My last three hours playing this game have mostly been one distraction after another. I went to Arefu to deliver a letter, only to discover that Lucy West's parents were dead and her brother Ian was missing. The obvious suspects were a group of raiders called The Family, so I tracked them down, only to find that they were innocent. Ian killed his parents, driven by a perverse cannibalistic hunger.
It turns out the Family is like rehab for cannibals, teaching them to control their hunger and act like vampires instead. I am not entirely sold on this plotline. In the world of Fallout, homicidal cannibalism is like a disease that strikes people at random? Drinking blood is somehow preferable? And that doesn't really explain why the Family acted like such assholes to the people of Arefu. I don't know, it just all strikes me as very dubious. It doesn't matter, though. In the end, I was able to broker a peace in which the Family provided protection for Arefu in exchange for blood packs. I guess life finds a way. A disgusting, morally problematic, and nonsensical way.
After that, I swung back to Greyditch to finish off those giant ants. It was pretty quick and straightforward now that I have a combat shotgun. The ant queen grossed me the fuck out, but I left her alive because the mad scientist dude seemed to think he could use her to cure the ants of their giantism. The trickiest part of this quest was finding a new home for Bryan. He mentioned that he had an aunt Vera in Rivet City, but did not give more specific directions, so I had to search practically the whole ship before I found her.
It was during the course of this search that I did something I regret in retrospect. There was this woman named Angela who had the hots for a guy named Diego who wants to become a priest, so I acquired for her some ant queen pheromones to help her seal the deal. It's probably not the big a deal. It's probably just like some crazy sexy perfume. Yet it feels skeevy to me. Ah well, I will probably never see them again.
Once I wrapped up those quests, it was time to head north, to start the Pitt DLC. Unfortunately, it was a long walk, and things kept pulling me off the path. The first was an abandoned vault that was just begging to be explored.
On the balance, I like finding vaults. They usually have an interesting story attached to them. Like Vault 106, the one I found, where the Overseer released some kind of psychoactive gas that made the residents become violently insane, and which inspired in me some pretty trippy hallucinations. They also usually have some pretty sweet loot - I found two skill books, some advanced armor, and a science bobblehead (which I wasn't even looking for, so it came as a very pleasant surprise). However, the downside of exploring vaults is that they are, one and all, dreary mazes, with few easily identified landmarks, spatially unintuitive layouts and nigh-on useless minimaps. The last, especially, is a pain. I know it's a real challenge to create a 2-d map of a 3-d space, but what's wrong with a layered approach, with each level of the building getting a separate map? It works for the Zelda games, it can work for Fallout.
The other big distraction was Paradise Falls. That's the capitol wasteland's headquarters for the slave trade. I'm pretty sure there are quests associated with this place that allow you to peacefully interact with the residents, but I've never seen them because the same thing always happens whenever I stumble across it - the front gate guard says something unforgivably offensive, I tell him he can say it to my gun, and then I wind up slaughtering the whole staff. I do liberate the slaves in the process, but can I really hold myself up as having the moral high ground here? Slavery is vile, but one of the very few things it can be compared favorably to is mass slaughter. Oh well, let's just say that I'm a post-apocalyptic John Brown and leave it at that.
There were a myriad of other, lesser distractions, including at least three trips back to Craterside Supply in Megaton to sell my loot, and an ambush by the Talon Company, who for some reason were contracted out to teach me a lesson about doing good deeds (and this was before I took out Paradise Falls, so you can't even really say it was a vengeance killing, which makes the motive all the more inexplicable, unless someone, somewhere, was making a profit off the giant ants of Greyditch or the chaos in Arefu). These distractions were individually quite short, but they add up. So it is that I only just got to the point where I can start the Pitt.
My first task is to acquire some ratty clothes so I can disguise myself as a slave. There's no way this ends poorly. . .
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