Notes From New Vegas 45
Jun. 4th, 2012 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 45: Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And AUGH ROBOT SCORPIONS
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had successfully retrieved the X-2 Antenna of Focusing Thought Waves And Also Bashing, the X-8 Frequency of Blowing Up Forcefields Among Other Things That Need Holes In Them, the X-13 Sneak Suit That For No Apparent Reason Had The Word Cardiac In The Name (Or Maybe There Was A Reason, I Just Wasn't Paying Attention), and the Little Yangtze Sense of Overwhelming Loathing For The Whole Damn Place. All of these except the last one were the things the floating brains had told her to get her own brain back from its probable current keeper, Dr. Mobius. She kind of figured they were lying to her about the affair somewhere, since they'd done this to her in the first place and anyway look what they'd presided over at Little Yangtze, but... well, who knew. Maybe she could get some answers. Yes, they were located inside a pacification field that kept her from being able to attack them or even draw a weapon, but surely she could overcome that a little if she were determined enough, right?
Well, no. The field was the field and there was no arguing with it, even though she marched in there with all the rage she could physically muster. I suppose when you're a brain in a jar surrounded by horribly surgically mutilated ex-humans with Tesla coils jammed in the spaces where their brains used to be, and you get attacked by one or more humans really seriously bent on giving you trouble, you develop a certain affinity for potent security measures. The most Janice could muster up inside the dome full o' brains was a mild sense of righteous but vague indignation, so in the hopes that she could work herself up to something better she headed over to Dr. Borous first. You'll remember that Borous was the brain who had installed an atomic core in his giant pet cyberdog for no good reason- the cyberdog who had only gotten gigantic in the first place because of all the chems Borous fed him. The cyberdog who had been Borous' pet originally, rather than a bred-and-born lab animal. The- you get the idea; I mostly mention it now because when Borous turned around to thank her for putting Gabe down and express mild regret at the necessity of losing a test subject, Janice began bringing all of these things up one after another. Borous agreed as she pointed out each of these things, and even started reminiscing about how Gabe used to sit by his side with his head on his leg (back when he had legs) and be comforting and friendly to him when he had been bullied and laughed at in high school. And how Gabe had even stayed loyal during all of the mutations and experiments he'd done... funny, his biogel was liquefying in places, and he was experiencing a very strange feeling he scarcely recognized...
Janice pointed out that it sounded like he was feeling guilty for having hurt someone who loved him very much. Borous agreed, and then deliberately suppressed the feelings and the memories and went back to the crazy talk, albeit somewhat subdued. Janice figured that was all she was going to get out of him, but counted it as a good sign that she was able to induce guilt in someone who'd been a bodiless amoral monster for two hundred years, and went over to talk to Klein instead.
Now, Borous was crazy but at least listened to Janice and other people to some degree. Klein just thundered a lot and had little to no interest in anything anybody else had to say. When Janice spoke to him he thanked her for retrieving the, um, the... things... the technologies... that... would be useful. Yes. Very... okay, he didn't remember what they would be useful for but she should totally go and deal with Mobius now, okay? He was SURE they had reasons for sending her to get those technologies and he'd explain about them once she got rid of Mobius. Or something.
Unfortunately that was the best Janice could do. Despite her best efforts she couldn't even get properly angry, let alone overcome the anti-aggression field. The only brains left were 8, 0, and Dala, and of the three of them only 0 seemed like one she could get herself angry at- he'd been the one to so casually refer to Little Yangtze as a human farm, even if he did seem more than a little pathetic. Dala just skeeved Janice out too much to go near. And 8 she actually felt sorry for, even knowing everything the brains had done. There just... wasn't much point in sticking around the place, the way she saw it; she'd better go and find Mobius and see if some good could come out of that.
The boundless rage came back pretty much as soon as she left the Think Tank area, of course, but she couldn't prop the door open behind her enough to get a line of sight on any of the brains and she didn't have any explosives to throw, so she couldn't really make use of that fact. None of the AIs in The Sink were helpful either, unless she wanted to count the toaster's ravings as inspirational material. As for the AI in her sneak suit, it kept chiming up with "I bet nobody has ever been as sneaky as me!" and "Maybe the monsters have stealth suits too, and that's why we're not seeing them" whenever she tried to talk to it. When it suddenly asked her "Who do you think is cuter, Dr. Klein or Dr. Borous?" she practically leaped out of it, cardioregulatory bibble-babble be damned, and shoved it in a locker in favor of her Sierra Madre armor. Nobody should have to answer that question.
The trip to the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME was about what you would expect for any kind of journey across the Big MT crater and so I will not bore you with it. I will note that she encountered a building called the Y-0 Research Center that was almost completely ruined, and that had a truck smashed into it, and a computer terminal out front that she managed to coax into telling her that this had apparently been where the matter-rearrangement tech in the Sierra Madre vending machines had been developed. She couldn't get in, though, no matter what she tried. Probably wouldn't have helped much, if the ranting she heard Dr. Mobius hurling over his announcements was true. (I probably should've mentioned some time ago that every few minutes when she was outdoors, Mobius would broadcast some kind of rant or threat towards the brains of the Think Tank. One of them was "Klein, remember when you destroyed Y-0 through a careless miscalculation? ... oh, wait, or was that me?") Damned shame, really. Those machines were the only good thing about that hell-pit.
Well, it didn't really matter because in the end AUGH ROBOT SCORPIONS. EVERYWHERE. If you were expecting me to get philosophical about loss and war and the passage of time and the foolishness of man, nope. Look on my works, ye mighty, and AUGH ROBOT SCORPIONS. Mobius' headquarters was the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME, and the Y-0 center was very very near the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME, and that meant patrols from the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME passed through the area fairly often and that meant ROBOT SCORPIONS. Screw philosophy. Laser-tailed armored exploding robot bugs the size of motorcycles take precedence every time.
Some time later, in a fair deal of pain and carrying quite a few energy cells and fission batteries (Janice hated the bugs but damn well intended to profit by their corpses), Janice made it into the X-42 Robo-Warfare Research Facility, just inside the FORBIDDEN ZONE ENTRANCE. Thankfully, the gigantic hangar beyond was not full of robot scorpions.
It was full of robot scorpion. One.
One that was roughly the size of a 747.
Not that she saw it for long. The place went dark except for spewing sparks and the voice of Mobius warned visitors that a combat experiment was in progress and everybody should put on their goggles and take their Rad-X, because the X-42 GIANT ROBOSCORPION WAS ALIIIIIIVE! AWAKEN, MY PET, AND INITIATE YOUR SEARCH AND DESTROY PROTOCOL! Etc., etc.; well, it... pretty much did exactly that, although thankfully it wasn't all that good at the search part. Either that or Janice was exceptionally sneaky even without the disturbingly chipper suit, which was a very real possibility given how much her not-getting-splattered-up-to-now had depended on sneaking and otherwise not being noticed. It didn't matter which it was, of course. What mattered was that the gigantic robot scorpion with the ATOMIC LASER TAIL that gave off SERIOUS amounts of radiation every time it fired hadn't seen her yet- and there were several control terminals scattered around the perimeter of the room. If she was very, very lucky, one of them would be some kind of emergency control cutoff device.
She was not very, very lucky, alas. She did manage to launch some robot drones to distract it- Mobius sounded entertained by the fact that the drones had 'somehow' come online- and then overloaded some of its generators a bit from the next terminal. Unfortunately the terminal after that didn't do anything, just noted that the scorpion was being tested for military use and the military was expecting results very soon, which led to the horrific image of the soldiers of the pre-nuclear phase of the Great War being flanked on every side by Hell's Pokemon. Given that Janice had no alcohol on hand to wash that image out of her... well, her Tesla coils, her brain wasn't exactly in her head... she had no choice but to keep going.
Fortunately the next terminal turned on the various laser turrets that were positioned around the room, and set all of them to 'Scorponok has gone into unstoppable robo-roid-rage, so blow him right the slag up'. Unfortunately, Scorpy there took that as a personal insult and started firing right back at the turrets... it still didn't see Janice, but when that tail laser hit it tended to spew all kinds of sparks and energy stream effects, along with a boatload of rads, and Janice really didn't like that. Particularly not when she finally found the half-sheltered booth with the 'turn off the goddamn robot' terminal in it and couldn't get to the side with the door without being seein and had to hack the terminal by leaning through the window and typing very, very fast with one hand. There was a laser turret around the other side and the splash damage from a Scorpy near-miss was nasty. She finally managed to shut the thing down before taking enough rads to melt her bones, though, so that was something.
Funnily enough Mobius did not come out to see what was going on. Or even yell at her or threaten or bluster, which she would've expected, honestly. She didn't want to stick around, of course, there was always the chance Mobius would reactivate the thing, but she made a quick sweep of what was left of the room perimeter and snagged a souped-up laser gun and a new frequency holotape for the emitter gun for her troubles. Also a couple of packages of Mentats, which... well, she didn' t have much use for them herself, but she could always sell them somewhere. So there was that. And then there really wasn't anything else except one last door, and that was the one that led straight to Mobius.
I'm actually gonna close this entry here. Mobius deserves his own entry and I didn't take enough notes during that encounter to do him justice from memory alone.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had successfully retrieved the X-2 Antenna of Focusing Thought Waves And Also Bashing, the X-8 Frequency of Blowing Up Forcefields Among Other Things That Need Holes In Them, the X-13 Sneak Suit That For No Apparent Reason Had The Word Cardiac In The Name (Or Maybe There Was A Reason, I Just Wasn't Paying Attention), and the Little Yangtze Sense of Overwhelming Loathing For The Whole Damn Place. All of these except the last one were the things the floating brains had told her to get her own brain back from its probable current keeper, Dr. Mobius. She kind of figured they were lying to her about the affair somewhere, since they'd done this to her in the first place and anyway look what they'd presided over at Little Yangtze, but... well, who knew. Maybe she could get some answers. Yes, they were located inside a pacification field that kept her from being able to attack them or even draw a weapon, but surely she could overcome that a little if she were determined enough, right?
Well, no. The field was the field and there was no arguing with it, even though she marched in there with all the rage she could physically muster. I suppose when you're a brain in a jar surrounded by horribly surgically mutilated ex-humans with Tesla coils jammed in the spaces where their brains used to be, and you get attacked by one or more humans really seriously bent on giving you trouble, you develop a certain affinity for potent security measures. The most Janice could muster up inside the dome full o' brains was a mild sense of righteous but vague indignation, so in the hopes that she could work herself up to something better she headed over to Dr. Borous first. You'll remember that Borous was the brain who had installed an atomic core in his giant pet cyberdog for no good reason- the cyberdog who had only gotten gigantic in the first place because of all the chems Borous fed him. The cyberdog who had been Borous' pet originally, rather than a bred-and-born lab animal. The- you get the idea; I mostly mention it now because when Borous turned around to thank her for putting Gabe down and express mild regret at the necessity of losing a test subject, Janice began bringing all of these things up one after another. Borous agreed as she pointed out each of these things, and even started reminiscing about how Gabe used to sit by his side with his head on his leg (back when he had legs) and be comforting and friendly to him when he had been bullied and laughed at in high school. And how Gabe had even stayed loyal during all of the mutations and experiments he'd done... funny, his biogel was liquefying in places, and he was experiencing a very strange feeling he scarcely recognized...
Janice pointed out that it sounded like he was feeling guilty for having hurt someone who loved him very much. Borous agreed, and then deliberately suppressed the feelings and the memories and went back to the crazy talk, albeit somewhat subdued. Janice figured that was all she was going to get out of him, but counted it as a good sign that she was able to induce guilt in someone who'd been a bodiless amoral monster for two hundred years, and went over to talk to Klein instead.
Now, Borous was crazy but at least listened to Janice and other people to some degree. Klein just thundered a lot and had little to no interest in anything anybody else had to say. When Janice spoke to him he thanked her for retrieving the, um, the... things... the technologies... that... would be useful. Yes. Very... okay, he didn't remember what they would be useful for but she should totally go and deal with Mobius now, okay? He was SURE they had reasons for sending her to get those technologies and he'd explain about them once she got rid of Mobius. Or something.
Unfortunately that was the best Janice could do. Despite her best efforts she couldn't even get properly angry, let alone overcome the anti-aggression field. The only brains left were 8, 0, and Dala, and of the three of them only 0 seemed like one she could get herself angry at- he'd been the one to so casually refer to Little Yangtze as a human farm, even if he did seem more than a little pathetic. Dala just skeeved Janice out too much to go near. And 8 she actually felt sorry for, even knowing everything the brains had done. There just... wasn't much point in sticking around the place, the way she saw it; she'd better go and find Mobius and see if some good could come out of that.
The boundless rage came back pretty much as soon as she left the Think Tank area, of course, but she couldn't prop the door open behind her enough to get a line of sight on any of the brains and she didn't have any explosives to throw, so she couldn't really make use of that fact. None of the AIs in The Sink were helpful either, unless she wanted to count the toaster's ravings as inspirational material. As for the AI in her sneak suit, it kept chiming up with "I bet nobody has ever been as sneaky as me!" and "Maybe the monsters have stealth suits too, and that's why we're not seeing them" whenever she tried to talk to it. When it suddenly asked her "Who do you think is cuter, Dr. Klein or Dr. Borous?" she practically leaped out of it, cardioregulatory bibble-babble be damned, and shoved it in a locker in favor of her Sierra Madre armor. Nobody should have to answer that question.
The trip to the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME was about what you would expect for any kind of journey across the Big MT crater and so I will not bore you with it. I will note that she encountered a building called the Y-0 Research Center that was almost completely ruined, and that had a truck smashed into it, and a computer terminal out front that she managed to coax into telling her that this had apparently been where the matter-rearrangement tech in the Sierra Madre vending machines had been developed. She couldn't get in, though, no matter what she tried. Probably wouldn't have helped much, if the ranting she heard Dr. Mobius hurling over his announcements was true. (I probably should've mentioned some time ago that every few minutes when she was outdoors, Mobius would broadcast some kind of rant or threat towards the brains of the Think Tank. One of them was "Klein, remember when you destroyed Y-0 through a careless miscalculation? ... oh, wait, or was that me?") Damned shame, really. Those machines were the only good thing about that hell-pit.
Well, it didn't really matter because in the end AUGH ROBOT SCORPIONS. EVERYWHERE. If you were expecting me to get philosophical about loss and war and the passage of time and the foolishness of man, nope. Look on my works, ye mighty, and AUGH ROBOT SCORPIONS. Mobius' headquarters was the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME, and the Y-0 center was very very near the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME, and that meant patrols from the FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME passed through the area fairly often and that meant ROBOT SCORPIONS. Screw philosophy. Laser-tailed armored exploding robot bugs the size of motorcycles take precedence every time.
Some time later, in a fair deal of pain and carrying quite a few energy cells and fission batteries (Janice hated the bugs but damn well intended to profit by their corpses), Janice made it into the X-42 Robo-Warfare Research Facility, just inside the FORBIDDEN ZONE ENTRANCE. Thankfully, the gigantic hangar beyond was not full of robot scorpions.
It was full of robot scorpion. One.
One that was roughly the size of a 747.
Not that she saw it for long. The place went dark except for spewing sparks and the voice of Mobius warned visitors that a combat experiment was in progress and everybody should put on their goggles and take their Rad-X, because the X-42 GIANT ROBOSCORPION WAS ALIIIIIIVE! AWAKEN, MY PET, AND INITIATE YOUR SEARCH AND DESTROY PROTOCOL! Etc., etc.; well, it... pretty much did exactly that, although thankfully it wasn't all that good at the search part. Either that or Janice was exceptionally sneaky even without the disturbingly chipper suit, which was a very real possibility given how much her not-getting-splattered-up-to-now had depended on sneaking and otherwise not being noticed. It didn't matter which it was, of course. What mattered was that the gigantic robot scorpion with the ATOMIC LASER TAIL that gave off SERIOUS amounts of radiation every time it fired hadn't seen her yet- and there were several control terminals scattered around the perimeter of the room. If she was very, very lucky, one of them would be some kind of emergency control cutoff device.
She was not very, very lucky, alas. She did manage to launch some robot drones to distract it- Mobius sounded entertained by the fact that the drones had 'somehow' come online- and then overloaded some of its generators a bit from the next terminal. Unfortunately the terminal after that didn't do anything, just noted that the scorpion was being tested for military use and the military was expecting results very soon, which led to the horrific image of the soldiers of the pre-nuclear phase of the Great War being flanked on every side by Hell's Pokemon. Given that Janice had no alcohol on hand to wash that image out of her... well, her Tesla coils, her brain wasn't exactly in her head... she had no choice but to keep going.
Fortunately the next terminal turned on the various laser turrets that were positioned around the room, and set all of them to 'Scorponok has gone into unstoppable robo-roid-rage, so blow him right the slag up'. Unfortunately, Scorpy there took that as a personal insult and started firing right back at the turrets... it still didn't see Janice, but when that tail laser hit it tended to spew all kinds of sparks and energy stream effects, along with a boatload of rads, and Janice really didn't like that. Particularly not when she finally found the half-sheltered booth with the 'turn off the goddamn robot' terminal in it and couldn't get to the side with the door without being seein and had to hack the terminal by leaning through the window and typing very, very fast with one hand. There was a laser turret around the other side and the splash damage from a Scorpy near-miss was nasty. She finally managed to shut the thing down before taking enough rads to melt her bones, though, so that was something.
Funnily enough Mobius did not come out to see what was going on. Or even yell at her or threaten or bluster, which she would've expected, honestly. She didn't want to stick around, of course, there was always the chance Mobius would reactivate the thing, but she made a quick sweep of what was left of the room perimeter and snagged a souped-up laser gun and a new frequency holotape for the emitter gun for her troubles. Also a couple of packages of Mentats, which... well, she didn' t have much use for them herself, but she could always sell them somewhere. So there was that. And then there really wasn't anything else except one last door, and that was the one that led straight to Mobius.
I'm actually gonna close this entry here. Mobius deserves his own entry and I didn't take enough notes during that encounter to do him justice from memory alone.
