![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Notes From New Vegas 11
Notes From New Vegas 11: Horrible Solar Burny Death? Woo!
When last we saw our heroine Janice was heading north to see about finding herself some work at the NCR power plant, because she didn't really want to get shot or bitten or stung or poisoned or forced to throw herself off cliffs or exploded or set on fire any more. When she got to the plant, though, she found out that this was not likely to be in the cards. According to the grouchy NCR lady at the front door the place was just doing a horrible job. They had a scientist trying to run it, but he was an idiot, and frankly she couldn't see why the damned Brotherhood of Steel had ever wanted the joint in the first place. Apparently the NCR had seized the plant from the Brotherhood by force...
(We'll now pause for a history lesson. I don't remember whether anyone mentioned this in the game up to this point, but the Brotherhood of Steel is a faction of heavily technologically capable soldier types that've been in the Fallout universe since the very beginning. Their goal is to gather up as much pre-war technology as possible to keep it out of the wrong hands. I realize this sounds like kind of an asshole thing to do given that nobody outside the Brotherhood is really considered the right hands, but the first game gives you the opportunity to find out why these guys are the way they are. Essentially, back before the Great War, a group of soldiers stationed at the research base where the military was studying the virus that created the supermutants found out that the military was using live human prisoners as their test subjects. They, and their leader, flipped out at the prospect and basically killed all the scientists involved in the research, then declared themselves mutineers and seceded from the United States. Nobody bothered to come and yell at them for doing so, mostly because there were bigger things to worry about- the soldiers had done this on October 21st of 2077 and the war with China went nuclear on October 23, 2077. The soldiers and their families survived in underground bunkers and wound up finding a better bunker to live in, but not before being attacked several times along the way by desert wackos who'd gone all Lord Of The Flies only with high tech weaponry. All things considered it's really kind of hard to blame them for deciding anybody but them was 'the wrong hands'. As far as the Brotherhood in Fallout 3, the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood is a lot nicer than the ones out west largely because their leader actually opened his eyes and looked at the people around him and said "shit, you know, maybe we need to rearrange our priorities if we're gonna save humanity as a whole and start saving local people so they support us and make our job easier than if they resented us". So, yeah. History lesson concluded.)
Janice offered to see if she could talk to the idiot and find out what was going on. The NCR soldier told her that anything was better than that moron and gave her directions on where to find him, and off Janice went. It was kind of refreshing to travel through a building where nobody was trying to shoot at her or lunge out at her going GRAAAR. Janice was almost disappointed when she found the guy, who called himself Fantastic. Which he was not. He was, in fact, about as scientific as ... um... well. Perhaps I should give it to you in his own words.
"They were going door to door asking if anybody knew any scientists. I said look no further. They asked me if I knew anything about power plants. I said as much as everyone I'd ever met. They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
He rambled on about not knowing how to align the mirrors and not knowing what effect twiddling the knobs had and a prewar security system that killed two guys and how if she got the power up and running properly he'd pay her some extra caps to send all the power to the Strip and to McCarran Airport, yadda yadda. At one point he admitted to pretending that his work with the control consoles was something involving naked women. So, yeah, moron. Janice was pretty sure she knew science better than this guy, all things considered. It'd taken her a while to find him, so she thought she'd try the other door out of his room and see if it was easier to report to the lady at the front door from there. Maybe she could talk to her about taking over from Bozo here.
The door did not lead outside. It did, however, lead to a sober-faced dark-haired fellow in a lab coat who said he hadn't seen her around before and asked who she was affiliated with. That automatically put him farther up in Janice's estimation than Bozo, but she asked him to identify himself first. The new fella was named Ignacio Rivas, and he was a scientist with the Followers of the Apocalypse. Despite the name the Followers weren't HOORAY SPLODEY GO BOOM types like the Children of Atom back in Fallout 3. They were, instead, reconstructionists- people who were doing their best to learn and teach and quietly help humanity rebuild in the wake of the Great War, with an extra side helping of trying to make sure people remembered how and why the Great War had come about in the first place, specifically so it wouldn't happen again. And Nacho was here basically because HELIOS One was never just a power plant. (There was a kid in my sixth through eight grade classes named Ignacio Lopez. He told us on day one that his nickname was Nacho. It stuck.) Before the War it was a test bed for a massively powerful weapon platform named ARCHIMEDES. He said he believed that the Brotherhood had suspected the weapon's presence and that this was why they'd tried so hard to hold onto the power plant, but that the NCR didn't know about it and had by some miracle hired a moron for a scientist and so were unlikely to learn about it.
When Janice said that the lady at the front door had asked her to talk to Bozo and see if she could increase the plant's power output any, Nacho told her to try and do so, by all means, since if NCR got what they wanted from the plant they were less likely to try and get it to turn into a death ray. She was a little surprised that he'd trust her, but he said that his alternatives were to hope that the idiot was never replaced by someone with a greater clue and more desire to destroy, and that since Janice was at least talking to him and had no affiliation with anybody with real ulterior motives, she at least had a chance of doing something good instead of something destructive. He gave her the passwords to the terminals that would let her persuade the array of solar panels to talk to the HELIOS mainframe, warned her to be careful in the central building because the security system was seriously murderous, and told her he would be there when she was done.
Now, Janice really didn't relish the idea of running a gauntlet of being shot at. But Nacho had been really pretty nice to her, and possibly one of the most open and honest people she'd met so far. She felt kind of beholden to him for that. She also liked the sound of the Followers of the Apocalypse, especially compared to jerkfaces like the Legion. The NCR was okay people, but they were kind of controlling, and the idea of an expansionist government- and the NCR was pretty damn expansionist- suddenly being able to wield a solar death weapon didn't appeal to her. Running off and leaving the place was an option, but sooner or later the NCR would get tired of Bozo and hire someone with a clue, and then where would she be? On the wrong end of HORRIBLE FLAMING SOLAR DEATH, that's where. So, yeah, she figured she'd try and help Nacho out.
It was not a fun trip. I am not going to go into the details here. Most of them involved Janice huddling behind walls and screaming over the sound of automated gunfire until her Stimpaks kicked in. A few of them involve Janice huddling behind walls and screaming because she was fresh out of doctor's bags and Hydra and the last combat robot she went up against had managed to cripple one of her legs. (Well, the prox mine might have done that. When your leg decides it no longer wants to speak to you it's really hard to trace down the source.) One memorable bit involved me going 'wait, the Robobrain robots sound different for some reason' and looking up the voice credits, only to laugh myself sick because the Robobrains are now voiced by Wil Wheaton. Guess Wesley was special enough to get his brain scooped out and stuck in a robot for a couple hundred years, huh. At any rate Janice eventually managed to revive the HELIOS mainframe and order it to direct power to the entire region at the best level it could manage, since pretty much everybody in the area needed it and giving Bozo what he wanted had very little appeal to it, and then activated the array and nearly got blinded. Here's a hint: if you are working with a massive solar power plant and are at the top of a tower in the very center of the plant's physical grounds, and you tell the control system to align the mirrored panels now for maximum safe energy generation, you should really consider getting out of the way before all the light focuses on the building at once. I mean, you know, if you want to see afterward, or anything.
Janice eventually limped back to Nacho, who thanked her and gave her a science textbook, some stimpaks, and some doctor's bags, which she immediately used to stick her legs back into place. He said he doubted the NCR would try to find anything more in the plant's capabilities, since now they had what they wanted, and said he'd stick around anyway just in case. Fantastic showed no signs of being interested in hiring anybody else and neither did the soldier lady at the front door, so that left Janice without a visible means of employment... but, hey, at least no horrible solar space laser death for anyone in the Mojave, right? She was groovy with that. She'd just have to find something else to do. Maybe go hunting, or something. There was a lot of territory out there and surely not all of it was full of things that wanted to eat her face.
When last we saw our heroine Janice was heading north to see about finding herself some work at the NCR power plant, because she didn't really want to get shot or bitten or stung or poisoned or forced to throw herself off cliffs or exploded or set on fire any more. When she got to the plant, though, she found out that this was not likely to be in the cards. According to the grouchy NCR lady at the front door the place was just doing a horrible job. They had a scientist trying to run it, but he was an idiot, and frankly she couldn't see why the damned Brotherhood of Steel had ever wanted the joint in the first place. Apparently the NCR had seized the plant from the Brotherhood by force...
(We'll now pause for a history lesson. I don't remember whether anyone mentioned this in the game up to this point, but the Brotherhood of Steel is a faction of heavily technologically capable soldier types that've been in the Fallout universe since the very beginning. Their goal is to gather up as much pre-war technology as possible to keep it out of the wrong hands. I realize this sounds like kind of an asshole thing to do given that nobody outside the Brotherhood is really considered the right hands, but the first game gives you the opportunity to find out why these guys are the way they are. Essentially, back before the Great War, a group of soldiers stationed at the research base where the military was studying the virus that created the supermutants found out that the military was using live human prisoners as their test subjects. They, and their leader, flipped out at the prospect and basically killed all the scientists involved in the research, then declared themselves mutineers and seceded from the United States. Nobody bothered to come and yell at them for doing so, mostly because there were bigger things to worry about- the soldiers had done this on October 21st of 2077 and the war with China went nuclear on October 23, 2077. The soldiers and their families survived in underground bunkers and wound up finding a better bunker to live in, but not before being attacked several times along the way by desert wackos who'd gone all Lord Of The Flies only with high tech weaponry. All things considered it's really kind of hard to blame them for deciding anybody but them was 'the wrong hands'. As far as the Brotherhood in Fallout 3, the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood is a lot nicer than the ones out west largely because their leader actually opened his eyes and looked at the people around him and said "shit, you know, maybe we need to rearrange our priorities if we're gonna save humanity as a whole and start saving local people so they support us and make our job easier than if they resented us". So, yeah. History lesson concluded.)
Janice offered to see if she could talk to the idiot and find out what was going on. The NCR soldier told her that anything was better than that moron and gave her directions on where to find him, and off Janice went. It was kind of refreshing to travel through a building where nobody was trying to shoot at her or lunge out at her going GRAAAR. Janice was almost disappointed when she found the guy, who called himself Fantastic. Which he was not. He was, in fact, about as scientific as ... um... well. Perhaps I should give it to you in his own words.
"They were going door to door asking if anybody knew any scientists. I said look no further. They asked me if I knew anything about power plants. I said as much as everyone I'd ever met. They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
He rambled on about not knowing how to align the mirrors and not knowing what effect twiddling the knobs had and a prewar security system that killed two guys and how if she got the power up and running properly he'd pay her some extra caps to send all the power to the Strip and to McCarran Airport, yadda yadda. At one point he admitted to pretending that his work with the control consoles was something involving naked women. So, yeah, moron. Janice was pretty sure she knew science better than this guy, all things considered. It'd taken her a while to find him, so she thought she'd try the other door out of his room and see if it was easier to report to the lady at the front door from there. Maybe she could talk to her about taking over from Bozo here.
The door did not lead outside. It did, however, lead to a sober-faced dark-haired fellow in a lab coat who said he hadn't seen her around before and asked who she was affiliated with. That automatically put him farther up in Janice's estimation than Bozo, but she asked him to identify himself first. The new fella was named Ignacio Rivas, and he was a scientist with the Followers of the Apocalypse. Despite the name the Followers weren't HOORAY SPLODEY GO BOOM types like the Children of Atom back in Fallout 3. They were, instead, reconstructionists- people who were doing their best to learn and teach and quietly help humanity rebuild in the wake of the Great War, with an extra side helping of trying to make sure people remembered how and why the Great War had come about in the first place, specifically so it wouldn't happen again. And Nacho was here basically because HELIOS One was never just a power plant. (There was a kid in my sixth through eight grade classes named Ignacio Lopez. He told us on day one that his nickname was Nacho. It stuck.) Before the War it was a test bed for a massively powerful weapon platform named ARCHIMEDES. He said he believed that the Brotherhood had suspected the weapon's presence and that this was why they'd tried so hard to hold onto the power plant, but that the NCR didn't know about it and had by some miracle hired a moron for a scientist and so were unlikely to learn about it.
When Janice said that the lady at the front door had asked her to talk to Bozo and see if she could increase the plant's power output any, Nacho told her to try and do so, by all means, since if NCR got what they wanted from the plant they were less likely to try and get it to turn into a death ray. She was a little surprised that he'd trust her, but he said that his alternatives were to hope that the idiot was never replaced by someone with a greater clue and more desire to destroy, and that since Janice was at least talking to him and had no affiliation with anybody with real ulterior motives, she at least had a chance of doing something good instead of something destructive. He gave her the passwords to the terminals that would let her persuade the array of solar panels to talk to the HELIOS mainframe, warned her to be careful in the central building because the security system was seriously murderous, and told her he would be there when she was done.
Now, Janice really didn't relish the idea of running a gauntlet of being shot at. But Nacho had been really pretty nice to her, and possibly one of the most open and honest people she'd met so far. She felt kind of beholden to him for that. She also liked the sound of the Followers of the Apocalypse, especially compared to jerkfaces like the Legion. The NCR was okay people, but they were kind of controlling, and the idea of an expansionist government- and the NCR was pretty damn expansionist- suddenly being able to wield a solar death weapon didn't appeal to her. Running off and leaving the place was an option, but sooner or later the NCR would get tired of Bozo and hire someone with a clue, and then where would she be? On the wrong end of HORRIBLE FLAMING SOLAR DEATH, that's where. So, yeah, she figured she'd try and help Nacho out.
It was not a fun trip. I am not going to go into the details here. Most of them involved Janice huddling behind walls and screaming over the sound of automated gunfire until her Stimpaks kicked in. A few of them involve Janice huddling behind walls and screaming because she was fresh out of doctor's bags and Hydra and the last combat robot she went up against had managed to cripple one of her legs. (Well, the prox mine might have done that. When your leg decides it no longer wants to speak to you it's really hard to trace down the source.) One memorable bit involved me going 'wait, the Robobrain robots sound different for some reason' and looking up the voice credits, only to laugh myself sick because the Robobrains are now voiced by Wil Wheaton. Guess Wesley was special enough to get his brain scooped out and stuck in a robot for a couple hundred years, huh. At any rate Janice eventually managed to revive the HELIOS mainframe and order it to direct power to the entire region at the best level it could manage, since pretty much everybody in the area needed it and giving Bozo what he wanted had very little appeal to it, and then activated the array and nearly got blinded. Here's a hint: if you are working with a massive solar power plant and are at the top of a tower in the very center of the plant's physical grounds, and you tell the control system to align the mirrored panels now for maximum safe energy generation, you should really consider getting out of the way before all the light focuses on the building at once. I mean, you know, if you want to see afterward, or anything.
Janice eventually limped back to Nacho, who thanked her and gave her a science textbook, some stimpaks, and some doctor's bags, which she immediately used to stick her legs back into place. He said he doubted the NCR would try to find anything more in the plant's capabilities, since now they had what they wanted, and said he'd stick around anyway just in case. Fantastic showed no signs of being interested in hiring anybody else and neither did the soldier lady at the front door, so that left Janice without a visible means of employment... but, hey, at least no horrible solar space laser death for anyone in the Mojave, right? She was groovy with that. She'd just have to find something else to do. Maybe go hunting, or something. There was a lot of territory out there and surely not all of it was full of things that wanted to eat her face.
no subject
LOL!
I was doing this quest, cleared all the robots, turrets, and everything else that wanted to kill me... and couldn't pass the skill checks at the top of the building to align the mirrors.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Lol!
no subject
...
...that's the only thing wrong with minifig icons; you can't get a proper facepalm out of them. Never mind having recordings of Lincoln's voice; I sometimes think the real point of divergence for the Fallout 'verse was when the local Earth accreted around an idiot ball.
Edit: [The Followers of the Apocalypse] were, instead, reconstructionists- people who were doing their best to learn and teach and quietly help humanity rebuild in the wake of the Great War, with an extra side helping of trying to make sure people remembered how and why the Great War had come about in the first place, specifically so it wouldn't happen again.
So yeah, I was being specious and unfair. My bad.
no subject