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Notes From New Vegas 55
Notes From New Vegas 55: Right Yes Okay Back In The Saddle Now
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had finally heard the last of Pretentious Exposition Guy, aka Ulysses, last of the Twisted Hairs and former Frumentarius of Caesar's Legion. Theoretically she could go back any time and talk to him again, and I believe if you do that you can get the recipe for homemade antivenin or Bitter Drink healing potion or something from him, but... no. See, that would require willingly walking into that man's presence. Which, no. Janice had had it up to HERE with that man and his inability to deal with the real world without trying to force everything onto a symbolic level. She just wanted to go and deal with somebody practical, who wouldn't talk her ear off. It struck her that Boone was back in Novac and didn't really seem to enjoy his job there...
And here I have to confess that I didn't take notes for this part. See, when I was writing this more actively I got to a point where it was taking me longer to write things out than it was to play them, and I played ahead of myself a bit. I don't actually have my notes or direct impressions from when Janice and Boone spent some quality time running around the Mojave together, so I can't give you a proper writeup on that. I can give you this rather sketchy outline, if that will suffice:
- Boone allowed Janice to talk him into leaving town and letting Manny handle the guard sniper duty instead
- They headed off east because hey, it was better than going near the Divide again
- Boone warned her that they were getting close to Legion territory and that he'd probably just start killing Legionaries if he saw them, so Janice said okay that sounded cool
- They ran into some NCR troopers outside a town called Nelson who were trying to get a line of sight so they could put several NCR POWs the Legion had crucified out of their misery
- Janice went thbbbt at the NCR troopers and she and Boone went into Nelson
- A SCENE OF UNIMAGINABLE VIOLENCE
- Janice got money from the NCR troopers for getting their POWs back alive and retaking the town from the Legion, yay
- Some other stuff happened
- Janice eventually talked Boone into talking about his wife
- Apparently Boone had tracked the slave party that took her down and found her being auctioned off to Legion soldiers with hundreds of other slaves
- Since Boone couldn't get through to rescue her himself, the only way he could save her from a life of slavery (probably including forced breeding, given Legion policies about children) was with his sniper rifle
- ... so, yeah, some other stuff happened, like slaughtering a Legion encampment at Cottonwood Cove and freeing some slave prisoners there and Janice didn't ask him much after that
- But eventually it came out that he had been part of an NCR attack on Bitter Springs
- Which was supposed to be an encampment of Great Khan warriors
- Only it wasn't, it was lots of women, sick, elderly, and children
- And the NCR ordered them into doing it anyway
- Hence the rest of Boone's psychological issues
- So they went to Bitter Springs again, to see if he couldn't get some closure
- It's an NCR refugee camp now
- Janice and Boone did some other stuff while they were there to make life easier for the refugees and the doctors
- And then that night a massive Legion slaving party attacked
- MY GOD EVERYTHING IS COVERED IN BLOOD
- According to Mr. New Vegas' radio broadcast, "The Legion slaver party was wiped out in a failed raid of the Bitter Springs refugee camp, with two armed civilians inflicting heavy Legion casualties. One witness said, quote: "God sent us two angels, and at least one o' them had a .308 caliber flaming sword of justice - with a telescopic sight."
- Not that this fixed Boone's mental issues, you understand, but Janice was able to persuade him after that to pursue a more useful sort of repentance
- Yay
So... yeah. There was that. Sometime after that Janice and Boone parted ways. I don't remember how, so I'm handwaving that he expressed an interest in returning to NCR service and Janice encouraged him to do just that. Which left her without a companion again, but... yanno, these things happen.
Of course, the philosophical attitude evaporated the instant she found the old prewar atomic testing range. Janice did NOT want to walk out onto it alone, and Boone was back up north anyway, so... maybe it was time to go pick up a companion in case of running across more of this. Ronnie would ask too many questions. Maybe somebody was at the Followers' place. Janice figured she owed them a favor or two, plus apparently she had a good rep with them for preventing Armageddon (I still don' t know how they found out). Up to the Old Mormon Fort it was.
Or it was GOING to be, right up until the guy in the sporting gear armor showed up and started yammering. THE CAESAR HAS MARKED YOU FOR DEATH AND THE LEGION OBEYS, READY YOURSELF FOR BATTLE good God how many people are terminally stupid out here? ... one, apparently. Janice shot him and stomped over the nearby ridge, where she discovered that there was some kind of bug in the software that caused the other Legionaries to be deaf. Or to have grown a survival instinct, one of the two. They hadn't seen her start shooting, so they didn't attack her, just glared at her, and when she walked a little too close to one of them to see what she could get away with he snarled, "GIVE ME CAUSE, PROFLIGATE." Yeah whatevs. Leaving now.
Shortly thereafter she stumbled across the Nevada Wind Farm, which was kind of a pretty place until it turned out to be COMPLETELY SWARMING WITH CAZADORES . At this point I can only assume that the reason the words "JANICE SMASH!!!" did not come into play is that I don't think you can call what the holorifle does smashing. There were a lot of dead bugs very quickly, though, since the Divide teaches you how not to die. So there was that. Janice kept moving, going to see what was going on with the Followers, and in the process eventually ran across a sharecropper farm on the outskirts of Vegas with a giant hole in its fence.
Huh.
Ordinarily this would have been the beginning of a quest to find out why the farmers weren't able to produce, and it would have led to the discovery of problems with the water supply, and that would have led to what was supposed to be an emotionally wrenching decision about who to spare and who to leave to twist in the wind. Slight problem with that: the water supply issue had to do with Vault 34. Janice had already dealt with that, so basically she walked onto the farm, found out that the farmers were doing reasonably well, and went on her way. The emotionally wrenching decision was supposed to be 'do I disable the reactor and thus remove the radiation poisoning the sharecroppers' farm from the groundwater, or do I reroute control of the systems in here to the handful of survivors, allowing them to escape alive and unghoulified but leaving the radiation in the water'. Since by the time Janice got there she'd disabled Vault 34's reactor and the last people in Vault 34 were long since dead, the quest didn't happen.
Anyway, I think that's enough to start off with. When next we meet Janice will have a shiny new follower. Also there will be Elvis. Sorta. More or less.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had finally heard the last of Pretentious Exposition Guy, aka Ulysses, last of the Twisted Hairs and former Frumentarius of Caesar's Legion. Theoretically she could go back any time and talk to him again, and I believe if you do that you can get the recipe for homemade antivenin or Bitter Drink healing potion or something from him, but... no. See, that would require willingly walking into that man's presence. Which, no. Janice had had it up to HERE with that man and his inability to deal with the real world without trying to force everything onto a symbolic level. She just wanted to go and deal with somebody practical, who wouldn't talk her ear off. It struck her that Boone was back in Novac and didn't really seem to enjoy his job there...
And here I have to confess that I didn't take notes for this part. See, when I was writing this more actively I got to a point where it was taking me longer to write things out than it was to play them, and I played ahead of myself a bit. I don't actually have my notes or direct impressions from when Janice and Boone spent some quality time running around the Mojave together, so I can't give you a proper writeup on that. I can give you this rather sketchy outline, if that will suffice:
- Boone allowed Janice to talk him into leaving town and letting Manny handle the guard sniper duty instead
- They headed off east because hey, it was better than going near the Divide again
- Boone warned her that they were getting close to Legion territory and that he'd probably just start killing Legionaries if he saw them, so Janice said okay that sounded cool
- They ran into some NCR troopers outside a town called Nelson who were trying to get a line of sight so they could put several NCR POWs the Legion had crucified out of their misery
- Janice went thbbbt at the NCR troopers and she and Boone went into Nelson
- A SCENE OF UNIMAGINABLE VIOLENCE
- Janice got money from the NCR troopers for getting their POWs back alive and retaking the town from the Legion, yay
- Some other stuff happened
- Janice eventually talked Boone into talking about his wife
- Apparently Boone had tracked the slave party that took her down and found her being auctioned off to Legion soldiers with hundreds of other slaves
- Since Boone couldn't get through to rescue her himself, the only way he could save her from a life of slavery (probably including forced breeding, given Legion policies about children) was with his sniper rifle
- ... so, yeah, some other stuff happened, like slaughtering a Legion encampment at Cottonwood Cove and freeing some slave prisoners there and Janice didn't ask him much after that
- But eventually it came out that he had been part of an NCR attack on Bitter Springs
- Which was supposed to be an encampment of Great Khan warriors
- Only it wasn't, it was lots of women, sick, elderly, and children
- And the NCR ordered them into doing it anyway
- Hence the rest of Boone's psychological issues
- So they went to Bitter Springs again, to see if he couldn't get some closure
- It's an NCR refugee camp now
- Janice and Boone did some other stuff while they were there to make life easier for the refugees and the doctors
- And then that night a massive Legion slaving party attacked
- MY GOD EVERYTHING IS COVERED IN BLOOD
- According to Mr. New Vegas' radio broadcast, "The Legion slaver party was wiped out in a failed raid of the Bitter Springs refugee camp, with two armed civilians inflicting heavy Legion casualties. One witness said, quote: "God sent us two angels, and at least one o' them had a .308 caliber flaming sword of justice - with a telescopic sight."
- Not that this fixed Boone's mental issues, you understand, but Janice was able to persuade him after that to pursue a more useful sort of repentance
- Yay
So... yeah. There was that. Sometime after that Janice and Boone parted ways. I don't remember how, so I'm handwaving that he expressed an interest in returning to NCR service and Janice encouraged him to do just that. Which left her without a companion again, but... yanno, these things happen.
Of course, the philosophical attitude evaporated the instant she found the old prewar atomic testing range. Janice did NOT want to walk out onto it alone, and Boone was back up north anyway, so... maybe it was time to go pick up a companion in case of running across more of this. Ronnie would ask too many questions. Maybe somebody was at the Followers' place. Janice figured she owed them a favor or two, plus apparently she had a good rep with them for preventing Armageddon (I still don' t know how they found out). Up to the Old Mormon Fort it was.
Or it was GOING to be, right up until the guy in the sporting gear armor showed up and started yammering. THE CAESAR HAS MARKED YOU FOR DEATH AND THE LEGION OBEYS, READY YOURSELF FOR BATTLE good God how many people are terminally stupid out here? ... one, apparently. Janice shot him and stomped over the nearby ridge, where she discovered that there was some kind of bug in the software that caused the other Legionaries to be deaf. Or to have grown a survival instinct, one of the two. They hadn't seen her start shooting, so they didn't attack her, just glared at her, and when she walked a little too close to one of them to see what she could get away with he snarled, "GIVE ME CAUSE, PROFLIGATE." Yeah whatevs. Leaving now.
Shortly thereafter she stumbled across the Nevada Wind Farm, which was kind of a pretty place until it turned out to be COMPLETELY SWARMING WITH CAZADORES . At this point I can only assume that the reason the words "JANICE SMASH!!!" did not come into play is that I don't think you can call what the holorifle does smashing. There were a lot of dead bugs very quickly, though, since the Divide teaches you how not to die. So there was that. Janice kept moving, going to see what was going on with the Followers, and in the process eventually ran across a sharecropper farm on the outskirts of Vegas with a giant hole in its fence.
Huh.
Ordinarily this would have been the beginning of a quest to find out why the farmers weren't able to produce, and it would have led to the discovery of problems with the water supply, and that would have led to what was supposed to be an emotionally wrenching decision about who to spare and who to leave to twist in the wind. Slight problem with that: the water supply issue had to do with Vault 34. Janice had already dealt with that, so basically she walked onto the farm, found out that the farmers were doing reasonably well, and went on her way. The emotionally wrenching decision was supposed to be 'do I disable the reactor and thus remove the radiation poisoning the sharecroppers' farm from the groundwater, or do I reroute control of the systems in here to the handful of survivors, allowing them to escape alive and unghoulified but leaving the radiation in the water'. Since by the time Janice got there she'd disabled Vault 34's reactor and the last people in Vault 34 were long since dead, the quest didn't happen.
Anyway, I think that's enough to start off with. When next we meet Janice will have a shiny new follower. Also there will be Elvis. Sorta. More or less.