Notes From New Vegas 33
Feb. 5th, 2012 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 33: Well, That Was... Something...
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had left the Sierra Madre with a song in her heart, two bars of gold in her backpack, and a lot of nasty red guck in her lungs. I honestly have no idea how she was supposed to get back to the Mojave from the Madre, since according to the game she was essentially dragged there by Dog and God while unconscious, and since Dog and God had been unified into one personality (who, for lack of a canon name, I will call Lambert) that no longer had access to most memories of the Courier or of the Madre, the idea that she got back the way she came is right out. Dean Domino might theoretically have assisted her in getting back, since he'd traveled the area before the War, but- well. New Vegas and its add-ons hark back to the original Fallout games in that they have somebody tell you what happened to everybody you interacted with in a significant way after you get to the end. After the Dead Money stuff ended, the game informed me that none of the other survivors of the Sierra Madre knew what had happened to Janice until much, much later- apparently their collar signals just went dead, and they eventually decided to go their separate ways. So Dean didn't show Janice the way back, and Lambert didn't, and Christine didn't even leave the casino- she figured that if one pants-on-head crazy man found the place and tried to use it to 'cleanse' the Mojave, another might do the same thing. Especially since she and Janice and the others had gone to so much trouble to kill the defenses.
Thus, Janice was left to her own devices to get back. The game deposited her back in the abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker where she'd been kidnapped from in the first place. Because it amuses me, I'm saying that Janice celebrated her escape from the casino by jamming a bunch of chips into the last vending machine she saw and getting spectacularly drunk, and that while she was drunk she realized that even after a doctor's bag put them back on her formerly crippled limbs still hurt like the dickens so she took some Buffout because she remembered that Med-X and liquor don't mix very well, and the combination of STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE and booze got her all the way back to the bunker intact. And possibly with a Legion dog hat to show for her trouble, because they don't have lampshades in the Mojave to wear when you're in wild and crazy mode.
Anyway, she woke up in the bunker and swore not to do that again. She poked around the bunker and found a set of Father Elijah's robes in a footlocker, which were not all that bad in terms of condition but which had a lingering stench of crazy. She also found that the radio in the bunker was broadcasting Christine's goodbye and her hope that the Courier could take the opportunity to let go and begin again. She turned the radio off, because frankly, letting go meant never thinking of the Madre again if she could help it- except for one thing. There was a Sierra Madre vending machine in the bunker, and it worked pretty well. Like, it took her chips- and it accepted clothing and cigarettes at the same stuff-for-chips rate as before, so she now had a steady source of the materials for things like stimpaks and doctor's bags, without having to pick the plants and find the syringes and scrounge up the scalpels. So that was good. Elijah's notes on the terminal in the same room weren't quite as interesting, but they did mention Veronica, so she copied the note files to her Pip-Boy and figured hey, might as well go find Ronnie and apologize for ditching her, right? It wasn't that far to the 188.
Off she went! Hooray, sunshine! Hooray, non-killer air! Hooray, scorpions! Okay, not so much hooray scorpions per se but hey, they sure beat Ghost People! Really, by the time Janice reached the 188 she was practically skipping. What a wonderful place the ordinary homicidal horrors of the Mojave were by comparison with that hell-pit of a casino!
Anyway, she reached the 188 and found Veronica there looking bored. The reunion was a little uncomfortable, since a lot of it amounted to 'hi, uh, remember your mentor who you said was closer to you than your own parents? Well, he's not coming back, like, ever. No, trust me on this', but it went pretty much okay. Ronnie checked Elijah's final message and said it mostly amounted to crazy old man ramblings, but there was some information there she thought she could benefit from, although she wasn't exactly sure how to explain it.... (This was code for 'each Companion in the game bestows a diferent perk while they're with you, and Veronica's original perk of being a portable workbench was kind of lame, so we're adding some extra combat mojo to her via an awkward plot device'.) Ronnie cheerfully agreed to come along with Janice again, so they went to look for ED-E. Because really, why not travel with a flying robot? And why not check out the upgrades the Followers of the Apocalypse had made? They'd seemed like nice people, so Janice was kind of curious as to just how much they could have done to the 'bot to make him more dangerous.
ED-E wasn't in Vegas, though. For some reason the little guy had gone back to Primm, where they'd originally found him and brought him back online. Well, whatever, Janice wasn't gonna complain. Primm wasn't such a bad place to visit. Especialy not when you didn't have to account for exactly how you got there- Fast Travel is a blessing, truly, especially for someone who didn't want to take the chance of another mountain pass with a deathclaw in it. ED-E made happy noises when Janice showed up and immediately rejoined her and Ronnie. The people of Primm were doing pretty well, too, although Deputy Beagle was all pouty about the NCR having taken over the place. Yeah, well, guess what, pal, you had your chance. If you'd either taken over as sheriff or pointed Janice at a better candidate, that wouldn't have happened to you. Stupid Beagle.
Janice sold off her radscorpion venom glands while she was in town, since Ruby Nash was still making those venom casseroles, and then sat down to have a chat with Ronnie and ED-E. Well, with Ronnie. ED-E mostly just beeped. After some discussion they decided to go and finish the job they'd promised the Boomers they'd do. You remember the Boomers, right? The Tribe of Jamie Hyneman, holed up at Nellis AFB? Yeah. They'd promised them they'd try to help get the crashed bomber in Lake Mead up to the surface. Janice was, you may recall, very big on not being shot in the head again. Given that the Boomers had artillery, if they ever found out she was out there and not following up on her promise, Janice figured she'd wind up with the ultimate being-shot-in-the-head. So, Lake Mead time it was.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #1: there are absolutely no safe approaches to the lake except for the one that passes through an NCR military encampment. There's cazadors on the northern shore- you remember cazadors, right? Tarantula hawk wasps as big as Janice. Yeah. Along the southern shore you stand a very good chance of running into lakelurks. These are essentially the unholy offspring of Lord Voldemort and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. If you ever watched the movie Cowboys And Aliens, the aliens in that movie look very much like lakelurks. They just don't have the sonic scream attack- oh, yes, the lakelurks can claw your face off but mostly they scream at you at a frequency fit to mangle your bones. Given that Ronnie has a penchant for punching things, Janice was very pleased to discover that the Followers had upgraded ED-E with a zapgun capable of disintegrating things at a significant distance- before Ronnie could get in the way. True, the sonics could still hit her at a distance, and they could do a lot of damage to the robot, but it wasn't nearly as bad.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #2: lakelurk meat has a fairly high nutritional value in the game. Apparently they're mutated from pre-War snapping turtles or something. Janice didn't know, and she didn't care. The things walked on two feet and had hands and almost-human faces. The idea of hacking one of them up for dinner raised faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too many memories of hunting Ghost People, so those 'lurk corpses stayed exactly where they fell. Desert practicality takes a back seat to mental health sometimes.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #3: there's a platform in the middle of it where you can haul yourself out for a bit and gather some supplies and a copy of the Wasteland Survival Guide. Theoretically. Because fun fact #4 is that THE DAMN THING IS COVERED IN LAKELURKS. And unless you use binoculars or a sniper scope from shore, you find out about them when they start screaming into the water as you swim towards the platform. The water doesn't slow their screams down any, did you know that? Yeah. Also you can't use a weapon while you're swimming, so your only choices are to dive out of the way or to try to scramble up onto the platform and shoot them or otherwise attack them from there. And Ronnie isn't a very fast swimmer, and ED-E doesn't always find a proper path to the middle of the lake, so you might just be fighting six lakelurks ALONE. That didn't quite happen to Janice- ED-E eventually managed to start shooting 'lurks before they could kill her- but Janice really didn't react well to the whole sorry mess.
At least there weren't 'lurks around the bomber when she finally put the rebreather on and dove. Just some fish, and some plant life, and an actual freakin' World War 2 bomber, propellers and all, sitting there on the bottom of the lake like it'd cruised to a landing and inconveniently forgotten to put down its landing gear on approach. Janice sort of stared at it for a while, then shrugged and swam down under the wings to attach the ballast the Boomers had given her. If they had some way of making the two hundred year old airplane work, good for them, and if not, nobody could say she hadn't tried.
NB for those of y'all who've come in from playing Fallout 3: the Mojave region wasn't nearly as much of a target as the Washington, DC area. Unlike in the Capital Wasteland, a lot of the water in the Mojave isn't even a little bit radioactive. Janice did her genes no damage on this dive.
She managed to haul herself out on the shore and found a moderately safe spot. Only moderately, because there were very obvious cazador nests on the side of a nearby building even if she didn't see the giant wasps of horrible pain. Not like she was planning to be there long, though, so she powered up the detonator the crazy artillery people gave her, picked a suitable range, and pulled the trigger. At which point the lake ERUPTED in bomber- not bomber parts, bomber. The plane came up intact. It just did so with a FWOOOOOM of water and splashing in all possible directions. It eventually settled down to bobbing on the water, so Janice figured hey, she'd done her duty. Time to get away from the horrifying wasp zone and gather up Ronnie and ED-E and report back to the Boomers.
The Boomers were just tickled pink to see her again, and even happier to hear that the Lady in the Water had been raised. Loyal told her they'd be distracting the NCR by shelling some irrelevant locations in outer Las Vegas while they sent some of the Nellis robot contingent down to haul the bomber out of the water and bring it back to the base, and thanked her for making an old man's fondest dream come true. Mother Pearl practically adopted her into the tribe and told her that if she ever needed any favors from the crazy splodey go boom people, she'd make sure it happened, and then gave her a Boomer flightsuit and helmet and wished earnestly that she not blow herself up. Janice and Ronnie and ED-E then left, and Janice felt pretty good about herself, at least for a while. What the heck, she'd done a favor for some people who completely didn't know her at all. Maybe she should go do some favors for the people who'd given ED-E enough weaponry to get her past the lakelurks alive, too. Just to be properly grateful.
Slight problem: helping the Followers meant doing stuff in Freeside. Donating medical supplies was fine, Lord knew Janice had plenty of those to spare now that she could turn cigarettes and clothing into chips and then turn chips into chems, but actually finding relapsed addicts and persuading them to get treatment for their problems, or finding an ongoing source of chems and supplies for the Followers that would be more reliable than one vending machine... that required spending time on the street in Freeside. And very nearly every time Janice set foot in the Freeside streets, someone tried to kill her. Usually someone armed with a baseball bat or a really bad gun, and dressed, at most, in cheap Brahmin-skin clothing. Don't get me wrong, Janice could take care of herself, and Ronnie still had the Punch of Kill Everything and ED-E's zap gun was even more dangerous to idiot humans with no armor than it had been to the lakelurks. But it was incredibly disturbing to know that if she set foot openly on the street, Janice was going to have to kill someone, or else risk being shot in the head. Again. A girl can only take so much of that, and of being smarmed at by the owner and operator of the Atomic Wrangler Casino when she goes to talk to him about medication supplies for the Followers. Janice finally decided that she needed to do something else as far from Vegas as humanly possible. Screw couriering. Screw Benny. Screw Platinum Chips. She just wanted out. So when the radio signal came up on her Pip-Boy indicating that the Happy Trails Caravan Company was looking for people to hire on for a trip to Utah, to re-establish trade and communication with the people of somewhere called New Canaan... well. Utah sounded just about far enough. Janice packed her bags with as many stimpaks, microfusion cells, and food products as she could carry and set out for the meet-up point. Who knew? Maybe they'd hire Ronnie and ED-E too.
Ahahahaha. Yeah. Right. Excuse me while I wipe the tears o' snickering from my eye. It's not that easy, Janice. It's never that easy. NEVER.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had left the Sierra Madre with a song in her heart, two bars of gold in her backpack, and a lot of nasty red guck in her lungs. I honestly have no idea how she was supposed to get back to the Mojave from the Madre, since according to the game she was essentially dragged there by Dog and God while unconscious, and since Dog and God had been unified into one personality (who, for lack of a canon name, I will call Lambert) that no longer had access to most memories of the Courier or of the Madre, the idea that she got back the way she came is right out. Dean Domino might theoretically have assisted her in getting back, since he'd traveled the area before the War, but- well. New Vegas and its add-ons hark back to the original Fallout games in that they have somebody tell you what happened to everybody you interacted with in a significant way after you get to the end. After the Dead Money stuff ended, the game informed me that none of the other survivors of the Sierra Madre knew what had happened to Janice until much, much later- apparently their collar signals just went dead, and they eventually decided to go their separate ways. So Dean didn't show Janice the way back, and Lambert didn't, and Christine didn't even leave the casino- she figured that if one pants-on-head crazy man found the place and tried to use it to 'cleanse' the Mojave, another might do the same thing. Especially since she and Janice and the others had gone to so much trouble to kill the defenses.
Thus, Janice was left to her own devices to get back. The game deposited her back in the abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker where she'd been kidnapped from in the first place. Because it amuses me, I'm saying that Janice celebrated her escape from the casino by jamming a bunch of chips into the last vending machine she saw and getting spectacularly drunk, and that while she was drunk she realized that even after a doctor's bag put them back on her formerly crippled limbs still hurt like the dickens so she took some Buffout because she remembered that Med-X and liquor don't mix very well, and the combination of STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE and booze got her all the way back to the bunker intact. And possibly with a Legion dog hat to show for her trouble, because they don't have lampshades in the Mojave to wear when you're in wild and crazy mode.
Anyway, she woke up in the bunker and swore not to do that again. She poked around the bunker and found a set of Father Elijah's robes in a footlocker, which were not all that bad in terms of condition but which had a lingering stench of crazy. She also found that the radio in the bunker was broadcasting Christine's goodbye and her hope that the Courier could take the opportunity to let go and begin again. She turned the radio off, because frankly, letting go meant never thinking of the Madre again if she could help it- except for one thing. There was a Sierra Madre vending machine in the bunker, and it worked pretty well. Like, it took her chips- and it accepted clothing and cigarettes at the same stuff-for-chips rate as before, so she now had a steady source of the materials for things like stimpaks and doctor's bags, without having to pick the plants and find the syringes and scrounge up the scalpels. So that was good. Elijah's notes on the terminal in the same room weren't quite as interesting, but they did mention Veronica, so she copied the note files to her Pip-Boy and figured hey, might as well go find Ronnie and apologize for ditching her, right? It wasn't that far to the 188.
Off she went! Hooray, sunshine! Hooray, non-killer air! Hooray, scorpions! Okay, not so much hooray scorpions per se but hey, they sure beat Ghost People! Really, by the time Janice reached the 188 she was practically skipping. What a wonderful place the ordinary homicidal horrors of the Mojave were by comparison with that hell-pit of a casino!
Anyway, she reached the 188 and found Veronica there looking bored. The reunion was a little uncomfortable, since a lot of it amounted to 'hi, uh, remember your mentor who you said was closer to you than your own parents? Well, he's not coming back, like, ever. No, trust me on this', but it went pretty much okay. Ronnie checked Elijah's final message and said it mostly amounted to crazy old man ramblings, but there was some information there she thought she could benefit from, although she wasn't exactly sure how to explain it.... (This was code for 'each Companion in the game bestows a diferent perk while they're with you, and Veronica's original perk of being a portable workbench was kind of lame, so we're adding some extra combat mojo to her via an awkward plot device'.) Ronnie cheerfully agreed to come along with Janice again, so they went to look for ED-E. Because really, why not travel with a flying robot? And why not check out the upgrades the Followers of the Apocalypse had made? They'd seemed like nice people, so Janice was kind of curious as to just how much they could have done to the 'bot to make him more dangerous.
ED-E wasn't in Vegas, though. For some reason the little guy had gone back to Primm, where they'd originally found him and brought him back online. Well, whatever, Janice wasn't gonna complain. Primm wasn't such a bad place to visit. Especialy not when you didn't have to account for exactly how you got there- Fast Travel is a blessing, truly, especially for someone who didn't want to take the chance of another mountain pass with a deathclaw in it. ED-E made happy noises when Janice showed up and immediately rejoined her and Ronnie. The people of Primm were doing pretty well, too, although Deputy Beagle was all pouty about the NCR having taken over the place. Yeah, well, guess what, pal, you had your chance. If you'd either taken over as sheriff or pointed Janice at a better candidate, that wouldn't have happened to you. Stupid Beagle.
Janice sold off her radscorpion venom glands while she was in town, since Ruby Nash was still making those venom casseroles, and then sat down to have a chat with Ronnie and ED-E. Well, with Ronnie. ED-E mostly just beeped. After some discussion they decided to go and finish the job they'd promised the Boomers they'd do. You remember the Boomers, right? The Tribe of Jamie Hyneman, holed up at Nellis AFB? Yeah. They'd promised them they'd try to help get the crashed bomber in Lake Mead up to the surface. Janice was, you may recall, very big on not being shot in the head again. Given that the Boomers had artillery, if they ever found out she was out there and not following up on her promise, Janice figured she'd wind up with the ultimate being-shot-in-the-head. So, Lake Mead time it was.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #1: there are absolutely no safe approaches to the lake except for the one that passes through an NCR military encampment. There's cazadors on the northern shore- you remember cazadors, right? Tarantula hawk wasps as big as Janice. Yeah. Along the southern shore you stand a very good chance of running into lakelurks. These are essentially the unholy offspring of Lord Voldemort and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. If you ever watched the movie Cowboys And Aliens, the aliens in that movie look very much like lakelurks. They just don't have the sonic scream attack- oh, yes, the lakelurks can claw your face off but mostly they scream at you at a frequency fit to mangle your bones. Given that Ronnie has a penchant for punching things, Janice was very pleased to discover that the Followers had upgraded ED-E with a zapgun capable of disintegrating things at a significant distance- before Ronnie could get in the way. True, the sonics could still hit her at a distance, and they could do a lot of damage to the robot, but it wasn't nearly as bad.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #2: lakelurk meat has a fairly high nutritional value in the game. Apparently they're mutated from pre-War snapping turtles or something. Janice didn't know, and she didn't care. The things walked on two feet and had hands and almost-human faces. The idea of hacking one of them up for dinner raised faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too many memories of hunting Ghost People, so those 'lurk corpses stayed exactly where they fell. Desert practicality takes a back seat to mental health sometimes.
Fun fact about Lake Mead #3: there's a platform in the middle of it where you can haul yourself out for a bit and gather some supplies and a copy of the Wasteland Survival Guide. Theoretically. Because fun fact #4 is that THE DAMN THING IS COVERED IN LAKELURKS. And unless you use binoculars or a sniper scope from shore, you find out about them when they start screaming into the water as you swim towards the platform. The water doesn't slow their screams down any, did you know that? Yeah. Also you can't use a weapon while you're swimming, so your only choices are to dive out of the way or to try to scramble up onto the platform and shoot them or otherwise attack them from there. And Ronnie isn't a very fast swimmer, and ED-E doesn't always find a proper path to the middle of the lake, so you might just be fighting six lakelurks ALONE. That didn't quite happen to Janice- ED-E eventually managed to start shooting 'lurks before they could kill her- but Janice really didn't react well to the whole sorry mess.
At least there weren't 'lurks around the bomber when she finally put the rebreather on and dove. Just some fish, and some plant life, and an actual freakin' World War 2 bomber, propellers and all, sitting there on the bottom of the lake like it'd cruised to a landing and inconveniently forgotten to put down its landing gear on approach. Janice sort of stared at it for a while, then shrugged and swam down under the wings to attach the ballast the Boomers had given her. If they had some way of making the two hundred year old airplane work, good for them, and if not, nobody could say she hadn't tried.
NB for those of y'all who've come in from playing Fallout 3: the Mojave region wasn't nearly as much of a target as the Washington, DC area. Unlike in the Capital Wasteland, a lot of the water in the Mojave isn't even a little bit radioactive. Janice did her genes no damage on this dive.
She managed to haul herself out on the shore and found a moderately safe spot. Only moderately, because there were very obvious cazador nests on the side of a nearby building even if she didn't see the giant wasps of horrible pain. Not like she was planning to be there long, though, so she powered up the detonator the crazy artillery people gave her, picked a suitable range, and pulled the trigger. At which point the lake ERUPTED in bomber- not bomber parts, bomber. The plane came up intact. It just did so with a FWOOOOOM of water and splashing in all possible directions. It eventually settled down to bobbing on the water, so Janice figured hey, she'd done her duty. Time to get away from the horrifying wasp zone and gather up Ronnie and ED-E and report back to the Boomers.
The Boomers were just tickled pink to see her again, and even happier to hear that the Lady in the Water had been raised. Loyal told her they'd be distracting the NCR by shelling some irrelevant locations in outer Las Vegas while they sent some of the Nellis robot contingent down to haul the bomber out of the water and bring it back to the base, and thanked her for making an old man's fondest dream come true. Mother Pearl practically adopted her into the tribe and told her that if she ever needed any favors from the crazy splodey go boom people, she'd make sure it happened, and then gave her a Boomer flightsuit and helmet and wished earnestly that she not blow herself up. Janice and Ronnie and ED-E then left, and Janice felt pretty good about herself, at least for a while. What the heck, she'd done a favor for some people who completely didn't know her at all. Maybe she should go do some favors for the people who'd given ED-E enough weaponry to get her past the lakelurks alive, too. Just to be properly grateful.
Slight problem: helping the Followers meant doing stuff in Freeside. Donating medical supplies was fine, Lord knew Janice had plenty of those to spare now that she could turn cigarettes and clothing into chips and then turn chips into chems, but actually finding relapsed addicts and persuading them to get treatment for their problems, or finding an ongoing source of chems and supplies for the Followers that would be more reliable than one vending machine... that required spending time on the street in Freeside. And very nearly every time Janice set foot in the Freeside streets, someone tried to kill her. Usually someone armed with a baseball bat or a really bad gun, and dressed, at most, in cheap Brahmin-skin clothing. Don't get me wrong, Janice could take care of herself, and Ronnie still had the Punch of Kill Everything and ED-E's zap gun was even more dangerous to idiot humans with no armor than it had been to the lakelurks. But it was incredibly disturbing to know that if she set foot openly on the street, Janice was going to have to kill someone, or else risk being shot in the head. Again. A girl can only take so much of that, and of being smarmed at by the owner and operator of the Atomic Wrangler Casino when she goes to talk to him about medication supplies for the Followers. Janice finally decided that she needed to do something else as far from Vegas as humanly possible. Screw couriering. Screw Benny. Screw Platinum Chips. She just wanted out. So when the radio signal came up on her Pip-Boy indicating that the Happy Trails Caravan Company was looking for people to hire on for a trip to Utah, to re-establish trade and communication with the people of somewhere called New Canaan... well. Utah sounded just about far enough. Janice packed her bags with as many stimpaks, microfusion cells, and food products as she could carry and set out for the meet-up point. Who knew? Maybe they'd hire Ronnie and ED-E too.
Ahahahaha. Yeah. Right. Excuse me while I wipe the tears o' snickering from my eye. It's not that easy, Janice. It's never that easy. NEVER.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 04:07 am (UTC)Everything I know about the Las Vegas region is the result of fandom research. Either for something to do with Fallout New Vegas, or for Transformers fanfic, since I'm assuming the Bayverse is an alternate Earth where Mission City exists where our world has Las Vegas. (22 miles from Hoover Dam and that many buildings? You couldn't put two cities within that radius and have enough water to supply them both. So it's either Mission City or Las Vegas, not both.)