Notes From New Vegas 28
Jan. 7th, 2012 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 28: Look At Your Life, Look At Your Choices
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had gathered up Dog and God, Dean Domino, and a scarred mute bald lady who her Pip-Boy told her was named Christine. The Floating Head of Father Jerkface informed them all that they were going to break into the Madre casino by triggering the special original gala event that had been scheduled hundreds of years ago. There'd be lights and firework and music in the streets and he wasn't going to bother being condescendingly cheerful at them because he hated them all. Okay, no, he didn't say that last part but he didn't need to. Janice could smell the disdain coming off him even though she was talking to his hologram. All she had to do was make the events happen by getting her three companions into their appropriate places and doing their particular tasks, and then doing hers, and then the real work would begin.
Said the man who hadn't had to staple his arm and leg back into shape after being viciously brutalized by an exploding radio.
Janice kind of hated him a little more than usual at that point and lost track of what he was saying. by the time she was listening again he was yammering about how "we're not plundering the Sierra Madre, we're PLUNDERING HISTORY! We're taking from the Old World itself!". All together with me, now: what do you mean we, white man? Janice made a point of flipping off the hologram as soon as she felt it was safe, and then turned around and told God they were going to go get him settled first. This was mostly so that he'd have less time to bitch at her about how morally reprehensible wanting a vacation had been. It didn't work, since in between the chittering of the Ghost People and the OH HELL WHEN DID THEY START THROWING EXPLOSIVE GAS CANISTERS and the spears and things he informed her "curiosity and greed- same thing," but hey, she tried. And she did a lot of Ghost People stabbing as they went, as well as gathering up all the duct tape and scrap metal and wrenches and such she could find. Anyplace that had this many ancient bits of workman's crap lying around would have a workbench sooner or later, and then she could put together some really sweet weapon repair kits and not only fix the crappy holorifle Elijah had given her but recharge its spent microfusion cells. Not that the spears she took from the dead Ghost People weren't pretty dangerous weapons in their own right, but there was something very comforting at looking at Ghost People through a sniper scope instead of OH JESUS BEAR TRAP FIST TO THE FACE.
She and God made it to a high-walled courtyard with a bunch of power switches in it and some kind of diagram. Janice was under the impression she was supposed to flip them herself and leave God to guard it, but God informed her that he could do the switches himself, assuming he actually wanted to stay. Problem was, the instant the gala started, the Ghost People would go berserk- all those fireworks, all that noise over the speakers, and so on. Granted, he could close the gates and hold off the Ghost People spears through the gates, but there was the little problem of Dog. The other personality would probably emerge under the stress of all the explosions and the spears and everything else, and given that Dog was driven entirely by hunger and fear, he'd probably burst out of the gates and then everything would go to hell. If she wanted him to stay in the courtyard and not mess up the switching, she was going to have to bring him something to eat to keep Dog satiated and quiet. Something specific. Something fresh.
Which is how Janice found herself stumping unhappily through the streets of the area (it had some kind of Spanish name and whatever it was SHE NO LONGER CARED), shouting "Hey, Ghost People! Come and get it! Big tasty bait!" and hoping that the ones who attacked her had really fat thighs. Seriously, she had to leave God where he was and go kill two Ghost People and bring him big chunks of their meat. Killing them, fine, whatever, that was self defense, but the butchering part... it was a serious 'look at your life, look at your choices' moment. Janice kinda decided about then that if she made it through all this alive she was gonna hire somebody else to do everything meat-related for her and never eat anything recognizable as muscle again.
Thankfully, she was able to get God his Dog chow (I'm so sorry, it had to be said) and sprint like hell before either personality sat down to tuck in. The next time she needed food she'd dump a couple fistfuls of chips into the nearest vending machine and get herself some nice artificially artificial macaroni and cheese and a bottle of some kind of booze or something. Much safer that way.
(At this point I have to object to something about the vending machines. If you use them to buy food items, you get exactly the same food items you would anywhere else in the Mojave. Exactly the same. As in, you take several rads from eating them. Given that Father Jerkface claims at the start of the DLC that you lost all your stuff because casino security/the Cloud/the Fairy of Suck removes anything with the faintest trace of radioactive contamination and sends it back home, why are the machines reassembling matter into an irradiated form? Also, how the hell did your Pip-Boy avoid being contaminated? Seriously, both of those need to be fixed on an OOC level.)
Anyway, she made it back to the fountain and rounded up Dean, who was unimpressed with Father Jerkface, both as a person and as a hologram. Apparently he liked a 'Vera' hologram better- Janice figured that was probably the holo of a woman in a slinky dress that appeared when the floating head of Father Jerkface vanished. She thought that was just the Madre's mascot or something, but no, apparently she'd been a real person once. Vera Keyes. She'd been a star before the Bomb and had a good voice and good legs, which was not something Janice really needed to hear from a guy with neither skin nor nose remaining. Sinclair, the man who built the Sierra Madre, had a liking for her once- Dean said he'd introduced them and Sinclair had built the Madre for her somehow. Janice thought about this, and about the weird entries in the medical area's terminal records, and decided the conversation was going into an area she really and truly did not want to hear about. Fortunately Dean was happy to talk about other things, like the way he figured the gala event would put such a drain on the casino's power supply that the security systems would be shut down long enough to let them in. And about how the casino's emergency frequency signal had been hooked up to an advertising recording of Vera's voice instead of to a real emergency recording- apparently they were going to switch it around or something later, only the Bomb fell first and so the casino had been advertising on the radio for the last two hundred years. Good Lord.
At that point Janice remembered she had given God something to eat, which meant the mutant's digestive system was gonna be going to town, which meant that the most disgusting clock in the world was ticking. No more time for exposition- she had to get Dean to his place, which was... somewhere else with a Spanish name, nowhere near God's position, and OF COURSE completely crawling with Ghost People. In the process of killin' her way through her chittering scrambling enemies Janice found out by mistake that she could tune her Pip-Boy to the frequencies of everyone else's collars and listen in, which she didn't really see the point of. She was, after all, right next to one of the other collars, and Christine was mute, so that left God. She'd gone to a lot of trouble not to hear him whinge at her and saw no point in listening further. She did manage to tune in on Father Jerkface's signal and heard him muttering to himself, and at that point she switched the radio off because wasn't her life disturbing enough already.
(I imagine she could probably have gotten some interesting background information or something if she'd kept listening or if she'd questioned Dean further, but honestly, the whole environment was just so grim and oppressive that I couldn't see her wanting to know the full story. No matter how enlightening it would've been to the player.)
By the time she and Dean got to the ghoul's position she found out a number of things that she really did not ever want to know. One was that there were radios and speakers that caused collar issues that couldn't be destroyed or shut down; you just had to outrun them. Another was that Ghost People were really, really good at setting traps, both the 'explode your sorry ass clear into a wall' kind and the 'GIVE ME BACK MY LEG YOU BITCH' kind. And yet another was that she had NOWHERE NEAR enough chips to buy what she needed from the vending machines. And then, ONLY THEN, did she find out that Dean was getting the jibblies about the Ghost People and flat-out refused to stay at his post and hold the broken wires together unless Janice could guarantee his safety and no, he wouldn't go buy her medical supplies to staple her leg back on and wonderglue her head back together, either. OR loan her a needle of Med-X to at least kill the pain. No, she'd have to go find some way to turn on the local security holograms before he'd do a damn thing. ARRRRGH. HATE. So. much. Hate.
Long story short, she eventually found the hologram control terminals. One was nearby, and that was nice. One was NOT nearby, and required going into an otherwise sealed building and finding her way to an area with a door opening into another area entirely with the stairs leading to the control terminal in it- and then limping back to Dean's post. Apparently each terminal controlled exactly one hologram for some moronic reason. Having your vital points of control in areas completely unrelated to each other is very very nice when you are talking about the President and the Vice President, but kind of sucks when you are trying to reach both points and not die. At least Dean was willing to thank her for her troubles, but that still left her bleeding and crippled and concussed and hating her life more than she had imagined physically possible as she limped her way back towards Christine and the fountain.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had gathered up Dog and God, Dean Domino, and a scarred mute bald lady who her Pip-Boy told her was named Christine. The Floating Head of Father Jerkface informed them all that they were going to break into the Madre casino by triggering the special original gala event that had been scheduled hundreds of years ago. There'd be lights and firework and music in the streets and he wasn't going to bother being condescendingly cheerful at them because he hated them all. Okay, no, he didn't say that last part but he didn't need to. Janice could smell the disdain coming off him even though she was talking to his hologram. All she had to do was make the events happen by getting her three companions into their appropriate places and doing their particular tasks, and then doing hers, and then the real work would begin.
Said the man who hadn't had to staple his arm and leg back into shape after being viciously brutalized by an exploding radio.
Janice kind of hated him a little more than usual at that point and lost track of what he was saying. by the time she was listening again he was yammering about how "we're not plundering the Sierra Madre, we're PLUNDERING HISTORY! We're taking from the Old World itself!". All together with me, now: what do you mean we, white man? Janice made a point of flipping off the hologram as soon as she felt it was safe, and then turned around and told God they were going to go get him settled first. This was mostly so that he'd have less time to bitch at her about how morally reprehensible wanting a vacation had been. It didn't work, since in between the chittering of the Ghost People and the OH HELL WHEN DID THEY START THROWING EXPLOSIVE GAS CANISTERS and the spears and things he informed her "curiosity and greed- same thing," but hey, she tried. And she did a lot of Ghost People stabbing as they went, as well as gathering up all the duct tape and scrap metal and wrenches and such she could find. Anyplace that had this many ancient bits of workman's crap lying around would have a workbench sooner or later, and then she could put together some really sweet weapon repair kits and not only fix the crappy holorifle Elijah had given her but recharge its spent microfusion cells. Not that the spears she took from the dead Ghost People weren't pretty dangerous weapons in their own right, but there was something very comforting at looking at Ghost People through a sniper scope instead of OH JESUS BEAR TRAP FIST TO THE FACE.
She and God made it to a high-walled courtyard with a bunch of power switches in it and some kind of diagram. Janice was under the impression she was supposed to flip them herself and leave God to guard it, but God informed her that he could do the switches himself, assuming he actually wanted to stay. Problem was, the instant the gala started, the Ghost People would go berserk- all those fireworks, all that noise over the speakers, and so on. Granted, he could close the gates and hold off the Ghost People spears through the gates, but there was the little problem of Dog. The other personality would probably emerge under the stress of all the explosions and the spears and everything else, and given that Dog was driven entirely by hunger and fear, he'd probably burst out of the gates and then everything would go to hell. If she wanted him to stay in the courtyard and not mess up the switching, she was going to have to bring him something to eat to keep Dog satiated and quiet. Something specific. Something fresh.
Which is how Janice found herself stumping unhappily through the streets of the area (it had some kind of Spanish name and whatever it was SHE NO LONGER CARED), shouting "Hey, Ghost People! Come and get it! Big tasty bait!" and hoping that the ones who attacked her had really fat thighs. Seriously, she had to leave God where he was and go kill two Ghost People and bring him big chunks of their meat. Killing them, fine, whatever, that was self defense, but the butchering part... it was a serious 'look at your life, look at your choices' moment. Janice kinda decided about then that if she made it through all this alive she was gonna hire somebody else to do everything meat-related for her and never eat anything recognizable as muscle again.
Thankfully, she was able to get God his Dog chow (I'm so sorry, it had to be said) and sprint like hell before either personality sat down to tuck in. The next time she needed food she'd dump a couple fistfuls of chips into the nearest vending machine and get herself some nice artificially artificial macaroni and cheese and a bottle of some kind of booze or something. Much safer that way.
(At this point I have to object to something about the vending machines. If you use them to buy food items, you get exactly the same food items you would anywhere else in the Mojave. Exactly the same. As in, you take several rads from eating them. Given that Father Jerkface claims at the start of the DLC that you lost all your stuff because casino security/the Cloud/the Fairy of Suck removes anything with the faintest trace of radioactive contamination and sends it back home, why are the machines reassembling matter into an irradiated form? Also, how the hell did your Pip-Boy avoid being contaminated? Seriously, both of those need to be fixed on an OOC level.)
Anyway, she made it back to the fountain and rounded up Dean, who was unimpressed with Father Jerkface, both as a person and as a hologram. Apparently he liked a 'Vera' hologram better- Janice figured that was probably the holo of a woman in a slinky dress that appeared when the floating head of Father Jerkface vanished. She thought that was just the Madre's mascot or something, but no, apparently she'd been a real person once. Vera Keyes. She'd been a star before the Bomb and had a good voice and good legs, which was not something Janice really needed to hear from a guy with neither skin nor nose remaining. Sinclair, the man who built the Sierra Madre, had a liking for her once- Dean said he'd introduced them and Sinclair had built the Madre for her somehow. Janice thought about this, and about the weird entries in the medical area's terminal records, and decided the conversation was going into an area she really and truly did not want to hear about. Fortunately Dean was happy to talk about other things, like the way he figured the gala event would put such a drain on the casino's power supply that the security systems would be shut down long enough to let them in. And about how the casino's emergency frequency signal had been hooked up to an advertising recording of Vera's voice instead of to a real emergency recording- apparently they were going to switch it around or something later, only the Bomb fell first and so the casino had been advertising on the radio for the last two hundred years. Good Lord.
At that point Janice remembered she had given God something to eat, which meant the mutant's digestive system was gonna be going to town, which meant that the most disgusting clock in the world was ticking. No more time for exposition- she had to get Dean to his place, which was... somewhere else with a Spanish name, nowhere near God's position, and OF COURSE completely crawling with Ghost People. In the process of killin' her way through her chittering scrambling enemies Janice found out by mistake that she could tune her Pip-Boy to the frequencies of everyone else's collars and listen in, which she didn't really see the point of. She was, after all, right next to one of the other collars, and Christine was mute, so that left God. She'd gone to a lot of trouble not to hear him whinge at her and saw no point in listening further. She did manage to tune in on Father Jerkface's signal and heard him muttering to himself, and at that point she switched the radio off because wasn't her life disturbing enough already.
(I imagine she could probably have gotten some interesting background information or something if she'd kept listening or if she'd questioned Dean further, but honestly, the whole environment was just so grim and oppressive that I couldn't see her wanting to know the full story. No matter how enlightening it would've been to the player.)
By the time she and Dean got to the ghoul's position she found out a number of things that she really did not ever want to know. One was that there were radios and speakers that caused collar issues that couldn't be destroyed or shut down; you just had to outrun them. Another was that Ghost People were really, really good at setting traps, both the 'explode your sorry ass clear into a wall' kind and the 'GIVE ME BACK MY LEG YOU BITCH' kind. And yet another was that she had NOWHERE NEAR enough chips to buy what she needed from the vending machines. And then, ONLY THEN, did she find out that Dean was getting the jibblies about the Ghost People and flat-out refused to stay at his post and hold the broken wires together unless Janice could guarantee his safety and no, he wouldn't go buy her medical supplies to staple her leg back on and wonderglue her head back together, either. OR loan her a needle of Med-X to at least kill the pain. No, she'd have to go find some way to turn on the local security holograms before he'd do a damn thing. ARRRRGH. HATE. So. much. Hate.
Long story short, she eventually found the hologram control terminals. One was nearby, and that was nice. One was NOT nearby, and required going into an otherwise sealed building and finding her way to an area with a door opening into another area entirely with the stairs leading to the control terminal in it- and then limping back to Dean's post. Apparently each terminal controlled exactly one hologram for some moronic reason. Having your vital points of control in areas completely unrelated to each other is very very nice when you are talking about the President and the Vice President, but kind of sucks when you are trying to reach both points and not die. At least Dean was willing to thank her for her troubles, but that still left her bleeding and crippled and concussed and hating her life more than she had imagined physically possible as she limped her way back towards Christine and the fountain.
