Notes From New Vegas 50
Jul. 4th, 2012 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 50: We Can't Stop Here, This Is Allegory Country
Happy Independence Day, everybody. Sorry about the delay. I know I said 'tune in next week', but I've been in the middle of a seriously nasty heat wave and turning on my Xbox tends to create almost as much heat as my air conditioner nullifies. I don't believe in Method gaming, so the Lonesome Road stuff had to wait until the area cooled down a bit.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had decided to follow up on a weird radio message for Courier Six from someone named Ulysses. It wasn't much of a message, just geographical coordinates and the words 'Courier Six' and the sender's name, but it was delivered in a voice that sounded suspiciously like a cross between Keith "Goliath" David and Isaiah "Look At Your Man, Now Look At Me" Mustafa, which is always promising. More promising was the fact that she'd heard that voice on a couple of tapes in the Big MT, mostly talking to Christine, the former Brotherhood Knight she'd run into in the Sierra Madre. This fellow apparently knew her if the original tapes were right, and had some kind of answers about... well, something, she didn't know what. But since the old man who ran the Mojave Express back in Primm- remember that? Back when Janice was actually following up on her couriering job, after getting, y'know, shot in the head? Johnston Nash, his name was, and he'd said that the original person meant to carry her package had seen her name on the form and turned around and left. Since there weren't really a whole lot of people in the world who ever got to see those forms, she figured Portentous Exposition Guy was probably the person who had refused to carry her package, and so she wanted answers from him. Besides, it sure as hell beat thinking about what had happened to her brain back in Big Mountain, or trying to chase down Evil Chandler Bing (remember him?) andreturn to pursuing the A-plot get her package back. And anyway, when she did stuff without a clear goal she seemed to end up neck deep in deathclaws. Which, no.
So. Off to the coordinates she went. Turned out she'd been there before, way back when she was fumbling her way outward from Goodsprings. It was a heap of wreckage blocking the mouth of a canyon, all Old World cars and metal and such, and it was pretty much covered in graffiti. 'LONESOME ROAD' was just the usual meaningless graffiti you found when people got bored, she figured. 'COURIER SIX' was ... probably Ulysses, maybe trying to get her attention. 'YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER' did not really strike her as an especially reassuring statement, given the circumstances. On the other hand, it did kind of occur to her that this Ulysses might be trying to say he had information that would let her ultimately give the Mojave the finger and go back to wherever she came from, which sounded kind of AHAHAHAHA oh God I can't believe I typed that much with a straight face. Silly Janice! Nothing EVER works out that nicely! Remember what happened when you tried to take a vacation? The Casino of Horrible Lung Death! When you tried to investigate a possible Old World film festival? Your brain got taken out of your head! When you tried to get a job doing something in an area where nobody particularly knew who you were or wanted you to die? YOU GOT STRANDED IN UTAH. Going home at this point would probably be a cross between every 'are you sure you don't want to stay at the palace a little longer?' fairy tale ever and the 'well CRAP so much for my only living relatives who will never be mentioned again' scene in Star Wars. If you were LUCKY.
*cough*
Sorry. Um. Anyway, Janice kind of side-eyed the graffiti, tried to decide if that was 'I can get you home' courier-go-home or 'ROMANES EUNT DOMUS' courier-go-home, finally decided it didn't matter, and pushed open the only part of the wreckage that she could physically move without knocking everything down.
And the introductory movie completely failed to start.
No, seriously. The other three pieces of DLC have intro movies to set the scene for the player and/or the character. Nothing at all like that here. Just a pop-up for the player saying Lonesome Road was intended for Couriers of experience level 25 or higher, that no companions could come with you, that no companions you might get inside could follow you back out, that you could carry any equipment with you that you wanted, and that if you changed your mind you could turn around and retrace your steps back to the Mojave at any time. But if you were ready, history awaited.
Yeah. THAT'S NOT UNNERVING AT ALL.
Anyway, Janice stepped through the wreckage door and navigated the canyon beyond, and when she finally got to somewhere with enough light to see, she was looking out over an utterly devastated scene of something so broken that it made everywhere else she'd ever been since the start of the game look like freakin' Singapore....
(Meanwhile, 'Quest Completed: The Reunion' appeared on my screen. And then 'Quest Added: The Silo. Navigate Hopeville Missile Silo to reach the Lonesome Road.' Oh, God. Was this going to be Personal Growth and Character Development Through Heavy-Handed Metaphor? WAS I IN ALLEGORY COUNTRY? WAS THAT IT?)
(Meanwhile meanwhile, my copy of iTunes, which is set to random shuffle, just started playing "No Mercy" from the 300 soundtrack while I wrote that. Apparently, yes. Janice is, in fact, in Allegory Country. Hu boy.)
Pretty much everything around her was shattered rock and torn pipes and twisted metal. The sky overhead was moving, just this huge constant rush of what looked like sandstorm glowing a kind of yellowish muddy brown. Ahead of her was a huge canyon, all full of the wreckage of buildings and stone, studded in a couple of places with glowing red- no, sorry, slowly pulsating red- lights all strung out in a widely spaced line. She'd thought the scene out the window from the Sink's balcony had resembled industrial Hell when she first found it, but, yeah... not so much, not any more.
So, yeah, she kinda looked at all that. And she kinda looked at her Pip-Boy's recorded radio message screen. And without saying ONE WORD FURTHER, she reached for the Big Mountain Transportalponder, which was supposed to be able to send her back to the Sink at a moment's notice, and started yanking that thing's trigger like her life depended on it.
Didn't work, of course. God didn't like her that much.
She put the thing back and looked over her shoulder at the wreckage again and then she walked up to the edge of the canyon and peered alllllllllllllll the way down to the horrendously far away bottom, and while she didn't yell for fear of triggering an avalanche, the only thing going through her head at that point was GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON I SHOULDN'T TURN AROUND AND LEAVE.
NO, SERIOUSLY, I'M WAITING.
REALLY, WHY AM I NOT RUNNING AWAY.
OH WAIT. IF I FIND PORTENTOUS EXPOSITION GUY I CAN BEAT THE ANSWERS OUT OF HIM. OKAY.
JUST DON'T THINK I'M GOING TO BE HAPPY ABOUT IT.
So she straightened up, and gave the disaster zone in front of her the finger with both hands at once, and started along the only path that did not involve attempting to climb over fallen radio antennas and the wreckage of two-hundred-year-old atomic-powered cars. The path led towards a door in the rock; on one side there was a sign reading "Hopeville Ballistic Defense Station. Authorized Military Personnel Only". On the other side there was an Old World Flag graffito in white. For a door that was supposed to be Authorized Anything Only it sure opened without giving her any grief. Might've been Ulysses' doing, though, since when she got inside there was more of that YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER' graffiti on the walls-
Wait. Wait wait whoa whoa wait why did that double-width metal door open automatically? Where was the electric eye or the person at the controls? WHO WAS WATCHING HER? There had to be someone here-
But of course there wasn't, and she couldn't find any cameras, and when she started following the left-hand wall in an attempt to stay on a reasonably sensible course she immediately found a massive locked door labeled REACTOR. And then a control console with a shiny red lever that was marked 'Hopeville Silo Blast Door Controls, which for some reason was supposedly 'encrypted beyond your ability to hack'. Given that it was a shiny red lever I had a hard time seeing how it could be encrypted beyond anything, but it turned out later that the encryption message referred to a separate panel on the console that had to be activated in order for the lever to get enough electricity to work... anyway, it didn't really matter to Janice just at that point. When you are in a nuclear missile silo you do not pull shiny red levers no matter how old they are, because you are in a GODDAMN NUCLEAR MISSILE SILO, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.
Anyway, the next room had a breathing mask of some kind, which struck her as a wise idea given the ongoing sandstorm. And an arc welder gun, which did not strike her as such a great idea, because it was a large, heavy weapon with which she was unfamiliar; she left it alone. And also a couple of tubes for storage of OOOH! Robot! Specifically, an eyebot that looked awfully like ED-E, the little robot she'd gotten from Johnston Nash and wound up leaving in Veronica's care. It struck Janice that she could probably open the pod and activate the bot. ED-E had started following her immediately and proved really useful, and in a place this grim she could use a friend or a companion or at least something else to keep her company. So, yeah, she figured she'd open the pod and let it out.
The bot immediately activated and floated up to face her in a storm of cheerful expository beeping. I don't know how she understood it, but apparently she did, and didn't seem weirded out by that fact either. Maybe she'd picked up the knack when she had Tesla coils stuffed in her skull. Maybe it was something else. Whatever, didn't matter. She was just happy to have ED-E with her in this land of unbelievably weird. Apparently there were systems in the Divide that had detected the little robot being activated back in the Mojave and built a copy remotely, even including all its data and recordings. Once again, THAT'S NOT CREEPY AT ALL.
*ahem*
Janice didn't have time to get too wigged out about that, because apparently being less dinged-up and patched together gave ED-E access to recordings Janice hadn't heard yet. He started playing the voice of Dr. Whitley, the scientist who'd built him for the Enclave. Nothing big or fancy, just some chatter about testing this series of eyebot and stuff along those lines, but hearing the voice played seemed to make the little flying beachball happy, so Janice didn't mind too much. There was something weirdly cute about ED-E bouncing up and down and squeebling joyfully at the sound of its maker's voice. Somewhere this grim, she needed all the cute she could get.
They went back into the room with the shiny red handle- there wasn't anywhere else to go- and ED-E squealed happily before making some kind of control panel rise out of the console. Once the little bot zapped it a few times, it turned to Janice expectantly, and she very reluctantly tugged at the shiny red handle. Fortunately, all it did was open the blast doors. On a freakin' intact ICBM being worked on by other eyebots, but... well, it just opened the blast doors. That was enough. She couldn't get through there, but the door marked REACTOR had unlocked at the same time, so she and ED-E headed off that way. By the time they got to the missile something had apparently managed to destroy the other eyebots- they sure as heck weren't there any more and there was a lot of electronic scrap lying around. This, naturally, creeped out Janice, because she couldn't find what had done it.
It creeped out ED-E more; the little guy started playing another audio log from his creator, who was vehemently protesting a female scientist's insistence on working on ED-E without disengaging his activity protocols, protesting that she was hurting the 'bot. By the time the recording was over ED-E was kind of drooping sadly in midair, which is an impressive feat for something that's essentially Sputnik with a radiator grille. Janice did her best to comfort him- hey, she'd tried to be nice to a freaking floating brain in a jar back in Big Mountain, why not to a robot- and they went on.
(There was some stuff here about an Old World tv program called RALPHIE, too. Janice's familiarity with this extended roughly as far as 'there was a poster for that over my bed at the Sink, wasn't there?', and so she did not pay much attention. In-game, you get an XP bonus and fulfil a challenge if you find every single RALPHIE poster in the Divide. Keep those hours-of-gameplay numbers up by any means necessary, Obsidian!)
Anyway, from there they proceeded very slowly, trying to avoid laser turrets and other such things (probably the source of the other eyebots' destruction). Poke poke poke, investigate investigate poke, HOLY JESUS DEAD DUDES WITH NO SKIN.
No, seriously, she opened the door to a room nearby and found a dead Sentrybot facing down two dead dudes who gave the impression of having been flayed alive. Ghouls looked rotten. This was something else, and it was revolting, so she didn't look very long- just long enough to note that they had vaguely Legion-looking armor that had been patched together with Old World street signs and the like. And then you'd better believe she scrambled out of there.
The next room was an office, with windows on either side that showed closet-sized rooms full of sentrybots. On the floor was a huge official-looking seal of the Old World government. Around the outside it read BALLISTIC DEFENSE DIVISION - COMMONWEALTH DEFENSE ADMINISTRATION. In the middle, across the red, white, and blue shield, was a banner that read 'Exitus Acta Probat'. Janice didn't have enough Latin to understand that, and neither did I, so I grabbed my Latin-to-English dictionary (look, I had it before I started playing the game with the pseudo-Roman weirdoes in it, okay?) and went to look it up.
Turns out 'Exitus Acta Probat' means 'the result validates the deeds'. Or, more conventionally, 'the ends justify the means'. Mmmyeah. That's the kind of thought you want on the minds of the dudes with their hands on the Button.
Well, it didn't much matter now. Janice poked around the room a bit, not that she had to poke especially hard, seeing as how other than the robots in the closet the only thing of note in the room was the base commander's desk and he'd died in it. In his uniform, which was still nicely intact and possibly worth taking with her for when she absolutely had to take her armor off (it was just an outfit, not armor, but an appealing one- what can I say?). Oh, and he had a bottle of vodka in his desk, and a pack of cigarettes next to him, and his ten millimeter pistol and several spent rounds lying next to what was left of his bones, and a harmonica. Yeah, I'm not clear on that one either. Whatever.
Janice and ED-E booked it out of there and kept searching around the place, and eventually found a room with a sentrybot with a Bowie knife sticking out of its eye, which, once again, isn't creepy at all. She found a still-powered mainframe that was apparently connected to some doors and security systems, so she got ED-E to kick it online, and they moved on into the Tunnels Full of Dudes With No Skin. Still-moving Dudes With No Skin, you understand, and not just in a staggering-around, augh augh augh augh augh dying now, kind of way. They were engaging in pretty vicious combat with the laser turrets the mainframe had switched on, and several of them broke off to try and attack Janice and ED-E.
Skinless or no, they died of holorifle pretty nicely, so Janice and ED-E went on their way. After, it should be noted, noticing that only some of the Dudes With No Skin were in pseudo-Legion armor. Some of them were in what looked not unlike NCR gear. Not that Janice planned on getting particularly close. She might have been a practical enough person to go through corpses' pockets and strip uniforms off skeletons, but ew. Skinless. ewwwwww. She wasn't that desperate.
They rounded a corner and ran into that damn YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER marking on the wall again. Janice made a face at it and opened the door that ostensibly led to Hopeville, and that was when Portentous Exposition Guy commandeered her robot. No, he wasn't there physically, he just suddenly started broadcasting his voice to her through ED-E and did something that prevvented the little bot from trying to escape. The hell. MY ROBOT. LET GO OF MY ROBOT YOU POMPOUS VOICED ASS. AND LEARN TO USE SOME COMPLETE SENTENCES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Seriously. Portentous Exposition Guy had the vocal equivalent of a Homestuck typing quirk in that wherever possible, he left the subject off his sentences. He also tended to leave pronouns out if he could get away with it. Probably this was meant to indicate to the player that he had a different native language or dialect or something, but to Janice it meant that he sounded like a pretentious jerk. Judge for yourself:
"I'm a courier. Courier Six... was Courier Six. Like you- and not like you, in all the ways that matter. Spent too many years looking for you- now, letting you come to me."
"If you follow a symbol to the end, ask yourself what that means. More important, ask what happens after the end."
"Let the land do the killing for you. That's one of the things you taught me." - what? WHAT? Yeah, that was something that woke Janice right the hell up.
"There was death in that package, and while the Chip is important to Old World ghosts... you are more dangerous than that chip could ever be. Maybe why you found each other, little piece of the Old World speaking to you, waiting for you to wake something else up with it."
What is this place? "The Divide... this place is a slice of it. Old military. Can still smell pride, and the fear." etc. etc. "America sleeps in the Divide. giants, beneath the earth. You saw one locked in the silo beneath you. There's more. Only takes a few of them, locked below dground, to tear apart the earth, and cast dust, sand, ash... into the skies above. You'll see the extent- the miles of it, soon enough."
"If you saw their corpses, you saw mercy."
"America sleeps ahead of you, its nightmares filled with quakes, storms. You'll need to find your own path. That means waking America's spears up from their slumber." Translation: Janice had to blow up warheads with a laser detonator that Portentous Exposition Guy couldn't be arsed to locate more precisely than 'out there'. Great.
That's not everything he said, but overall, that's what he talked like. He said he'd left markers in different colors and claimed they'd lead Janice to what was left of her home, or something along those lines. 'Maybe remind you of why you wander'. Yeah. That's reassuring.
So, yeah. That's where things stood: now Janice had to wander around in the dark in the ruins of the Hopeville military base looking for the damn detonator for the warheads. With those skinless guys out there looking to kill her ass. WELL THAT'S JUST PRIME.
Tune in next week for horrible things with scales on!
Happy Independence Day, everybody. Sorry about the delay. I know I said 'tune in next week', but I've been in the middle of a seriously nasty heat wave and turning on my Xbox tends to create almost as much heat as my air conditioner nullifies. I don't believe in Method gaming, so the Lonesome Road stuff had to wait until the area cooled down a bit.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had decided to follow up on a weird radio message for Courier Six from someone named Ulysses. It wasn't much of a message, just geographical coordinates and the words 'Courier Six' and the sender's name, but it was delivered in a voice that sounded suspiciously like a cross between Keith "Goliath" David and Isaiah "Look At Your Man, Now Look At Me" Mustafa, which is always promising. More promising was the fact that she'd heard that voice on a couple of tapes in the Big MT, mostly talking to Christine, the former Brotherhood Knight she'd run into in the Sierra Madre. This fellow apparently knew her if the original tapes were right, and had some kind of answers about... well, something, she didn't know what. But since the old man who ran the Mojave Express back in Primm- remember that? Back when Janice was actually following up on her couriering job, after getting, y'know, shot in the head? Johnston Nash, his name was, and he'd said that the original person meant to carry her package had seen her name on the form and turned around and left. Since there weren't really a whole lot of people in the world who ever got to see those forms, she figured Portentous Exposition Guy was probably the person who had refused to carry her package, and so she wanted answers from him. Besides, it sure as hell beat thinking about what had happened to her brain back in Big Mountain, or trying to chase down Evil Chandler Bing (remember him?) and
So. Off to the coordinates she went. Turned out she'd been there before, way back when she was fumbling her way outward from Goodsprings. It was a heap of wreckage blocking the mouth of a canyon, all Old World cars and metal and such, and it was pretty much covered in graffiti. 'LONESOME ROAD' was just the usual meaningless graffiti you found when people got bored, she figured. 'COURIER SIX' was ... probably Ulysses, maybe trying to get her attention. 'YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER' did not really strike her as an especially reassuring statement, given the circumstances. On the other hand, it did kind of occur to her that this Ulysses might be trying to say he had information that would let her ultimately give the Mojave the finger and go back to wherever she came from, which sounded kind of AHAHAHAHA oh God I can't believe I typed that much with a straight face. Silly Janice! Nothing EVER works out that nicely! Remember what happened when you tried to take a vacation? The Casino of Horrible Lung Death! When you tried to investigate a possible Old World film festival? Your brain got taken out of your head! When you tried to get a job doing something in an area where nobody particularly knew who you were or wanted you to die? YOU GOT STRANDED IN UTAH. Going home at this point would probably be a cross between every 'are you sure you don't want to stay at the palace a little longer?' fairy tale ever and the 'well CRAP so much for my only living relatives who will never be mentioned again' scene in Star Wars. If you were LUCKY.
*cough*
Sorry. Um. Anyway, Janice kind of side-eyed the graffiti, tried to decide if that was 'I can get you home' courier-go-home or 'ROMANES EUNT DOMUS' courier-go-home, finally decided it didn't matter, and pushed open the only part of the wreckage that she could physically move without knocking everything down.
And the introductory movie completely failed to start.
No, seriously. The other three pieces of DLC have intro movies to set the scene for the player and/or the character. Nothing at all like that here. Just a pop-up for the player saying Lonesome Road was intended for Couriers of experience level 25 or higher, that no companions could come with you, that no companions you might get inside could follow you back out, that you could carry any equipment with you that you wanted, and that if you changed your mind you could turn around and retrace your steps back to the Mojave at any time. But if you were ready, history awaited.
Yeah. THAT'S NOT UNNERVING AT ALL.
Anyway, Janice stepped through the wreckage door and navigated the canyon beyond, and when she finally got to somewhere with enough light to see, she was looking out over an utterly devastated scene of something so broken that it made everywhere else she'd ever been since the start of the game look like freakin' Singapore....
(Meanwhile, 'Quest Completed: The Reunion' appeared on my screen. And then 'Quest Added: The Silo. Navigate Hopeville Missile Silo to reach the Lonesome Road.' Oh, God. Was this going to be Personal Growth and Character Development Through Heavy-Handed Metaphor? WAS I IN ALLEGORY COUNTRY? WAS THAT IT?)
(Meanwhile meanwhile, my copy of iTunes, which is set to random shuffle, just started playing "No Mercy" from the 300 soundtrack while I wrote that. Apparently, yes. Janice is, in fact, in Allegory Country. Hu boy.)
Pretty much everything around her was shattered rock and torn pipes and twisted metal. The sky overhead was moving, just this huge constant rush of what looked like sandstorm glowing a kind of yellowish muddy brown. Ahead of her was a huge canyon, all full of the wreckage of buildings and stone, studded in a couple of places with glowing red- no, sorry, slowly pulsating red- lights all strung out in a widely spaced line. She'd thought the scene out the window from the Sink's balcony had resembled industrial Hell when she first found it, but, yeah... not so much, not any more.
So, yeah, she kinda looked at all that. And she kinda looked at her Pip-Boy's recorded radio message screen. And without saying ONE WORD FURTHER, she reached for the Big Mountain Transportalponder, which was supposed to be able to send her back to the Sink at a moment's notice, and started yanking that thing's trigger like her life depended on it.
Didn't work, of course. God didn't like her that much.
She put the thing back and looked over her shoulder at the wreckage again and then she walked up to the edge of the canyon and peered alllllllllllllll the way down to the horrendously far away bottom, and while she didn't yell for fear of triggering an avalanche, the only thing going through her head at that point was GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON I SHOULDN'T TURN AROUND AND LEAVE.
NO, SERIOUSLY, I'M WAITING.
REALLY, WHY AM I NOT RUNNING AWAY.
OH WAIT. IF I FIND PORTENTOUS EXPOSITION GUY I CAN BEAT THE ANSWERS OUT OF HIM. OKAY.
JUST DON'T THINK I'M GOING TO BE HAPPY ABOUT IT.
So she straightened up, and gave the disaster zone in front of her the finger with both hands at once, and started along the only path that did not involve attempting to climb over fallen radio antennas and the wreckage of two-hundred-year-old atomic-powered cars. The path led towards a door in the rock; on one side there was a sign reading "Hopeville Ballistic Defense Station. Authorized Military Personnel Only". On the other side there was an Old World Flag graffito in white. For a door that was supposed to be Authorized Anything Only it sure opened without giving her any grief. Might've been Ulysses' doing, though, since when she got inside there was more of that YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER' graffiti on the walls-
Wait. Wait wait whoa whoa wait why did that double-width metal door open automatically? Where was the electric eye or the person at the controls? WHO WAS WATCHING HER? There had to be someone here-
But of course there wasn't, and she couldn't find any cameras, and when she started following the left-hand wall in an attempt to stay on a reasonably sensible course she immediately found a massive locked door labeled REACTOR. And then a control console with a shiny red lever that was marked 'Hopeville Silo Blast Door Controls, which for some reason was supposedly 'encrypted beyond your ability to hack'. Given that it was a shiny red lever I had a hard time seeing how it could be encrypted beyond anything, but it turned out later that the encryption message referred to a separate panel on the console that had to be activated in order for the lever to get enough electricity to work... anyway, it didn't really matter to Janice just at that point. When you are in a nuclear missile silo you do not pull shiny red levers no matter how old they are, because you are in a GODDAMN NUCLEAR MISSILE SILO, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.
Anyway, the next room had a breathing mask of some kind, which struck her as a wise idea given the ongoing sandstorm. And an arc welder gun, which did not strike her as such a great idea, because it was a large, heavy weapon with which she was unfamiliar; she left it alone. And also a couple of tubes for storage of OOOH! Robot! Specifically, an eyebot that looked awfully like ED-E, the little robot she'd gotten from Johnston Nash and wound up leaving in Veronica's care. It struck Janice that she could probably open the pod and activate the bot. ED-E had started following her immediately and proved really useful, and in a place this grim she could use a friend or a companion or at least something else to keep her company. So, yeah, she figured she'd open the pod and let it out.
The bot immediately activated and floated up to face her in a storm of cheerful expository beeping. I don't know how she understood it, but apparently she did, and didn't seem weirded out by that fact either. Maybe she'd picked up the knack when she had Tesla coils stuffed in her skull. Maybe it was something else. Whatever, didn't matter. She was just happy to have ED-E with her in this land of unbelievably weird. Apparently there were systems in the Divide that had detected the little robot being activated back in the Mojave and built a copy remotely, even including all its data and recordings. Once again, THAT'S NOT CREEPY AT ALL.
*ahem*
Janice didn't have time to get too wigged out about that, because apparently being less dinged-up and patched together gave ED-E access to recordings Janice hadn't heard yet. He started playing the voice of Dr. Whitley, the scientist who'd built him for the Enclave. Nothing big or fancy, just some chatter about testing this series of eyebot and stuff along those lines, but hearing the voice played seemed to make the little flying beachball happy, so Janice didn't mind too much. There was something weirdly cute about ED-E bouncing up and down and squeebling joyfully at the sound of its maker's voice. Somewhere this grim, she needed all the cute she could get.
They went back into the room with the shiny red handle- there wasn't anywhere else to go- and ED-E squealed happily before making some kind of control panel rise out of the console. Once the little bot zapped it a few times, it turned to Janice expectantly, and she very reluctantly tugged at the shiny red handle. Fortunately, all it did was open the blast doors. On a freakin' intact ICBM being worked on by other eyebots, but... well, it just opened the blast doors. That was enough. She couldn't get through there, but the door marked REACTOR had unlocked at the same time, so she and ED-E headed off that way. By the time they got to the missile something had apparently managed to destroy the other eyebots- they sure as heck weren't there any more and there was a lot of electronic scrap lying around. This, naturally, creeped out Janice, because she couldn't find what had done it.
It creeped out ED-E more; the little guy started playing another audio log from his creator, who was vehemently protesting a female scientist's insistence on working on ED-E without disengaging his activity protocols, protesting that she was hurting the 'bot. By the time the recording was over ED-E was kind of drooping sadly in midair, which is an impressive feat for something that's essentially Sputnik with a radiator grille. Janice did her best to comfort him- hey, she'd tried to be nice to a freaking floating brain in a jar back in Big Mountain, why not to a robot- and they went on.
(There was some stuff here about an Old World tv program called RALPHIE, too. Janice's familiarity with this extended roughly as far as 'there was a poster for that over my bed at the Sink, wasn't there?', and so she did not pay much attention. In-game, you get an XP bonus and fulfil a challenge if you find every single RALPHIE poster in the Divide. Keep those hours-of-gameplay numbers up by any means necessary, Obsidian!)
Anyway, from there they proceeded very slowly, trying to avoid laser turrets and other such things (probably the source of the other eyebots' destruction). Poke poke poke, investigate investigate poke, HOLY JESUS DEAD DUDES WITH NO SKIN.
No, seriously, she opened the door to a room nearby and found a dead Sentrybot facing down two dead dudes who gave the impression of having been flayed alive. Ghouls looked rotten. This was something else, and it was revolting, so she didn't look very long- just long enough to note that they had vaguely Legion-looking armor that had been patched together with Old World street signs and the like. And then you'd better believe she scrambled out of there.
The next room was an office, with windows on either side that showed closet-sized rooms full of sentrybots. On the floor was a huge official-looking seal of the Old World government. Around the outside it read BALLISTIC DEFENSE DIVISION - COMMONWEALTH DEFENSE ADMINISTRATION. In the middle, across the red, white, and blue shield, was a banner that read 'Exitus Acta Probat'. Janice didn't have enough Latin to understand that, and neither did I, so I grabbed my Latin-to-English dictionary (look, I had it before I started playing the game with the pseudo-Roman weirdoes in it, okay?) and went to look it up.
Turns out 'Exitus Acta Probat' means 'the result validates the deeds'. Or, more conventionally, 'the ends justify the means'. Mmmyeah. That's the kind of thought you want on the minds of the dudes with their hands on the Button.
Well, it didn't much matter now. Janice poked around the room a bit, not that she had to poke especially hard, seeing as how other than the robots in the closet the only thing of note in the room was the base commander's desk and he'd died in it. In his uniform, which was still nicely intact and possibly worth taking with her for when she absolutely had to take her armor off (it was just an outfit, not armor, but an appealing one- what can I say?). Oh, and he had a bottle of vodka in his desk, and a pack of cigarettes next to him, and his ten millimeter pistol and several spent rounds lying next to what was left of his bones, and a harmonica. Yeah, I'm not clear on that one either. Whatever.
Janice and ED-E booked it out of there and kept searching around the place, and eventually found a room with a sentrybot with a Bowie knife sticking out of its eye, which, once again, isn't creepy at all. She found a still-powered mainframe that was apparently connected to some doors and security systems, so she got ED-E to kick it online, and they moved on into the Tunnels Full of Dudes With No Skin. Still-moving Dudes With No Skin, you understand, and not just in a staggering-around, augh augh augh augh augh dying now, kind of way. They were engaging in pretty vicious combat with the laser turrets the mainframe had switched on, and several of them broke off to try and attack Janice and ED-E.
Skinless or no, they died of holorifle pretty nicely, so Janice and ED-E went on their way. After, it should be noted, noticing that only some of the Dudes With No Skin were in pseudo-Legion armor. Some of them were in what looked not unlike NCR gear. Not that Janice planned on getting particularly close. She might have been a practical enough person to go through corpses' pockets and strip uniforms off skeletons, but ew. Skinless. ewwwwww. She wasn't that desperate.
They rounded a corner and ran into that damn YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER marking on the wall again. Janice made a face at it and opened the door that ostensibly led to Hopeville, and that was when Portentous Exposition Guy commandeered her robot. No, he wasn't there physically, he just suddenly started broadcasting his voice to her through ED-E and did something that prevvented the little bot from trying to escape. The hell. MY ROBOT. LET GO OF MY ROBOT YOU POMPOUS VOICED ASS. AND LEARN TO USE SOME COMPLETE SENTENCES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Seriously. Portentous Exposition Guy had the vocal equivalent of a Homestuck typing quirk in that wherever possible, he left the subject off his sentences. He also tended to leave pronouns out if he could get away with it. Probably this was meant to indicate to the player that he had a different native language or dialect or something, but to Janice it meant that he sounded like a pretentious jerk. Judge for yourself:
"I'm a courier. Courier Six... was Courier Six. Like you- and not like you, in all the ways that matter. Spent too many years looking for you- now, letting you come to me."
"If you follow a symbol to the end, ask yourself what that means. More important, ask what happens after the end."
"Let the land do the killing for you. That's one of the things you taught me." - what? WHAT? Yeah, that was something that woke Janice right the hell up.
"There was death in that package, and while the Chip is important to Old World ghosts... you are more dangerous than that chip could ever be. Maybe why you found each other, little piece of the Old World speaking to you, waiting for you to wake something else up with it."
What is this place? "The Divide... this place is a slice of it. Old military. Can still smell pride, and the fear." etc. etc. "America sleeps in the Divide. giants, beneath the earth. You saw one locked in the silo beneath you. There's more. Only takes a few of them, locked below dground, to tear apart the earth, and cast dust, sand, ash... into the skies above. You'll see the extent- the miles of it, soon enough."
"If you saw their corpses, you saw mercy."
"America sleeps ahead of you, its nightmares filled with quakes, storms. You'll need to find your own path. That means waking America's spears up from their slumber." Translation: Janice had to blow up warheads with a laser detonator that Portentous Exposition Guy couldn't be arsed to locate more precisely than 'out there'. Great.
That's not everything he said, but overall, that's what he talked like. He said he'd left markers in different colors and claimed they'd lead Janice to what was left of her home, or something along those lines. 'Maybe remind you of why you wander'. Yeah. That's reassuring.
So, yeah. That's where things stood: now Janice had to wander around in the dark in the ruins of the Hopeville military base looking for the damn detonator for the warheads. With those skinless guys out there looking to kill her ass. WELL THAT'S JUST PRIME.
Tune in next week for horrible things with scales on!
