Notes From New Vegas 24
Dec. 12th, 2010 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 24: I Knew The Reavers, The Reavers Were Enemies Of Mine... You, Sir, Are No Reaver
When last we saw our heroine, she and Veronica were heading off to find Vault 3 in the hopes that it contained some usable parts for the Brotherhood of Steel's bunker's air filtration system. Given that Vault 3 was the home of a gang of psychopathic chem users called the Fiends, Janice did not hold out a lot of hope that the parts hadn't been turned into some kidn of drug processing rig, but hey, you never knew. Besides, Veronica was wearing strength-enhancing power armor and a power fist, which basically means she had a Punch of Kill Everything, so even if Janice had wanted to run away it wasn't an option. On the bright side, she and Ronnie had just killed three of the most coherent Fiends and turned their heads in for big caps, so she figured if she was lucky Vault 3 would be full of either crazy gigglers or people so hyperaggressive they'd attack each other just as easily as her.
Naturally, she wasn't lucky. Or rather, she was, just in a very weird way and not straight off the bat. Much to her irritation she and Veronica had to march across most of the southern Vegas outskirts and get shot at from all kinds of ruins and once or twice run like the dickens from proximity mines some enterprising soul had planted just to reach the general area of Fiend territory, as Vault 3 was in Fiend territory. What Janice didn't realize was that this was not a vague, handwavey description of where the whackjobs lived. There was an entire sector of the southern Vegas ruins that had been walled off and kitted out with gates and stuff and the Fiends lived in there. Fiend territory was its very own walled ghetto. I mean, yeah, there were Fiends roaming the area outside more or less at will and only getting shot if they came within effective range of the NCR guards, but the population density of crazy people in animal-skull hats on the other side of the gate to Fiend country was about up there with the population density of New Jersey, period, end of sentence. She really couldn't walk more than about five seconds without somebody screaming gleefully and trying to kill her.
Fun fact: the Fiends were apparently so hopped up on Jet, Psycho, and all the other wonders of post-nuclear pharmacology that they seemed to make no clear distinction between 'I can totally kill this bitch with my plasma rifle', 'I can totally kill this bitch with my laser weapon', 'I can totally kill this bitch with my shotgun', and 'I can totally kill this bitch with my pool cue'. Seriously. Not even sledgehammers or supersledges or whatever. Pool cues. There were Fiends running up to Ronnie trying to kill the woman in T-51b power armor by whapping at her with pool cues. Even after Ronnie demonstrated the Punch of Kill Everything on them repeatedly.
Say no to chems, kids.
Anyway, after leaving a significant portion of the population of Fiend territory in small green puddles or lumpy reddish heaps- and picking over the corpses, because a weak stomach means you pass up quite a lot of ammo- Janice and Ronnie finally had enough breathing room to head for the remains of a school under which the enterprising souls at Vault-Tec had built Vault 3. I don't know what Vault 3's role in the Great SOSHUL EXPERIMENT LOL had been and I don't know that Janice particularly cared at that point. What she did know was that the people inside the Vault weren't in radio contact with the people outside, because when she tapped the Brotherhood's default 'open the door dammit' code into the panel to get Vault 3's door open, she was greeted not by gunfire but by a grouchy Fiend door guard who demanded to know her business and whether or not she had a death wish.
At which point Janice proved to be the favored one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, because she blurted out, "I'm a Great Khan courier and I'm here on business, I've got chems for your boss."
And the guard believed her.
Ronnie and Janice more or less just strolled on down through Vault 3 following the guard's directions and found themselves in Motor-Runner's throne room without any kind of difficulty. Apparently he'd set up a big chair with some ugly decorations in the maintenance sector, and he and his vicious ugly dogs were just chillin'. Janice sold him some chems she'd taken off the Fiends she'd killed outside and got him to tell her about Vault 3. Apparently the people who'd lived there had been really trusting and hadn't bothered to set up a defense system or lock the door, so the Fiends strolled in under Motor-Runner's leadership because hey, he needed somewhere to settle his people. She might've had more sympathy for their needs if his people hadn't been quite so prone to killin' and rapin', but she kept it to herself. After that he more or less waved her away, telling her to come back when she had more. She wandered off to search the rest of the maintenance area and found the ventilation system parts, and then she thought about things for a bit. More specifically, she thought about how Motor-Runner didn't seem to have anybody else at all in his room other than his dogs, and how coked-up everybody else in the room was, and about the size of that bounty on his head. And about how she had a Stealth Boy on her person, as well as a frag grenade she'd been saving for a special occasion.
Fun fact #2: if you are currently invisible and your armored friend is nowhere in sight, the Fiends of Vault 3 are so chemically messed up that even if they hear an explosion from their boss's throne room, so long as you don't do anything to tip them off to the fact that there is an invisible person in the room, they won't think to connect the sudden explosion and the fact that they didn't see you leave. Janice held very still until it stopped raining Motor-Runner and the guards outside his room stopped running around looking for the source of the kaboom. Then, very slowly and very casually, she and Ronnie stroooooolled on out of Motor-Runner's throne room and made their way out of the Vault.
Whereupon the surface Fiends started attacking them again, but eh, whatevs. Janice had taken the opportunity to pick up Motor-Runner's weapon of choice in addition to his helmet and the Vault filtration stuff, so it seemed like a good time to test it out. Sadly, chainsaws are not quite as awesome to wield as they are to behold in action, at least not if you haven't been trained with them. Janice wound up having to drop the dang chainsaw and go back to the Q-35, which might have been a bit expensive to use, but at least had a reasonable rate of fire and didn't do that creepy bucking thing when it hit bone.
Camp McCarran was very happy to see Ronnie again, especially since she dropped Motor-Runner's helmet right in their lap. (Or tried to. There's a bug in the game where you get rewarded for his helmet but don't ever get it taken out of your inventory.) They were also thrilled that apparently she'd rescued someone named Bryce Anders. Turned out they'd sent a ranger to kill Motor-Runner and he'd never come back, and somehow he'd managed to escape when she did her killin'. Apparently that's a bug too, but Janice wasn't about to complain about stuff that made these guys happy. The NCR had been pretty decent to her so far.
She and Ronnie set out after that to make their way back to Hidden Valley, where Senior Knight Lorenzo did the Secret Brotherhood Dance of Joy at a) getting the filtration system parts and b) not being responsible for two more helpful souls' deaths. He sent Ronnie and Janice to see Elder McNamara and tell him the good news. Elder McNamara was far too proper to do a dance of joy, but he did thank Janice sincerely and tell her she'd shamed him into realizing that his actions in declaring the lockdown after HELIOS One were motivated by fear rather than prudence. Between what an outsider had done to help them, and the scouts' reports indicating that the NCR wasn't nearly as powerful of a threat as he'd feared, he felt it was entirely reasonable to end the lockdown and resume normal operations again. Oh, and Janice was welcome to come and go as she pleased, he was that grateful to her. Also, she could use the Brotherhood safehouse they had on the surface, off to the northeast. Which was actually cooler than it sounded, because it meant a guaranteed safe place to sleep and someone who was guaranteed to be able to repair her stuff in an otherwise rather vendor-barren part of the map.
Janice thanked him and headed out of his office, then pulled Ronnie aside and said that she felt it was time for them to part ways. OOCly, this was because I had another companion I wanted to try running around with now. ICly, this was because Janice figured she'd helped the Brotherhood as far as she was able, and she'd just gotten a radio message on her Pip-Boy that ED-E's repairs were done and she could come pick him up, and she really didn't want to take the chance of Ronnie suggesting she bring ED-E to the bunker for a look-over. Ronnie pouted a bit, but eventually said she'd go back to the 188 trading post. Janice thought it was a little weird that she didn't just, y'know, stay in the bunker now that it was free and open again, but... whatever. At least she knew where to find Ronnie if she ever went looking for her again.
With that in mind, she set out for northern New Vegas, and the local headquarters of the Followers of the Apocalypse.
When last we saw our heroine, she and Veronica were heading off to find Vault 3 in the hopes that it contained some usable parts for the Brotherhood of Steel's bunker's air filtration system. Given that Vault 3 was the home of a gang of psychopathic chem users called the Fiends, Janice did not hold out a lot of hope that the parts hadn't been turned into some kidn of drug processing rig, but hey, you never knew. Besides, Veronica was wearing strength-enhancing power armor and a power fist, which basically means she had a Punch of Kill Everything, so even if Janice had wanted to run away it wasn't an option. On the bright side, she and Ronnie had just killed three of the most coherent Fiends and turned their heads in for big caps, so she figured if she was lucky Vault 3 would be full of either crazy gigglers or people so hyperaggressive they'd attack each other just as easily as her.
Naturally, she wasn't lucky. Or rather, she was, just in a very weird way and not straight off the bat. Much to her irritation she and Veronica had to march across most of the southern Vegas outskirts and get shot at from all kinds of ruins and once or twice run like the dickens from proximity mines some enterprising soul had planted just to reach the general area of Fiend territory, as Vault 3 was in Fiend territory. What Janice didn't realize was that this was not a vague, handwavey description of where the whackjobs lived. There was an entire sector of the southern Vegas ruins that had been walled off and kitted out with gates and stuff and the Fiends lived in there. Fiend territory was its very own walled ghetto. I mean, yeah, there were Fiends roaming the area outside more or less at will and only getting shot if they came within effective range of the NCR guards, but the population density of crazy people in animal-skull hats on the other side of the gate to Fiend country was about up there with the population density of New Jersey, period, end of sentence. She really couldn't walk more than about five seconds without somebody screaming gleefully and trying to kill her.
Fun fact: the Fiends were apparently so hopped up on Jet, Psycho, and all the other wonders of post-nuclear pharmacology that they seemed to make no clear distinction between 'I can totally kill this bitch with my plasma rifle', 'I can totally kill this bitch with my laser weapon', 'I can totally kill this bitch with my shotgun', and 'I can totally kill this bitch with my pool cue'. Seriously. Not even sledgehammers or supersledges or whatever. Pool cues. There were Fiends running up to Ronnie trying to kill the woman in T-51b power armor by whapping at her with pool cues. Even after Ronnie demonstrated the Punch of Kill Everything on them repeatedly.
Say no to chems, kids.
Anyway, after leaving a significant portion of the population of Fiend territory in small green puddles or lumpy reddish heaps- and picking over the corpses, because a weak stomach means you pass up quite a lot of ammo- Janice and Ronnie finally had enough breathing room to head for the remains of a school under which the enterprising souls at Vault-Tec had built Vault 3. I don't know what Vault 3's role in the Great SOSHUL EXPERIMENT LOL had been and I don't know that Janice particularly cared at that point. What she did know was that the people inside the Vault weren't in radio contact with the people outside, because when she tapped the Brotherhood's default 'open the door dammit' code into the panel to get Vault 3's door open, she was greeted not by gunfire but by a grouchy Fiend door guard who demanded to know her business and whether or not she had a death wish.
At which point Janice proved to be the favored one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, because she blurted out, "I'm a Great Khan courier and I'm here on business, I've got chems for your boss."
And the guard believed her.
Ronnie and Janice more or less just strolled on down through Vault 3 following the guard's directions and found themselves in Motor-Runner's throne room without any kind of difficulty. Apparently he'd set up a big chair with some ugly decorations in the maintenance sector, and he and his vicious ugly dogs were just chillin'. Janice sold him some chems she'd taken off the Fiends she'd killed outside and got him to tell her about Vault 3. Apparently the people who'd lived there had been really trusting and hadn't bothered to set up a defense system or lock the door, so the Fiends strolled in under Motor-Runner's leadership because hey, he needed somewhere to settle his people. She might've had more sympathy for their needs if his people hadn't been quite so prone to killin' and rapin', but she kept it to herself. After that he more or less waved her away, telling her to come back when she had more. She wandered off to search the rest of the maintenance area and found the ventilation system parts, and then she thought about things for a bit. More specifically, she thought about how Motor-Runner didn't seem to have anybody else at all in his room other than his dogs, and how coked-up everybody else in the room was, and about the size of that bounty on his head. And about how she had a Stealth Boy on her person, as well as a frag grenade she'd been saving for a special occasion.
Fun fact #2: if you are currently invisible and your armored friend is nowhere in sight, the Fiends of Vault 3 are so chemically messed up that even if they hear an explosion from their boss's throne room, so long as you don't do anything to tip them off to the fact that there is an invisible person in the room, they won't think to connect the sudden explosion and the fact that they didn't see you leave. Janice held very still until it stopped raining Motor-Runner and the guards outside his room stopped running around looking for the source of the kaboom. Then, very slowly and very casually, she and Ronnie stroooooolled on out of Motor-Runner's throne room and made their way out of the Vault.
Whereupon the surface Fiends started attacking them again, but eh, whatevs. Janice had taken the opportunity to pick up Motor-Runner's weapon of choice in addition to his helmet and the Vault filtration stuff, so it seemed like a good time to test it out. Sadly, chainsaws are not quite as awesome to wield as they are to behold in action, at least not if you haven't been trained with them. Janice wound up having to drop the dang chainsaw and go back to the Q-35, which might have been a bit expensive to use, but at least had a reasonable rate of fire and didn't do that creepy bucking thing when it hit bone.
Camp McCarran was very happy to see Ronnie again, especially since she dropped Motor-Runner's helmet right in their lap. (Or tried to. There's a bug in the game where you get rewarded for his helmet but don't ever get it taken out of your inventory.) They were also thrilled that apparently she'd rescued someone named Bryce Anders. Turned out they'd sent a ranger to kill Motor-Runner and he'd never come back, and somehow he'd managed to escape when she did her killin'. Apparently that's a bug too, but Janice wasn't about to complain about stuff that made these guys happy. The NCR had been pretty decent to her so far.
She and Ronnie set out after that to make their way back to Hidden Valley, where Senior Knight Lorenzo did the Secret Brotherhood Dance of Joy at a) getting the filtration system parts and b) not being responsible for two more helpful souls' deaths. He sent Ronnie and Janice to see Elder McNamara and tell him the good news. Elder McNamara was far too proper to do a dance of joy, but he did thank Janice sincerely and tell her she'd shamed him into realizing that his actions in declaring the lockdown after HELIOS One were motivated by fear rather than prudence. Between what an outsider had done to help them, and the scouts' reports indicating that the NCR wasn't nearly as powerful of a threat as he'd feared, he felt it was entirely reasonable to end the lockdown and resume normal operations again. Oh, and Janice was welcome to come and go as she pleased, he was that grateful to her. Also, she could use the Brotherhood safehouse they had on the surface, off to the northeast. Which was actually cooler than it sounded, because it meant a guaranteed safe place to sleep and someone who was guaranteed to be able to repair her stuff in an otherwise rather vendor-barren part of the map.
Janice thanked him and headed out of his office, then pulled Ronnie aside and said that she felt it was time for them to part ways. OOCly, this was because I had another companion I wanted to try running around with now. ICly, this was because Janice figured she'd helped the Brotherhood as far as she was able, and she'd just gotten a radio message on her Pip-Boy that ED-E's repairs were done and she could come pick him up, and she really didn't want to take the chance of Ronnie suggesting she bring ED-E to the bunker for a look-over. Ronnie pouted a bit, but eventually said she'd go back to the 188 trading post. Janice thought it was a little weird that she didn't just, y'know, stay in the bunker now that it was free and open again, but... whatever. At least she knew where to find Ronnie if she ever went looking for her again.
With that in mind, she set out for northern New Vegas, and the local headquarters of the Followers of the Apocalypse.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-14 11:03 pm (UTC)I found the Ranger who'd gotten injured and holed himself up in a little room he'd booby-trapped the entrance to, so I patched him and agreed to help him get out.
Then I unlocked the door behind him and he took out his knife and charged into a group of Fiends waiting on the other side. Easy come, easy go.
I did manage to rescue that group of prisoners, though. Well, I went and stole the key to their cell but when I returned half of them were already and sneaking their way to the exit. With guards standing two feet away failing to react to the prison break.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 03:54 pm (UTC)I dunno, maybe they thought it'd relax people who had access to too many guns?