Notes From New Vegas 12
Nov. 17th, 2010 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 12: YAY PUNCHINGS
First thing I need to say here is a correction. Back in part ten I said that Manny told Janice that Evil Chandler Bing had gone to the Strip. This is not the case. He told her he and his Khan buddies had gone to somewhere called Boulder City, off to the northeast. Either way the result was the same: Janice noted the place on her Pip-Boy map as 'do not go here' territory.
Right, then.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just finished getting the HELIOS One solar power plant to work and to not rain down horrible solar death rays from on high. Nacho the Follower of the Apocalypse approved of her methods and gave her some stuff to keep body and soul together on her journeys, and she headed on out of there. She probably could've gone back to Novac, especially given that she'd just made the local NCR guys happy and provided electricity to the region, but- eh. There was road outside and she wanted to know where it went. So she bought up some drinking water and roasted up some gecko meat (I really don't want to know how you go about carrying- never mind. I was going to say how you go about carrying uncooked meat for long periods without it rotting and then it occurred to me that you get rads from eating the stuff, so it's been pre-irradiated for your convenience and just doesn't have bacteria in it that'll make it rot. Or something), and then set off north along the road, with a wary eye out for 'don't go here, there's deathclaws' signs.
No deathclaws on the road north of Novac, thankfully. There was a dry lake to the west of the road, which she wandered into to have a look at. Again, there were ants. But this time they breathed fire. Now that's just unfair, especially to someone who's wearing metal armor. At least the ants in Fallout 3 that breathed fire had an excuse; Professor Farnsworth- I'm sorry, Doctor Lesko- was screwin' around with FEV and tried to flip the 'get smaller' switch but got 'stay big and breathe fire' instead. I don't know what the deal was with the fire ants in that lake. I just knew Janice disliked them. Intensely. Enough that when she managed to run far enough to get a bit of a lead, she turned around and shot out as many antennae as she could, not to distract them by having a few fight the rest, but just to watch the beastly things tear themselves to bits. She shot everything that was left standing, looked for interesting stuff to gather up, found little, and kept going.
Turned out she wasn't the only one on the road. The caravans weren't interesting, but the guy who was hanging out by one of the billboards, playing his guitar, was another story. He seemed nice enough, and his guitar was really appealing, but he didn't give a name. Probably ran in the family, since he said his dad had been real mysterious all the time he'd been with the family, like there was a stranger living in the house or something. Yes, yes, we get it, the Mysterious Stranger perk isn't just some psychic thing, it's a guy who apparently gets his jollies running around waiting for the protagonist to need someone to shoot people for them. And he had a kid. Uh huh. Whatevs. Janice didn't know any of that, so she made some polite conversation with the guy and kept heading north, mostly just grateful that he wasn't breathing fire. Hey, out here you never knew.
A little further ahead she eventually caught sight of an NCR flag and a bunch of huddled structures, which was great, because it turned out to be a trading post where they had water for sale. It's never really a good sign when the guy who runs a place like that is swigging whiskey straight from the bottle in the middle of the day, so Janice made a point of looking for other people to talk to. She ran into a sour-faced guy who wouldn't talk, a couple of NCR soldiers, an ex-NCR soldier who bought and sold guns, ammo, and armor, and a cheerful girl in robes and a hood. Who, thankfully, was not a ghoul grouchy at having missed the Great Journey. No, her name was Veronica and she was voiced by Felicia Day and her family was at home in a hole in the ground- well, a bunker- and she was shopping and looking for resources and had Janice ever heard of the Brotherhood of Steel, because she'd run into them and oh, Janice had? Well okay then. Say, did Janice want any company? Because Veronica really wanted to go out and see the world, or at least the Wasteland, or at least how different groups and people lived in the Wasteland and yes, okay, she was in fact part of the Brotherhood, was that a problem? No? Okay! YAY PUNCHINGS!
I'm serious. Normally to see this kind of enthusiasm about punching things, you have to find someone who's just been playing God Hand. Veronica comes with a set of robes- they look burlappy, but they're armored- and a power fist, which means that when she punches things they tend to explode. Not everything, mind. Sometimes she has to punch a giant radscorpion two or three times before it explodes. But the important part, as Janice saw it, was: 1. Veronica hits things. 2. They stop being able to eat my face.
Okay then.
At this point Janice thought for a bit and decided that if she had someone from the Brotherhood of Steel around, more importantly someone from the Brotherhood who wasn't busy being a jerkface about other people having nice things, she should take advantage of that. There was a broken robot in Primm that Johnson Nash had said she could have if she could fix it. Sounded to her like it was time to go get that robot and have Veronica get it working again. They could file it under 'seeing how other people live', right? Right.
I should note that Veronica can't actually fix anything. The closest she gets is that you can use her as a workbench, and I honestly have no way of making that not sound dirty. She has a dialog option where you can ask her to craft things for you and it's basically the same screen as using a workbench. In-universe, it just sounds better to say 'the Brotherhood member fixed the robot' than 'Janice used skill-increasing magazine to crank her Repair and Science stats up to the point where she could fix the robot, and promptly forgot how when the magazines wore off'. The important thing was that at the end of it, she had a whistling beeping Sputnik-looking robot that had a MY KID IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ROOSEVELT ACADEMY bumper sticker on one side, and that apparently answered to ED-E as a name.
Oh, and the robot had a laser. The useful kind, that incinerated things. And it also played Western-style musical cues whenever anything aggressive started in their direction. Which... was actually pretty unintrusive but really turned out to be useful for alerting Janice to things that were about to try to eat her face, so she didn't bother looking for an off switch. She just figured, hey, floating security system, sounds good to her. She also figured they'd head back to the 188 trading post where she'd met Veronica (Fast Travel means never having to come up with a narrative of More Things That Happened On The Road), and then start wandering around in the area looking for interesting stuff. Mostly because, well, she could. Having a YAY PUNCHINGS! assistant and a flying zapbot along for the trip meant she stood a much better chance of exploring things and not dying, so hey, might as well, right? Especially since it meant not having to go down the road at the trading post that had the sign pointing to Boulder City. The main plot, as far as she was concerned, could go diddle itself.
Turned out there was plenty to explore in the vicinity. That happens when there's mountains and hills nearby. There are caves, and caves usually have things in them. Granted, most of Janice's experience indicated that whatever lived in the caves would probably want to eat her face, but she had help with her this time. Hopefully all her body parts would stay on. As long as they didn't find a deathclaw den or something, they'd be good.
... so of course she found Dead Wind Cavern, which she went into for exactly as long as it took to smell ALL THE DEATHCLAW IN THE WORLD and turn around and run out. I am so very much not kidding about ALL THE DEATHCLAW IN THE WORLD. You know what lives in Dead Wind Cavern? A creature called the freakin' Legendary Deathclaw, that's what. AND regular deathclaws. AND mother deathclaws. And I think some babies but I"m not sure. It doesn't really matter. Regular deathclaws are AIEEEEE RUNNING NOW, mother deathclaws are WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, and the Legendary Deathclaw is I KNOW WHERE GOD IS. AZATHOTH ATE HIM. So you can understand why Janice and company ran for their tiny little lives and left the nice evil mutant lizard dinosaur spawns of Satan and a genetics lab exactly where they'd found them.
It's kind of a wonder they were willing to enter the next tunnel they found in the mountains. I can only assume they decided to do it because they were afraid of being caught in the open by a deathclaw hunting pack and nobody smelled anything nearly as bad. 'Course, that might've had something to do with the fact that the tunnel entrance wasn't really big enough to maneuver a giant killer mutant monster death lizard in. Then again, it was a manmade tunnel, as our merry little gang discovered when they got in far enough and found the door....
... but I think we'll go on to Vault 11 tomorrow.
First thing I need to say here is a correction. Back in part ten I said that Manny told Janice that Evil Chandler Bing had gone to the Strip. This is not the case. He told her he and his Khan buddies had gone to somewhere called Boulder City, off to the northeast. Either way the result was the same: Janice noted the place on her Pip-Boy map as 'do not go here' territory.
Right, then.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just finished getting the HELIOS One solar power plant to work and to not rain down horrible solar death rays from on high. Nacho the Follower of the Apocalypse approved of her methods and gave her some stuff to keep body and soul together on her journeys, and she headed on out of there. She probably could've gone back to Novac, especially given that she'd just made the local NCR guys happy and provided electricity to the region, but- eh. There was road outside and she wanted to know where it went. So she bought up some drinking water and roasted up some gecko meat (I really don't want to know how you go about carrying- never mind. I was going to say how you go about carrying uncooked meat for long periods without it rotting and then it occurred to me that you get rads from eating the stuff, so it's been pre-irradiated for your convenience and just doesn't have bacteria in it that'll make it rot. Or something), and then set off north along the road, with a wary eye out for 'don't go here, there's deathclaws' signs.
No deathclaws on the road north of Novac, thankfully. There was a dry lake to the west of the road, which she wandered into to have a look at. Again, there were ants. But this time they breathed fire. Now that's just unfair, especially to someone who's wearing metal armor. At least the ants in Fallout 3 that breathed fire had an excuse; Professor Farnsworth- I'm sorry, Doctor Lesko- was screwin' around with FEV and tried to flip the 'get smaller' switch but got 'stay big and breathe fire' instead. I don't know what the deal was with the fire ants in that lake. I just knew Janice disliked them. Intensely. Enough that when she managed to run far enough to get a bit of a lead, she turned around and shot out as many antennae as she could, not to distract them by having a few fight the rest, but just to watch the beastly things tear themselves to bits. She shot everything that was left standing, looked for interesting stuff to gather up, found little, and kept going.
Turned out she wasn't the only one on the road. The caravans weren't interesting, but the guy who was hanging out by one of the billboards, playing his guitar, was another story. He seemed nice enough, and his guitar was really appealing, but he didn't give a name. Probably ran in the family, since he said his dad had been real mysterious all the time he'd been with the family, like there was a stranger living in the house or something. Yes, yes, we get it, the Mysterious Stranger perk isn't just some psychic thing, it's a guy who apparently gets his jollies running around waiting for the protagonist to need someone to shoot people for them. And he had a kid. Uh huh. Whatevs. Janice didn't know any of that, so she made some polite conversation with the guy and kept heading north, mostly just grateful that he wasn't breathing fire. Hey, out here you never knew.
A little further ahead she eventually caught sight of an NCR flag and a bunch of huddled structures, which was great, because it turned out to be a trading post where they had water for sale. It's never really a good sign when the guy who runs a place like that is swigging whiskey straight from the bottle in the middle of the day, so Janice made a point of looking for other people to talk to. She ran into a sour-faced guy who wouldn't talk, a couple of NCR soldiers, an ex-NCR soldier who bought and sold guns, ammo, and armor, and a cheerful girl in robes and a hood. Who, thankfully, was not a ghoul grouchy at having missed the Great Journey. No, her name was Veronica and she was voiced by Felicia Day and her family was at home in a hole in the ground- well, a bunker- and she was shopping and looking for resources and had Janice ever heard of the Brotherhood of Steel, because she'd run into them and oh, Janice had? Well okay then. Say, did Janice want any company? Because Veronica really wanted to go out and see the world, or at least the Wasteland, or at least how different groups and people lived in the Wasteland and yes, okay, she was in fact part of the Brotherhood, was that a problem? No? Okay! YAY PUNCHINGS!
I'm serious. Normally to see this kind of enthusiasm about punching things, you have to find someone who's just been playing God Hand. Veronica comes with a set of robes- they look burlappy, but they're armored- and a power fist, which means that when she punches things they tend to explode. Not everything, mind. Sometimes she has to punch a giant radscorpion two or three times before it explodes. But the important part, as Janice saw it, was: 1. Veronica hits things. 2. They stop being able to eat my face.
Okay then.
At this point Janice thought for a bit and decided that if she had someone from the Brotherhood of Steel around, more importantly someone from the Brotherhood who wasn't busy being a jerkface about other people having nice things, she should take advantage of that. There was a broken robot in Primm that Johnson Nash had said she could have if she could fix it. Sounded to her like it was time to go get that robot and have Veronica get it working again. They could file it under 'seeing how other people live', right? Right.
I should note that Veronica can't actually fix anything. The closest she gets is that you can use her as a workbench, and I honestly have no way of making that not sound dirty. She has a dialog option where you can ask her to craft things for you and it's basically the same screen as using a workbench. In-universe, it just sounds better to say 'the Brotherhood member fixed the robot' than 'Janice used skill-increasing magazine to crank her Repair and Science stats up to the point where she could fix the robot, and promptly forgot how when the magazines wore off'. The important thing was that at the end of it, she had a whistling beeping Sputnik-looking robot that had a MY KID IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT ROOSEVELT ACADEMY bumper sticker on one side, and that apparently answered to ED-E as a name.
Oh, and the robot had a laser. The useful kind, that incinerated things. And it also played Western-style musical cues whenever anything aggressive started in their direction. Which... was actually pretty unintrusive but really turned out to be useful for alerting Janice to things that were about to try to eat her face, so she didn't bother looking for an off switch. She just figured, hey, floating security system, sounds good to her. She also figured they'd head back to the 188 trading post where she'd met Veronica (Fast Travel means never having to come up with a narrative of More Things That Happened On The Road), and then start wandering around in the area looking for interesting stuff. Mostly because, well, she could. Having a YAY PUNCHINGS! assistant and a flying zapbot along for the trip meant she stood a much better chance of exploring things and not dying, so hey, might as well, right? Especially since it meant not having to go down the road at the trading post that had the sign pointing to Boulder City. The main plot, as far as she was concerned, could go diddle itself.
Turned out there was plenty to explore in the vicinity. That happens when there's mountains and hills nearby. There are caves, and caves usually have things in them. Granted, most of Janice's experience indicated that whatever lived in the caves would probably want to eat her face, but she had help with her this time. Hopefully all her body parts would stay on. As long as they didn't find a deathclaw den or something, they'd be good.
... so of course she found Dead Wind Cavern, which she went into for exactly as long as it took to smell ALL THE DEATHCLAW IN THE WORLD and turn around and run out. I am so very much not kidding about ALL THE DEATHCLAW IN THE WORLD. You know what lives in Dead Wind Cavern? A creature called the freakin' Legendary Deathclaw, that's what. AND regular deathclaws. AND mother deathclaws. And I think some babies but I"m not sure. It doesn't really matter. Regular deathclaws are AIEEEEE RUNNING NOW, mother deathclaws are WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, and the Legendary Deathclaw is I KNOW WHERE GOD IS. AZATHOTH ATE HIM. So you can understand why Janice and company ran for their tiny little lives and left the nice evil mutant lizard dinosaur spawns of Satan and a genetics lab exactly where they'd found them.
It's kind of a wonder they were willing to enter the next tunnel they found in the mountains. I can only assume they decided to do it because they were afraid of being caught in the open by a deathclaw hunting pack and nobody smelled anything nearly as bad. 'Course, that might've had something to do with the fact that the tunnel entrance wasn't really big enough to maneuver a giant killer mutant monster death lizard in. Then again, it was a manmade tunnel, as our merry little gang discovered when they got in far enough and found the door....
... but I think we'll go on to Vault 11 tomorrow.
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Date: 2010-11-21 02:21 pm (UTC)Or, as
mother deathclaws are WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, and the Legendary Deathclaw is I KNOW WHERE GOD IS. AZATHOTH ATE HIM.
...have I told you lately how much my brain loves yours?