Notes From New Vegas 36
Mar. 4th, 2012 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes For New Vegas 36: The Terminal Man
When last we saw our heroine, she had just successfully pulled through a meeting with the Angriest Mormon Alive, Joshua Graham, who wanted her to go with Follows-Chalk and find some prewar navigation tools to bring to his companion in the New Canaanite faith so that they could find their way once they left Zion Valley. Given that the last time a mysterious scary man gave her a mission it was Father Jerkface, and Father Jerkface had been insulting as all get-out and had tried to get her to kill the others he'd roped into his scheme, Janice kinda figured hey, she'd gotten off light here. Poke around someplace green and living and look for stuff that doesn't lead directly to anybody's horrible splodey death? Sounds like fun!
Not that she went straight to compass shopping, you understand. She'd promised Follows-Chalk that she'd help him with his tribe's Bighorner problem. For those of you who didn't see it in the earlier post, Janice's tribal companion had mentioned that the local Bighorner herd- you know, the giant sheep apparently designed by Mike "Hellboy" Mignola- had lost track of one of their babies. If somebody didn't find it and return it to the herd, the herd would either stampede through the Dead Horses camp or leave the area completely, and either one would be a problem for the tribe. Given that Joshua had indicated they were planning on evacuating soonish anyway, Janice briefly wondered if it was worth finding the calf, but eh. If the herd stampeded it would make pulling up stakes more difficult than it had to be. So, off into the mountains to see about finding that baby sheep.
It should be noted that Bighorners are roughly the size of horses, and that as the descendants of ordinary bighorn sheep they've got very good balance and footing on any kind of terrain you care to mention. They also get hostile if you get too close. And there are a lot of them in the area where you have to look for the baby. Janice had not taken the perk Animal Friend at any point, which amounts to 'if it ain't a giant bug or a horrible fire-breathing lizard from hell, it doesn't care that you're there', so she had to do a fair bit of sneaking and sweating before finding the baby and luring it back to its mama with banana yucca fruits. In the process, I'm pretty sure she got a Dead Horse tribal name. Follows-Chalk said he got his because as a junior scout he didn't really get to explore much on his own, just follow the chalk markings left by other Dead Horse scouts; Janice's, I'm almost certain, was Splatter-Waiting. Short for Splatter-Waiting-To-Happen, because good Lord did that girl come within millimeters of walking off every cliff imaginable when she was trying to evade angry Bighorners without killing them and cheesing off the herd even more.
She got the calf back to its momma and scurried away from the death sheep safely, thankfully. Eventually she and Follows-Chalk made it to a gorge where an old prewar bus had gone off the road long ago. Chalk commented that 'this is why your own two feet are better than any cart, whether it's pulled by critters or goes on its own'. Clearly he hadn't been paying the slightest bit of attention to Janice's performance among the Bighorners, but whatever. He also noted that there were skeletons in the bus, and that Joshua had said the skeletons were of scouts- although they looked awful small to him. And that there was an awful lot of that old stuff- electronics?- on the bus. When Janice managed to scootch down there and beat the snot out of the geckoes that were paddling around nearby (as I said, Animal Friend was not on her roster, so it wasn't so much gratuitous aggression as a very proactive form of NO EATING MY FACE), she found that he was right on both counts. There were lots of pieces of scrap electronics scattered around the bus, and lots of small skeletons- and lunchboxes, and Dinky the T-Rex toys, and other things. They'd been scouts, all right. Boy Scouts. One of them, or possibly the scoutmaster (Janice only found one adult-sized skeleton) had been carrying a compass, which was understandably a bit on the broken side after a crash landing and two hundred years of sitting in the wet. Fortunately, Janice had learned a great deal about repairing stuff in her travels, so she was able to coax it back into working order and impress Chalk with the idea of a device that could always tell where north was even if it couldn't see the stars. Huzzah, mission one accomplished, etc.
Mission two involved getting to the park's old general store and nearby ranger station to find a bunch of Li'l Scout lunchboxes. Regular ol' lunchboxes wouldn't do for some reason, so I'm guessing the Li'l Scout models were packed with survival gear or something. I know they had to go to the ranger station to find extra medical supplies. Janice was cool with this, but the thing was that this particular part of Zion happened to be less prone to geckoes than the area where the bus had crashed. What it was more prone to was green geckoes- the kind that spit venom at a distance- and yao guai. You know. Mutant grizzly bears. Possibly pack-living mutant grizzly bears since they tended to appear in groups of two or three. Pack-living mutant grizzly bears roughly the size of CARS. With a tendency to ignore quite a lot of vertical distance if it came to the shortest possible charging route between their current position and Janice's.
DEATH FROM ABOVE IS NOT A PHRASE THAT SHOULD BE ASSOCIATED WITH BEARS.
So, yeah, that part wasn't exactly Janice's idea of fun, and permanently set her personal definition of 'a walk in the park' to something on the order of 'a day of falling off rocks, being swarmed by giant mantises, and being HIT IN THE HEAD BY FALLING BEARS'. I cannot emphasize the bear thing enough. Janice developed a loathing for bears that rivaled Stephen Colbert's at that point. Given this fact I'm not entirely sure why she decided to start poking around in caves after finding those lunchboxes and supplies, except maybe to see if she could find bears while they were sleeping and kill them first. (Note: I do not endorse attempted genocide against real-world bears. Real-world bears are ordinary omnivorous predators with more of an interest in humans' garbage than humans themselves, and are generally pretty good about not leaping down ten feet of vertical drop for any reason whatsoever. Please do not take this as encouragement to do harm to bears; thanks to humans, they've got enough troubles to deal with as it is. Thank you.)
Anyway, point is, she and Chalk headed into a cave that had previously been marked as taboo for some reason. Chalk was thrilled, because he wanted to see the taboo places without getting yelled at by the other scouts. Janice, on the other hand, was extremely cautious. The cave didn't smell much like bear, possibly because it OW was pretty well stocked with JEEZ MY LEG traps and THAT WAS MY FAVORITE ARM specially rigged shotguns. Janice figured that meant there was something worthwhile on the other side, and she was right. Another well-supplied cave with a computer terminal and workbenches and such awaited. She patched herself and Chalk up and headed over to the terminal to check it out while she waited for the bleeding to stop.
It had notes from the same guy as last time, dated 2097-2101. Apparently somebody called 'the Coughers' were present in the area, but they'd finally left. Possibly because Terminal Man had spent ten months killing them, which he said they they deserved for some reason. Apparently before they left he ate their dead. Or they ate their own dead- SOMEBODY ate their dead, anyway. The wording was a little unclear. Either way, charming, really. One of them didn't make it out with the others, a woman who got stuck in a trap and called the others evil, children of the devil- they'd been sick from something they caught in their original vault. And according to her, he said, 'let's just say it was bad to be a woman in that group' and she didn't know how to live outside a Vault. Her name, it seemed, was Sylvie, and he felt sorry for her, so nobody got shot that day. By 2100, the notes said, she was pregnant, and he was 47 and terrified.... and by 2101, the baby hadn't been born because little Michael was a breech presentation and Terminal Man had steeled his nerves and performed an emergency C-section too late, one from which Sylvie had never woken up. The last line of that entry talked of suicide but Janice couldn't help but notice there were no bones in the cave...
Janice left after that, because that kind of thing just doesn't sit well no matter how you slice it. She and Chalk headed off down the other branch of the cave to see if they could find a shortcut to their next destination, a fishing lodge. Not... not so much. Definitely not so much with the shortcuts. More, um, more like large cavern full of SPITTING EVIL DEATH PLANTS AND KILLER GREEN MONSTER MEN OUT OF VAULT 22, WHAT THE SMEG. Seriously, the ding-dang things were all over the place. By the time Janice came down from her rampage I don't think there was a flat surface anywhere in the cavern that wasn't splattered with sap and bloodlike goo. Chalk said something about the spitters and green guys not being native to Zion but I'm not sure she cared. She just wanted OUT.
So, out they went. There were some nice views in the area when Janice insisted on climbing up high to get a good look around them, including an old, old radio tower. Chalk was very proud to be able to show that off and tell Janice about how Back When, folks used towers like that to actually talk to one another on the air. Not that it was working now, but hey, it had a good vantage point. So did the crashed airplane she spotted up on a particularly high spire, but she was never able to find her way up there and eventually gave up. If she couldn't get up there, she figured neither bears nor mutant green monster spore men could, so it probably didn't matter so much.
The fishing lodge itself was a pretty uneventful thing. There were maybe some geckoes or some mantises or something, nothing worth writing home about, and she and Chalk came away from that with walkie-talkies to keep the group together. I am not sure how a Boy Scout compass could be broken and in need of repair while walkie-talkies worked just fine after two hundred years. Possibly one of the aspects of the 1950s that persisted in the Fallout universe was 'made in Japan = crap', and the compass was a product of Japan while the walkie-talkies were made in the States. Who knows. The important thing is, they worked well enough that they would be of use to Daniel and his people.
So they went out of there and did some more scouting around Zion, just in case. There were critters, after all, and periodically there were White Legs- there'd been White Legs for some time, they just weren't worth mentioning. Eventually, Janice and Chalk found a side canyon of sorts where they were greeted by a volley of spit; it was the plants again. Quite a lot of them. Janice loaded up the ol' holorifle and started ashing every freakin' Audrey 2000 in sight. Turned out they'd found an encampment once used by people from Vault 22, a fact made plain by the note Janice found when she was searching a duffle bag for useful supplies. It began with 'BEWARE - A VENGEFUL SPIRIT STALKS THESE CANYONS' and went downhill from there. Given that she found an awful lot of old bones in the area that nobody had ever bothered to bury, and a number of mounds that looked kind of like graves, Janice kind of wondered what, exactly, the Vault 22 dwellers might have done other than treat their women badly. Maybe that line in the computer entry had referred to the Vault 22 folks eating the dead after all.
Regardless, it didn't much matter. She and Chalk left in a hurry, as they had the stuff Daniel needed now. In the process, they stumbled across another cave; Janice was starting to find herself in serious need of a nap, so they headed in to see if there were any safe spots. There weren't any traps near the entrance, but they did run into spitter plants, which met as grisly a fate as Janice could manage; she was really starting to hate those things. Further exploration revealed a pile of brush and sticks and other stuff that had no reason to be heaped up inside a cave, so Janice scootched it out of the way carefully. Yep. Tripwires under the trash. Aaaaand... yep, rigged shotguns, and beartraps, and a locked door leading to another cavern full of- was that beeping?
Fortunately Janice got the explosive disarmed before she and Chalk could be smeared all over the wall. It was another supply cave, this one with a terminal that had diary entries from 2108, 2113, and 2123. Apparently Terminal Man didn't kill himself after all. In 2108, he reported seeing things that looked like corpses and attacked like animals but didn't smell rotted- feral ghouls. In 2113 on Feb. 5 he wished himself a happy birthday and considered suicide again, but, once again, couldn't bring himself to do it. Possibly for the best, as in 2123, he ran across a group of twenty-four children encamped at the same spot as somebody else long gone- Janice wasn't sure who, maybe the people the Vault 22 dwellers ate. He said the kids had escaped somewhere called 'the School' but didn't know where it was, and that they were literate English speakers. Apparently the older ones took care of the younger ones, and they scared each other by saying 'be good or the Principal will get you'. Something about the kids must've touched the guy, because the last line of the entry said, "Principal better not show up or I'll blow his goddamn head off. I can still shoot straight."
Janice was starting to feel a little bit guilty about taking this guy's stuff, but only a little bit. He'd been dead for close to two centuries by now, and none of these caves were his gravesite. They were just places to scavenge, like any other. It just happened that she was starting to learn a little bit of the story of the person who had lived there once. Not like she hadn't stepped over bones galore before, or taken things from the people she'd had to kill along the way, right? This just... she didn't know, it was different. But, as I said before, only a little. You don't survive long in the Mojave if you let sentimentality about dead people keep you from taking what you need to survive killer monster death plants and projectile spitting venomous lizards and tarantula hawk wasps the size of twelve-year-old children and psychopathic murderin' scavenger tribal bastards and GIANT MUTANT BEARS FROM ABOVE (she really did not like the bears). She gathered up what she could find that she had use for, left the rest on the premises, and moved on. She'd get sleep later.
At this point she had everything Daniel needed, but thought she might do a little more exploring in southern Zion just in case. A, she might need to make sure the area was clear of hazards when the time came to leave, and b, she still hadn't found a safe place to sleep. And she still hadn't when she and Chalk stumbled across the bones facing eastward at the top of a hilly area apparently called Red Gate. She was a little surprised nothing had scattered them or taken more of them away, but... well, who knew. All she knew for sure was that there was a skull and a heap of bones (I refuse to believe a human skeleton exposed to the elements will remain articulated and intact for more than a hundred and fifty years), and a duffle bag. When she opened the duffel, she found some supplies, and quite a nice scoped rifle, and a holotape with '2124' scrawled on it. She slotted it into her Pip-Boy, and sure enough, it was Terminal Man.
Terminal Man had kept an eye on those kids after they showed up, Principal or no. The holotape said he'd been keeping out of sight, not wanting to interfere or be seen, but that he'd been leaving notes for the kids, and gifts. Books- stories, medical books, weapon manuals, everything he could find and bring back. The notes, he said, were all mushy stuff, talking about how much they were loved and cared for; he figured they could use it, in a world like this. He said his notes had told them that he was giving them Zion as a gift to make up for the sorrows of their lives so far and all the sorrows man had visited on man. He'd told them to be kind to each other, and never to hurt each other, but if someone else came along and tried to hurt them, to strike back with righteous anger. He said he'd been signing the notes 'the Father', partly because he didn't want them looking for him, but largely because he could get away with it... oh, and it turned out that now, at the end, his lungs were giving out on him. He'd been having trouble breathing and he was coughing up blood. His best guess was cancer. He made a point, he said, of leaving most of what he had with the kids and said he figured they'd find the rest in the caves when they got older. He didn't want them to find him, though, because 'the Father' being a broken down old man would be just a disappointment. His final decision was to go up to the high mound next to Red Gate and stare at the sky until exposure kills him. 'It feels right' were his specific words. Then he signed off with notes of regret to his wives and kids (wife and child #1 were killed in the atomic war; #2 were Sylvie and unborn baby Michael) and wishes the kids in Zion well, saying it was a gift to him at the end of it all to behold innocence. 'Goodbye, Zion. Randall Dean Clark, Feb. 5th, 2053-Jan. 2124.'
*snif*
That... was about the point where Janice decided it was time to make her way to Daniel. You couldn't really top something like that.
When last we saw our heroine, she had just successfully pulled through a meeting with the Angriest Mormon Alive, Joshua Graham, who wanted her to go with Follows-Chalk and find some prewar navigation tools to bring to his companion in the New Canaanite faith so that they could find their way once they left Zion Valley. Given that the last time a mysterious scary man gave her a mission it was Father Jerkface, and Father Jerkface had been insulting as all get-out and had tried to get her to kill the others he'd roped into his scheme, Janice kinda figured hey, she'd gotten off light here. Poke around someplace green and living and look for stuff that doesn't lead directly to anybody's horrible splodey death? Sounds like fun!
Not that she went straight to compass shopping, you understand. She'd promised Follows-Chalk that she'd help him with his tribe's Bighorner problem. For those of you who didn't see it in the earlier post, Janice's tribal companion had mentioned that the local Bighorner herd- you know, the giant sheep apparently designed by Mike "Hellboy" Mignola- had lost track of one of their babies. If somebody didn't find it and return it to the herd, the herd would either stampede through the Dead Horses camp or leave the area completely, and either one would be a problem for the tribe. Given that Joshua had indicated they were planning on evacuating soonish anyway, Janice briefly wondered if it was worth finding the calf, but eh. If the herd stampeded it would make pulling up stakes more difficult than it had to be. So, off into the mountains to see about finding that baby sheep.
It should be noted that Bighorners are roughly the size of horses, and that as the descendants of ordinary bighorn sheep they've got very good balance and footing on any kind of terrain you care to mention. They also get hostile if you get too close. And there are a lot of them in the area where you have to look for the baby. Janice had not taken the perk Animal Friend at any point, which amounts to 'if it ain't a giant bug or a horrible fire-breathing lizard from hell, it doesn't care that you're there', so she had to do a fair bit of sneaking and sweating before finding the baby and luring it back to its mama with banana yucca fruits. In the process, I'm pretty sure she got a Dead Horse tribal name. Follows-Chalk said he got his because as a junior scout he didn't really get to explore much on his own, just follow the chalk markings left by other Dead Horse scouts; Janice's, I'm almost certain, was Splatter-Waiting. Short for Splatter-Waiting-To-Happen, because good Lord did that girl come within millimeters of walking off every cliff imaginable when she was trying to evade angry Bighorners without killing them and cheesing off the herd even more.
She got the calf back to its momma and scurried away from the death sheep safely, thankfully. Eventually she and Follows-Chalk made it to a gorge where an old prewar bus had gone off the road long ago. Chalk commented that 'this is why your own two feet are better than any cart, whether it's pulled by critters or goes on its own'. Clearly he hadn't been paying the slightest bit of attention to Janice's performance among the Bighorners, but whatever. He also noted that there were skeletons in the bus, and that Joshua had said the skeletons were of scouts- although they looked awful small to him. And that there was an awful lot of that old stuff- electronics?- on the bus. When Janice managed to scootch down there and beat the snot out of the geckoes that were paddling around nearby (as I said, Animal Friend was not on her roster, so it wasn't so much gratuitous aggression as a very proactive form of NO EATING MY FACE), she found that he was right on both counts. There were lots of pieces of scrap electronics scattered around the bus, and lots of small skeletons- and lunchboxes, and Dinky the T-Rex toys, and other things. They'd been scouts, all right. Boy Scouts. One of them, or possibly the scoutmaster (Janice only found one adult-sized skeleton) had been carrying a compass, which was understandably a bit on the broken side after a crash landing and two hundred years of sitting in the wet. Fortunately, Janice had learned a great deal about repairing stuff in her travels, so she was able to coax it back into working order and impress Chalk with the idea of a device that could always tell where north was even if it couldn't see the stars. Huzzah, mission one accomplished, etc.
Mission two involved getting to the park's old general store and nearby ranger station to find a bunch of Li'l Scout lunchboxes. Regular ol' lunchboxes wouldn't do for some reason, so I'm guessing the Li'l Scout models were packed with survival gear or something. I know they had to go to the ranger station to find extra medical supplies. Janice was cool with this, but the thing was that this particular part of Zion happened to be less prone to geckoes than the area where the bus had crashed. What it was more prone to was green geckoes- the kind that spit venom at a distance- and yao guai. You know. Mutant grizzly bears. Possibly pack-living mutant grizzly bears since they tended to appear in groups of two or three. Pack-living mutant grizzly bears roughly the size of CARS. With a tendency to ignore quite a lot of vertical distance if it came to the shortest possible charging route between their current position and Janice's.
DEATH FROM ABOVE IS NOT A PHRASE THAT SHOULD BE ASSOCIATED WITH BEARS.
So, yeah, that part wasn't exactly Janice's idea of fun, and permanently set her personal definition of 'a walk in the park' to something on the order of 'a day of falling off rocks, being swarmed by giant mantises, and being HIT IN THE HEAD BY FALLING BEARS'. I cannot emphasize the bear thing enough. Janice developed a loathing for bears that rivaled Stephen Colbert's at that point. Given this fact I'm not entirely sure why she decided to start poking around in caves after finding those lunchboxes and supplies, except maybe to see if she could find bears while they were sleeping and kill them first. (Note: I do not endorse attempted genocide against real-world bears. Real-world bears are ordinary omnivorous predators with more of an interest in humans' garbage than humans themselves, and are generally pretty good about not leaping down ten feet of vertical drop for any reason whatsoever. Please do not take this as encouragement to do harm to bears; thanks to humans, they've got enough troubles to deal with as it is. Thank you.)
Anyway, point is, she and Chalk headed into a cave that had previously been marked as taboo for some reason. Chalk was thrilled, because he wanted to see the taboo places without getting yelled at by the other scouts. Janice, on the other hand, was extremely cautious. The cave didn't smell much like bear, possibly because it OW was pretty well stocked with JEEZ MY LEG traps and THAT WAS MY FAVORITE ARM specially rigged shotguns. Janice figured that meant there was something worthwhile on the other side, and she was right. Another well-supplied cave with a computer terminal and workbenches and such awaited. She patched herself and Chalk up and headed over to the terminal to check it out while she waited for the bleeding to stop.
It had notes from the same guy as last time, dated 2097-2101. Apparently somebody called 'the Coughers' were present in the area, but they'd finally left. Possibly because Terminal Man had spent ten months killing them, which he said they they deserved for some reason. Apparently before they left he ate their dead. Or they ate their own dead- SOMEBODY ate their dead, anyway. The wording was a little unclear. Either way, charming, really. One of them didn't make it out with the others, a woman who got stuck in a trap and called the others evil, children of the devil- they'd been sick from something they caught in their original vault. And according to her, he said, 'let's just say it was bad to be a woman in that group' and she didn't know how to live outside a Vault. Her name, it seemed, was Sylvie, and he felt sorry for her, so nobody got shot that day. By 2100, the notes said, she was pregnant, and he was 47 and terrified.... and by 2101, the baby hadn't been born because little Michael was a breech presentation and Terminal Man had steeled his nerves and performed an emergency C-section too late, one from which Sylvie had never woken up. The last line of that entry talked of suicide but Janice couldn't help but notice there were no bones in the cave...
Janice left after that, because that kind of thing just doesn't sit well no matter how you slice it. She and Chalk headed off down the other branch of the cave to see if they could find a shortcut to their next destination, a fishing lodge. Not... not so much. Definitely not so much with the shortcuts. More, um, more like large cavern full of SPITTING EVIL DEATH PLANTS AND KILLER GREEN MONSTER MEN OUT OF VAULT 22, WHAT THE SMEG. Seriously, the ding-dang things were all over the place. By the time Janice came down from her rampage I don't think there was a flat surface anywhere in the cavern that wasn't splattered with sap and bloodlike goo. Chalk said something about the spitters and green guys not being native to Zion but I'm not sure she cared. She just wanted OUT.
So, out they went. There were some nice views in the area when Janice insisted on climbing up high to get a good look around them, including an old, old radio tower. Chalk was very proud to be able to show that off and tell Janice about how Back When, folks used towers like that to actually talk to one another on the air. Not that it was working now, but hey, it had a good vantage point. So did the crashed airplane she spotted up on a particularly high spire, but she was never able to find her way up there and eventually gave up. If she couldn't get up there, she figured neither bears nor mutant green monster spore men could, so it probably didn't matter so much.
The fishing lodge itself was a pretty uneventful thing. There were maybe some geckoes or some mantises or something, nothing worth writing home about, and she and Chalk came away from that with walkie-talkies to keep the group together. I am not sure how a Boy Scout compass could be broken and in need of repair while walkie-talkies worked just fine after two hundred years. Possibly one of the aspects of the 1950s that persisted in the Fallout universe was 'made in Japan = crap', and the compass was a product of Japan while the walkie-talkies were made in the States. Who knows. The important thing is, they worked well enough that they would be of use to Daniel and his people.
So they went out of there and did some more scouting around Zion, just in case. There were critters, after all, and periodically there were White Legs- there'd been White Legs for some time, they just weren't worth mentioning. Eventually, Janice and Chalk found a side canyon of sorts where they were greeted by a volley of spit; it was the plants again. Quite a lot of them. Janice loaded up the ol' holorifle and started ashing every freakin' Audrey 2000 in sight. Turned out they'd found an encampment once used by people from Vault 22, a fact made plain by the note Janice found when she was searching a duffle bag for useful supplies. It began with 'BEWARE - A VENGEFUL SPIRIT STALKS THESE CANYONS' and went downhill from there. Given that she found an awful lot of old bones in the area that nobody had ever bothered to bury, and a number of mounds that looked kind of like graves, Janice kind of wondered what, exactly, the Vault 22 dwellers might have done other than treat their women badly. Maybe that line in the computer entry had referred to the Vault 22 folks eating the dead after all.
Regardless, it didn't much matter. She and Chalk left in a hurry, as they had the stuff Daniel needed now. In the process, they stumbled across another cave; Janice was starting to find herself in serious need of a nap, so they headed in to see if there were any safe spots. There weren't any traps near the entrance, but they did run into spitter plants, which met as grisly a fate as Janice could manage; she was really starting to hate those things. Further exploration revealed a pile of brush and sticks and other stuff that had no reason to be heaped up inside a cave, so Janice scootched it out of the way carefully. Yep. Tripwires under the trash. Aaaaand... yep, rigged shotguns, and beartraps, and a locked door leading to another cavern full of- was that beeping?
Fortunately Janice got the explosive disarmed before she and Chalk could be smeared all over the wall. It was another supply cave, this one with a terminal that had diary entries from 2108, 2113, and 2123. Apparently Terminal Man didn't kill himself after all. In 2108, he reported seeing things that looked like corpses and attacked like animals but didn't smell rotted- feral ghouls. In 2113 on Feb. 5 he wished himself a happy birthday and considered suicide again, but, once again, couldn't bring himself to do it. Possibly for the best, as in 2123, he ran across a group of twenty-four children encamped at the same spot as somebody else long gone- Janice wasn't sure who, maybe the people the Vault 22 dwellers ate. He said the kids had escaped somewhere called 'the School' but didn't know where it was, and that they were literate English speakers. Apparently the older ones took care of the younger ones, and they scared each other by saying 'be good or the Principal will get you'. Something about the kids must've touched the guy, because the last line of the entry said, "Principal better not show up or I'll blow his goddamn head off. I can still shoot straight."
Janice was starting to feel a little bit guilty about taking this guy's stuff, but only a little bit. He'd been dead for close to two centuries by now, and none of these caves were his gravesite. They were just places to scavenge, like any other. It just happened that she was starting to learn a little bit of the story of the person who had lived there once. Not like she hadn't stepped over bones galore before, or taken things from the people she'd had to kill along the way, right? This just... she didn't know, it was different. But, as I said before, only a little. You don't survive long in the Mojave if you let sentimentality about dead people keep you from taking what you need to survive killer monster death plants and projectile spitting venomous lizards and tarantula hawk wasps the size of twelve-year-old children and psychopathic murderin' scavenger tribal bastards and GIANT MUTANT BEARS FROM ABOVE (she really did not like the bears). She gathered up what she could find that she had use for, left the rest on the premises, and moved on. She'd get sleep later.
At this point she had everything Daniel needed, but thought she might do a little more exploring in southern Zion just in case. A, she might need to make sure the area was clear of hazards when the time came to leave, and b, she still hadn't found a safe place to sleep. And she still hadn't when she and Chalk stumbled across the bones facing eastward at the top of a hilly area apparently called Red Gate. She was a little surprised nothing had scattered them or taken more of them away, but... well, who knew. All she knew for sure was that there was a skull and a heap of bones (I refuse to believe a human skeleton exposed to the elements will remain articulated and intact for more than a hundred and fifty years), and a duffle bag. When she opened the duffel, she found some supplies, and quite a nice scoped rifle, and a holotape with '2124' scrawled on it. She slotted it into her Pip-Boy, and sure enough, it was Terminal Man.
Terminal Man had kept an eye on those kids after they showed up, Principal or no. The holotape said he'd been keeping out of sight, not wanting to interfere or be seen, but that he'd been leaving notes for the kids, and gifts. Books- stories, medical books, weapon manuals, everything he could find and bring back. The notes, he said, were all mushy stuff, talking about how much they were loved and cared for; he figured they could use it, in a world like this. He said his notes had told them that he was giving them Zion as a gift to make up for the sorrows of their lives so far and all the sorrows man had visited on man. He'd told them to be kind to each other, and never to hurt each other, but if someone else came along and tried to hurt them, to strike back with righteous anger. He said he'd been signing the notes 'the Father', partly because he didn't want them looking for him, but largely because he could get away with it... oh, and it turned out that now, at the end, his lungs were giving out on him. He'd been having trouble breathing and he was coughing up blood. His best guess was cancer. He made a point, he said, of leaving most of what he had with the kids and said he figured they'd find the rest in the caves when they got older. He didn't want them to find him, though, because 'the Father' being a broken down old man would be just a disappointment. His final decision was to go up to the high mound next to Red Gate and stare at the sky until exposure kills him. 'It feels right' were his specific words. Then he signed off with notes of regret to his wives and kids (wife and child #1 were killed in the atomic war; #2 were Sylvie and unborn baby Michael) and wishes the kids in Zion well, saying it was a gift to him at the end of it all to behold innocence. 'Goodbye, Zion. Randall Dean Clark, Feb. 5th, 2053-Jan. 2124.'
*snif*
That... was about the point where Janice decided it was time to make her way to Daniel. You couldn't really top something like that.
