Notes From New Vegas 35
Feb. 20th, 2012 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 35: Yes Sir, Okay Sir, Please Don't Look At Me Like That Sir
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was in Follows-Chalk's company, making her way to the camp of the Dead Horses tribe and the home of the legendary Burned Man and former second-in-command of the Legion, Joshua Graham. It was not exactly a trip she wanted to take, but hell, she was stuck in Utah all by herself with only enough supplies to get part of the way back home, and if she wanted to get any assistance finishing the trip she was going to have to trade with the tribe and any surviving New Canaanites among them. And that meant meeting the scary man out of local legend, the Angriest Mormon Alive.
I should note I got kind of grouchy when the Dead Money DLC started off by informing me that of COURSE I had heard of the Sierra Madre Casino, that EVERYBODY had heard the legends, bla dee bla dee bla. Up until that DLC started the only mention of the Madre I could think of in the game had been a couple of posters in the wreckage somewhere up in the northern part of the map- and I only knew about those because of other playthroughs, not because Janice had ever been there herself. To suddenly be told that there had been this grand casino and that everybody told stories about it made me immediately go all contrary and arbitrarily declare that no, Janice had never heard of it, neener neener. Didn't happen like that with the Burned Man, though. Not sure why. Possibly because of 'THE BURNED MAN WALKS' graffiti being all over the wreckage at the Divide- at the time I first put Janice through that area I only really noticed the graffiti about COURIER SIX but the Burned Man stuff was there too. Possibly because unlike the Madre, Graham's story was connected to something extant and well-known in the game- the Legion. Possibly because Jed Masterson didn't assume that Janice knew the story- the DLC intro gave the legend as much for the PC as for the player. Whatever. All I know is, I didn't get nearly as grumpy about Joshua as I did about the casino.
Anyway, Janice still had to make it to Joshua first. Which was a little tricky, because she kept getting distracted. By the green growing things, sometimes. By the river, too, which was a good deal nicer than Lake Mead. Oh, and by the fact that all of a sudden water fell from the sky.
Seriously. As she and Follows-Chalk made their way along, it started raining. It's the first time I've seen weather in a Fallout game anywhere- even in the simulated Alaska missions in Operation Anchorage, it doesn't actively snow. Real actual water fell from the sky, splashing all over the place and not burning or hurting or anything... Janice just kinda had to goggle at that. And at the fish, which were all over the place in the river. Like the ones in Lake Mead, only more adorable because she was wading through the river up to her waist and she could see the fish around her instead of swimming past them. Follows-Chalk did have to warn her to watch out for the traps in the water, because his people set them to keep the White Legs out of the Eastern Virgin river canyon, so she paid more attention after that. Didn't bother stopping to spring the traps, mind. Sure, it would have provided XP, but Follows-Chalk had said they were his people's defenses so it wouldn't have been fair.
A lot of the canyon walls had rock paintings on them. Follows-Chalk said they were to commemorate victories over other tribes, and that there had been a lot more of them made since Joshua came. Janice couldn't help but notice a bunch of them were paintings of a heavily bandaged face with red smudgy eyes, a fact which distracted her from the fact that the canyon walls were also an odd glowy green. Maybe if her Geiger counter had gone off she'd have noticed, but eh. Her attention was elsewhere, and it was just reflection anyway.
At one point they passed a cave, and Janice asked to get out of the river and check the cave out, because she was starting to get tired of being soaked below the waist. Follows-Chalk had no objections, so into the cave they BLAM! ... ow. Whoever had been in there last had set up a tripwire for whoever might try to follow them. And rigged up a couple of shotguns to aim directly at the entrance; if Janice hadn't been wearing that casino armor she would have been dead. Oh, and set up a bunch of frag mines inside the cave... okay then. Clearly this place had belonged to somebody paranoid as all hell. Janice was just about to say 'we should turn around and leave' when she realized they'd come into an area with a substantial amount of camping equipment, and a campfire, and a workbench, and somebody's computer terminal hooked up to an ancient, ancient generator or something. No sign of the resident, though, so she checked on the computer and found a number of diary entries from someone very, very bitter-sounding- someone who had survived the Great War in that cave, and didn't know why they, of all people, had managed to live when everybody else had gone down.
... ya-heh.
Well, whoever they were, they weren't here any more unless they'd become a ghoul. And nobody had been into the cave in a long time, because there weren't bones or anything up near the traps. So whoever they were, they didn't need the stuff in the cave any more. Janice went through all the stuff she found, extracted the more useful things- microfusion cells, fusion batteries, small energy cells,water, a weapon repair kit, Rad-Away- and hurried on out of there.
It wasn't much farther after that. Follows-Chalk cheerfully pointed out his people's camp and said Joshua would be up ahead in Angel Cave. The Dead Horse camp itself was pretty neat, as far as tribal communities went. Geckoes roasting on an open fire, Brahmin and Bighorner skulls all over for decoration, clay pots, gecko skins staked out for tanning, people practicing wrestling or other combat forms, people doing daily work... not bad, overall. Most of them didn't do more than glance her way, so she was a little surprised when one of the Dead Horses inside Angel Cave addressed her in some kind of gibberish that sounded vaguely like pidgin German to me- she addressed Janice as 'Owslandr', according to the subtitles. The only part she understood was the last two words, 'Joshua Graham', so she took a stab at it and politely asked where he was, because she was looking for him. The Dead Horse woman nodded and called her a smart Owslandr and said Joshua Graham was in the highest part of the cave. And to show respect, 'because Joshua is greatest warrior and if you no show respect he show you thunder and fire'.
Janice might have been the favored one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, but she knew better than to be a gratuitous smartass. She thanked the Dead Horse and continued on her way instead of making any stupid comments. Sure enough, once they got all the way up to the highest point of the cave, Janice and Follows-Chalk found him- wearing Salt Lake City police department riot gear, over more bandages than Janice had ever seen, busily assembling lots and lots and lots of clips of ammunition. Thunder and fire, right there. He kept right on working as he told Janice, "We should've given you a better welcome on your first visit to Zion, but the White Legs beat us to it." Apparently they'd been expecting a courier, just not her... and Janice had his sympathy. And he said he prayed for the safety of all good people who came to Zion, even Gentiles, but that we couldn't expect God to do all the work.
Janice didn't really know what to say to that. He was pretty calm and very polite, but there was this sort of undercurrent of something dangerous in his voice, so she figured she'd better fall back on maximum manners and minimum fuss. Rather than ask him what the hell a Gentile was, she said she'd come with the Happy Trails Caravan Company in the hopes of trading with New Canaan, and left it at that. He nodded and informed her that he had bad news: New Canaan was destroyed, all because of the White Legs and Caesar. The White Legs, it seemed, wanted to join the Legion (which sounded weird to Janice but hey, she wasn't a psychopathic murderin' tribal lunatic, what did she know). Caesar's price of admission was that they destroy the New Canaanites, almost certainly because of Joshua. There was good news, though, namely that they could help her- another New Canaanite was still alive and had made maps of the area that would make it easier for her to get out. Bad news- they couldn't help her right now.
Now, normally she'd have been inclined to say 'of course not, that would be too easy', but... well, she'd been thinking on her way there. The Mojave was not a fun place to be, and people there wanted to shoot her in the head. That whole platinum chip thing was out of her hands; why should she care what became of it? Her obligation to the package ended with the part where she was buried in a shallow grave. What did she have to get back to in the Mojave other than OH RIGHT Veronica would probably worry. If nothing else, she owed Ronnie the courtesy of not thinking Janice had died and abandoned her and the robot... well, anyway, the point was, she didn't exactly feel compelled to hurry to get back to New Vegas, not when this place was about a dozen times nicer by just about any objective standard other than the existence of toilets.
So, yeah, why hurry to leave? Sure, the wildlife here wanted to kill her and there were the lunatics with the machine guns, but the wildlife in the Mojave mostly wanted to kill her and there were still Fiends wandering around in Outer Vegas, and other raider types farther south, and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man. At least around here there was more water and things didn't smell as bad. She asked what Joshua needed her to do, and he said he wanted... prewar tools. Seriously, just navigation gear to help them find their ways outside Zion- compasses and things like that. The Dead Horses and the Sorrows apparently considered prewar buildings taboo- the Sorrows, especially. who believed in a spirit that punished them for trespassing in the caves. (Considering what Janice had run into when she hit that tripwire, she couldn't entirely blame them.) Since Follows-Chalk was young enough and smart enough to ignore the taboo marks the Sorrows put up on prewar places, he could help her.
Janice felt about brave enough at that point to start asking questions, and Joshua didn't seem to object. When she brought up his comment about another courier he shrugged and said Caesar knew he was still alive, because Caesar had sent plenty of agents after him and he had killed them all. Except maybe one. Who probably should've been dead but maybe he wasn't. BECAUSE THAT'S NOT CREEPY IN THE SLIGHTEST, MR. BURNED MAN SIR.
*cough*
Sorry. Janice kept on going after that, mostly because she doubted she'd ever work up the nerve to talk to this guy again, and found out about the interesting guns. Apparently all the local tribes have signature weapons, like the ones the White Legs raided from an armory near Spanish Fork and the war clubs of the Dead Horses. The .45 Auto had been designed by one of Joshua's tribe four hundred years ago originally (approx. 1881), so it was something the New Canaanites opted to keep. She found out other things, too- the White Legs had no real survival skills, but scavenged and stole; the tribes had developed languages from those of whatever 'res' their ancestors had come from and from the languages of long ago stranded tourists; the Sorrows were hunters but not warriors and that's why the Dead Horses were there; Joshua was the Dead Horse warleader but mostly the tribe ran itself, another New Canaanite named Daniel was the spiritual leader and he was up with the Sorrows elsewhere in Zion; etc. Joshua was also very firm about his own people being a tribe:
"We may wear more clothes and understand tech better, but we're a tribe- it's a family thing. When the walls come down you always have family, and the family always has tribe. New Canaan is destroyed, but the tribe lives on."
Not sure if that's purely Joshua's point of view or something derived from his religion or what, but it did kind of stand out a bit.
One can only ask a man questions for so long while he quietly does things with stacks and stacks of ammo and pistols, though. Janice opted to stop before she asked anything particularly personal (like, say, "is there a reason you're still bandaged from head to foot all these years after the fact?"), and grabbed Follows-Chalk. It was time to go see about those Bighorners, and then to go find the supplies Daniel needed.
Yeah, I know, this Note wasn't a particularly humorous or entertaining one, but that's gonna happen once in a while. Hopefully next time will be an improvement.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was in Follows-Chalk's company, making her way to the camp of the Dead Horses tribe and the home of the legendary Burned Man and former second-in-command of the Legion, Joshua Graham. It was not exactly a trip she wanted to take, but hell, she was stuck in Utah all by herself with only enough supplies to get part of the way back home, and if she wanted to get any assistance finishing the trip she was going to have to trade with the tribe and any surviving New Canaanites among them. And that meant meeting the scary man out of local legend, the Angriest Mormon Alive.
I should note I got kind of grouchy when the Dead Money DLC started off by informing me that of COURSE I had heard of the Sierra Madre Casino, that EVERYBODY had heard the legends, bla dee bla dee bla. Up until that DLC started the only mention of the Madre I could think of in the game had been a couple of posters in the wreckage somewhere up in the northern part of the map- and I only knew about those because of other playthroughs, not because Janice had ever been there herself. To suddenly be told that there had been this grand casino and that everybody told stories about it made me immediately go all contrary and arbitrarily declare that no, Janice had never heard of it, neener neener. Didn't happen like that with the Burned Man, though. Not sure why. Possibly because of 'THE BURNED MAN WALKS' graffiti being all over the wreckage at the Divide- at the time I first put Janice through that area I only really noticed the graffiti about COURIER SIX but the Burned Man stuff was there too. Possibly because unlike the Madre, Graham's story was connected to something extant and well-known in the game- the Legion. Possibly because Jed Masterson didn't assume that Janice knew the story- the DLC intro gave the legend as much for the PC as for the player. Whatever. All I know is, I didn't get nearly as grumpy about Joshua as I did about the casino.
Anyway, Janice still had to make it to Joshua first. Which was a little tricky, because she kept getting distracted. By the green growing things, sometimes. By the river, too, which was a good deal nicer than Lake Mead. Oh, and by the fact that all of a sudden water fell from the sky.
Seriously. As she and Follows-Chalk made their way along, it started raining. It's the first time I've seen weather in a Fallout game anywhere- even in the simulated Alaska missions in Operation Anchorage, it doesn't actively snow. Real actual water fell from the sky, splashing all over the place and not burning or hurting or anything... Janice just kinda had to goggle at that. And at the fish, which were all over the place in the river. Like the ones in Lake Mead, only more adorable because she was wading through the river up to her waist and she could see the fish around her instead of swimming past them. Follows-Chalk did have to warn her to watch out for the traps in the water, because his people set them to keep the White Legs out of the Eastern Virgin river canyon, so she paid more attention after that. Didn't bother stopping to spring the traps, mind. Sure, it would have provided XP, but Follows-Chalk had said they were his people's defenses so it wouldn't have been fair.
A lot of the canyon walls had rock paintings on them. Follows-Chalk said they were to commemorate victories over other tribes, and that there had been a lot more of them made since Joshua came. Janice couldn't help but notice a bunch of them were paintings of a heavily bandaged face with red smudgy eyes, a fact which distracted her from the fact that the canyon walls were also an odd glowy green. Maybe if her Geiger counter had gone off she'd have noticed, but eh. Her attention was elsewhere, and it was just reflection anyway.
At one point they passed a cave, and Janice asked to get out of the river and check the cave out, because she was starting to get tired of being soaked below the waist. Follows-Chalk had no objections, so into the cave they BLAM! ... ow. Whoever had been in there last had set up a tripwire for whoever might try to follow them. And rigged up a couple of shotguns to aim directly at the entrance; if Janice hadn't been wearing that casino armor she would have been dead. Oh, and set up a bunch of frag mines inside the cave... okay then. Clearly this place had belonged to somebody paranoid as all hell. Janice was just about to say 'we should turn around and leave' when she realized they'd come into an area with a substantial amount of camping equipment, and a campfire, and a workbench, and somebody's computer terminal hooked up to an ancient, ancient generator or something. No sign of the resident, though, so she checked on the computer and found a number of diary entries from someone very, very bitter-sounding- someone who had survived the Great War in that cave, and didn't know why they, of all people, had managed to live when everybody else had gone down.
... ya-heh.
Well, whoever they were, they weren't here any more unless they'd become a ghoul. And nobody had been into the cave in a long time, because there weren't bones or anything up near the traps. So whoever they were, they didn't need the stuff in the cave any more. Janice went through all the stuff she found, extracted the more useful things- microfusion cells, fusion batteries, small energy cells,water, a weapon repair kit, Rad-Away- and hurried on out of there.
It wasn't much farther after that. Follows-Chalk cheerfully pointed out his people's camp and said Joshua would be up ahead in Angel Cave. The Dead Horse camp itself was pretty neat, as far as tribal communities went. Geckoes roasting on an open fire, Brahmin and Bighorner skulls all over for decoration, clay pots, gecko skins staked out for tanning, people practicing wrestling or other combat forms, people doing daily work... not bad, overall. Most of them didn't do more than glance her way, so she was a little surprised when one of the Dead Horses inside Angel Cave addressed her in some kind of gibberish that sounded vaguely like pidgin German to me- she addressed Janice as 'Owslandr', according to the subtitles. The only part she understood was the last two words, 'Joshua Graham', so she took a stab at it and politely asked where he was, because she was looking for him. The Dead Horse woman nodded and called her a smart Owslandr and said Joshua Graham was in the highest part of the cave. And to show respect, 'because Joshua is greatest warrior and if you no show respect he show you thunder and fire'.
Janice might have been the favored one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, but she knew better than to be a gratuitous smartass. She thanked the Dead Horse and continued on her way instead of making any stupid comments. Sure enough, once they got all the way up to the highest point of the cave, Janice and Follows-Chalk found him- wearing Salt Lake City police department riot gear, over more bandages than Janice had ever seen, busily assembling lots and lots and lots of clips of ammunition. Thunder and fire, right there. He kept right on working as he told Janice, "We should've given you a better welcome on your first visit to Zion, but the White Legs beat us to it." Apparently they'd been expecting a courier, just not her... and Janice had his sympathy. And he said he prayed for the safety of all good people who came to Zion, even Gentiles, but that we couldn't expect God to do all the work.
Janice didn't really know what to say to that. He was pretty calm and very polite, but there was this sort of undercurrent of something dangerous in his voice, so she figured she'd better fall back on maximum manners and minimum fuss. Rather than ask him what the hell a Gentile was, she said she'd come with the Happy Trails Caravan Company in the hopes of trading with New Canaan, and left it at that. He nodded and informed her that he had bad news: New Canaan was destroyed, all because of the White Legs and Caesar. The White Legs, it seemed, wanted to join the Legion (which sounded weird to Janice but hey, she wasn't a psychopathic murderin' tribal lunatic, what did she know). Caesar's price of admission was that they destroy the New Canaanites, almost certainly because of Joshua. There was good news, though, namely that they could help her- another New Canaanite was still alive and had made maps of the area that would make it easier for her to get out. Bad news- they couldn't help her right now.
Now, normally she'd have been inclined to say 'of course not, that would be too easy', but... well, she'd been thinking on her way there. The Mojave was not a fun place to be, and people there wanted to shoot her in the head. That whole platinum chip thing was out of her hands; why should she care what became of it? Her obligation to the package ended with the part where she was buried in a shallow grave. What did she have to get back to in the Mojave other than OH RIGHT Veronica would probably worry. If nothing else, she owed Ronnie the courtesy of not thinking Janice had died and abandoned her and the robot... well, anyway, the point was, she didn't exactly feel compelled to hurry to get back to New Vegas, not when this place was about a dozen times nicer by just about any objective standard other than the existence of toilets.
So, yeah, why hurry to leave? Sure, the wildlife here wanted to kill her and there were the lunatics with the machine guns, but the wildlife in the Mojave mostly wanted to kill her and there were still Fiends wandering around in Outer Vegas, and other raider types farther south, and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man. At least around here there was more water and things didn't smell as bad. She asked what Joshua needed her to do, and he said he wanted... prewar tools. Seriously, just navigation gear to help them find their ways outside Zion- compasses and things like that. The Dead Horses and the Sorrows apparently considered prewar buildings taboo- the Sorrows, especially. who believed in a spirit that punished them for trespassing in the caves. (Considering what Janice had run into when she hit that tripwire, she couldn't entirely blame them.) Since Follows-Chalk was young enough and smart enough to ignore the taboo marks the Sorrows put up on prewar places, he could help her.
Janice felt about brave enough at that point to start asking questions, and Joshua didn't seem to object. When she brought up his comment about another courier he shrugged and said Caesar knew he was still alive, because Caesar had sent plenty of agents after him and he had killed them all. Except maybe one. Who probably should've been dead but maybe he wasn't. BECAUSE THAT'S NOT CREEPY IN THE SLIGHTEST, MR. BURNED MAN SIR.
*cough*
Sorry. Janice kept on going after that, mostly because she doubted she'd ever work up the nerve to talk to this guy again, and found out about the interesting guns. Apparently all the local tribes have signature weapons, like the ones the White Legs raided from an armory near Spanish Fork and the war clubs of the Dead Horses. The .45 Auto had been designed by one of Joshua's tribe four hundred years ago originally (approx. 1881), so it was something the New Canaanites opted to keep. She found out other things, too- the White Legs had no real survival skills, but scavenged and stole; the tribes had developed languages from those of whatever 'res' their ancestors had come from and from the languages of long ago stranded tourists; the Sorrows were hunters but not warriors and that's why the Dead Horses were there; Joshua was the Dead Horse warleader but mostly the tribe ran itself, another New Canaanite named Daniel was the spiritual leader and he was up with the Sorrows elsewhere in Zion; etc. Joshua was also very firm about his own people being a tribe:
"We may wear more clothes and understand tech better, but we're a tribe- it's a family thing. When the walls come down you always have family, and the family always has tribe. New Canaan is destroyed, but the tribe lives on."
Not sure if that's purely Joshua's point of view or something derived from his religion or what, but it did kind of stand out a bit.
One can only ask a man questions for so long while he quietly does things with stacks and stacks of ammo and pistols, though. Janice opted to stop before she asked anything particularly personal (like, say, "is there a reason you're still bandaged from head to foot all these years after the fact?"), and grabbed Follows-Chalk. It was time to go see about those Bighorners, and then to go find the supplies Daniel needed.
Yeah, I know, this Note wasn't a particularly humorous or entertaining one, but that's gonna happen once in a while. Hopefully next time will be an improvement.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 10:13 pm (UTC)