but you don't go to Vegas with the geography you want, you go to Vegas with the geography the developers give you. Anyway, to get from Novac to Primm you have three options. One is to go south along the old roads or railroads until you hit the vicinity of Nipton, which you'll remember is the town where we met Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man, and then turn west until you hit the next road and follow that north. One is to go all the way north until you reach the Vegas city outskirts and go through the outer edges of Vegas until you hit the road south, and take that. This did not strike Janice as a very good idea. When she tried to go north from Goodsprings she hit scorpions and cazadors and signs warning about deathclaws. The road north to Vegas could be paved with candy and lined with NCR soldiers shoulder-to-shoulder the entire distance, but she'd still have to get through those damned wasps coming south, and probably the scorpions as well. The third option was a little cut-through she'd seen in the mountains near Ranger Station Charlie. Which, not a place she really wanted to go back to on account of the possibility of Caesar's Legion, but she was going to have to pass the spot anyway to get to a road back to Primm. She figured she'd give that a try.
Here is the thing about convenient little cut-throughs in the mountains. They are NOT CONVENIENT AT ALL. And do you know WHY they are not convenient at all? Because they have DEATHCLAWS in them.
Well. One deathclaw. One blind deathclaw. But even blind it was still a twelve foot tall GIANT MUTANT KILLER MONSTER DEATH LIZARD with the leaping and the roaring and the CLAWS THAT IGNORE YOUR ARMOR and the RAAAGH and the yeah, you get the picture. I wish I could say Janice waged a drawn-out hard-fought battle against the blind deathclaw of Primm Pass and made it safe for future travelers, but she didn't. Deathclaws can gut an early-game character one and a half times in the amount of time it takes you to discover that two lit sticks of dynamite can't even cripple one of its legs. Ultimately, the only thing that got Janice through Primm Pass alive was the fact that there are very steep climbs at both ends, and she basically fell off one of them by mistake. The deathclaw apparently didn't like the idea of falling and wasted its time looking for a safe path down, by which point Janice was limping towards Primm and wondering whether maybe the NCR had managed to push the convicts out of town yet.
Hint: no.
Fortunately the convicts weren't all that organized at the end of Primm where Janice managed to make her way into town. She did a lot of running and hiding behind the legs of the town's roller coaster- yes, it has one. Old fashioned wooden roller coaster, loops around about half the town, you can see it for miles. Doesn't work, but it makes a nice environment piece- anyway, she used that thing for cover for as long as it took to get the convicts to STOP SHOOTING AT HER, DAMMIT. Granted, these were the kind of convicts who really had nothing left to lose, so they STOPPED SHOOTING AT HER, DAMMIT because they were dead, but not shooting is not shooting and Janice was not a fussy person. She pantsed as many of them as she could on the off chance that their supplies would come in handy and then went looking for people who were not of the convict persuasion.
Not a whole lot of those to be found, to be honest. The houses on the south end of Primm were empty, and when she found the local Mojave Express office, it was empty of people. There was a broken robot of a kind she didn't recognize on the counter, but it was powered down so there was no chance of partially activating it and asking what happened. She headed for what looked like the nearest non-barricaded door after that, the door to the Vikki and Vance casino.
(Side note: what is it with the Fallout games and the name Vance? There was Vance the chem dealer in the first game, Vance the vampire in Fallout 3, now this guy...)
Apparently she made the right choice, because everybody in town was holed up here. The first person she met was an old guy with a face like a sackful of wrinkled leather who told her the town had gone to hell. Turned out he was Johnson Nash and he ran the local trading post and Mojave Express office. He told her that yeah, he remembered her delivery; there were a bunch of packages being sent out at the same time. By 'that cowboy robot' and no he did not mean the one working the Vikki and Vance casino floor.
... ya-huh.
There'd been another candidate to carry Janice's delivery- some kind of platinum poker chip- but apparently that one canceled when he saw her name on the list. Nash didn't know why, just that he did.
... again, ya-huh.
Nash mentioned that someone'd seen Evil Chandler Bing and his Great Khan buddies a few nights ago, but didn't know much about them. Someone named 'Deputy Beagle' did, and had been taking notes on them, but nobody'd seen Beagle since he was last slinking around the Bison Steve hotel. So if Janice wanted to know any more she had to find him. She thanked Nash for the information and went off to poke around the casino for a while and think, and maybe talk to a robot who wasn't a creepy stalker with ulterior motives- the Protectron, Primm Slim, who kept an eye on the casino floor. That wound up getting her the story of Vikki and Vance and their nationwide crime-spree-only-not-really (shoplifting! bad check writing! accidentally driving into a police crossfire destined for someone else!), but not that much in the way of useful information. The only other person around with much to say was Ruby Nash, Johnson's wife, who makes radscorpion venom casseroles if you happen to have the glands to offer. Mmm, tasty! Not that Janice didn't kind of like the idea of culinary vengeance ("WHO'S ON TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN NOW, STINGER BOY?") but, well, radscorpion venom glands in the food. Yeah, no.
With nothing else to really do if she wanted information on where not to go, Janice decided to sneak into the Bison Steve across the street and try to find Deputy Beagle. Bad move. The reason Beagle hadn't come back from the Bison Steve was that there were convicts inside the Bison Steve as well as the outside and they were all as jumpy as medical school students on the third day of midterm exams. Janice, and I cannot stress this enough, did not want to get shot in the head again. However, Janice also could not get the door open to retreat (screw you, Bethesda, I'll run like a coward if I want to) so her only real option was WHY YOU GOT TO MAKE ME HURT YOU time. And they made her hurt them a lot.
I don't doubt that the whole hotel was chock full of bad people and that the other floors had amazing loot and useful resources to be found, but this is Janice we're talking about. The second she got the maintenance room door open and found Deputy Beagle tied up in there she started planning her exit route. I'll admit, I was terribly disappointed to find out Beagle was just a human with an unfortunate name. I'd been looking forward to a robot in a sheriff's hat, or possibly even an anthropomorphic beagle. Nope, just a guy in leather armor with a real easygoing accent who said he'd probably remember more about the folks who shot her if she'd be so kind as to untie his bonds first. So of course the instant she got his ropes off he ran like a rabbit and the guy in the next room who was toting the combat flamethrower took advantage of the opportunity.
Janice decided right about then that she liked being set on fire even less than being shot in the head. At least she didn't remember being shot.
Eventually she stumped out of the hotel and found Beagle out front, congratulating her on having helped him free himself and fight his way out. The option to slap him silly did not come up, so instead she just made him tell her what he knew about Evil Chandler Bing. Who, as it turned out, said he was heading through Nipton to Novac to OH FOR GOD'S SAKE I JUST CAME FROM THERE I HATE YOU SO MUCH.
However, Beagle also pointed something else out: that the town had no law since the convicts killed the sheriff while he was off duty. She was a bit surprised that Beagle hadn't... well, no, she wasn't surprised at all. Beagle was a damn wuss. Since Johnson Nash and his wife had been pretty decent people and she figured the town didn't really deserve to be stuck with this yoyo as its only protection, she asked what he expected in the way of law and order, and he offered two possibilities. One was to ask the NCR guys across the road to take over the job, and the other was that the convicts had been talking about a dude in the prison up the road who had been a sheriff before he got arrested.
Oh... kay. Ask an already overextended bunch of soldiers to do more work than they were able to pull off in the first place, or... go convince a bunch of angry men with guns to let her walk out with one guy so that they couldn't terrorize anybody in the conveniently nearby town any more. Well. Wasn't that just a lovely selection of alternatives. After some consideration she decided enh, what the hell, she'd go talk to the NCR dudes. Less likely to get her killed.
(In point of fact I originally played this part of the game with Janice going to the prison to see if she could disguise herself as a Powder Ganger and casually sneak out with the ex-sheriff in tow, but the prison was bugged. There is one person with a key to the front door and if he doesn't come out, you cannot get in. No lock pick, no explosives, no nothing- if Dawes isn't at the front door you're reduced to running around the prison walls screaming "IS NO ONE HERE MAN ENOUGH TO FIGHT ME?", and apparently the answer is no.)
Anyway, the NCR dudes said they'd need reinforcements from the Mojave outpost, so Janice figured why not. There was a decently safe road to the outpost, she'd go take that south. And hey, maybe in the process she'd find out what that interesting giant statuary on the horizon was... and just possibly get that stupid cowboy robot to stop following her.
When last we saw our heroine Janice was on her way back from the REPCONN facility to Novac, having sent a bunch of religious ghouls off to Creator alone knows where. She didn't know what happened to Chris, the human who was helping them, and if we are being honest she didn't really care. Either he went with them or he didn't and either way his business was none of hers. She just wanted to get a good night's rest and figure out what to do in the morning.
Only thing is, she was going back to the motel, and while the motel was pretty nice and Cliff even gave her a room for free for as long as she needed in thanks for helping the town with so many things, there was still that !&*!(&) robot. Grateful as Janice was to Victor for having dug her out of the graveyard, she kinda got the bahoogies from the thought of that thing following her around half the freakin' Mojave. It seemed like a good idea to her to find something else to do so that it would get bored and go back to Goodsprings or something, so after she slept she decided it was time to... *sigh*... go and check up on her, y'know, job. The one that got her shot in the head. Maybe if she went back to Primm, which was the nearest town with a Mojave Express office, she could find out where the people who shot her went so that she could go as far away from that direction as possible, and bore the robot into leaving her alone. Or something, anyway.
Now, there are mountains between the roads that lead through both Novac and Primm. I don't know if those are really near the real-world town of Primm or if they were put there by game developers or what, but you don't go to Vegas with the geography you want, you go to Vegas with the geography the developers give you. Anyway, to get from Novac to Primm you have three options. One is to go south along the old roads or railroads until you hit the vicinity of Nipton, which you'll remember is the town where we met Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man, and then turn west until you hit the next road and follow that north. One is to go all the way north until you reach the Vegas city outskirts and go through the outer edges of Vegas until you hit the road south, and take that. This did not strike Janice as a very good idea. When she tried to go north from Goodsprings she hit scorpions and cazadors and signs warning about deathclaws. The road north to Vegas could be paved with candy and lined with NCR soldiers shoulder-to-shoulder the entire distance, but she'd still have to get through those damned wasps coming south, and probably the scorpions as well. The third option was a little cut-through she'd seen in the mountains near Ranger Station Charlie. Which, not a place she really wanted to go back to on account of the possibility of Caesar's Legion, but she was going to have to pass the spot anyway to get to a road back to Primm. She figured she'd give that a try.
Here is the thing about convenient little cut-throughs in the mountains. They are NOT CONVENIENT AT ALL. And do you know WHY they are not convenient at all? Because they have DEATHCLAWS in them.
Well. One deathclaw. One blind deathclaw. But even blind it was still a twelve foot tall GIANT MUTANT KILLER MONSTER DEATH LIZARD with the leaping and the roaring and the CLAWS THAT IGNORE YOUR ARMOR and the RAAAGH and the yeah, you get the picture. I wish I could say Janice waged a drawn-out hard-fought battle against the blind deathclaw of Primm Pass and made it safe for future travelers, but she didn't. Deathclaws can gut an early-game character one and a half times in the amount of time it takes you to discover that two lit sticks of dynamite can't even cripple one of its legs. Ultimately, the only thing that got Janice through Primm Pass alive was the fact that there are very steep climbs at both ends, and she basically fell off one of them by mistake. The deathclaw apparently didn't like the idea of falling and wasted its time looking for a safe path down, by which point Janice was limping towards Primm and wondering whether maybe the NCR had managed to push the convicts out of town yet.
Hint: no.
Fortunately the convicts weren't all that organized at the end of Primm where Janice managed to make her way into town. She did a lot of running and hiding behind the legs of the town's roller coaster- yes, it has one. Old fashioned wooden roller coaster, loops around about half the town, you can see it for miles. Doesn't work, but it makes a nice environment piece- anyway, she used that thing for cover for as long as it took to get the convicts to STOP SHOOTING AT HER, DAMMIT. Granted, these were the kind of convicts who really had nothing left to lose, so they STOPPED SHOOTING AT HER, DAMMIT because they were dead, but not shooting is not shooting and Janice was not a fussy person. She pantsed as many of them as she could on the off chance that their supplies would come in handy and then went looking for people who were not of the convict persuasion.
Not a whole lot of those to be found, to be honest. The houses on the south end of Primm were empty, and when she found the local Mojave Express office, it was empty of people. There was a broken robot of a kind she didn't recognize on the counter, but it was powered down so there was no chance of partially activating it and asking what happened. She headed for what looked like the nearest non-barricaded door after that, the door to the Vikki and Vance casino.
(Side note: what is it with the Fallout games and the name Vance? There was Vance the chem dealer in the first game, Vance the vampire in Fallout 3, now this guy...)
Apparently she made the right choice, because everybody in town was holed up here. The first person she met was an old guy with a face like a sackful of wrinkled leather who told her the town had gone to hell. Turned out he was Johnson Nash and he ran the local trading post and Mojave Express office. He told her that yeah, he remembered her delivery; there were a bunch of packages being sent out at the same time. By 'that cowboy robot' and no he did not mean the one working the Vikki and Vance casino floor.
... ya-huh.
There'd been another candidate to carry Janice's delivery- some kind of platinum poker chip- but apparently that one canceled when he saw her name on the list. Nash didn't know why, just that he did.
... again, ya-huh.
Nash mentioned that someone'd seen Evil Chandler Bing and his Great Khan buddies a few nights ago, but didn't know much about them. Someone named 'Deputy Beagle' did, and had been taking notes on them, but nobody'd seen Beagle since he was last slinking around the Bison Steve hotel. So if Janice wanted to know any more she had to find him. She thanked Nash for the information and went off to poke around the casino for a while and think, and maybe talk to a robot who wasn't a creepy stalker with ulterior motives- the Protectron, Primm Slim, who kept an eye on the casino floor. That wound up getting her the story of Vikki and Vance and their nationwide crime-spree-only-not-really (shoplifting! bad check writing! accidentally driving into a police crossfire destined for someone else!), but not that much in the way of useful information. The only other person around with much to say was Ruby Nash, Johnson's wife, who makes radscorpion venom casseroles if you happen to have the glands to offer. Mmm, tasty! Not that Janice didn't kind of like the idea of culinary vengeance ("WHO'S ON TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN NOW, STINGER BOY?") but, well, radscorpion venom glands in the food. Yeah, no.
With nothing else to really do if she wanted information on where not to go, Janice decided to sneak into the Bison Steve across the street and try to find Deputy Beagle. Bad move. The reason Beagle hadn't come back from the Bison Steve was that there were convicts inside the Bison Steve as well as the outside and they were all as jumpy as medical school students on the third day of midterm exams. Janice, and I cannot stress this enough, did not want to get shot in the head again. However, Janice also could not get the door open to retreat (screw you, Bethesda, I'll run like a coward if I want to) so her only real option was WHY YOU GOT TO MAKE ME HURT YOU time. And they made her hurt them a lot.
I don't doubt that the whole hotel was chock full of bad people and that the other floors had amazing loot and useful resources to be found, but this is Janice we're talking about. The second she got the maintenance room door open and found Deputy Beagle tied up in there she started planning her exit route. I'll admit, I was terribly disappointed to find out Beagle was just a human with an unfortunate name. I'd been looking forward to a robot in a sheriff's hat, or possibly even an anthropomorphic beagle. Nope, just a guy in leather armor with a real easygoing accent who said he'd probably remember more about the folks who shot her if she'd be so kind as to untie his bonds first. So of course the instant she got his ropes off he ran like a rabbit and the guy in the next room who was toting the combat flamethrower took advantage of the opportunity.
Janice decided right about then that she liked being set on fire even less than being shot in the head. At least she didn't remember being shot.
Eventually she stumped out of the hotel and found Beagle out front, congratulating her on having helped him free himself and fight his way out. The option to slap him silly did not come up, so instead she just made him tell her what he knew about Evil Chandler Bing. Who, as it turned out, said he was heading through Nipton to Novac to OH FOR GOD'S SAKE I JUST CAME FROM THERE I HATE YOU SO MUCH.
However, Beagle also pointed something else out: that the town had no law since the convicts killed the sheriff while he was off duty. She was a bit surprised that Beagle hadn't... well, no, she wasn't surprised at all. Beagle was a damn wuss. Since Johnson Nash and his wife had been pretty decent people and she figured the town didn't really deserve to be stuck with this yoyo as its only protection, she asked what he expected in the way of law and order, and he offered two possibilities. One was to ask the NCR guys across the road to take over the job, and the other was that the convicts had been talking about a dude in the prison up the road who had been a sheriff before he got arrested.
Oh... kay. Ask an already overextended bunch of soldiers to do more work than they were able to pull off in the first place, or... go convince a bunch of angry men with guns to let her walk out with one guy so that they couldn't terrorize anybody in the conveniently nearby town any more. Well. Wasn't that just a lovely selection of alternatives. After some consideration she decided enh, what the hell, she'd go talk to the NCR dudes. Less likely to get her killed.
(In point of fact I originally played this part of the game with Janice going to the prison to see if she could disguise herself as a Powder Ganger and casually sneak out with the ex-sheriff in tow, but the prison was bugged. There is one person with a key to the front door and if he doesn't come out, you cannot get in. No lock pick, no explosives, no nothing- if Dawes isn't at the front door you're reduced to running around the prison walls screaming "IS NO ONE HERE MAN ENOUGH TO FIGHT ME?", and apparently the answer is no.)
Anyway, the NCR dudes said they'd need reinforcements from the Mojave outpost, so Janice figured why not. There was a decently safe road to the outpost, she'd go take that south. And hey, maybe in the process she'd find out what that interesting giant statuary on the horizon was... and just possibly get that stupid cowboy robot to stop following her.
