Notes From New Vegas 29
Jan. 12th, 2012 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 29: I'm Gonna Have A Heart Attack And Die From That Surprise
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had gone to a great deal of trouble and put herself in a great deal of pain in order to get God and Dog, and also Dean Domino, to go to specific places and do specific things in order to appease the Floating Head of Father Jerkface. Of course she was going to have to move a third person into position, because otherwise Father Jerkface wouldn't have bothered with the synched exploding collars on everybody; he'd just have let somebody die, or left someone out of the fun to begin with. And of course the third person would be the hardest to deal with, because nothing says 'hey, you're going to die of killer air and a mutant's digestive system!' like the fact that your life and job now depend on winning at a game of Charades. So Janice did just about the only sensible thing possible: stumped over to the nearest Sierra Madre vending machine and started cramming cigarettes down its throat.
No, really. The Madre vending machines don't just spit out stuff for you. If you get the right code tapes for the machines, they let you turn in certain objects in exchange for chips. Mostly it's pre-war clothing (but not businesswear) and cigarettes, so once Janice got that freakin' ghoul off her figurative back, she made a point of going through any dressers, nightstands, closets, drawers, etc. that she could reach without her concussion making her vision go swimmy. Fortunately she had enough clothes and smokes to make a nice little heap of chips, and so she was able to patch up her head and other broken bits with freshly purchased doctor bags. More importantly, once she could see straight again, she could read up a bit on communicating with the mute- she'd found an issue of Today's Physician while she was scrounging- and pump some more chips into the machine for a package of Mentats. Mmm, Mentats. Sweet, sweet, intelligence-and-perception-enhancing, so-totally-worth-the-risk-of-addiction Mentats. Well. Totally worth the risk if you could avoid using any part of your shiny new boosted intellect to think in greater detail about how you and the others were totally boned, but, you know.
*ahem* THE POINT, I am getting to it. Janice snarfed down the Mentats and promised herself she wouldn't get all depressed over her situation, then went to talk to the scar-covered mute lady in the splodey-go-boom collar. Christine was examining the fountain at the time, specifically the hologram generator, and indicated she wanted a look at Janice's Pip-Boy. From there a string of one-sided conversation ensued in which Christine made obscure hand-wavey gestures and Janice made brilliant guesses as to what was being said. Yes, she thought Father Jerkface was using the Pip-Boy as a communications link to them. No, she didn't know where he was but she thought he was nearby. No, even if it would make communicating easier, she couldn't write; she'd had an injury that made that impossible. One that involved electricity and her head and some very unpleasant surgery. Yes, her voice could probably be fixed, but it would require the use of an autodoc and they gave her the bahoogies, so that wasn't gonna happen.
Turned out she actually had a reason for coming to the Madre that had nothing to do with pretty voices on the radio or the possibility of riches or being a big stupid egotistical chupacabra jerk. She managed to convey a symbol via gesture, something involving a circle with wings, and Janice managed to guess in return that she was indicating membership in the Brotherhood of Steel. One who was looking for Elijah, specifically, who was no mere jerk but who was in fact outright crazy. Which isn't to say Christine didn't think he was a jerk too; some sad faces and some finger gestures indicated that Elijah had at some point in the past been enough of a jerk to deliberately separate Christine from- "Your husband? ... okay, no. Wife? ... Girlfriend- no, more important than- your lover? Hooray, I win Charades again! ... sorry." Anyway, once that was cleared up Christine also indicated that once all of this was finished they could get their collars off and probably leave the whole stupid place, but it would be very hard for Janice to come back. And only Janice, because if Janice was reading the wigglefinger gestures correctly (it wasn't ASL, just impromptu gestures), Christine was here specifically to kill Elijah and then stay. Somebody had to protect the Madre, after all, because people might get hurt. Although Christine had to admit you couldn't protect the world from the world.
Boy howdy those were some damn fine Mentats.
*cough* anyway, Janice had to get Christine to an electrical switching station of some kind, one too complicated for either God or Dean to deal with. It was, quite naturally, on the other side of venomous air clouds and extremely well-armed Ghost People. At least Christine had some sweet combat mojo once Janice gave her some extra weapons and ammo. yeah, she still had to go up to the Ghost People and dismember the corpses, but you know what was great about that? Christine didn't want to eat them. Not even a little bit!
... look, that bit with Dog and God kinda got to her, okay?
So they made it through Cloud and Ghost People and up the stairs to the Puesta Del Sol Switching Station, where Janice cheerfully bypassed a HA HA YOU MUST FIND THREE TINY OBJECTS THAT COULD BE ANYWHERE fetch quest by thumping on a fusebox with her fist and shouting at it. (Repair skill check of 60. I choose to believe she intimidated the machine-spirits into doing their job.) She read some old computer terminal entries, shot up some potentially dangerous malfunctioning speakers, opened the door to the giant room of industrial pipes and horribly poisonous clouds of red cloudiness WHY WAS SHE NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT SURPRISED ANY MORE. At least nothing else was trying to kill them. That was in the next room, with the automated laser death turrets. Oh, and the speakers, there were speakers all over the place and she could only shoot about half of them. She had to find terminals to turn the others off. But hey, that was cool, right? They were off and she was able to get Christine to the room with the elevator to the central controls for the OF COURSE SHE WON'T GET IN THE ELEVATOR. OF COURSE.
I don't think Janice even bothered trying to discuss it with Christine. The instant Christine started making the 'I'm wigging out now' face Janice agreed to find another way to let her control the switching station and left at high speed. She was gonna need to find a nice private place to bang her head against the wall and scream in frustration.
Once she calmed down she found a key to some prewar supervisor's locker, and a note about how forgetful the guy had been. The locker wasn't too far away, and it turned out that even in 2077 people were the bane of their IT departments, because the supervisor had not only forgotten his stupid key, but had left his computer password written on a paper inside the locked locker. She made tearful gestures of thanks in the direction of the dead guy's stuff and headed back to the room with Christine and the elevator. Sure enough, Forgetful Jones' password let her transfer control of the central control room to a terminal in the area Christine was willing to stand around in. Christine made happy faces at not having to go into a small cramped room full of strange machines and gave Janice back all her stuff, since she wasn't in any danger down there and Janice had her own work to do.
Yeah, Janice was beginning to see why Father Jerkface had needed humans instead of robots for this. Didn't make her any happier, though, particularly since Jerkface immediately started yammering in her ear about how she had to get to the bell tower on the local churchlike building and trigger the official gala event from the controls there. Because it made SO MUCH SENSE to - well, actually, the tower did have a pretty good view of the whole area, so maybe it did make a little sense for a coordinator to have to sit up there. It'd make radioing people in the streets to do this, that or the other thing a little easier. Only, you know, you had to get up to the tower first. And while that might have been fine way back in the days before, there was a LOT of poison red cloud yuk in the air between the switching station and the churchy building. And there were a lot of Ghost People around, too. There were ALWAYS Ghost People. In the streets. In the wine cellars. In the various bunk rooms. In the supply room. In the funerary chapel with the long dead candles and the embalming fluid which turned out to be of no significance. Seriously, there were so many Ghost People I started wondering if they were really ghoul-type chemical mutants or if they'd figured out how to breed through those horrible suits they wore. Then I remembered how many people it took to run a place like Disneyworld without the visitors noticing and decided I could buy this.
(Side note: if you are not Janice, you can stop to read the terminals you find and learn that the Ghost People were various resort workers who had taken to wearing hazmat suits when the Cloud first manifested as an extremely dangerous gas leak. Only thing was, the hazmat suits were the only ones they could buy in large quantity at the time, and so were heavy and stiff and hard to make yourself understood in. And their seals corroded shut upon exposure to the Cloud, so people inside them had to be cut out with bizarrely sharp kitchen knives. But you would actually have to stop and read the terminals and find out what was going on. Janice just wanted to get the frak out of there. She's very much a 'But don't you want to know why you're killing him with ice magic?' 'BECAUSE HE IS IMMUNE TO FIRE' kind of Courier. Especially when her life depends on a chupacabra's digestive system.)
Anyway, Janice eventually managed to sneak, holorifle, and stabbity-stab her way up to the bell tower and signal everybody despite Father Jerkface yammering in her ear AGAIN. They did their part, she did hers, and WHEEEEE FIREWORKS! WHEEE MUSIC! WHEE GIANT SEARCHLIGHTS! WHEE OH SMEG THE GHOST PEOPLE. Apparently neither God nor Dean had been exaggerating. The entire square below was suddenly crawling with angry Ghost People, spears and gas bombs and all. About the only thing the angry mob lacked was torches.
Well, shouting "SAAANCTUARRRRRY!!!" was right out. And Janice did not have enough microfusion cells or explosives on her to battle her way through that. She did, however, have a little skill at moving quietly and enough health to deal with a few seconds in the extra-heavy Cloud areas, so once she got out of the bell tower she potshotted a few of them, hid from more of them, and ran like an extremely runny thing. Someone somewhere along the way had had a sick sense of humor and scrawled 'RUN RUN RUN' on the walls a lot, and someone else was just a sick sick excuse for a former human being now sealed forever into a hideous second-rate hazmat suit, because they'd rigged most of her path with bear traps. Especially in really Cloudy areas. And Janice was, yet again, out of doctor bags. Two hundred year old Pringles might help keep her on her feet in general, but food wasn't gonna get her out of this one unmangled.
I don't even remember how long it took our girl to make it out of there, but when she finally made it out of that part of the grounds and locked the door behind her she was all YOU'RE MY BESTEST FRIEND IN THE WHOLE WORLD, CORPSEY DEAD GUY at the first dismembered Ghost Person she found. Because it meant she'd already been through the area and killed enough Ghost People that the others had decided to regroup elsewhere and leave their deceased bro to his unfortunate fate. Oh, she ran into one or two of them along the way, but at enough distance that she could use the holorifle to take them down without her mangled leg getting involved, and nobody disturbed her while she crammed enough chips into the next vending machine to let her repair the remains of her leg.
(I leveled up at some point around here. One of the perks I was offered was Adamantium Skeleton, which reduces limb damage 50%. I seriously considered it for poor Janice but decided I couldn't justify her suddenly and spontaneously going through the Weapon X process in the middle of the Sierra Madre casino grounds. Maybe later.)
Once she had a leg worth the name Janice stumped back to the fountain, but Father Jerkface was nowhere in sight. She did consider trying to make a break for it, but her collar started making beeping noises as she approached the exit gate. So much for that. Might as well head over to the casino main gate and see what she could do about AUGH GOD UNCONSCIOUS AGAIN DAMMIT. Thank you so much, Father Jerkface.
We'll cover her waking up next time. It's kind of late where I am just now.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had gone to a great deal of trouble and put herself in a great deal of pain in order to get God and Dog, and also Dean Domino, to go to specific places and do specific things in order to appease the Floating Head of Father Jerkface. Of course she was going to have to move a third person into position, because otherwise Father Jerkface wouldn't have bothered with the synched exploding collars on everybody; he'd just have let somebody die, or left someone out of the fun to begin with. And of course the third person would be the hardest to deal with, because nothing says 'hey, you're going to die of killer air and a mutant's digestive system!' like the fact that your life and job now depend on winning at a game of Charades. So Janice did just about the only sensible thing possible: stumped over to the nearest Sierra Madre vending machine and started cramming cigarettes down its throat.
No, really. The Madre vending machines don't just spit out stuff for you. If you get the right code tapes for the machines, they let you turn in certain objects in exchange for chips. Mostly it's pre-war clothing (but not businesswear) and cigarettes, so once Janice got that freakin' ghoul off her figurative back, she made a point of going through any dressers, nightstands, closets, drawers, etc. that she could reach without her concussion making her vision go swimmy. Fortunately she had enough clothes and smokes to make a nice little heap of chips, and so she was able to patch up her head and other broken bits with freshly purchased doctor bags. More importantly, once she could see straight again, she could read up a bit on communicating with the mute- she'd found an issue of Today's Physician while she was scrounging- and pump some more chips into the machine for a package of Mentats. Mmm, Mentats. Sweet, sweet, intelligence-and-perception-enhancing, so-totally-worth-the-risk-of-addiction Mentats. Well. Totally worth the risk if you could avoid using any part of your shiny new boosted intellect to think in greater detail about how you and the others were totally boned, but, you know.
*ahem* THE POINT, I am getting to it. Janice snarfed down the Mentats and promised herself she wouldn't get all depressed over her situation, then went to talk to the scar-covered mute lady in the splodey-go-boom collar. Christine was examining the fountain at the time, specifically the hologram generator, and indicated she wanted a look at Janice's Pip-Boy. From there a string of one-sided conversation ensued in which Christine made obscure hand-wavey gestures and Janice made brilliant guesses as to what was being said. Yes, she thought Father Jerkface was using the Pip-Boy as a communications link to them. No, she didn't know where he was but she thought he was nearby. No, even if it would make communicating easier, she couldn't write; she'd had an injury that made that impossible. One that involved electricity and her head and some very unpleasant surgery. Yes, her voice could probably be fixed, but it would require the use of an autodoc and they gave her the bahoogies, so that wasn't gonna happen.
Turned out she actually had a reason for coming to the Madre that had nothing to do with pretty voices on the radio or the possibility of riches or being a big stupid egotistical chupacabra jerk. She managed to convey a symbol via gesture, something involving a circle with wings, and Janice managed to guess in return that she was indicating membership in the Brotherhood of Steel. One who was looking for Elijah, specifically, who was no mere jerk but who was in fact outright crazy. Which isn't to say Christine didn't think he was a jerk too; some sad faces and some finger gestures indicated that Elijah had at some point in the past been enough of a jerk to deliberately separate Christine from- "Your husband? ... okay, no. Wife? ... Girlfriend- no, more important than- your lover? Hooray, I win Charades again! ... sorry." Anyway, once that was cleared up Christine also indicated that once all of this was finished they could get their collars off and probably leave the whole stupid place, but it would be very hard for Janice to come back. And only Janice, because if Janice was reading the wigglefinger gestures correctly (it wasn't ASL, just impromptu gestures), Christine was here specifically to kill Elijah and then stay. Somebody had to protect the Madre, after all, because people might get hurt. Although Christine had to admit you couldn't protect the world from the world.
Boy howdy those were some damn fine Mentats.
*cough* anyway, Janice had to get Christine to an electrical switching station of some kind, one too complicated for either God or Dean to deal with. It was, quite naturally, on the other side of venomous air clouds and extremely well-armed Ghost People. At least Christine had some sweet combat mojo once Janice gave her some extra weapons and ammo. yeah, she still had to go up to the Ghost People and dismember the corpses, but you know what was great about that? Christine didn't want to eat them. Not even a little bit!
... look, that bit with Dog and God kinda got to her, okay?
So they made it through Cloud and Ghost People and up the stairs to the Puesta Del Sol Switching Station, where Janice cheerfully bypassed a HA HA YOU MUST FIND THREE TINY OBJECTS THAT COULD BE ANYWHERE fetch quest by thumping on a fusebox with her fist and shouting at it. (Repair skill check of 60. I choose to believe she intimidated the machine-spirits into doing their job.) She read some old computer terminal entries, shot up some potentially dangerous malfunctioning speakers, opened the door to the giant room of industrial pipes and horribly poisonous clouds of red cloudiness WHY WAS SHE NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT SURPRISED ANY MORE. At least nothing else was trying to kill them. That was in the next room, with the automated laser death turrets. Oh, and the speakers, there were speakers all over the place and she could only shoot about half of them. She had to find terminals to turn the others off. But hey, that was cool, right? They were off and she was able to get Christine to the room with the elevator to the central controls for the OF COURSE SHE WON'T GET IN THE ELEVATOR. OF COURSE.
I don't think Janice even bothered trying to discuss it with Christine. The instant Christine started making the 'I'm wigging out now' face Janice agreed to find another way to let her control the switching station and left at high speed. She was gonna need to find a nice private place to bang her head against the wall and scream in frustration.
Once she calmed down she found a key to some prewar supervisor's locker, and a note about how forgetful the guy had been. The locker wasn't too far away, and it turned out that even in 2077 people were the bane of their IT departments, because the supervisor had not only forgotten his stupid key, but had left his computer password written on a paper inside the locked locker. She made tearful gestures of thanks in the direction of the dead guy's stuff and headed back to the room with Christine and the elevator. Sure enough, Forgetful Jones' password let her transfer control of the central control room to a terminal in the area Christine was willing to stand around in. Christine made happy faces at not having to go into a small cramped room full of strange machines and gave Janice back all her stuff, since she wasn't in any danger down there and Janice had her own work to do.
Yeah, Janice was beginning to see why Father Jerkface had needed humans instead of robots for this. Didn't make her any happier, though, particularly since Jerkface immediately started yammering in her ear about how she had to get to the bell tower on the local churchlike building and trigger the official gala event from the controls there. Because it made SO MUCH SENSE to - well, actually, the tower did have a pretty good view of the whole area, so maybe it did make a little sense for a coordinator to have to sit up there. It'd make radioing people in the streets to do this, that or the other thing a little easier. Only, you know, you had to get up to the tower first. And while that might have been fine way back in the days before, there was a LOT of poison red cloud yuk in the air between the switching station and the churchy building. And there were a lot of Ghost People around, too. There were ALWAYS Ghost People. In the streets. In the wine cellars. In the various bunk rooms. In the supply room. In the funerary chapel with the long dead candles and the embalming fluid which turned out to be of no significance. Seriously, there were so many Ghost People I started wondering if they were really ghoul-type chemical mutants or if they'd figured out how to breed through those horrible suits they wore. Then I remembered how many people it took to run a place like Disneyworld without the visitors noticing and decided I could buy this.
(Side note: if you are not Janice, you can stop to read the terminals you find and learn that the Ghost People were various resort workers who had taken to wearing hazmat suits when the Cloud first manifested as an extremely dangerous gas leak. Only thing was, the hazmat suits were the only ones they could buy in large quantity at the time, and so were heavy and stiff and hard to make yourself understood in. And their seals corroded shut upon exposure to the Cloud, so people inside them had to be cut out with bizarrely sharp kitchen knives. But you would actually have to stop and read the terminals and find out what was going on. Janice just wanted to get the frak out of there. She's very much a 'But don't you want to know why you're killing him with ice magic?' 'BECAUSE HE IS IMMUNE TO FIRE' kind of Courier. Especially when her life depends on a chupacabra's digestive system.)
Anyway, Janice eventually managed to sneak, holorifle, and stabbity-stab her way up to the bell tower and signal everybody despite Father Jerkface yammering in her ear AGAIN. They did their part, she did hers, and WHEEEEE FIREWORKS! WHEEE MUSIC! WHEE GIANT SEARCHLIGHTS! WHEE OH SMEG THE GHOST PEOPLE. Apparently neither God nor Dean had been exaggerating. The entire square below was suddenly crawling with angry Ghost People, spears and gas bombs and all. About the only thing the angry mob lacked was torches.
Well, shouting "SAAANCTUARRRRRY!!!" was right out. And Janice did not have enough microfusion cells or explosives on her to battle her way through that. She did, however, have a little skill at moving quietly and enough health to deal with a few seconds in the extra-heavy Cloud areas, so once she got out of the bell tower she potshotted a few of them, hid from more of them, and ran like an extremely runny thing. Someone somewhere along the way had had a sick sense of humor and scrawled 'RUN RUN RUN' on the walls a lot, and someone else was just a sick sick excuse for a former human being now sealed forever into a hideous second-rate hazmat suit, because they'd rigged most of her path with bear traps. Especially in really Cloudy areas. And Janice was, yet again, out of doctor bags. Two hundred year old Pringles might help keep her on her feet in general, but food wasn't gonna get her out of this one unmangled.
I don't even remember how long it took our girl to make it out of there, but when she finally made it out of that part of the grounds and locked the door behind her she was all YOU'RE MY BESTEST FRIEND IN THE WHOLE WORLD, CORPSEY DEAD GUY at the first dismembered Ghost Person she found. Because it meant she'd already been through the area and killed enough Ghost People that the others had decided to regroup elsewhere and leave their deceased bro to his unfortunate fate. Oh, she ran into one or two of them along the way, but at enough distance that she could use the holorifle to take them down without her mangled leg getting involved, and nobody disturbed her while she crammed enough chips into the next vending machine to let her repair the remains of her leg.
(I leveled up at some point around here. One of the perks I was offered was Adamantium Skeleton, which reduces limb damage 50%. I seriously considered it for poor Janice but decided I couldn't justify her suddenly and spontaneously going through the Weapon X process in the middle of the Sierra Madre casino grounds. Maybe later.)
Once she had a leg worth the name Janice stumped back to the fountain, but Father Jerkface was nowhere in sight. She did consider trying to make a break for it, but her collar started making beeping noises as she approached the exit gate. So much for that. Might as well head over to the casino main gate and see what she could do about AUGH GOD UNCONSCIOUS AGAIN DAMMIT. Thank you so much, Father Jerkface.
We'll cover her waking up next time. It's kind of late where I am just now.
