Notes From New Vegas 19
Nov. 25th, 2010 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 19: Is One Sane Technology Company Too Much To Ask
When last we saw our heroines, Janice and Veronica were on their merry way to the REPCONN corporate headquarters area. Janice needed to find a missing Brotherhood of Steel patrol that had been sent to the facility, and Veronica was coming along so that they could get up to Nellis Air Force Base and find the technology needed to push the Brotherhood Elder into admitting that they needed to change their isolationist ways. Also a senior Paladin had asked Janice to help him overthrow the Elder, which Janice was not particularly interested in but agreed to look into in order to make the Paladin go away.
REPCONN first, though. The building looked relatively intact, and as they approached Janice saw why. Turned out there were Mr. Handys roaming around the building, doing maintenance and keeping the premises relatively decent. Basically, maintenance robots that look like metal beachballs with three equidistant optics and three rotating woogly arms, and a rotary sawblade and maybe a flamethrower just in case some piece of equipment gets uppity and needs to be shown who's boss. I don't know. They have flamethrowers, that's all I know.
When they got into the REPCONN building the first thing they found was a pile of dead guys in spiky armor and animal skull hats. This is how the Fallout universe lets people know they are in for a fun time. Apparently the dead folk had thought that attacking a building full of flamethrower robots when they themselves were wielding hunting rifles, one-barrel shotguns, and a sledgehammer was a smart idea. I can say in this case that they most definitely were on chems, because the corpses were identified as Fiends, and the signature trait of the Fiends gang is that they spend more time high on any chem they can get their hands on than they do sober. So at least they had an excuse for being stupid. Janice opted not to attack the beachball flamethrower robots because she had survival instincts. I would say common sense but this is the Fallout universe, and common sense is so rare there it's a goddamn superpower.
Anyway, she didn't attack the beachball robots. She did, however, slip past one and start investigating an area that claimed to be some kind of museum. And it was, kinda; it was... hm. REPCONN was a technology company that was producing rockets that ran on radioactive fuel, and that was doing plasma weapon research. REPCONN was the company that had the test site with the religious ghouls and the wobbly rockets. REPCONN built a museum to show off their technology and the technology they expected to investigate in THE FUTURE!. REPCONN geared this museum towards seven-year-olds. So basically, if you got a company with the inherent dangers of Union Carbide's operations in India in the early 1980s, the incipient image problem of tobacco companies in the days when people were starting to listen to the surgeon general, and the gosh-golly-gee-whiz can-do tech writing team of Mr. Wizard, that would be a combination that could result in this museum. Seriously, there was an exhibit that cheerfully talked about how the display of canisters of "supposedly 'toxic' waste" gathered in one place was just like a family sitting around a table, and don't get me started on the completely not-reassuring-at-all disclaimers on every single display...
The museum didn't lead much of anywhere, but it did at one point yield a lost employee key card, which made Janice's life a bit easier. She was able to get into an area with a computer that still had communication with the REPCONN mainframe. It didn't have access to any security cameras that could tell her if the Brotherhood guys had been on the premises, but it did let her add her own face and Ronnie's to the security database, and that turned out to be a good thing because at least one of the beachball robots turned out to be a mobile security scanner. She tried to ask it if it could point her towards the Brotherhood guys but it didn't answer questions. Dangnabbit. Well, time to search the rest of the floor. No joy there, but she did find a locked door of extreme difficulty, along with a computer terminal that could theoretically have unlocked it had either she or Ronnie been capable of persuading it to respond to them. She wound up fishing her copy of Locksmiths Weekly (or whatever the skill magazine is called, I forget) out of her pack and popping some Mentats to amp her comprehension, then picking the lock; for all she knew the Brotherhood guys could've gotten in there and been trapped.
They hadn't. There was nobody in the room. There was, however, a shiny shiny gun. Literally shiny, in that it was glowing green; it was a prototype plasma rifle with a note attached calling it the Q-35 Matter Modulator. Ronnie didn't seem too interested in it, which was fine, because Janice basically screeched "MY" and grabbed that gun like li'l baby Saavik launching herself at the okay nobody actually read that Star Trek novel but me so I'm just gonna drop that line of comparison now. Suffice it to say that Janice got herself a new gun and finally had a means of making use of the microfusion cells she'd found in a number of places but been unable to sell.
Anyway, they made it up to the second floor, which was an unnerving experience because the door opened onto GIANT EYES OF TERROR. It took a moment to realize that this was a propaganda poster announcing that "only YOU can prevent corporate espionage!". There were a lot of posters like that around, actually. Workplace Safety Begins With You wasn't too bad, and Employees- Our Greatest Asset! was the usual line of prewar garbage that just happened to be combined with slightly creepitudinal propaganda imagery, but some of them just got kinda creepy. Not that Janice had a lot of time to look at all of them, because the robots were patrolling the second floor as well and demanding to know who she was. Fortunately the facial recognition database downstairs was the same one that the robots up here were using, so nobody got shot at.
They swept the floor looking for the Brotherhood guys, but didn't find them. As they started towards the third floor, ED-E suddenly started talking again. Only this time it wasn't the recorded Enclave guy- it was Senior Knight Lorenzo of the Brotherhood of Steel, who had apparently caught sight of Janice's robot and had been monitoring it for some time and who wanted her to bring the robot back to Hidden Valley so the Brotherhood could have a look at it because it might be valuable or useful.
Okay, that's TOTALLY NOT CREEPY AT ALL. Thanks for asking before monitoring my damn robot, Lorenzo. If Janice could've answered him she would've but apparently there was no capacity to communicate with the guy through the bot. She just got to scowl.
It got better, though. Shortly after Lorenzo relinquished control someone else started talking- a woman this time, saying she was with the Followers of the Apocalypse and that they'd been keeping an eye on the 'bot too, and that they wanted to have a look at the 'bot if she was interested. The woman pointed out that the Followers had a much more liberal attitude about sharing technology with others than the Brotherhood and asked Janice to bring the bot to the Old Mormon Fort if she got the chance.
... ya-huh. Well, Veronica didn't really have anything to say about it, but Janice guessed that if ED-E had been enough to change McNamara's mind about the outside world, he'd have said something when, y'know, the robot floated into the room at Janice's beck and call. So Janice figured she'd think about both requests for a bit before doing anything.
Having exhausted the possibilities of the second floor they started for the third, and two things happened. One, almost as soon as they made it onto the third floor, Janice spotted the corpses of a couple of dead Paladins. And two, a flamethrower robot floated up to them and told them third floor access was for executives only, did they have clearance. Janice stammered something that she hoped sounded authoritarian, but it didn't work; the robot informed her she had thirty seconds to vacate the floor before Security Measures Would Be Taken.
Turns out thirty seconds is just long enough to yoink some dog tags and mission orders from the dead guys and run for your life. Janice and Veronica and ED-E vacated the premises as fast as their feet could take them, and all was well. All that remained now was to get up to Nellis and find that last set of corpses. Paladins. Whatever.
When last we saw our heroines, Janice and Veronica were on their merry way to the REPCONN corporate headquarters area. Janice needed to find a missing Brotherhood of Steel patrol that had been sent to the facility, and Veronica was coming along so that they could get up to Nellis Air Force Base and find the technology needed to push the Brotherhood Elder into admitting that they needed to change their isolationist ways. Also a senior Paladin had asked Janice to help him overthrow the Elder, which Janice was not particularly interested in but agreed to look into in order to make the Paladin go away.
REPCONN first, though. The building looked relatively intact, and as they approached Janice saw why. Turned out there were Mr. Handys roaming around the building, doing maintenance and keeping the premises relatively decent. Basically, maintenance robots that look like metal beachballs with three equidistant optics and three rotating woogly arms, and a rotary sawblade and maybe a flamethrower just in case some piece of equipment gets uppity and needs to be shown who's boss. I don't know. They have flamethrowers, that's all I know.
When they got into the REPCONN building the first thing they found was a pile of dead guys in spiky armor and animal skull hats. This is how the Fallout universe lets people know they are in for a fun time. Apparently the dead folk had thought that attacking a building full of flamethrower robots when they themselves were wielding hunting rifles, one-barrel shotguns, and a sledgehammer was a smart idea. I can say in this case that they most definitely were on chems, because the corpses were identified as Fiends, and the signature trait of the Fiends gang is that they spend more time high on any chem they can get their hands on than they do sober. So at least they had an excuse for being stupid. Janice opted not to attack the beachball flamethrower robots because she had survival instincts. I would say common sense but this is the Fallout universe, and common sense is so rare there it's a goddamn superpower.
Anyway, she didn't attack the beachball robots. She did, however, slip past one and start investigating an area that claimed to be some kind of museum. And it was, kinda; it was... hm. REPCONN was a technology company that was producing rockets that ran on radioactive fuel, and that was doing plasma weapon research. REPCONN was the company that had the test site with the religious ghouls and the wobbly rockets. REPCONN built a museum to show off their technology and the technology they expected to investigate in THE FUTURE!. REPCONN geared this museum towards seven-year-olds. So basically, if you got a company with the inherent dangers of Union Carbide's operations in India in the early 1980s, the incipient image problem of tobacco companies in the days when people were starting to listen to the surgeon general, and the gosh-golly-gee-whiz can-do tech writing team of Mr. Wizard, that would be a combination that could result in this museum. Seriously, there was an exhibit that cheerfully talked about how the display of canisters of "supposedly 'toxic' waste" gathered in one place was just like a family sitting around a table, and don't get me started on the completely not-reassuring-at-all disclaimers on every single display...
The museum didn't lead much of anywhere, but it did at one point yield a lost employee key card, which made Janice's life a bit easier. She was able to get into an area with a computer that still had communication with the REPCONN mainframe. It didn't have access to any security cameras that could tell her if the Brotherhood guys had been on the premises, but it did let her add her own face and Ronnie's to the security database, and that turned out to be a good thing because at least one of the beachball robots turned out to be a mobile security scanner. She tried to ask it if it could point her towards the Brotherhood guys but it didn't answer questions. Dangnabbit. Well, time to search the rest of the floor. No joy there, but she did find a locked door of extreme difficulty, along with a computer terminal that could theoretically have unlocked it had either she or Ronnie been capable of persuading it to respond to them. She wound up fishing her copy of Locksmiths Weekly (or whatever the skill magazine is called, I forget) out of her pack and popping some Mentats to amp her comprehension, then picking the lock; for all she knew the Brotherhood guys could've gotten in there and been trapped.
They hadn't. There was nobody in the room. There was, however, a shiny shiny gun. Literally shiny, in that it was glowing green; it was a prototype plasma rifle with a note attached calling it the Q-35 Matter Modulator. Ronnie didn't seem too interested in it, which was fine, because Janice basically screeched "MY" and grabbed that gun like li'l baby Saavik launching herself at the okay nobody actually read that Star Trek novel but me so I'm just gonna drop that line of comparison now. Suffice it to say that Janice got herself a new gun and finally had a means of making use of the microfusion cells she'd found in a number of places but been unable to sell.
Anyway, they made it up to the second floor, which was an unnerving experience because the door opened onto GIANT EYES OF TERROR. It took a moment to realize that this was a propaganda poster announcing that "only YOU can prevent corporate espionage!". There were a lot of posters like that around, actually. Workplace Safety Begins With You wasn't too bad, and Employees- Our Greatest Asset! was the usual line of prewar garbage that just happened to be combined with slightly creepitudinal propaganda imagery, but some of them just got kinda creepy. Not that Janice had a lot of time to look at all of them, because the robots were patrolling the second floor as well and demanding to know who she was. Fortunately the facial recognition database downstairs was the same one that the robots up here were using, so nobody got shot at.
They swept the floor looking for the Brotherhood guys, but didn't find them. As they started towards the third floor, ED-E suddenly started talking again. Only this time it wasn't the recorded Enclave guy- it was Senior Knight Lorenzo of the Brotherhood of Steel, who had apparently caught sight of Janice's robot and had been monitoring it for some time and who wanted her to bring the robot back to Hidden Valley so the Brotherhood could have a look at it because it might be valuable or useful.
Okay, that's TOTALLY NOT CREEPY AT ALL. Thanks for asking before monitoring my damn robot, Lorenzo. If Janice could've answered him she would've but apparently there was no capacity to communicate with the guy through the bot. She just got to scowl.
It got better, though. Shortly after Lorenzo relinquished control someone else started talking- a woman this time, saying she was with the Followers of the Apocalypse and that they'd been keeping an eye on the 'bot too, and that they wanted to have a look at the 'bot if she was interested. The woman pointed out that the Followers had a much more liberal attitude about sharing technology with others than the Brotherhood and asked Janice to bring the bot to the Old Mormon Fort if she got the chance.
... ya-huh. Well, Veronica didn't really have anything to say about it, but Janice guessed that if ED-E had been enough to change McNamara's mind about the outside world, he'd have said something when, y'know, the robot floated into the room at Janice's beck and call. So Janice figured she'd think about both requests for a bit before doing anything.
Having exhausted the possibilities of the second floor they started for the third, and two things happened. One, almost as soon as they made it onto the third floor, Janice spotted the corpses of a couple of dead Paladins. And two, a flamethrower robot floated up to them and told them third floor access was for executives only, did they have clearance. Janice stammered something that she hoped sounded authoritarian, but it didn't work; the robot informed her she had thirty seconds to vacate the floor before Security Measures Would Be Taken.
Turns out thirty seconds is just long enough to yoink some dog tags and mission orders from the dead guys and run for your life. Janice and Veronica and ED-E vacated the premises as fast as their feet could take them, and all was well. All that remained now was to get up to Nellis and find that last set of corpses. Paladins. Whatever.
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Date: 2010-11-26 06:05 am (UTC)