Over the past four hours I've accomplished a whole lot of squat. And I mean that literally. I may have accomplished squat, but at least there was a whole lot of it.
It's been a pretty steady pattern. I roll into town, somebody tells me about a problem, and then I completely fail to be strong enough to actually address the problem. The sheriff of Redding just straight up told me I wasn't high enough level to do his little errand. The bandit leader who has taken over Vault 15 can kill me in two shots. The shady drug lab that tests its products on slaves is too well guarded for me to take down. The only thing I'm qualified to do is be a fluffer in a New Reno porn studio, and the pay for that is terrible.
What's worse is the Arroyo shaman is breathing down my neck, having popped in via the astral plain to guilt trip me about not finding the G.E.C.K. It's not my fault nobody knows where Vault 13 is.
Actually, I, the player, know, but it turns out the game has anticipated such blatant metagaming on my part and refused to put the vault on the map until I actually discover it in game. I found this out by stumbling into the ruins of the Mariposa military base, making my way down to sub-level 2, and promptly getting myself killed by super mutants (I will say this for the bastards, they can survive being sealed underground without food or air for 80 years, so maybe the government was onto something with their whole super soldier project).
I suppose I can still call this progress, of a sort. I may be running into insurmountable obstacles everywhere I turn, but at least the frontier of my incompetence is being pushed towards the end of the game. I know I'm close, I just have to find the right trigger to push me over the edge (for a very literal example of this - Tandi in the NCR had a quest for me - that would not activate until I talked to the NCR sheriff, whose only contribution was to tell me that President Tandi had a job for me).
It hasn't entirely been thumb-twiddling, though. I do have one concrete accomplishment to my name. I found a car. Smitty in the Den fixed it up for me, using a part I got from Skeeter in Gecko, and I can now zoom across the wasteland in comfort in style. True, that mostly means that I can arrive and be useless in a fraction of the time, and the fuel for the vehicle is a rare form of ammunition I am not powerful enough to acquire in bulk, but it's still super cool.
What I need to do now is find some way to get a quick power boost. Specifically, I need some late game armor. The reinforced leather jacket I'm wearing now is just barely good enough to ward off the bite of a rat. Facing heavily armed raiders and mutants, I need something with some actual protection. The way I see it, I have two options. I can go to the Den and try and get into the Brotherhood of Steel base (maybe my reputation is good enough now that they'll want to recruit me) or I can go to San Francisco and try and buy some gear from the merchants there (there is a secret third option that I am not going to entertain because it's blatant sequence breaking). The smart thing to do would be to try the Brotherhood first (because its stuff is free) and then the merchants only if that doesn't work. My fear is that my car won't have the juice to make it.
I love that damned car.
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