Notes From New Vegas 53
Jul. 28th, 2012 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 53: That's It, This Guy Is Toast
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was FREAKING RIGHT THE HELL OUT because WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT BUILDS SINGLE CONTROL LAUNCH CONSOLES FOR INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILES. WHAT. HELL. WHAT. Yeeeah, apparently, um, the lever she pulled in the belief that it would unlock the outer door to the Ashton missile silo? Opened the silo blast doors and launched an actual goddamn missile. At somewhere nearby. And set it off. Which... you know, the control panel was outside, under the open sky, it just did not seem to her like a logical place to put the ONE AND ONLY CONTROL TO LAUNCH THE GODDAMN INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE. Probably it had been indoors once- there were shattered walls in the area, just not many- but even so! Pull one shiny red handle and NUCLEAR MISSILE. THE HELL. Weren't those things supposed to have two keys each or something? This- it-
.... I'm sorry, my copy of iTunes just started playing "Wasn't That A Party", which, um. Despite the first few lines being Could've been the whiskey, might've been the gin, could've been the three or four six-packs, I don't know, but won't you look at the mess I'm in....
I don't think there was enough alcohol in the WORLD for Janice to un-freak at that point in time.
Anyway, it eventually occurred to her that getting indoors might be a good idea. I think she planned to slump next to the wall and make horrified wailing noises. Unfortunately that wasn't in the cards, because the silo was coming apart and on fire. I guess that's what happens when someone finally fails their roll to disbelieve two-hundred-year-old unmaintained architecture lasting through being put to a violent and splodey use. So of course she did the most sensible thing, which was to run at the big ol' cargo lift dead ahead of her and pull the 'get me out of here' lever. Only when it started moving, it started moving DOWN. As in, INTO the fire and the falling apart and the OH GREAT seismic activity- did I mention the ground shaking? Yeah. The ground was shaking. And she was going down. And her Geiger counter was going off. And then the tunnelers started crawling up the shaft and leaping at her. OH, THAT'S JUST PRIME.
There's a section in Half-Life 2 where you have to ride an elevator with Alyx Vance and your only job is to keep fiery plummeting debris from falling into your face and smashing the both of you to paste. This? Was not like that. The fiery plummeting debris was not actively crawling down the elevator shaft and leaping at Gordon Freeman and trying to rip his face off from four different directions at once. Janice spent most of the-
*eyes psiTunes* "Die Another Day". Yes. That's about right. Thanks to that lovely lovely holorifle, and to ED-E's electrical zap gun, and Janice's casino armor, the only dying done during that elevator ride was entirely handled by tunnelers, wretched degenerate little things....
She got to the bottom of the shaft alive and still had ammo left- she collected the stuff like her life depended on it, which it did- but there still wasn't any time for huddling against the wall and wailing, because things were still on fire. No tunnelers, thank goodness. Just fire and earthquake, which were pretty much horrible enough as it stood. Janice was pretty much having the kind of day where "Well, at least my brain is still inside my skull" was the best news she could muster. That and "Oh, hey, broken eyebot- ED-E, do you want any parts?", since she found some bits to upgrade him with as she ran like a very runny thing through the remains of the silo, but that was about it.
Of course, there were no doors into nice safe secure bunker areas to be found, or any emergency exit passages; very likely she'd just come in from the emergency exit, all things considered. The only way out was to go right down to the middle of the flaming burning sparking collapsing wreckage left directly under where the missile had been and wriggle through a hole she found. This was not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat, because either of those two options would have been too NICE. No, this was a hole of rock and pointy bits and detritus that led directly to sunken building parts, and not government buildings, either, but some kind of residential tower with bank signage nearby, seriously, who the hell builds ordinary residential multistorey apartment buildings that directly next to a missile silo. Aren't there regulations about not letting civilians get that close, or something?
Not that it mattered, because tunnelers. Outside the building. Inside the building. In some of the rooms and in the stairwell. You stop asking questions about two hundred year old architecture when your ruminations are interrupted every thirty seconds by TUNNELERS MY FAAAACE.
Well, she survived the tunnelers and she survived the horrible building, and she made it up to the roof exit, and that's when you know who started yammering at her via ED-E all over again. I'll be honest, I think at that point she would've preferred Voldemort. I know I would've. At least he wouldn't have taken the opportunity to inform me that "Ahead lies your work, the history you burned in the earth, what you brought to the people here."
....
"You delivered a package. Had markings that matched those in the Divide...."
I'm in no mood to look for his exact words anywhere, and I couldn't be bothered to transcribe them at the time. Basically, Ulysses said she brought an unusual kind of detonator to the Divide and Ulysses followed because he wanted to see what would happen and the detonator sent out some kind of automatic signal that made things explode. All the things. ALL OF THEM. YOU DID THIS THIS IS YOUR FAULT ALL YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. Screw you, Ulysses.
And you too, Obsidian. You don't get to give someone a backstory this far into the game unless you specifically say that they had amnesia from their traumatic head injury at the start of the game. I mean, damn, you couldn't even be bothered to properly foreshadow this in the main game. Pulling a reveal of this magnitude out of your butts this late in the show? Bad form, old man, bad form. I already had a backstory for my girl and it did not include this.
Well, anyway, back to the pretentious jerk, because he sure as hell wasn't going to let Janice forget him. He said he survived because machines saved him. Autodocs, I think, although how he wound up in one I'm not sure and I don't much care to find out. He thought Janice was dead at the time. He also made some disparaging remarks about ED-E and how the local machines can't even leave the silos without a human to shadow, and then he said, "You carry death wherever you go- if the Mojave doesn't know it yet, it will." And he went into great detail, in his not-really-very-detailed-at-all-because-it's-just-oh-so-much-more-important-to-blither-about-freaking-symbols-instead-of-using-actual-nouns kind of way...
Oh God. He was bitching because the people who formed a survivor community here used the Old World flag as their symbol, and their community was one that would outlast the Bear and Bull- and Janice had killed it. So basically he was saying YOU KILLED AMERICA ALL OVER AGAIN. WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA, JANICE?
I... really don't remember if he had anything else to say after that. I'm just going to go with the assumption that at that point Janice turned around and mooned ED-E rather than listen to Ulysses any further, or at least tried her best to moon the 'bot since that doesn't work so well when you're wearing armor instead of pants. When she straightened up again he wasn't in control of the bot any more, so she sort of edged over to the forward part of the building for a look-see at what was supposedly her handiwork, and AUGH ROCKETS. Yeah, there were skinless dudes down below. Scope and holorifle time, kids. @whee.
This section mostly just annoyed me, because it amounted to plinking skinless dudes (I'm in no mood to call them Marked Men any more) from a distance wherever possible and from closer where not possible, then rummaging through their stuff and going on to the next building. Oh, and blowing up Big Bowls of Pudding, there were several of those. At one point Janice found a holotape on which Ulysses had recorded his account of a massive squick fit he had when the White Legs decided they liked him so much they'd change their tribal appearance to look as much like him as possible and adopt his tribal hairstyle along with it. Which, problem, because the Twisted Hairs (his old tribe, which Caesar had wiped out/assimilated, whatever) encoded history and message in the knots and twists of their hair, and the White Legs didn't know anything about that, so basically they just looked like a bunch of culturally appropriating murdering rapist scavenger versions of his tribe's ghosts without knowing what any of it meant.
Ya know, big guy, I think Janice might actually have had some sympathy for you at some point in her life, but after the time she'd had in the Divide so far? Nuh-uh. She literally could not have cared any less. It would have been a physical impossibility for her to care any less about your little moment of horror. She would have had to outsource the not-caring to other people entirely to create any less caring. And there weren't any other people around other than the ones who didn't have skin so WHOOPTY FUCKING CRAP, CRY ME A RIVER, MISTER TOO GOOD FOR PRONOUNS.
*cough*
Sorry. So, um, Ulysses tape, that's one thing, and then ED-E started playing a recording of a small child- little Tommy- begging his Dad to let him bring the hurt robot he'd just found to Mom because maybe Mom could fix him, please please please? He looks so lonely! Maybe if mom fies him, he can help out around the garage! He'll be just like RALPHIE, only this one's not a toy!
Huh. Guess the holotapes survived, or maybe there was a tie-in comic or something. Who knew. According to ED-E's beeps after the recording stopped, that happened somewhere in Illinois- one of the conversational options was even "What's a Chicago?", so that was one of a handful of references to Fallout Tactics- but ED-E had his mission and had to reach Navarro so he'd regretfully left the little boy and his family behind. Honestly, Janice didn't know it was possible for faceless balls of metal to look that sad. She promised ED-E they'd just have to keep going and reach the end of the Divide and then maybe they'd see him on his way, and they kept right on going.
After a lot of turning skinless dudes to ash, they ran across another Big Bowl of Pudding nestled in the middle of a heap of rubble Janice couldn't climb over. She backed up, blew it up with the laser detonator, and watched a nearby building fall over and block her way in an entirely different place. Great, just great. Apparently the only way around now was through some kind of set of caves or something. Well, screw that. Janice was going to TAKE HER FREAKING TIME now and dig through all of the local buildings wherever she could just because she hated the feeling of being railroaded. Not that she found all that much, and what she did find didn't make her feel any better- a computer terminal that had once held a message from Commander Devlin, the base commander, who told the various soldiers on base "Do not engage the protestors outside the construction zone. I know, I know, the presence of those no-goodniks fills my brain with the WHITE-HOT RAGE OF CAPITALIST JUSTICE..."
The little Ragey Stephen Colbert bit wouldn't have been so bad on its own, but Devlin went on to say that the something special being planned for the protestors involved the chief liaison officer to the Big Mountain Research Facility, who was paying a visit to 'collect our guests and take them someplace where they can do some good for their country beyond stinking of patchouli and shooting the LSD'. And, well, Janice had been to Big Mountain. And there had been so many lobotomites and Robobrains and skeletons in trauma harnesses and beds and graves in Little Yangtze and that one room full of brains, and..... Yeeeeah.
Tell me again, Ulysses, about the importance of the Old World symbol? Tell me again how America slept? Because Devlin and Big Mountain were America, too, you know.
Well, anyway, Janice got out of there and wound up finding a sewer entrance and poking through that until she found some more eyebot parts- tell me again, Ulysses, how these machines can't even leave their pods or whatever without a human to shadow?- and then found another exit. That one led to the third floor of a building for whatever reason, where she found another Ulysses tape. He talked about his visit to Big Mountain on that one, including the part where he asked the brains "who are you, who do not know your history?" and he got them to admit that they remembered America and that they had loved their country once, and some other things... It sounded moderately profound at the time, and as a player I kind of appreciated it, but Janice didn't much care. She'd convinced the brains to do what she asked them to do and one day she'd go back there so she could just wig out in peace while the Sink central AI said comforting things to her, that was all she cared about right then.
She kept on going and ED-E started playing music and then a gunshot. Janice recognized it as being the incident that got the little robot so damaged she found him in Johnston Nash's store. I recognized it as being the initial Fallout New Vegas trailer/TV commercial, which opened with a shot of an eyebot with an Illinois license plate patching one side and a MY KID GOES TO ROOSEVELT ACADEMY bumper sticker on the other, to the tune of Kay Kyser's "(I Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle". So that was pretty much sewing up the rest of ED-E's backstory, which was kind of neat, and while Janice might not have been able to do much with that, at least it didn't make her ragey. She had plenty of ragey already.
Eventually even Janice had to concede that she had no further way out of the Divide except to either go back the way she came- which was mighty tempting- or to go through those stupid caves, and so she headed for the stupid caves. Ulysses had painted a red Old World flag symbol on the wall nearby, though, and ED-E started beeping and shivering in terror, which did not sit well with Janice. Still, not much choice if she wanted to get this all over with, so-
"You have discovered CAVE OF THE ABADDON", said the screen at that point. Oh come ON, are we not even TRYING to hide that we're in allegory country? Good Lord... For reference's sake, abaddon is a Hebrew word that translates as a form of the word 'destruction'. In the Book of Revelation there's a seriously nasty angel shown as the king of an army of seriously psychedelic locusts, "whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and which in Greek means Apolloyon, the Destroyer". So, yeah, this is the cave of VERY VERY VERY BAD THINGS, and that whole army of locusts part is relevant because EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN ARE EVERYWHERE IN IT. SO MANY EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. SO MANY.
I see no reason to transcribe further. Janice basically went all Michael Ironside "YOU GET DOWN THERE AND YOU KILL ANYTHING THAT HAS MORE THAN TWOLEGSSCALES", and wound up pretty much standing atop a heap of tunnelers and ash by the time it was all done. You don't need more detail than that, do you? Conveniently, the cave not only housed enough tunnelers to make "The Lurking Fear" look a bit conservative in its numbers, it also housed the remains of a hospital, and conveniently, the only part of the hospital that was accessible was a conveniently working autodoc. It didn't talk and it wasn't very comforting, but at least Janice's skin was whole and her limbs were all in working order when its door opened. So, yay for that.
Having survived all that allegory, Janice stumped her way out through the next available collapsed building. What then proceeded to honk her off was passing a graffiti wall on which it said 'you can go home Courier', and then said 'Courier Six?', and the paint was in two different colors. Seriously, Ulysses? You were that bored that you went off and found another paint pot and came back later with it? This is what you were doing with your time? Janice rolled her eyes so hard at the sight that she almost missed the sound of the RALPHIE recording ED-E was playing, the one where the little human boy urged RALPHIE to fly far and fly fast so that mean ol' General Winters couldn't get him. It was apparently the second to last episode, or at least the second to last episode of a story arc, because the announcer said to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion only on Vault-Tec Channel 9. Then Dr. Whitley's voice came on, wondering who'd left the video recordings running, and urging ED-E to get back into his recharge pod because it was late. All very cute, really.
Which was probably the point, because the next time Janice stepped through a door and out into the open air again, that ASS Ulysses took over ED-E once again. Yammer yammer yammer, pretentious pretentious pretentious, "you brought me what I wanted- that machine..."
The hell- you need ED-E? Seriously? That's what you were after, this whole time? You wanted someone to unlock the bot and bring it to you? YOU COULDN'T DO THAT YOURSELF? ... okay, apparently ED-E had the codes to unlock the missiles here and that ass Ulysses wanted to 'bring the Divide to your home, burn your nation as the Divide burned'. Good Christ, man, you have problems. If Janice ever finds you... hey hey hey WHOA let go of ED-E, GIVE ME BACK MY ROBOT I don't CARE if the command override for the missiles is Navarro GIVE ME BACK MY ROBOT I HATE YOU SO MUCH I HATe YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU
And ED-E cruised off under Ulysses' control.
Dear Ulysses: I hate you, and Janice hates you, and the only reason you are going to get out of this DLC alive is because Janice is the chosen one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, rather than the original deity my very first Courier was the chosen one of, which was Axlotl, God of Literally Blood-Thirsty Mutant Lizards. You are going to live SOLELY because someone as pretentious and symbol-obsessed and enthralled with the sound of his own voice as you does not deserve to die, but deserves to wind up with Janice's foot on his neck as she screams, "Say it! SAY IT! YOU WERE WRONG AND I WAS RIGHT! YOU! DON'T! KNOW! EVERYTHING!" And then wind up living a long, bitter life with the knowledge of that forever lodged in his skull.
And that, I think, is a good place to stop for now.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice was FREAKING RIGHT THE HELL OUT because WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT BUILDS SINGLE CONTROL LAUNCH CONSOLES FOR INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILES. WHAT. HELL. WHAT. Yeeeah, apparently, um, the lever she pulled in the belief that it would unlock the outer door to the Ashton missile silo? Opened the silo blast doors and launched an actual goddamn missile. At somewhere nearby. And set it off. Which... you know, the control panel was outside, under the open sky, it just did not seem to her like a logical place to put the ONE AND ONLY CONTROL TO LAUNCH THE GODDAMN INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE. Probably it had been indoors once- there were shattered walls in the area, just not many- but even so! Pull one shiny red handle and NUCLEAR MISSILE. THE HELL. Weren't those things supposed to have two keys each or something? This- it-
.... I'm sorry, my copy of iTunes just started playing "Wasn't That A Party", which, um. Despite the first few lines being Could've been the whiskey, might've been the gin, could've been the three or four six-packs, I don't know, but won't you look at the mess I'm in....
I don't think there was enough alcohol in the WORLD for Janice to un-freak at that point in time.
Anyway, it eventually occurred to her that getting indoors might be a good idea. I think she planned to slump next to the wall and make horrified wailing noises. Unfortunately that wasn't in the cards, because the silo was coming apart and on fire. I guess that's what happens when someone finally fails their roll to disbelieve two-hundred-year-old unmaintained architecture lasting through being put to a violent and splodey use. So of course she did the most sensible thing, which was to run at the big ol' cargo lift dead ahead of her and pull the 'get me out of here' lever. Only when it started moving, it started moving DOWN. As in, INTO the fire and the falling apart and the OH GREAT seismic activity- did I mention the ground shaking? Yeah. The ground was shaking. And she was going down. And her Geiger counter was going off. And then the tunnelers started crawling up the shaft and leaping at her. OH, THAT'S JUST PRIME.
There's a section in Half-Life 2 where you have to ride an elevator with Alyx Vance and your only job is to keep fiery plummeting debris from falling into your face and smashing the both of you to paste. This? Was not like that. The fiery plummeting debris was not actively crawling down the elevator shaft and leaping at Gordon Freeman and trying to rip his face off from four different directions at once. Janice spent most of the-
*eyes psiTunes* "Die Another Day". Yes. That's about right. Thanks to that lovely lovely holorifle, and to ED-E's electrical zap gun, and Janice's casino armor, the only dying done during that elevator ride was entirely handled by tunnelers, wretched degenerate little things....
She got to the bottom of the shaft alive and still had ammo left- she collected the stuff like her life depended on it, which it did- but there still wasn't any time for huddling against the wall and wailing, because things were still on fire. No tunnelers, thank goodness. Just fire and earthquake, which were pretty much horrible enough as it stood. Janice was pretty much having the kind of day where "Well, at least my brain is still inside my skull" was the best news she could muster. That and "Oh, hey, broken eyebot- ED-E, do you want any parts?", since she found some bits to upgrade him with as she ran like a very runny thing through the remains of the silo, but that was about it.
Of course, there were no doors into nice safe secure bunker areas to be found, or any emergency exit passages; very likely she'd just come in from the emergency exit, all things considered. The only way out was to go right down to the middle of the flaming burning sparking collapsing wreckage left directly under where the missile had been and wriggle through a hole she found. This was not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat, because either of those two options would have been too NICE. No, this was a hole of rock and pointy bits and detritus that led directly to sunken building parts, and not government buildings, either, but some kind of residential tower with bank signage nearby, seriously, who the hell builds ordinary residential multistorey apartment buildings that directly next to a missile silo. Aren't there regulations about not letting civilians get that close, or something?
Not that it mattered, because tunnelers. Outside the building. Inside the building. In some of the rooms and in the stairwell. You stop asking questions about two hundred year old architecture when your ruminations are interrupted every thirty seconds by TUNNELERS MY FAAAACE.
Well, she survived the tunnelers and she survived the horrible building, and she made it up to the roof exit, and that's when you know who started yammering at her via ED-E all over again. I'll be honest, I think at that point she would've preferred Voldemort. I know I would've. At least he wouldn't have taken the opportunity to inform me that "Ahead lies your work, the history you burned in the earth, what you brought to the people here."
....
"You delivered a package. Had markings that matched those in the Divide...."
I'm in no mood to look for his exact words anywhere, and I couldn't be bothered to transcribe them at the time. Basically, Ulysses said she brought an unusual kind of detonator to the Divide and Ulysses followed because he wanted to see what would happen and the detonator sent out some kind of automatic signal that made things explode. All the things. ALL OF THEM. YOU DID THIS THIS IS YOUR FAULT ALL YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. Screw you, Ulysses.
And you too, Obsidian. You don't get to give someone a backstory this far into the game unless you specifically say that they had amnesia from their traumatic head injury at the start of the game. I mean, damn, you couldn't even be bothered to properly foreshadow this in the main game. Pulling a reveal of this magnitude out of your butts this late in the show? Bad form, old man, bad form. I already had a backstory for my girl and it did not include this.
Well, anyway, back to the pretentious jerk, because he sure as hell wasn't going to let Janice forget him. He said he survived because machines saved him. Autodocs, I think, although how he wound up in one I'm not sure and I don't much care to find out. He thought Janice was dead at the time. He also made some disparaging remarks about ED-E and how the local machines can't even leave the silos without a human to shadow, and then he said, "You carry death wherever you go- if the Mojave doesn't know it yet, it will." And he went into great detail, in his not-really-very-detailed-at-all-because-it's-just-oh-so-much-more-important-to-blither-about-freaking-symbols-instead-of-using-actual-nouns kind of way...
Oh God. He was bitching because the people who formed a survivor community here used the Old World flag as their symbol, and their community was one that would outlast the Bear and Bull- and Janice had killed it. So basically he was saying YOU KILLED AMERICA ALL OVER AGAIN. WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA, JANICE?
I... really don't remember if he had anything else to say after that. I'm just going to go with the assumption that at that point Janice turned around and mooned ED-E rather than listen to Ulysses any further, or at least tried her best to moon the 'bot since that doesn't work so well when you're wearing armor instead of pants. When she straightened up again he wasn't in control of the bot any more, so she sort of edged over to the forward part of the building for a look-see at what was supposedly her handiwork, and AUGH ROCKETS. Yeah, there were skinless dudes down below. Scope and holorifle time, kids. @whee.
This section mostly just annoyed me, because it amounted to plinking skinless dudes (I'm in no mood to call them Marked Men any more) from a distance wherever possible and from closer where not possible, then rummaging through their stuff and going on to the next building. Oh, and blowing up Big Bowls of Pudding, there were several of those. At one point Janice found a holotape on which Ulysses had recorded his account of a massive squick fit he had when the White Legs decided they liked him so much they'd change their tribal appearance to look as much like him as possible and adopt his tribal hairstyle along with it. Which, problem, because the Twisted Hairs (his old tribe, which Caesar had wiped out/assimilated, whatever) encoded history and message in the knots and twists of their hair, and the White Legs didn't know anything about that, so basically they just looked like a bunch of culturally appropriating murdering rapist scavenger versions of his tribe's ghosts without knowing what any of it meant.
Ya know, big guy, I think Janice might actually have had some sympathy for you at some point in her life, but after the time she'd had in the Divide so far? Nuh-uh. She literally could not have cared any less. It would have been a physical impossibility for her to care any less about your little moment of horror. She would have had to outsource the not-caring to other people entirely to create any less caring. And there weren't any other people around other than the ones who didn't have skin so WHOOPTY FUCKING CRAP, CRY ME A RIVER, MISTER TOO GOOD FOR PRONOUNS.
*cough*
Sorry. So, um, Ulysses tape, that's one thing, and then ED-E started playing a recording of a small child- little Tommy- begging his Dad to let him bring the hurt robot he'd just found to Mom because maybe Mom could fix him, please please please? He looks so lonely! Maybe if mom fies him, he can help out around the garage! He'll be just like RALPHIE, only this one's not a toy!
Huh. Guess the holotapes survived, or maybe there was a tie-in comic or something. Who knew. According to ED-E's beeps after the recording stopped, that happened somewhere in Illinois- one of the conversational options was even "What's a Chicago?", so that was one of a handful of references to Fallout Tactics- but ED-E had his mission and had to reach Navarro so he'd regretfully left the little boy and his family behind. Honestly, Janice didn't know it was possible for faceless balls of metal to look that sad. She promised ED-E they'd just have to keep going and reach the end of the Divide and then maybe they'd see him on his way, and they kept right on going.
After a lot of turning skinless dudes to ash, they ran across another Big Bowl of Pudding nestled in the middle of a heap of rubble Janice couldn't climb over. She backed up, blew it up with the laser detonator, and watched a nearby building fall over and block her way in an entirely different place. Great, just great. Apparently the only way around now was through some kind of set of caves or something. Well, screw that. Janice was going to TAKE HER FREAKING TIME now and dig through all of the local buildings wherever she could just because she hated the feeling of being railroaded. Not that she found all that much, and what she did find didn't make her feel any better- a computer terminal that had once held a message from Commander Devlin, the base commander, who told the various soldiers on base "Do not engage the protestors outside the construction zone. I know, I know, the presence of those no-goodniks fills my brain with the WHITE-HOT RAGE OF CAPITALIST JUSTICE..."
The little Ragey Stephen Colbert bit wouldn't have been so bad on its own, but Devlin went on to say that the something special being planned for the protestors involved the chief liaison officer to the Big Mountain Research Facility, who was paying a visit to 'collect our guests and take them someplace where they can do some good for their country beyond stinking of patchouli and shooting the LSD'. And, well, Janice had been to Big Mountain. And there had been so many lobotomites and Robobrains and skeletons in trauma harnesses and beds and graves in Little Yangtze and that one room full of brains, and..... Yeeeeah.
Tell me again, Ulysses, about the importance of the Old World symbol? Tell me again how America slept? Because Devlin and Big Mountain were America, too, you know.
Well, anyway, Janice got out of there and wound up finding a sewer entrance and poking through that until she found some more eyebot parts- tell me again, Ulysses, how these machines can't even leave their pods or whatever without a human to shadow?- and then found another exit. That one led to the third floor of a building for whatever reason, where she found another Ulysses tape. He talked about his visit to Big Mountain on that one, including the part where he asked the brains "who are you, who do not know your history?" and he got them to admit that they remembered America and that they had loved their country once, and some other things... It sounded moderately profound at the time, and as a player I kind of appreciated it, but Janice didn't much care. She'd convinced the brains to do what she asked them to do and one day she'd go back there so she could just wig out in peace while the Sink central AI said comforting things to her, that was all she cared about right then.
She kept on going and ED-E started playing music and then a gunshot. Janice recognized it as being the incident that got the little robot so damaged she found him in Johnston Nash's store. I recognized it as being the initial Fallout New Vegas trailer/TV commercial, which opened with a shot of an eyebot with an Illinois license plate patching one side and a MY KID GOES TO ROOSEVELT ACADEMY bumper sticker on the other, to the tune of Kay Kyser's "(I Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle". So that was pretty much sewing up the rest of ED-E's backstory, which was kind of neat, and while Janice might not have been able to do much with that, at least it didn't make her ragey. She had plenty of ragey already.
Eventually even Janice had to concede that she had no further way out of the Divide except to either go back the way she came- which was mighty tempting- or to go through those stupid caves, and so she headed for the stupid caves. Ulysses had painted a red Old World flag symbol on the wall nearby, though, and ED-E started beeping and shivering in terror, which did not sit well with Janice. Still, not much choice if she wanted to get this all over with, so-
"You have discovered CAVE OF THE ABADDON", said the screen at that point. Oh come ON, are we not even TRYING to hide that we're in allegory country? Good Lord... For reference's sake, abaddon is a Hebrew word that translates as a form of the word 'destruction'. In the Book of Revelation there's a seriously nasty angel shown as the king of an army of seriously psychedelic locusts, "whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and which in Greek means Apolloyon, the Destroyer". So, yeah, this is the cave of VERY VERY VERY BAD THINGS, and that whole army of locusts part is relevant because EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN ARE EVERYWHERE IN IT. SO MANY EVIL LIZARD CHILDREN. SO MANY.
I see no reason to transcribe further. Janice basically went all Michael Ironside "YOU GET DOWN THERE AND YOU KILL ANYTHING THAT HAS MORE THAN TWO
Having survived all that allegory, Janice stumped her way out through the next available collapsed building. What then proceeded to honk her off was passing a graffiti wall on which it said 'you can go home Courier', and then said 'Courier Six?', and the paint was in two different colors. Seriously, Ulysses? You were that bored that you went off and found another paint pot and came back later with it? This is what you were doing with your time? Janice rolled her eyes so hard at the sight that she almost missed the sound of the RALPHIE recording ED-E was playing, the one where the little human boy urged RALPHIE to fly far and fly fast so that mean ol' General Winters couldn't get him. It was apparently the second to last episode, or at least the second to last episode of a story arc, because the announcer said to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion only on Vault-Tec Channel 9. Then Dr. Whitley's voice came on, wondering who'd left the video recordings running, and urging ED-E to get back into his recharge pod because it was late. All very cute, really.
Which was probably the point, because the next time Janice stepped through a door and out into the open air again, that ASS Ulysses took over ED-E once again. Yammer yammer yammer, pretentious pretentious pretentious, "you brought me what I wanted- that machine..."
The hell- you need ED-E? Seriously? That's what you were after, this whole time? You wanted someone to unlock the bot and bring it to you? YOU COULDN'T DO THAT YOURSELF? ... okay, apparently ED-E had the codes to unlock the missiles here and that ass Ulysses wanted to 'bring the Divide to your home, burn your nation as the Divide burned'. Good Christ, man, you have problems. If Janice ever finds you... hey hey hey WHOA let go of ED-E, GIVE ME BACK MY ROBOT I don't CARE if the command override for the missiles is Navarro GIVE ME BACK MY ROBOT I HATE YOU SO MUCH I HATe YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU
And ED-E cruised off under Ulysses' control.
Dear Ulysses: I hate you, and Janice hates you, and the only reason you are going to get out of this DLC alive is because Janice is the chosen one of Ferris Bueller, God of Liars, rather than the original deity my very first Courier was the chosen one of, which was Axlotl, God of Literally Blood-Thirsty Mutant Lizards. You are going to live SOLELY because someone as pretentious and symbol-obsessed and enthralled with the sound of his own voice as you does not deserve to die, but deserves to wind up with Janice's foot on his neck as she screams, "Say it! SAY IT! YOU WERE WRONG AND I WAS RIGHT! YOU! DON'T! KNOW! EVERYTHING!" And then wind up living a long, bitter life with the knowledge of that forever lodged in his skull.
And that, I think, is a good place to stop for now.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 02:39 pm (UTC)Links to pics (I didn't want to put them inline and possibly bugger up your page load):
http://s379.photobucket.com/albums/oo234/arionrhod/?action=view¤t=IMG_0378-1.jpg
http://s379.photobucket.com/albums/oo234/arionrhod/?action=view¤t=IMG_0387-1.jpg
http://s379.photobucket.com/albums/oo234/arionrhod/?action=view¤t=IMG_0389.jpg
no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-30 07:17 pm (UTC)Anyway, the real reason I'm commenting is to make sure you saw this, io9 is asking for questions to ask the author of Throne of the Crescent Moon.