Notes From New Vegas 37
Apr. 7th, 2012 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 37: BEARS BEARS BEARS AUGH BEARS
When we last saw our heroine, Follows-Chalk had brought Janice all the way to the Sorrows tribe and their current leader of sorts, a New Canaanite missionary named Daniel. Given that the only other New Canaanite Janice had met so far had been Joshua 'Burned Man' Graham, she was kinda on edge about the prospect, but no, Daniel turned out to be pretty mellow. Guess that's what happens when you don't lose track of your real goals and wind up making yourself Caesar's second in command and then pissing him off. Daniel was an ordinary-looking guy in a plaid shirt and a broad-brimmed hat who called Janice a Gentile and then apologized for it- I don't think she ever found out what the word meant, or even asked. She just had other things to do and it wasn't as if the term was causing any problems.
Daniel said he wanted to get everyone safely evacuated from Zion, preferably into an area called the Grand Staircase instead. He'd been sent by his bishop as a missionary, and he said that he was trying to make amends for allowing the New Canaanites' problems to become the Sorrows' problems. Apparently the tribes they worked with in the path became targets of the White Legs- which kinda made sense, because a, the White Legs had apparently zilch in the way of survival skills and preferred to scavenge and raid off more successful tribes, and b, the White Legs were trying to suck up to Caesar and Caesar kind of had a bee up his butt about the New Canaanites to begin with. Daniel said they'd lost the Tar Walkers and the Crazy Horns already and that he wanted to get out from under that debt, and getting the Sorrows and the Dead Horses out safely would be a start.
Janice felt kind of compelled at that point to point out that Joshua wanted to stand and fight. Daniel said no, not really, that Joshua wanted to annihilate the White Legs, not fight them. Daniel wasn't a big fan of the whole 'genocide' thing, and anyway the White Legs couldn't survive much longer, given what a mess they'd made of the more successful tribes around them. They'd be gone as a tribe within a generation if they didn't join the Legion, and if the Sorrows and the Dead Horses tried to stand and fight, the White Legs would keep coming after them in more and more force as long as they lived. Either Joshua had to kill their war chief and every single White Legs fighter alive, or they had to pull their people out and go somewhere the White Legs couldn't follow and let the White Legs die off on their own.
That was kind of interesting, and Janice would do some thinking about that for a while, but first she had some other things to clarify. Specifically, the spirit called the Father in the Caves- when she and Chalk had arrived they'd been greeted by a shaven-headed woman in a sports bikini type of thing, with feathers poking out of the back of her top, who called herself Waking Cloud and greeted them in the name of the Father in the Caves and His Holy Wife and Child. Considering the last note she'd found from the Terminal Man she was kinda curious about that. Daniel said the Father in the Caves was some spirit the Sorrows used to believe in, and that they marked the area caves with paint to indicate that they would be punished for going inside. Janice winced a little, since the Terminal Man's note had mentioned the kids he'd found should locate his stuff later, when they were older, but figured that someone had probably stumbled across one of the caves that had all the land mines and bear traps and ow. That kind of thing probably came across as pretty Wrath of God... anyway, she mentioned that Waking Cloud had said Daniel had preached about Him so it looked as if the Sorrows thought the Father in the Caves was Daniel's God. Daniel kinda facepalmed and muttered about 'no wonder they were picking up on things so easily, goes to show how tough communication can be', and then asked Janice one more favor. Specifically, he was pretty sure that one of the caves around there had a map of the Grand Staircase area in it, and they needed that to navigate their way to safety. Could she go take Waking Cloud as a guide and find it for him?
Again, almost crying about the level of harmless represented here. And actual nice.
Janice agreed and went off to find Waking Cloud. Waking Cloud happily agreed to come with her, and then said the tribe's shaman White Bird wanted to talk to her before they left. Which, kind of weird in Janice's book, having both a missionary and a working shaman in the same tribe, but whatever. If it kept the peace, that was the important part.
(In OOC terms, when you first meet Waking Cloud or any of the other Sorrows, they're all carrying massive gauntlets made from the paws of Yao Guai. If you ask Waking Cloud where she got hers she'll tell you that it's an adulthood rite for all Sorrows hunters and that you should talk to the shaman about it if you want one of your own, and then you get saddled with a side quest. I was hoping to get out of there and go after that map without that sidequest, so I didn't pursue that line of questioning, but Waking Cloud dropped it on me all on her own. Bleah.)
So, yeah, okay, whatever, Janice went over to talk to White Bird, who was old and bald- all the Sorrows are bald, I'm guessing they shave their heads as a hygiene measure or something- and who talked like a movie Indian from about 1979 despite being white as my uncle Timmy. Long story short, he felt it was very important for some reason that Janice undertake some ritual to prove she was a friend of the Sorrows. Guess his tribe had taken it in the loincloth (no pants on anyone in sight except the local Mormons) sometime in the past... anyway, Janice asked what was necessary and he said three datura roots. Which Janice produced on the spot, because she'd been gathering anything green and potentially medicinal that she could find at every possible turn- she's big on survival and she was running low on supplies. White Bird proceeded to make them into tea and then told her 'Drink this and go kill Ghost of She'.
... okay, um, he wanted her to do a vision quest? Fine, whatever, as long as... wait. Apparently not. 'Ghost of She' wasn't a ghost ghost so much. More like the biggest meanest goddamn BEAR IN THE ENTIRE ZION VALLEY kind of ghost. So not so much 'Ghost of She' as 'Horrible Physical Incarnation and Embodiment of Vengeance of Extremely Angry She'. And she'd just agreed to kill it while high on seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeriously vision-distorting, judgment-screwing-up drugs. HOKAY THEN.
I'd say at least she didn't have to kill it with a spoon or something, but honestly, when the world's swimming around you and Mr. 1979 Movie Indian is telling you 'take drugs, kill bear' like the living avatar of Advice Dog and your companion is a bald chick in a sports bikini whose idea of combat involves running up to guys with machine guns armed with a fist-mounted grizzly bear paw, it might actually be safer to try and kill the biggest bear in the valley with a spoon.
So, yeah, Janice kinda wandered out of the valley as high as it's possible to get on post-nuclear freshly prepared datura roots and the first thing she and Waking Cloud run into is Joshua Graham solemnly quoting the part of the Bible about Babylon and 'happy the hands that dash your little ones against the rock'. Janice wasn't sure he was actually there, but Waking Cloud seemed to be seeing him too, so she just let the scary man in the bandages and Salt Lake City police armor talk and nodded a lot. Especially when he talked about talking Daniel into fighting instead of evacuating. Because yeah, when someone is high as hell on weird-ass tribal drugs is a GREAT time to get them to convince your mostly-nonviolent buddy that genocide's a good idea.
Joshua finally said his piece and Janice managed to string a couple of coherent words together, mostly on the order of 'I'll think about it and let you know'. I'm kind of surprised she pulled that much off. He seemed to think this was good enough and let her go, so she and Waking Cloud trotted off in search of bears. Which they found. Bear after bear after bear. None of them were Ghost of She, you understand, they were just BEARS and MORE BEARS and OH GOD ANOTHER BEAR WHAT THE HELL and by the time they finally found the area where Waking Cloud wigged out about Ghost of She's lair and never having been brave enough to investigate it herself Janice was just giggling like a loon.
This was kind of a mistake. Ghost of She was mad. And huge. And on fire. And duplicating herself into about seven or eight other bears. God damn that White Bird knew how to make some mighty fine mess-with-your-head tea. BEAR KILLIN' TIME, YO. Janice channeled her inner Stephen Colbert and cut loose on every yao guai in sight, figuring one of them would eventually turn out to be real, and after reloading the game several times because Waking Cloud kept dying (from bear attacks, not from Janice's holorifle, thank you), she finally managed to slaughterinate the damned thing. Which is not bad, considering that it was roughly the size of any two other yao guai put together and she was still seeing all kinds of crazy things.
Wheeeeeeee.
Anyway, she figured what the hell, why not cut off its paw and bring that back as proof the bear was dead. Not like the damn bear needed it any more. And it would be a great reminder that anybody who cheesed Janice off enough could wind up splattered all over the landscape even if she was completely smashed at the time. Waking Cloud seemed to be okay with this, although considering that Janice was splattered in bear blood and guts and giggling like a loon it was entireloy possible that Waking Cloud would have been okay with anything the crazy Owslandr said at that point so long as it didn't get her killed. They took the bear's paw and headed back. I'm pretty sure Janice spent most of the trip singing. It seems like the kind of thing she'd do.
White Bird didn't seem particularly impressed or particularly surprised when they got there, but like I said, the man talks like a 1979 movie Indian. I'd have been surprised if he did make an expression. Janice handed him the bear paw and went to sleep off the tea in another part of the cave, and when she got up White Bird handed her a yao guai gauntlet of her very own with the words, "Here, take. Gift to remind you of visions. Use well. Or sell to curio trader. Either way, says much about you."
Punching things to death wasn't really Janice's style, but selling that paw didn't really strike her as something suitable either. She'd gone to a lot of trouble to kill that damn bear, so she tucked the gauntlet in her backpack, thanked the shaman, and went off to find Waking Cloud again.
Here's the thing about Waking Cloud and Follows-Chalk. Unlike your other companions in Fallout New Vegas, they're both pretty talkative. At random intervals they'll just spout off a couple of sentences that may or may not be relevant to the situation at hand. With Follows-Chalk, most of the sentences were at least reasonably related to the quest- happily talking about scouting, or commenting on how nasty yao guai were. With Waking Cloud, you got 'I know you want to leave but maybe if you stayed you'd find peace here' or 'Salt-Upon-Wounds salted the ground when he took New Canaan so nothing could grow there, what kind of monster DOES that' or praying, loudly and repeatedly, for the help of the Father for 'this woman who is the Vessel Of Your Will'. Sometimes when you're trying to sneak past enemies, although the enemies don't seem to be alerted to your presence by her yammering. She just... you can't go more than a few minutes without her either being horrified or religious or something at you, and it gets old fast.
It gets older faster when combat opens up and she announces 'I will fight you if I must!' and runs at dudes with machine guns to hit them with her big bear paw of hurting. Janice shoved her into a suit of leather armor (she didn't have much else available, armor is heavy stuff) at the first opportunity, but that didn't really help much, especially since Waking Cloud knows sod-all about using ranged weapons. So basically every time they were attacked by White Legs, Janice had to be the fastest gun in the West, otherwise Waking Cloud would use up all the stimpaks and healing powder Janice had. Cazadores were even worse, because then Janice had to shove datura antivenom at her- she wouldn't use ordinary antivenom for some reason, Janice had to concoct an antivenom formula using datura roots- or she'd die of giant wasp. Yes, she turned out to be pretty good at killing things once she got close enough, but she took so much damage along the way that between dealing with her in a fight and dealing with her yammering while they traveled, Janice really didn't like the woman much.
She did, however, talk to her for a bit in the hopes that maybe once they'd had a get-to-know-you conversation, Waking Cloud would shut up. Waking Cloud, it turned out, was married. Her children had been evacuated, like the other children of the tribe. Her husband, too, although she hadn't had word from him. Apparently she'd asked Daniel about that, but Daniel had just gotten quiet and changed the subject, and she didn't want to press him more but she really wanted to know... She didn't make puppy eyes but she didn't have to. Janice figured that if she could get an answer out of Daniel, Waking Cloud would owe her a favor and maybe she could use that to get her to quiet down a bit.
Daniel was nearby, fortunately. Unfortunately, he had an unpleasant truth that he'd been keeping from Waking Cloud, namely that her husband had been killed by White Legs as he guarded the evacuees. Daniel had kept this from Waking Cloud to keep her from being distracted during their final efforts. Janice thought about this for a bit, and then pointed out that this would not end well; when Waking Cloud found out she'd been lied to she'd be mad. Not to mention that she was pretty sure Waking Cloud could hold it together if it was important enough. Daniel sighed and admitted that he wasn't entirely sure of his judgment in this and asked Janice to tell her for him. Since they were going off to find the Grand Staircase map together Janice figured she had a better chance of talking Waking Cloud down from any massive emotional consequence than Daniel did, and agreed.
And, yeah, Waking Cloud was all 'what the hell, my husband' and 'how could he keep this from me', but eventually she calmed down and said she could handle it. Janice just breathed a sigh of relief about it, because she knew that if she had gone with Daniel's plan and the woman had started talking one more time about how she was just SURE Janice would have liked her family if she'd come to Zion and been able to meet them, she would've blurted the information out just to shut her up.
On the way out of the valley, to go find the map, they ran across Joshua Graham again. He seemed a lot less wrathful than he had when Janice was high, so she took the opportunity to ask him a few questions, mostly if there was anything she could do to help him out- who knew, maybe if she could ingratiate herself with him he'd listen to Daniel a little more. He thanked her, but said that he found out the hard way after the bit with the pitch and the Grand Canyon and the burning and the ow that he was completely immune to healing stims, not to mention to painkillers, and that his body wasn't all that great at regrowing burned skin in general. So he had to clean himself up and change his bandages every day to avoid infections and other horrible things, and he was still going through the same burning experience pretty much every day of his life, but he thanked her for her concern.
DAMN that man was hardcore. No wonder he was the Angriest Mormon Alive.
Janice kinda dropped the chat and the questioning after that, because seriously, what the hell are you supposed to say after finding out a fact like that. She and Waking Cloud would just, um. They'd just... be somewhere else. Go find the map. The map would be a good thing. One away from scary burned men with all the pain tolerance in the world. The map turned out to be in one of the caves Janice had already visited, she just hadn't spotted it (translation: the game didn't spawn it until she got to Daniel- thanks, guys), but that was okay. She'd already exploded and killed everything in that cave that needed exploding and killing. She just had to get Waking Cloud to stop freaking out about how the caves were forbidden and the Father would be angry, which turned out to be relatively easy once she promised to be respectful. They mostly stayed out of caves otherwise, though, except for one Janice spotted on the way back that she'd never seen before. Turned out it had been one of the Terminal Man's other hideouts, and still had information from him in it. The 'coughers' had all come from somewhere in suits with '22' across the back and most of them seemed to have some kind of lung sickness, and they'd descended upon an encampment of Mexican survivors and locked up the survivors in pens and then ate them. Charming people, truly, but it explained more than a bit about Terminal Man's attitude towards the coughers in later notes.
That was, essentially, the big stuff. From there it was mostly a matter of getting back to Daniel with Waking Cloud still alive. Janice made Waking Cloud wear some ranger commando armor that Terminal Man had left in one of his caves, which helped, but since the woman kept running at White Legs armed with automatic weapons Janice figured they'd better take a few other steps before going back to the Sorrows. Mostly stuff involving clearing bridges and roads of White Legs and of White Leg traps, because if Waking Cloud was like this, the other Sorrows probably were as well, and Janice didn't see getting half the tribe's hunters chewed up by gunfire as a good thing. She made Waking Cloud stay in secure places while she herself picked off White Legs from a distance or stole their war totems or talked other Sorrows out of trying to sneak up on White Legs and take them by surprise, and made a side detour specifically to blow the ever-living crap out of a cave full of yao guai while they were at it. With C4, not her holorifle- those freakin' bears weren't going to attack anybody EVer AGAIN, not while Janice had explosives to keep them from doing it, thank you very much.
Once the maniacal giggling finished and the smoke cleared, she and Waking Cloud headed back to Daniel at last. Janice had done some thinking on the way, both about the White Legs and about what Joshua and Daniel had said, and... well. Aside from GODDAMN BEARS, she was really, really tired of killing people. Didn't matter that they were shooting at her, didn't matter that they were morons- she was just tired of killing people. The White Leg encampments they'd found had been full of Old World stuff and very little sign of anything genuinely hunted or gathered; these were people who lived by stealing and scrounging. Joshua had said they'd only get into the Legion if they could wipe out the New Canaanites and the tribes associated with them. If the Sorrows escaped alive, the White Legs would be pretty screwed because nobody in the whole region would be willing to ally with them. They'd cease to be a threat before long. It just... it wasn't worth it, to take a whole tribe of people who were shocked at the idea of salting enemy ground and who really thought fighting with melee weapons only was a good idea and turn them into people who could wipe out entire enemy tribes. Not when the world could do it for them. And anyway, the Terminal Man would never approve.
(In the real world, I actually had to save my game and think about this for a while, because I had no guarantee that Daniel's claim of the White Legs falling apart within a generation was true. For all I knew the White Legs could have a resurgence when no one was looking, and the only way to be really safe was to destroy them all. I decided in the end that it was more in-character, given everything that had happened along the way, for Janice not to go with the 'kill 'em all' ideology.)
So, she handed the map over to Daniel and told him she thought they ought to evacuate to the Grand Staircase as soon as possible, and he thanked her and said they'd do it that night. And that's where I saved and closed the game for this session.
When we last saw our heroine, Follows-Chalk had brought Janice all the way to the Sorrows tribe and their current leader of sorts, a New Canaanite missionary named Daniel. Given that the only other New Canaanite Janice had met so far had been Joshua 'Burned Man' Graham, she was kinda on edge about the prospect, but no, Daniel turned out to be pretty mellow. Guess that's what happens when you don't lose track of your real goals and wind up making yourself Caesar's second in command and then pissing him off. Daniel was an ordinary-looking guy in a plaid shirt and a broad-brimmed hat who called Janice a Gentile and then apologized for it- I don't think she ever found out what the word meant, or even asked. She just had other things to do and it wasn't as if the term was causing any problems.
Daniel said he wanted to get everyone safely evacuated from Zion, preferably into an area called the Grand Staircase instead. He'd been sent by his bishop as a missionary, and he said that he was trying to make amends for allowing the New Canaanites' problems to become the Sorrows' problems. Apparently the tribes they worked with in the path became targets of the White Legs- which kinda made sense, because a, the White Legs had apparently zilch in the way of survival skills and preferred to scavenge and raid off more successful tribes, and b, the White Legs were trying to suck up to Caesar and Caesar kind of had a bee up his butt about the New Canaanites to begin with. Daniel said they'd lost the Tar Walkers and the Crazy Horns already and that he wanted to get out from under that debt, and getting the Sorrows and the Dead Horses out safely would be a start.
Janice felt kind of compelled at that point to point out that Joshua wanted to stand and fight. Daniel said no, not really, that Joshua wanted to annihilate the White Legs, not fight them. Daniel wasn't a big fan of the whole 'genocide' thing, and anyway the White Legs couldn't survive much longer, given what a mess they'd made of the more successful tribes around them. They'd be gone as a tribe within a generation if they didn't join the Legion, and if the Sorrows and the Dead Horses tried to stand and fight, the White Legs would keep coming after them in more and more force as long as they lived. Either Joshua had to kill their war chief and every single White Legs fighter alive, or they had to pull their people out and go somewhere the White Legs couldn't follow and let the White Legs die off on their own.
That was kind of interesting, and Janice would do some thinking about that for a while, but first she had some other things to clarify. Specifically, the spirit called the Father in the Caves- when she and Chalk had arrived they'd been greeted by a shaven-headed woman in a sports bikini type of thing, with feathers poking out of the back of her top, who called herself Waking Cloud and greeted them in the name of the Father in the Caves and His Holy Wife and Child. Considering the last note she'd found from the Terminal Man she was kinda curious about that. Daniel said the Father in the Caves was some spirit the Sorrows used to believe in, and that they marked the area caves with paint to indicate that they would be punished for going inside. Janice winced a little, since the Terminal Man's note had mentioned the kids he'd found should locate his stuff later, when they were older, but figured that someone had probably stumbled across one of the caves that had all the land mines and bear traps and ow. That kind of thing probably came across as pretty Wrath of God... anyway, she mentioned that Waking Cloud had said Daniel had preached about Him so it looked as if the Sorrows thought the Father in the Caves was Daniel's God. Daniel kinda facepalmed and muttered about 'no wonder they were picking up on things so easily, goes to show how tough communication can be', and then asked Janice one more favor. Specifically, he was pretty sure that one of the caves around there had a map of the Grand Staircase area in it, and they needed that to navigate their way to safety. Could she go take Waking Cloud as a guide and find it for him?
Again, almost crying about the level of harmless represented here. And actual nice.
Janice agreed and went off to find Waking Cloud. Waking Cloud happily agreed to come with her, and then said the tribe's shaman White Bird wanted to talk to her before they left. Which, kind of weird in Janice's book, having both a missionary and a working shaman in the same tribe, but whatever. If it kept the peace, that was the important part.
(In OOC terms, when you first meet Waking Cloud or any of the other Sorrows, they're all carrying massive gauntlets made from the paws of Yao Guai. If you ask Waking Cloud where she got hers she'll tell you that it's an adulthood rite for all Sorrows hunters and that you should talk to the shaman about it if you want one of your own, and then you get saddled with a side quest. I was hoping to get out of there and go after that map without that sidequest, so I didn't pursue that line of questioning, but Waking Cloud dropped it on me all on her own. Bleah.)
So, yeah, okay, whatever, Janice went over to talk to White Bird, who was old and bald- all the Sorrows are bald, I'm guessing they shave their heads as a hygiene measure or something- and who talked like a movie Indian from about 1979 despite being white as my uncle Timmy. Long story short, he felt it was very important for some reason that Janice undertake some ritual to prove she was a friend of the Sorrows. Guess his tribe had taken it in the loincloth (no pants on anyone in sight except the local Mormons) sometime in the past... anyway, Janice asked what was necessary and he said three datura roots. Which Janice produced on the spot, because she'd been gathering anything green and potentially medicinal that she could find at every possible turn- she's big on survival and she was running low on supplies. White Bird proceeded to make them into tea and then told her 'Drink this and go kill Ghost of She'.
... okay, um, he wanted her to do a vision quest? Fine, whatever, as long as... wait. Apparently not. 'Ghost of She' wasn't a ghost ghost so much. More like the biggest meanest goddamn BEAR IN THE ENTIRE ZION VALLEY kind of ghost. So not so much 'Ghost of She' as 'Horrible Physical Incarnation and Embodiment of Vengeance of Extremely Angry She'. And she'd just agreed to kill it while high on seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeriously vision-distorting, judgment-screwing-up drugs. HOKAY THEN.
I'd say at least she didn't have to kill it with a spoon or something, but honestly, when the world's swimming around you and Mr. 1979 Movie Indian is telling you 'take drugs, kill bear' like the living avatar of Advice Dog and your companion is a bald chick in a sports bikini whose idea of combat involves running up to guys with machine guns armed with a fist-mounted grizzly bear paw, it might actually be safer to try and kill the biggest bear in the valley with a spoon.
So, yeah, Janice kinda wandered out of the valley as high as it's possible to get on post-nuclear freshly prepared datura roots and the first thing she and Waking Cloud run into is Joshua Graham solemnly quoting the part of the Bible about Babylon and 'happy the hands that dash your little ones against the rock'. Janice wasn't sure he was actually there, but Waking Cloud seemed to be seeing him too, so she just let the scary man in the bandages and Salt Lake City police armor talk and nodded a lot. Especially when he talked about talking Daniel into fighting instead of evacuating. Because yeah, when someone is high as hell on weird-ass tribal drugs is a GREAT time to get them to convince your mostly-nonviolent buddy that genocide's a good idea.
Joshua finally said his piece and Janice managed to string a couple of coherent words together, mostly on the order of 'I'll think about it and let you know'. I'm kind of surprised she pulled that much off. He seemed to think this was good enough and let her go, so she and Waking Cloud trotted off in search of bears. Which they found. Bear after bear after bear. None of them were Ghost of She, you understand, they were just BEARS and MORE BEARS and OH GOD ANOTHER BEAR WHAT THE HELL and by the time they finally found the area where Waking Cloud wigged out about Ghost of She's lair and never having been brave enough to investigate it herself Janice was just giggling like a loon.
This was kind of a mistake. Ghost of She was mad. And huge. And on fire. And duplicating herself into about seven or eight other bears. God damn that White Bird knew how to make some mighty fine mess-with-your-head tea. BEAR KILLIN' TIME, YO. Janice channeled her inner Stephen Colbert and cut loose on every yao guai in sight, figuring one of them would eventually turn out to be real, and after reloading the game several times because Waking Cloud kept dying (from bear attacks, not from Janice's holorifle, thank you), she finally managed to slaughterinate the damned thing. Which is not bad, considering that it was roughly the size of any two other yao guai put together and she was still seeing all kinds of crazy things.
Wheeeeeeee.
Anyway, she figured what the hell, why not cut off its paw and bring that back as proof the bear was dead. Not like the damn bear needed it any more. And it would be a great reminder that anybody who cheesed Janice off enough could wind up splattered all over the landscape even if she was completely smashed at the time. Waking Cloud seemed to be okay with this, although considering that Janice was splattered in bear blood and guts and giggling like a loon it was entireloy possible that Waking Cloud would have been okay with anything the crazy Owslandr said at that point so long as it didn't get her killed. They took the bear's paw and headed back. I'm pretty sure Janice spent most of the trip singing. It seems like the kind of thing she'd do.
White Bird didn't seem particularly impressed or particularly surprised when they got there, but like I said, the man talks like a 1979 movie Indian. I'd have been surprised if he did make an expression. Janice handed him the bear paw and went to sleep off the tea in another part of the cave, and when she got up White Bird handed her a yao guai gauntlet of her very own with the words, "Here, take. Gift to remind you of visions. Use well. Or sell to curio trader. Either way, says much about you."
Punching things to death wasn't really Janice's style, but selling that paw didn't really strike her as something suitable either. She'd gone to a lot of trouble to kill that damn bear, so she tucked the gauntlet in her backpack, thanked the shaman, and went off to find Waking Cloud again.
Here's the thing about Waking Cloud and Follows-Chalk. Unlike your other companions in Fallout New Vegas, they're both pretty talkative. At random intervals they'll just spout off a couple of sentences that may or may not be relevant to the situation at hand. With Follows-Chalk, most of the sentences were at least reasonably related to the quest- happily talking about scouting, or commenting on how nasty yao guai were. With Waking Cloud, you got 'I know you want to leave but maybe if you stayed you'd find peace here' or 'Salt-Upon-Wounds salted the ground when he took New Canaan so nothing could grow there, what kind of monster DOES that' or praying, loudly and repeatedly, for the help of the Father for 'this woman who is the Vessel Of Your Will'. Sometimes when you're trying to sneak past enemies, although the enemies don't seem to be alerted to your presence by her yammering. She just... you can't go more than a few minutes without her either being horrified or religious or something at you, and it gets old fast.
It gets older faster when combat opens up and she announces 'I will fight you if I must!' and runs at dudes with machine guns to hit them with her big bear paw of hurting. Janice shoved her into a suit of leather armor (she didn't have much else available, armor is heavy stuff) at the first opportunity, but that didn't really help much, especially since Waking Cloud knows sod-all about using ranged weapons. So basically every time they were attacked by White Legs, Janice had to be the fastest gun in the West, otherwise Waking Cloud would use up all the stimpaks and healing powder Janice had. Cazadores were even worse, because then Janice had to shove datura antivenom at her- she wouldn't use ordinary antivenom for some reason, Janice had to concoct an antivenom formula using datura roots- or she'd die of giant wasp. Yes, she turned out to be pretty good at killing things once she got close enough, but she took so much damage along the way that between dealing with her in a fight and dealing with her yammering while they traveled, Janice really didn't like the woman much.
She did, however, talk to her for a bit in the hopes that maybe once they'd had a get-to-know-you conversation, Waking Cloud would shut up. Waking Cloud, it turned out, was married. Her children had been evacuated, like the other children of the tribe. Her husband, too, although she hadn't had word from him. Apparently she'd asked Daniel about that, but Daniel had just gotten quiet and changed the subject, and she didn't want to press him more but she really wanted to know... She didn't make puppy eyes but she didn't have to. Janice figured that if she could get an answer out of Daniel, Waking Cloud would owe her a favor and maybe she could use that to get her to quiet down a bit.
Daniel was nearby, fortunately. Unfortunately, he had an unpleasant truth that he'd been keeping from Waking Cloud, namely that her husband had been killed by White Legs as he guarded the evacuees. Daniel had kept this from Waking Cloud to keep her from being distracted during their final efforts. Janice thought about this for a bit, and then pointed out that this would not end well; when Waking Cloud found out she'd been lied to she'd be mad. Not to mention that she was pretty sure Waking Cloud could hold it together if it was important enough. Daniel sighed and admitted that he wasn't entirely sure of his judgment in this and asked Janice to tell her for him. Since they were going off to find the Grand Staircase map together Janice figured she had a better chance of talking Waking Cloud down from any massive emotional consequence than Daniel did, and agreed.
And, yeah, Waking Cloud was all 'what the hell, my husband' and 'how could he keep this from me', but eventually she calmed down and said she could handle it. Janice just breathed a sigh of relief about it, because she knew that if she had gone with Daniel's plan and the woman had started talking one more time about how she was just SURE Janice would have liked her family if she'd come to Zion and been able to meet them, she would've blurted the information out just to shut her up.
On the way out of the valley, to go find the map, they ran across Joshua Graham again. He seemed a lot less wrathful than he had when Janice was high, so she took the opportunity to ask him a few questions, mostly if there was anything she could do to help him out- who knew, maybe if she could ingratiate herself with him he'd listen to Daniel a little more. He thanked her, but said that he found out the hard way after the bit with the pitch and the Grand Canyon and the burning and the ow that he was completely immune to healing stims, not to mention to painkillers, and that his body wasn't all that great at regrowing burned skin in general. So he had to clean himself up and change his bandages every day to avoid infections and other horrible things, and he was still going through the same burning experience pretty much every day of his life, but he thanked her for her concern.
DAMN that man was hardcore. No wonder he was the Angriest Mormon Alive.
Janice kinda dropped the chat and the questioning after that, because seriously, what the hell are you supposed to say after finding out a fact like that. She and Waking Cloud would just, um. They'd just... be somewhere else. Go find the map. The map would be a good thing. One away from scary burned men with all the pain tolerance in the world. The map turned out to be in one of the caves Janice had already visited, she just hadn't spotted it (translation: the game didn't spawn it until she got to Daniel- thanks, guys), but that was okay. She'd already exploded and killed everything in that cave that needed exploding and killing. She just had to get Waking Cloud to stop freaking out about how the caves were forbidden and the Father would be angry, which turned out to be relatively easy once she promised to be respectful. They mostly stayed out of caves otherwise, though, except for one Janice spotted on the way back that she'd never seen before. Turned out it had been one of the Terminal Man's other hideouts, and still had information from him in it. The 'coughers' had all come from somewhere in suits with '22' across the back and most of them seemed to have some kind of lung sickness, and they'd descended upon an encampment of Mexican survivors and locked up the survivors in pens and then ate them. Charming people, truly, but it explained more than a bit about Terminal Man's attitude towards the coughers in later notes.
That was, essentially, the big stuff. From there it was mostly a matter of getting back to Daniel with Waking Cloud still alive. Janice made Waking Cloud wear some ranger commando armor that Terminal Man had left in one of his caves, which helped, but since the woman kept running at White Legs armed with automatic weapons Janice figured they'd better take a few other steps before going back to the Sorrows. Mostly stuff involving clearing bridges and roads of White Legs and of White Leg traps, because if Waking Cloud was like this, the other Sorrows probably were as well, and Janice didn't see getting half the tribe's hunters chewed up by gunfire as a good thing. She made Waking Cloud stay in secure places while she herself picked off White Legs from a distance or stole their war totems or talked other Sorrows out of trying to sneak up on White Legs and take them by surprise, and made a side detour specifically to blow the ever-living crap out of a cave full of yao guai while they were at it. With C4, not her holorifle- those freakin' bears weren't going to attack anybody EVer AGAIN, not while Janice had explosives to keep them from doing it, thank you very much.
Once the maniacal giggling finished and the smoke cleared, she and Waking Cloud headed back to Daniel at last. Janice had done some thinking on the way, both about the White Legs and about what Joshua and Daniel had said, and... well. Aside from GODDAMN BEARS, she was really, really tired of killing people. Didn't matter that they were shooting at her, didn't matter that they were morons- she was just tired of killing people. The White Leg encampments they'd found had been full of Old World stuff and very little sign of anything genuinely hunted or gathered; these were people who lived by stealing and scrounging. Joshua had said they'd only get into the Legion if they could wipe out the New Canaanites and the tribes associated with them. If the Sorrows escaped alive, the White Legs would be pretty screwed because nobody in the whole region would be willing to ally with them. They'd cease to be a threat before long. It just... it wasn't worth it, to take a whole tribe of people who were shocked at the idea of salting enemy ground and who really thought fighting with melee weapons only was a good idea and turn them into people who could wipe out entire enemy tribes. Not when the world could do it for them. And anyway, the Terminal Man would never approve.
(In the real world, I actually had to save my game and think about this for a while, because I had no guarantee that Daniel's claim of the White Legs falling apart within a generation was true. For all I knew the White Legs could have a resurgence when no one was looking, and the only way to be really safe was to destroy them all. I decided in the end that it was more in-character, given everything that had happened along the way, for Janice not to go with the 'kill 'em all' ideology.)
So, she handed the map over to Daniel and told him she thought they ought to evacuate to the Grand Staircase as soon as possible, and he thanked her and said they'd do it that night. And that's where I saved and closed the game for this session.
