Notes From New Vegas 13
Nov. 19th, 2010 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 13: The Terrible Secret Of Vault OH HELL NO
When last we saw our heroine and her friend full of punchings and her flying robot buddy, they had just stumbled across a cave that did not have deathclaws in it. Giant rats, yes. Giant mantises- not the little ones about the size of a human head that had been roaming around the Goodsprings school, but mantises the size of a ten-year-old child- yes. But no deathclaws. So that was a step up from the last cave. So was the fact that there was a door at the end of the cave and the door was big and gear-shaped and said 11 on it. Vault time! Yay!
. . . only, um, not. Because as soon as they got inside they found that a, the bugs and rats were in there too, and b, there were several skeletons lying in a group not far from the entrance, a ten-millimeter pistol, and a holotape recording of some kind. When Janice played it back, it proved to be the voices of five people discussing leaving the Vault and either leaving a record of the terrible things that'd happened, or concealing everything that'd happened because they could never live with people finding out. The recording overall sounded like a suicide pact in the works and the fact that it ended with gunshots only reinforced that impression. So you can imagine just how thrilled Janice was with the discovery. . . but there was also a certain morbid curiosity going on here.
I should note, at this point, that the Vault system of the Fallout universe is a major major MAJOR plot point of Fallout 2. If you don't know the Fallout mythos by now and don't want to be spoiled… well, you probably haven't read Notes 1-12. Honestly, if you've just stumbled across this entry and don't really know Fallout yet, please, for the love of the Buddha, go and either play the first two games, or play game two, or resign yourself to spoilers for what lies at the heart of this mythos because you're about to get it.
Back before the Great War of 2077 the entire United States was under the impression that nuclear doom was coming. A company called Vault-Tec seemingly decided to capitalize on this by building massive long-term underground fallout shelters called Vaults in which people could live for years at a time until the surface was deemed safe enough to return to. I say seemingly because this explanation is a filthy filthy lie. The Vaults, all of them, were part of a massive SOSHUL EXPERIMENT that makes the most vicious Internet trolls look like Fred freakin' Rogers by comparison. A shadow group within the United States Government made arrangements to take shelter en masse in a location far from any known nuclear target. The Vaults were their idea- not as shelters, but as tightly controlled test and control groups, each operating under conditions that tested different scenarios or variables to determine how that factor or social structure or whatever-it-was would affect the gov't types' chances of rebuilding, either on Earth or, should they have to get off-world, on Mars. In the words of Gabe and Tycho, "The Vaults were never really meant to save anybody."
That being said, very few people actually know that information. Janice sure as hell didn't. She thought the Vaults were havens from the Great War, possibly even repositories of interesting old technology and stuff to scavenge. So, yeah, she wanted to see what could've happened in a haven of the old world that could've left people so horrified as to shoot themselves before ever seeing the daylight.
The first thing she discovered was that the Vault had apparently been in the middle of election campaign season when it emptied out. There were posters EVERYWHERE in that Vault, calling on people to vote for the Justice Bloc or the Human Dignity Bloc. That part, fine, she could understand that. But then she saw the posters mentioning individual people, describing them in the most scathing terms possible (filthy degenerates, chem abusers, Communist sympathizers, etc.)- and loudly calling for them to be elected Vault Overseer. A few posters said things like "Don't vote for So-and-so, his family needs him". Stuff like that.
. . . . yyyyyeah.
Scavenging stopped being the point after a bit and it just turned into morbid curiosity. Also into chasing the robot because it'd sensed the presence of a giant bug somewhere up ahead and gone off to kill it and gotten lost on the way back. Veronica seemed to take special delight in punching the mantises to death. Janice was kind of glad for that, because things just kept getting relentlessly uglier the further into the Vault they went and it's easy to be caught off guard by killer insects when there's yet another poster of Too Much Information coming up. Eventually, she found a working computer , but that didn't really help much. All she found was a note from Overseer Katherine Stone issuing Overseer Order 745, which abolished the election process and decreed that from then on the Vault Overseer position was going to be chosen by the Vault's computer systems using a random number generator.
. . . uh huh.
That was about the point at which it became pretty obvious that something terrible was likely to happen to Vault 11's Overseer. Was likely to have happened. I could make a Douglas Adams reference here about trying to use linguistic tenses in relation to history as opposed to time travel but I won't. THE POINT IS, it looked as if a Vault 11 Overseer had maybe the life expectancy of a Brahmin calf born into the veal trade. Since everybody in Vault 11 was long dead it didn't really matter why, but by then Janice and Veronica and ED-E were so far into the Vault that it seemed like it'd be just as viable to keep poking around. Besides, they'd been finding guns and impromptu furniture barricades and things. Something really ugly had happened here.
When they finally found the next working computer it had a transcript of some kind of interrogation n it. Apparently Katherine Stone had been a murderer. And apparently she'd been a murderer because the Justice Bloc had nominated her husband for the position of Overseer. And apparently they'd done that because they were complete bastards who'd gotten tired of forcing Katherine to perform sexual favors for them in exchange for not nominating her husband. So naturally Katherine had to start killing them, but not because they were blackmailers and rapists- although that probably made it easier. No, it was because she figured that if she were caught in such a heinous act, people would elect her as Overseer with clear consciences.
I'd say Janice was losing her faith in human nature by now, but let's be honest. She started off this whole business by being shot in the head. Unless you are Harrison Ford's character in Regarding Henry, that's an automatic +15 to your Cynicism skill, and well earned, too. I don't know that she had much faith left to lose.
Anyway, she and Veronica eventually found a copy of a speech in the Vault atrium in which a rather desperate fellow pleaded for some kind of recollection of the days when election campaigns were based on merit. You know. Before they all lived in a Vault where the mainframe computer demanded the Vault sacrifice one person to it per year in exchange for not gassing everyone else in the Vault to death. Before the first Overseer was democratically elected to be the first sacrifice because the son of a bitch knew what the computer was going to ask and never told anybody. Before tradition made the Overseer the mandatory sacrifice every year. Before, yeah, you get the picture, right? I'm pretty sure that's the point where Janice decided that as soon as they got out of that place they'd head straight for the 188 and buy as much whiskey as her liver could handle.
However, there was one thing left in the Vault that she hadn't seen yet, and that was the Overseer's office. She kind of wanted to see what kind of place a moral degenerate who ruled for a year and then died horribly to appease a computer worked in. And it really wasn't that far away. So she and Veronica and the robot all set out for the office, and... well, it looked normal. Not-used-in-decades kind of normal, but still normal. No old gore, no chem containers, no stacks of booze, no porn, nothing. Just an office, with a round desk and a computer terminal and a switch that happened to open a tunnel down into the basement when AH HA HA HA.
Janice made extra certain to go down slowly and carefully, because after the rest of the Vault she was half expecting some giant starved monster to leap out at her and eat her like it used to eat Overseers. But there was no monster. Just very clean walls and a very clean floor and lots of light, and a recorded voice congratulating her on being chosen to live out the last moments of her life for the sake of all the other people in the Vault. Now sit down in the chair and watch the slideshow, because you're going to see images of the wonderful life you've lived before going into the even more wonderful next one.
It was all canned, of course. The slideshow didn't even attempt to look like it was someone's life story- she expected maybe the life of the last Overseer to die down there. It was completely generic, as was the dialog. So she ignored it and confirmed two other things: one, that there were no human remains anywhere in the room, and two, that the door she and Veronica and ED-E had come in by was locked behind them. Obviously, something hideous was going to happen when the recording ended. Sure enough, that was the point when the walls slid away on both sides and revealed ROBOTS and MORE ROBOTS and GUN TURRETS and I MENTIONED THE MORE ROBOTS, right? Right.
The Milgram Experiment was over and it was officially CLOBBERIN' TIME.
So, our heroes went to town beating, shooting, or incinerating the snot out of everything that was trying to kill them. There was a lot of running around and trying to take cover from one killer robot behind another killer robot, because there really wasn't much cover in the room otherwise. There was also an element of "oh, so that's where the corpses went- ick", because it seemed like Janice couldn't back up more than three steps without tripping over a skeleton or a skull or something. But overall it was a nice little fight, very cathartic after all the stuff upstairs, and Janice felt really good about it right up until the goddamn fourth wall broke.
Yeah. I'm sorry. At this point in the game I discovered that the OTHER Terrible Secret of Vault 11 was that the Sacrificial Chamber was bugged. Badly. If you kill everything in the room that you didn't bring with you, you get the error message QUEST FAILED: THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS PART I AND II. Even if you haven't been assigned that quest yet. One of the possible ending paths is automatically closed off to you no matter what you do if you kill your way out of the Sacrificial Chamber; apparently the gun turrets are coded as members of one particular faction, so if you shoot them up you piss off the faction badly enough to bork your chances permanently. Not that it was a faction I was planning to support, but it's just not cool to have a bug thrown in your face like that.
Anyway, once I got over the "Wait, WHAT?" moment, I got immersed in the game again. Janice picked through the robot corpses and took all their ammo before heading over to the mainframe and poking at it a bit. She triggered a recording of the five people whose skeletons she'd found in the entryway. Apparently they got this far and told the mainframe they refused to sacrifice ANYBODY to it ever again- possibly because those five were the only Vault residents left alive more than out of any real moral conviction, but still. She then found a second recording. Turned out that the mainframe had instructions to unlock the vault and let people come and go as they pleased if they ever flat out refused to send it a sacrifice, and would play a pre-recorded message congratulating them on being such a shining beacon to the rest of humanity.
In other words, LOL GUISE SOSHUL EXPERIMENT YOU CAN GO NOW.
No wonder the last few people wanted to shoot themselves. Although considering that she only ever found four skeletons up there, and the gun got left behind, that kind of implied that person #5 murdered the other four and ran for it... Well, whatever. Janice had had so much more than enough. Time to get out and get drunk as hell.
When last we saw our heroine and her friend full of punchings and her flying robot buddy, they had just stumbled across a cave that did not have deathclaws in it. Giant rats, yes. Giant mantises- not the little ones about the size of a human head that had been roaming around the Goodsprings school, but mantises the size of a ten-year-old child- yes. But no deathclaws. So that was a step up from the last cave. So was the fact that there was a door at the end of the cave and the door was big and gear-shaped and said 11 on it. Vault time! Yay!
. . . only, um, not. Because as soon as they got inside they found that a, the bugs and rats were in there too, and b, there were several skeletons lying in a group not far from the entrance, a ten-millimeter pistol, and a holotape recording of some kind. When Janice played it back, it proved to be the voices of five people discussing leaving the Vault and either leaving a record of the terrible things that'd happened, or concealing everything that'd happened because they could never live with people finding out. The recording overall sounded like a suicide pact in the works and the fact that it ended with gunshots only reinforced that impression. So you can imagine just how thrilled Janice was with the discovery. . . but there was also a certain morbid curiosity going on here.
I should note, at this point, that the Vault system of the Fallout universe is a major major MAJOR plot point of Fallout 2. If you don't know the Fallout mythos by now and don't want to be spoiled… well, you probably haven't read Notes 1-12. Honestly, if you've just stumbled across this entry and don't really know Fallout yet, please, for the love of the Buddha, go and either play the first two games, or play game two, or resign yourself to spoilers for what lies at the heart of this mythos because you're about to get it.
Back before the Great War of 2077 the entire United States was under the impression that nuclear doom was coming. A company called Vault-Tec seemingly decided to capitalize on this by building massive long-term underground fallout shelters called Vaults in which people could live for years at a time until the surface was deemed safe enough to return to. I say seemingly because this explanation is a filthy filthy lie. The Vaults, all of them, were part of a massive SOSHUL EXPERIMENT that makes the most vicious Internet trolls look like Fred freakin' Rogers by comparison. A shadow group within the United States Government made arrangements to take shelter en masse in a location far from any known nuclear target. The Vaults were their idea- not as shelters, but as tightly controlled test and control groups, each operating under conditions that tested different scenarios or variables to determine how that factor or social structure or whatever-it-was would affect the gov't types' chances of rebuilding, either on Earth or, should they have to get off-world, on Mars. In the words of Gabe and Tycho, "The Vaults were never really meant to save anybody."
That being said, very few people actually know that information. Janice sure as hell didn't. She thought the Vaults were havens from the Great War, possibly even repositories of interesting old technology and stuff to scavenge. So, yeah, she wanted to see what could've happened in a haven of the old world that could've left people so horrified as to shoot themselves before ever seeing the daylight.
The first thing she discovered was that the Vault had apparently been in the middle of election campaign season when it emptied out. There were posters EVERYWHERE in that Vault, calling on people to vote for the Justice Bloc or the Human Dignity Bloc. That part, fine, she could understand that. But then she saw the posters mentioning individual people, describing them in the most scathing terms possible (filthy degenerates, chem abusers, Communist sympathizers, etc.)- and loudly calling for them to be elected Vault Overseer. A few posters said things like "Don't vote for So-and-so, his family needs him". Stuff like that.
. . . . yyyyyeah.
Scavenging stopped being the point after a bit and it just turned into morbid curiosity. Also into chasing the robot because it'd sensed the presence of a giant bug somewhere up ahead and gone off to kill it and gotten lost on the way back. Veronica seemed to take special delight in punching the mantises to death. Janice was kind of glad for that, because things just kept getting relentlessly uglier the further into the Vault they went and it's easy to be caught off guard by killer insects when there's yet another poster of Too Much Information coming up. Eventually, she found a working computer , but that didn't really help much. All she found was a note from Overseer Katherine Stone issuing Overseer Order 745, which abolished the election process and decreed that from then on the Vault Overseer position was going to be chosen by the Vault's computer systems using a random number generator.
. . . uh huh.
That was about the point at which it became pretty obvious that something terrible was likely to happen to Vault 11's Overseer. Was likely to have happened. I could make a Douglas Adams reference here about trying to use linguistic tenses in relation to history as opposed to time travel but I won't. THE POINT IS, it looked as if a Vault 11 Overseer had maybe the life expectancy of a Brahmin calf born into the veal trade. Since everybody in Vault 11 was long dead it didn't really matter why, but by then Janice and Veronica and ED-E were so far into the Vault that it seemed like it'd be just as viable to keep poking around. Besides, they'd been finding guns and impromptu furniture barricades and things. Something really ugly had happened here.
When they finally found the next working computer it had a transcript of some kind of interrogation n it. Apparently Katherine Stone had been a murderer. And apparently she'd been a murderer because the Justice Bloc had nominated her husband for the position of Overseer. And apparently they'd done that because they were complete bastards who'd gotten tired of forcing Katherine to perform sexual favors for them in exchange for not nominating her husband. So naturally Katherine had to start killing them, but not because they were blackmailers and rapists- although that probably made it easier. No, it was because she figured that if she were caught in such a heinous act, people would elect her as Overseer with clear consciences.
I'd say Janice was losing her faith in human nature by now, but let's be honest. She started off this whole business by being shot in the head. Unless you are Harrison Ford's character in Regarding Henry, that's an automatic +15 to your Cynicism skill, and well earned, too. I don't know that she had much faith left to lose.
Anyway, she and Veronica eventually found a copy of a speech in the Vault atrium in which a rather desperate fellow pleaded for some kind of recollection of the days when election campaigns were based on merit. You know. Before they all lived in a Vault where the mainframe computer demanded the Vault sacrifice one person to it per year in exchange for not gassing everyone else in the Vault to death. Before the first Overseer was democratically elected to be the first sacrifice because the son of a bitch knew what the computer was going to ask and never told anybody. Before tradition made the Overseer the mandatory sacrifice every year. Before, yeah, you get the picture, right? I'm pretty sure that's the point where Janice decided that as soon as they got out of that place they'd head straight for the 188 and buy as much whiskey as her liver could handle.
However, there was one thing left in the Vault that she hadn't seen yet, and that was the Overseer's office. She kind of wanted to see what kind of place a moral degenerate who ruled for a year and then died horribly to appease a computer worked in. And it really wasn't that far away. So she and Veronica and the robot all set out for the office, and... well, it looked normal. Not-used-in-decades kind of normal, but still normal. No old gore, no chem containers, no stacks of booze, no porn, nothing. Just an office, with a round desk and a computer terminal and a switch that happened to open a tunnel down into the basement when AH HA HA HA.
Janice made extra certain to go down slowly and carefully, because after the rest of the Vault she was half expecting some giant starved monster to leap out at her and eat her like it used to eat Overseers. But there was no monster. Just very clean walls and a very clean floor and lots of light, and a recorded voice congratulating her on being chosen to live out the last moments of her life for the sake of all the other people in the Vault. Now sit down in the chair and watch the slideshow, because you're going to see images of the wonderful life you've lived before going into the even more wonderful next one.
It was all canned, of course. The slideshow didn't even attempt to look like it was someone's life story- she expected maybe the life of the last Overseer to die down there. It was completely generic, as was the dialog. So she ignored it and confirmed two other things: one, that there were no human remains anywhere in the room, and two, that the door she and Veronica and ED-E had come in by was locked behind them. Obviously, something hideous was going to happen when the recording ended. Sure enough, that was the point when the walls slid away on both sides and revealed ROBOTS and MORE ROBOTS and GUN TURRETS and I MENTIONED THE MORE ROBOTS, right? Right.
The Milgram Experiment was over and it was officially CLOBBERIN' TIME.
So, our heroes went to town beating, shooting, or incinerating the snot out of everything that was trying to kill them. There was a lot of running around and trying to take cover from one killer robot behind another killer robot, because there really wasn't much cover in the room otherwise. There was also an element of "oh, so that's where the corpses went- ick", because it seemed like Janice couldn't back up more than three steps without tripping over a skeleton or a skull or something. But overall it was a nice little fight, very cathartic after all the stuff upstairs, and Janice felt really good about it right up until the goddamn fourth wall broke.
Yeah. I'm sorry. At this point in the game I discovered that the OTHER Terrible Secret of Vault 11 was that the Sacrificial Chamber was bugged. Badly. If you kill everything in the room that you didn't bring with you, you get the error message QUEST FAILED: THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS PART I AND II. Even if you haven't been assigned that quest yet. One of the possible ending paths is automatically closed off to you no matter what you do if you kill your way out of the Sacrificial Chamber; apparently the gun turrets are coded as members of one particular faction, so if you shoot them up you piss off the faction badly enough to bork your chances permanently. Not that it was a faction I was planning to support, but it's just not cool to have a bug thrown in your face like that.
Anyway, once I got over the "Wait, WHAT?" moment, I got immersed in the game again. Janice picked through the robot corpses and took all their ammo before heading over to the mainframe and poking at it a bit. She triggered a recording of the five people whose skeletons she'd found in the entryway. Apparently they got this far and told the mainframe they refused to sacrifice ANYBODY to it ever again- possibly because those five were the only Vault residents left alive more than out of any real moral conviction, but still. She then found a second recording. Turned out that the mainframe had instructions to unlock the vault and let people come and go as they pleased if they ever flat out refused to send it a sacrifice, and would play a pre-recorded message congratulating them on being such a shining beacon to the rest of humanity.
In other words, LOL GUISE SOSHUL EXPERIMENT YOU CAN GO NOW.
No wonder the last few people wanted to shoot themselves. Although considering that she only ever found four skeletons up there, and the gun got left behind, that kind of implied that person #5 murdered the other four and ran for it... Well, whatever. Janice had had so much more than enough. Time to get out and get drunk as hell.
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Date: 2010-11-20 06:17 am (UTC)