Notes From New Vegas 51
Jul. 10th, 2012 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 51: Oh Dear God What Is That Thing
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was getting very tired of Portentous Exposition Guy, and had mentally changed his name to Pretentious Exposition Guy because he kind of deserved it. Anybody who insisted on referring to absolutely frickin' everything by its symbols but could not be bothered to use pronouns, in her estimation, deserved a good thumping. Not that she wasn't gonna thump hiim anyway, as he was pretty much her only available source of answers about anything whatsoever and she wanted to beat them out of him, but this was extra cause for thumping.
Unfortunately, his Nibs only communicated through her robot, and she couldn't signal him herself. It was pretty much a case of I Will Be Ominous At You When And Where I Feel Like Being Ominous At You, Now Watch Out For The Marked Men. That was his term for the Dudes With No Skin On. You know how ghouls are what happens to someone exposed to a lethal amount of radiation who just isn't fortunate enough to die? Marked Men are kind of like that, only worse. Instead of looking like half-rotted Brahmin meat, they basically looked like they'd had their skin sanded off by the Divide's constant storms. Pretty much the only thing keeping them alive was the local radiation. Which...
Okay, at this point I have to step back and complain from the point of view of a player. The Marked Men basically exist because Fallout seems to insist on providing at least two types of humanoid enemy in any given setting. In the main Mojave, you get ghouls and raiders, and the soldiers of whichever faction you manage to cheese off most. In Old World Blues, you get lobotomites and the Y-17 trauma harnesses. In Honest Hearts you mostly just get White Legs, but there's three or four diferent kinds of White Legs, and in Dead Money you get three or four different kinds of Ghost People. The Marked Men are in the Divide because you need humanoid enemies (the other quasi-humanoid ones are coming up later). Given that they're supposed to be kept alive and constantly healing, but not healing ENOUGH, by radiation, you'd think there would be a hell of a lot more residual radiation in the area. Remember the Glow, in game one? Like that. But no. There's places all over the Divide where you can walk around naked and not pick up any worse injury than someone shooting you. You don't get irradiated. You don't get your skin sanded off. Nothing. My only possible conclusion here is that Pretentious Exposition Guy is a liar, or at best, an unreliable narrator.
I'm gonna go with unreliable narrator, on the grounds that just because you have a deep, resonant, well-modulated voice, that doesn't make you the Authority of Authorities. Besides, Pretentious Exposition Guy does not like you. Why should he tell you the whole truth?
Anyway, back to our story. Before he let go of her robot, PEG told Janice that she was going to have to find some kind of laser detonator thing and blow up some old nuclear warheads to progress through Hopeville and find him. Which resulted in a lot of squeaking and flailing, because nuclear warheads, what. About the only justification I can find for the detonator thing is the idea that the laser would vaporize the explosives around the warhead's most critical parts in such a way that a reaction was no longer feasible, since I know that nukes rely heavily on all their parts being shaped and shielded in precisely the right way. It's a little bit of a thin justification, but the device doesn't work on anything but warheads, so...
Oh, who am I kidding. There's a special achievement for destroying all thirty warheads in the Divide. The detonator is there to keep you playing Lonesome Road longer, just like those blasted RALPHIE posters. That's the only reason it's there. I'm just doing the Dance of Fandom Rationalization to explain it in-universe, and I can only dance so hard.
So, yeah. Janice proceeded to set off from the Hopeville silo into Hopeville itself, and I'll tell you, the initial moment stepping out into that mess felt like leaving Vault 101 for the first time all over again. Only worse, because everything was darkened (Janice happened to emerge at night), and what she could see was periodically lit by distant red pulsing lights, and the dust storms raged overhead forever, and while there was wreckage in Fallout 3, there was open country as well. Here there was just wreckage as far as the eye could see, and a few intact buildings among it. And, of course, two or three warheads, their business end pulsing red themselves. Fun, ne?
Janice and ED-E proceeded to fumble through the darkness and map out everything they could in Hopeville, and in the process Janice found a couple of wrecked eyebots with parts she was able to use to upgrade ED-E a bit, since this was not a good environment for an unprotected little 'bot like him. They found some supplies, and they found some RALPHIE posters, and they got attacked by a LOT of Dudes With No Skin On. Janice took the NCR dogtags from the ones who had been NCR while they had skin and left the Legion-looking ones where they fell, because screw the Legion. At one point she found the old Hopeville military base armory, but the only useful stuff she found in it was a kind of rocket launcher thing, and she wasn't really a rocket launcher kind of gal. Screw the Divide's signature weapon, she had her holorifle.
She eventually found the laser detonator in a pile of wreckage on a roof in the middle of a camp of Marked Men, and of course the instant she picked it up they started swarming. Even though she'd searched all the ruins in the area very thoroughly and made sure nothing was in them. Even though she'd been keeping an eye out from the instant she got up on top of the building. Even though ED-E had been watching the whole time. Really, they pretty much just popped out of nowhere- at ground level, at least, but still. Janice managed to survive the standoff and then popped a LOT of Rad-X and blew up the warhead that was blocking the only way out of the area.
Funny, there was hardly any radiation left in the place the warhead had been by the time she got there. You have to wonder if that was an actual nuke or if it was just a conventional warhead for exploding things real good, maybe with depleted uranium casings.
I could probably go through the rest of her battle through Hopeville, but it mostly amounted to AUGH SKINLESS DUDE KILL IT AND SEARCH ITS POCKETS with the occasional WARHEAD GO BOOM NOW. Fairly standard 'oo, look how GRIM and HORRIBLE war really is!' stuff, at least as far as a game in which skinless dudes rely on nuclear radiation to stay alive can have any kind of standard commentary. Except for the part where ED-E suddenly started playing his maker's voice again as they made it to a partially collapsed car tunnel. That was kind of neat. Dr. Whitley was outraged, outraged, that one of the other Enclave scientists had gone over his head to Colonel Autumn to get approval to screw around with the eyebots while they were still active, in the name of 'efficiency'. "Just because the eyebots don't have true AI doesn't mean they're just machines. At least I've got you to talk to, huh, ED-E?"
Figures. A whole valley full of unexploded ordnance and dudes with no skin on and the only voice of compassion and decency anywhere in sight was a most-likely-dead guy worrying about his robots.
Not that Janice objected, exactly. She liked ED-E. The little bot was pretty appealing and friendly. She could understand treating it better than just a machine, especially if you were the one who created it. So she did her best to reassure the bot, and they headed into the collapsed tunnel, and What. The ass. Was that noise.
... oh. Wow. Apparently deathclaws could scream in terror. That... that, she didn't expect. Or the something black and scaly, with white claws, that dashed across her line of sight in pursuit of the giant murder death lizard. That was new, too.
The dead NCR guy she found, that wasn't so new. He had orders in his pocket, though. Yes, she went through the dead guy's pockets and looked for loose change. What, was HE going to use his stuff any more? ... at any rate, his orders said that Bravo Team was to sweep and clear the area tunnels, which intel suggested were only sparsely populated by small subterranean semi-humanoids. They had been armed with flashbangs and expected to meet minimal resistance.
Well, yanno. Given that there was a dead ranger and dead other trooper nearby, minimal resistance didn't look so minimal. Also, there was that screaming deathclaw, which would make a great name for a bar or a heavy metal band, but I digress.
She kept going, and at one point ran across another YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER graffito. That was starting to get REALLY old. Not that she had time to think about it, because one of the black scaly things came after her. Something the size of a twelve year old should NOT have been able to rip into her armor that easily, or been nearly that tough; it took two direct hits from the modded-clear-to-hell-and-back holorifle to kill it. When it died, it...
Oh dear.
The damn thing had been carrying a teddy bear. Don't ask me where, because I don't want to think about it, but it had been carrying a teddy bear. THAT was the moment Janice decided she had to start running and KEEP running and never STOP running, because while Mojave animals and mutated horrors carried a lot of things, they did not carry teddy bears. PEOPLE carried teddy bears. And so did former people, like ghouls. So this thing-
Well, she'd never read H. P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear", but I had, and that was pretty much enough. Time to run from the EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. And good Lord, there were enough of them...
She made it to daylight and did her best not to throw up, and that's when Pretentious Exposition Guy started yammering through her robot again. Poor ED-E didn't deserve her flipping him the bird, but it was the best she could do in terms of showing PEG what she thought of him. Bla bla bla, the Bear has an obsession with 'how things should be' instead of how they are, bla bla, stretched too thin, the Bear couldn't hold the Divide, yadda yadda...
... oh, Pretentious Exposition Guy was the one who discovered the Dam? And told Caesar about it and started his obsession? Well. Wasn't that nice. Up his.
She finally got some useful information out of him when she mentioned the HORRIBLE EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. The creatures in the underpass, he said, were called tunnelers, and they lived underground. What happened in the Divide gave them a better idea of what kind of prey was above. He was pretty sure they were going to be a massive threat to the Mojave. There were signs they were in the area before the Divide cracked their sky, and he thought they were created at the time of the War. He thought they'd spread into the Mojave in years, probably less. Said they bred fast and that they were more than numerous enough to bring the strongest in the Mojave down.
Well, YOU can just rock me to sleep tonight.
On the other hand, we're talking about the same guy who may or may not have lied to Janice about the nature of the warheads she had to oh so casually dispose of to keep moving through the Divide, and who gave every indication of wanting her to die in the desert. For all we know he could just have been messing with her head in the hopes that bad morale would bring her down. I really don't know why people automatically trust everything that comes out of the mouth of a stranger-bordering-on-enemy.
But back to Janice. PEG informed her that at the end of the High Road lay a place called Ashton, and its silo. (Ash town. Subtle names, much?) The machine, ED-E, could open it up. Janice couldn't help but comment that PEG seemed to really hate the robot, but no- PEG just seemed to hate what he stood for, pieces of the Old World being used without understanding what they meant. Or something like that, anyway. He started growling about something else before explaining very much. Specifically- well, let's go with his own words.
"There was life in the Divide, a town, farther West. Something you saw in your lifetime. It had the name 'the Divide' too, but it was a road from the west into the Mojave, a supply line. It took a Courier to make that road- you. Back then, you saw the road with eyes facing East. This time the Divide's in the other direction, and if your eyes try to make sense of it when you reach it... home's not what it was."
What?
"All roads lead back to one's home. Not your birthplace maybe, but home. Home isn't where you were born into this world. You taught me that. Part of your message, whether you meant it or not. Can be a place of mind, and they can be places you breathe life into. Never would've known the Divide, had it not been for you. The road you made with your tracks again and again. You were the only one willing to make the journey to and from here. Kept the land before the Divide alive. Can't have been just a job. Something more to you. Don't feel for a place that hard unless it's home."
Um. Obsidian? If you're going to give my character a backstory, do it BEFORE I'm seventy-plus hours into the game... anyway, PEG- Ulysses, whatever, I don't remember if this is where Janice coaxed his name out of him- got snippy here. Snippier than usual I mean. He said he thought this village that had sprung up in this place was a chance for a new nation, a new way of thinking. Something Janice had made that bridged East and West. And the NCR saw the worth in that road she made and staked a claim, wanted or not. And the Legion came to check out the Bear. And, yeah, then everything pretty much went to hell. The last thing he said was, "Walk west into the Sun, and keep walking until it dies. There- I'll be waiting."
... guh.
Anyway, that was it; Ulysses shut his yap after that and the robot went quiet, and the next part involved navigating an elevated highway full of horrible death, so this is where we stop for now. Tune in next time for, well, elevated highway full of horrible death.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was getting very tired of Portentous Exposition Guy, and had mentally changed his name to Pretentious Exposition Guy because he kind of deserved it. Anybody who insisted on referring to absolutely frickin' everything by its symbols but could not be bothered to use pronouns, in her estimation, deserved a good thumping. Not that she wasn't gonna thump hiim anyway, as he was pretty much her only available source of answers about anything whatsoever and she wanted to beat them out of him, but this was extra cause for thumping.
Unfortunately, his Nibs only communicated through her robot, and she couldn't signal him herself. It was pretty much a case of I Will Be Ominous At You When And Where I Feel Like Being Ominous At You, Now Watch Out For The Marked Men. That was his term for the Dudes With No Skin On. You know how ghouls are what happens to someone exposed to a lethal amount of radiation who just isn't fortunate enough to die? Marked Men are kind of like that, only worse. Instead of looking like half-rotted Brahmin meat, they basically looked like they'd had their skin sanded off by the Divide's constant storms. Pretty much the only thing keeping them alive was the local radiation. Which...
Okay, at this point I have to step back and complain from the point of view of a player. The Marked Men basically exist because Fallout seems to insist on providing at least two types of humanoid enemy in any given setting. In the main Mojave, you get ghouls and raiders, and the soldiers of whichever faction you manage to cheese off most. In Old World Blues, you get lobotomites and the Y-17 trauma harnesses. In Honest Hearts you mostly just get White Legs, but there's three or four diferent kinds of White Legs, and in Dead Money you get three or four different kinds of Ghost People. The Marked Men are in the Divide because you need humanoid enemies (the other quasi-humanoid ones are coming up later). Given that they're supposed to be kept alive and constantly healing, but not healing ENOUGH, by radiation, you'd think there would be a hell of a lot more residual radiation in the area. Remember the Glow, in game one? Like that. But no. There's places all over the Divide where you can walk around naked and not pick up any worse injury than someone shooting you. You don't get irradiated. You don't get your skin sanded off. Nothing. My only possible conclusion here is that Pretentious Exposition Guy is a liar, or at best, an unreliable narrator.
I'm gonna go with unreliable narrator, on the grounds that just because you have a deep, resonant, well-modulated voice, that doesn't make you the Authority of Authorities. Besides, Pretentious Exposition Guy does not like you. Why should he tell you the whole truth?
Anyway, back to our story. Before he let go of her robot, PEG told Janice that she was going to have to find some kind of laser detonator thing and blow up some old nuclear warheads to progress through Hopeville and find him. Which resulted in a lot of squeaking and flailing, because nuclear warheads, what. About the only justification I can find for the detonator thing is the idea that the laser would vaporize the explosives around the warhead's most critical parts in such a way that a reaction was no longer feasible, since I know that nukes rely heavily on all their parts being shaped and shielded in precisely the right way. It's a little bit of a thin justification, but the device doesn't work on anything but warheads, so...
Oh, who am I kidding. There's a special achievement for destroying all thirty warheads in the Divide. The detonator is there to keep you playing Lonesome Road longer, just like those blasted RALPHIE posters. That's the only reason it's there. I'm just doing the Dance of Fandom Rationalization to explain it in-universe, and I can only dance so hard.
So, yeah. Janice proceeded to set off from the Hopeville silo into Hopeville itself, and I'll tell you, the initial moment stepping out into that mess felt like leaving Vault 101 for the first time all over again. Only worse, because everything was darkened (Janice happened to emerge at night), and what she could see was periodically lit by distant red pulsing lights, and the dust storms raged overhead forever, and while there was wreckage in Fallout 3, there was open country as well. Here there was just wreckage as far as the eye could see, and a few intact buildings among it. And, of course, two or three warheads, their business end pulsing red themselves. Fun, ne?
Janice and ED-E proceeded to fumble through the darkness and map out everything they could in Hopeville, and in the process Janice found a couple of wrecked eyebots with parts she was able to use to upgrade ED-E a bit, since this was not a good environment for an unprotected little 'bot like him. They found some supplies, and they found some RALPHIE posters, and they got attacked by a LOT of Dudes With No Skin On. Janice took the NCR dogtags from the ones who had been NCR while they had skin and left the Legion-looking ones where they fell, because screw the Legion. At one point she found the old Hopeville military base armory, but the only useful stuff she found in it was a kind of rocket launcher thing, and she wasn't really a rocket launcher kind of gal. Screw the Divide's signature weapon, she had her holorifle.
She eventually found the laser detonator in a pile of wreckage on a roof in the middle of a camp of Marked Men, and of course the instant she picked it up they started swarming. Even though she'd searched all the ruins in the area very thoroughly and made sure nothing was in them. Even though she'd been keeping an eye out from the instant she got up on top of the building. Even though ED-E had been watching the whole time. Really, they pretty much just popped out of nowhere- at ground level, at least, but still. Janice managed to survive the standoff and then popped a LOT of Rad-X and blew up the warhead that was blocking the only way out of the area.
Funny, there was hardly any radiation left in the place the warhead had been by the time she got there. You have to wonder if that was an actual nuke or if it was just a conventional warhead for exploding things real good, maybe with depleted uranium casings.
I could probably go through the rest of her battle through Hopeville, but it mostly amounted to AUGH SKINLESS DUDE KILL IT AND SEARCH ITS POCKETS with the occasional WARHEAD GO BOOM NOW. Fairly standard 'oo, look how GRIM and HORRIBLE war really is!' stuff, at least as far as a game in which skinless dudes rely on nuclear radiation to stay alive can have any kind of standard commentary. Except for the part where ED-E suddenly started playing his maker's voice again as they made it to a partially collapsed car tunnel. That was kind of neat. Dr. Whitley was outraged, outraged, that one of the other Enclave scientists had gone over his head to Colonel Autumn to get approval to screw around with the eyebots while they were still active, in the name of 'efficiency'. "Just because the eyebots don't have true AI doesn't mean they're just machines. At least I've got you to talk to, huh, ED-E?"
Figures. A whole valley full of unexploded ordnance and dudes with no skin on and the only voice of compassion and decency anywhere in sight was a most-likely-dead guy worrying about his robots.
Not that Janice objected, exactly. She liked ED-E. The little bot was pretty appealing and friendly. She could understand treating it better than just a machine, especially if you were the one who created it. So she did her best to reassure the bot, and they headed into the collapsed tunnel, and What. The ass. Was that noise.
... oh. Wow. Apparently deathclaws could scream in terror. That... that, she didn't expect. Or the something black and scaly, with white claws, that dashed across her line of sight in pursuit of the giant murder death lizard. That was new, too.
The dead NCR guy she found, that wasn't so new. He had orders in his pocket, though. Yes, she went through the dead guy's pockets and looked for loose change. What, was HE going to use his stuff any more? ... at any rate, his orders said that Bravo Team was to sweep and clear the area tunnels, which intel suggested were only sparsely populated by small subterranean semi-humanoids. They had been armed with flashbangs and expected to meet minimal resistance.
Well, yanno. Given that there was a dead ranger and dead other trooper nearby, minimal resistance didn't look so minimal. Also, there was that screaming deathclaw, which would make a great name for a bar or a heavy metal band, but I digress.
She kept going, and at one point ran across another YOU CAN GO HOME COURIER graffito. That was starting to get REALLY old. Not that she had time to think about it, because one of the black scaly things came after her. Something the size of a twelve year old should NOT have been able to rip into her armor that easily, or been nearly that tough; it took two direct hits from the modded-clear-to-hell-and-back holorifle to kill it. When it died, it...
Oh dear.
The damn thing had been carrying a teddy bear. Don't ask me where, because I don't want to think about it, but it had been carrying a teddy bear. THAT was the moment Janice decided she had to start running and KEEP running and never STOP running, because while Mojave animals and mutated horrors carried a lot of things, they did not carry teddy bears. PEOPLE carried teddy bears. And so did former people, like ghouls. So this thing-
Well, she'd never read H. P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear", but I had, and that was pretty much enough. Time to run from the EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. And good Lord, there were enough of them...
She made it to daylight and did her best not to throw up, and that's when Pretentious Exposition Guy started yammering through her robot again. Poor ED-E didn't deserve her flipping him the bird, but it was the best she could do in terms of showing PEG what she thought of him. Bla bla bla, the Bear has an obsession with 'how things should be' instead of how they are, bla bla, stretched too thin, the Bear couldn't hold the Divide, yadda yadda...
... oh, Pretentious Exposition Guy was the one who discovered the Dam? And told Caesar about it and started his obsession? Well. Wasn't that nice. Up his.
She finally got some useful information out of him when she mentioned the HORRIBLE EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. The creatures in the underpass, he said, were called tunnelers, and they lived underground. What happened in the Divide gave them a better idea of what kind of prey was above. He was pretty sure they were going to be a massive threat to the Mojave. There were signs they were in the area before the Divide cracked their sky, and he thought they were created at the time of the War. He thought they'd spread into the Mojave in years, probably less. Said they bred fast and that they were more than numerous enough to bring the strongest in the Mojave down.
Well, YOU can just rock me to sleep tonight.
On the other hand, we're talking about the same guy who may or may not have lied to Janice about the nature of the warheads she had to oh so casually dispose of to keep moving through the Divide, and who gave every indication of wanting her to die in the desert. For all we know he could just have been messing with her head in the hopes that bad morale would bring her down. I really don't know why people automatically trust everything that comes out of the mouth of a stranger-bordering-on-enemy.
But back to Janice. PEG informed her that at the end of the High Road lay a place called Ashton, and its silo. (Ash town. Subtle names, much?) The machine, ED-E, could open it up. Janice couldn't help but comment that PEG seemed to really hate the robot, but no- PEG just seemed to hate what he stood for, pieces of the Old World being used without understanding what they meant. Or something like that, anyway. He started growling about something else before explaining very much. Specifically- well, let's go with his own words.
"There was life in the Divide, a town, farther West. Something you saw in your lifetime. It had the name 'the Divide' too, but it was a road from the west into the Mojave, a supply line. It took a Courier to make that road- you. Back then, you saw the road with eyes facing East. This time the Divide's in the other direction, and if your eyes try to make sense of it when you reach it... home's not what it was."
What?
"All roads lead back to one's home. Not your birthplace maybe, but home. Home isn't where you were born into this world. You taught me that. Part of your message, whether you meant it or not. Can be a place of mind, and they can be places you breathe life into. Never would've known the Divide, had it not been for you. The road you made with your tracks again and again. You were the only one willing to make the journey to and from here. Kept the land before the Divide alive. Can't have been just a job. Something more to you. Don't feel for a place that hard unless it's home."
Um. Obsidian? If you're going to give my character a backstory, do it BEFORE I'm seventy-plus hours into the game... anyway, PEG- Ulysses, whatever, I don't remember if this is where Janice coaxed his name out of him- got snippy here. Snippier than usual I mean. He said he thought this village that had sprung up in this place was a chance for a new nation, a new way of thinking. Something Janice had made that bridged East and West. And the NCR saw the worth in that road she made and staked a claim, wanted or not. And the Legion came to check out the Bear. And, yeah, then everything pretty much went to hell. The last thing he said was, "Walk west into the Sun, and keep walking until it dies. There- I'll be waiting."
... guh.
Anyway, that was it; Ulysses shut his yap after that and the robot went quiet, and the next part involved navigating an elevated highway full of horrible death, so this is where we stop for now. Tune in next time for, well, elevated highway full of horrible death.
