Fallout - Part 8: Pointless Conversations

My retrieval of the Water Chip was not quite a thankless task.

But the rewards are primarily moral. My fellow Vault dwellers are a useless, ineffectual bunch, and presumably the reason I get all these crazy assignments (aside from being the player character) is because I'm the only person who can actually get shit done.

However, my new goal is completely open-ended - find out what's causing all these mutants to appear and put a stop to it. I don't have a lot to go on. In fact, what I have is virtually nothing. No one in the Vault knows anything, and most of the people I've encountered on the outside completely failed to notice the problem.

In fact, the only mutants I ever saw were in Necropolis, so that seems as good a place as any to start. I head back and talk to the lead mutant.

Now, obviously, this is just an opening gambit. I'll probably have to do some clever manipulation to get the information out of him. It's the beginning of a long and difficult road . . .

Or he could just instantly transport me to the penultimate boss. That works too. I have no idea where I am or how I got there, but at least I'm face to face with the source of the evil mutants (who, honestly, I have not yet witnessed being particularly bad, but I'm sure it happens all the time off-screen).

Naturally, I have to play a game of twenty questions to learn the game's backstory.

But it's not too onerous. The mutant has a very soothing voice, and the actual background of his faction isn't too terribly complicated. There's a virus that induces a full-body mutation, transforming ordinary humans into creatures with super-human strength, endurance, and longevity. However, because it was released in the early stages of the war, humans on the surface have managed to develop an immunity. Thus the super mutants need access to original, pre-war humans in order to propagate their kind and expand their power over the world.

To this end, I am repeatedly punched in the stomach, in the hopes that I will give up the location of Vault 13. Of course, I tell Lou Tenant to fuck off, but it is not a decision that goes well for me.

My death was instantaneous. I'm talking deep into negative hit points with a single shot. Clearly, I am not nearly tough enough to face these enemies. Which leaves me with just one option - wander aimlessly around the wasteland fighting random monsters and doing inexplicable favors for strangers until I build up enough experience to fight effectively.

My first stop is the Hub.

It's a charming little town filled with aloof caravan drivers.

And armed police on every streetcorner.

I do eventually find a major NPC to talk to.

Though the quest he gives me is kind of ridiculous. If I'm being blown apart by super mutants, what sort of hope do I have against a Death Claw? Best case scenario, I get clawed to death. It's another thing to put near the bottom of my to-do list.

After further wandering, I come across a familiar sounding name.

Bob's Iguana Bits. If you recall from my early adventures in Junktown, Bob is in cahoots with Dr Morbid to sell human flesh disguised as Iguana meat. This simultaneously manages to be unethical, a major danger to public health, and also bizarrely inefficient. Surely, iguana is obtainable with less risk and expense than corpse meat transported halfway across the map.

I do what any traveling hero would do and confront him.

He doesn't bother denying it, and in the end winds up paying me off, to the tune of 200 bottlecaps a week. I accept because there doesn't appear to be any other way out of this conversation, but it's a baffling move on Bob's part. Now, in addition to all the other major flaws with his little scheme, he also has to fork over a significant amount of cash just to keep the whole thing quiet (though I don't know who I would report him to, in any event). He should really just accept what the universe is trying to tell him and get into a more honest line of work.

I get a nice chunk of xp out of this, so I can't entirely complain. But it's not nearly enough to make me super-mutant ready. I think I'm going to have to start being more aggressive in my pursuit of sidequests.

Fallout - Part 7: Meeting my Ghoul-Friends

After seriously depopulating Junktown, it's time to move on. Some other town is undoubtedly in need of an easily persuaded, wandering disaster area to clear out miscellaneous scum and riff-raff. I have no particular clue about where to go, but I have a menu of possible destinations.

Immediately below Junktown is a button that says "Raiders." I've been there before, to rescue Tandi from the Khans, and I can't imagine there's anything for me to find. I may have to go back to eliminate the danger they pose to the wasteland, but for now, I have a mission.

The next location then, is Necropolis. A traveling singer in Junktown told me about it, but I have no other information. I might have to pop in and see what's up.

I find the Necropolis to be full of undead, which seems fitting, but is a little out-of-genre.

I mean, these things are basically zombies. Where did they come from? Why are there zombies in a sci-fi game? It's not a big deal. I know from later Fallout games that they're just a weird type of mutant and they hate being called zombies, but how weird must this have seemed the first time you played the series.

I can't say for sure, because I did not visit this location the first time I played Fallout (I more or less gave up before finishing). By the time I actually came back and explored Necropolis, I was already quite familiar with Fallout's mythology. I don't recall thinking Fallout 3's ghouls were all that remarkable, but then my first contact was with the talking variety, so I guess I just accepted them.

The ghouls don't seem to trouble you so long as you stay away from them. The ones inside the building are a bit more civilized.

Though they are considerably more surly. There honestly doesn't appear to be anything to do here. Nobody says much to me, and there is no real threat. Nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to explore.

The only apparent way to go is down a manhole.

Joy of joys, it leads into a dank sewer. It's kind of an inevitability, of course, because Fallout is an rpg, and every rpg has a sewer level.

It makes sense that this is such a common cliche. Sewers are basically a ready-made dungeon. They are dark and mysterious, and they are naturally laid out in a twisting and not easily navigable pattern (especially if they are semi-ruined post-apocalyptic sewers). So no complaints, exactly, but I did roll my eyes a bit.

There are a few rats in the sewers, but like the ghouls up above, they have a fairly small sight range, so I can more or less walk through the place unmolested. As I get deeper in, I discover some more civilized ghouls.

Unlike the ones up above, this ghoul is talkative and friendly towards outsiders. And for the first time, I get some quest information.

 

Shockingly, it has to do with the Vault's water chip! The ghouls are using it to supply themselves with water. I can't take it without ruining their whole society, but I absolutely need it to save my people. Luckily, they have a secondary water source, so if I can fix that one, I could take the water-chip without a problem. It's a generous offer, though if I were the ghouls, I'd want to keep the backup, because these sorts of breakdowns are kind of inevitable.

I make my way farther through the sewers and emerge back onto the surface, to find a new sort of creature.

They look big and dangerous, but they're talkative (if not exactly friendly) and they don't attack me, so I proceed to ignore them. In the building in the back, there is one who is bigger, better dressed, and important enough to get an animated head.

He interrogates me about my presence here, and is clearly an anti-human fanatic, but he's also incredibly stupid and falls for obvious lies. As an "extremely advanced robot" I am not one of their targets. I'm able to walk past and access Necropolis' water equipment.

Using parts I found in the sewers, I attempt to repair the water pump. My repair score is a little too low to actually succeed at the attempt, so I retreat back to the sewers and go to the ghoul who gave me the mission.

He gives me some skill books that raise my repair skill, which apparently does the trick and allows me to repair the water pump. I go deeper into the water shed, and find an imprisoned ghoul. Since I have lockpicking as a tagged skill, letting him loose is a trivial matter. He tells me that the water chip is down a nearby manhole.

It's another Vault! I'm not sure why, but I wasn't really expecting it. It seems fairly obvious in retrospect, but I guess I didn't think there were quite so many Vaults. The glowy ghouls rush me, but they are fairly weak, having no ability to get through my armor and no resistance to Dogmeat's savage attacks.

Finding the water chip is actually trivial, because the layout of this Vault is exactly like every other Vault in the game. I find the computer at the same spot at the cave in in Vault 15.

It nets me a really nice xp bump and the satisfaction of a job well done. Well, that's it, that's the game. All wrapped up in a nice little bow. All I have to do is deliver the chip and collect my well-earned adulations.

Note the near-identical architecture. Though I have to wonder why one Vault has a huge Overseer chamber and one does not. In later years, we learn that the Vaults are social experiments (which actually seems kind of dumb to me, but the Fallout universe has no shortage of dangerous maniacs), so maybe there's some kind of sociological reason for this, but I don't think we learn why in this particular installment.

Regardless of the reason, it's not really relevant. The game will soon be ending. Time for me to collect my reward . . .

I don't like where this is going . . .

So my reward for doing good work is more work. Typical.

Fallout - Part 6: A Boy and His Dog and His Vigilante Killing Spree

I have, in the short term, a straightforward goal - eliminate Gizmo, the corrupt, human-trafficking casino owner/general vice maven who is holding Junktown in thrall. There appears to be some sort of nascent civilization in the ruins of the old world, so I can't just whack him. Instead I must approach this situation with subtlety and tact.

But first . . .

This dog starts following me for no apparent reason. (Actually, according to the wiki, it's because I'm wearing a leather jacket, like his former owner). It's kind of a nice moment, but I wish it was introduced a bit more gradually, so I'd have time to get used to the idea of pet ownership.

Opinions on Dogmeat (you don't get to name him) differ. The lady outside thinks he looks like a "nice pooch." The man inside the house thinks he's a killer beast. I think the man is probably closer to the truth, but it's nice to have a pet . . .

. . . he said, knowing that keeping Dogmeat alive through the endgame is like a living hell. Because I don't want to deal with torment, this dog is sadly doomed, but while he lasts, he will be a valuable near-rabid hell-hound with which I can savage my many enemies.

Like Gizmo, who, lucky for me, is kind of an idiot, and almost immediately starts blabbing his entire plan to the unknown wanderer.

It really, seriously, takes very little prompting on my part.

I'm pretty sure this is my high Speech skill kicking in, though even so, it's a little mysterious that he would be so willing to admit such damning thing to a complete stranger.

The only thing I can think is that he and Killian are operating under some very different legal assumptions. I'm carrying a recording device that will give Killian proof of Gizmo's nefarious plot, but who is he presenting that evidence to? Junktown doesn't seem to have much of  a judicial or legal system, so perhaps Gizmo thinks that accidentally confessing to attempted murder is not something he should realistically have to worry about.

Knowing how thing turn out, I can't say that he's wrong. I return to Killian with the recording and receive my blood money (I go with the shotgun, because armor is pretty cheap and I still have a dozen unused stimpacks)

And then Killian uses the information I gave him to immediately assemble a posse of bloodthirsty vigilantes.

I join up, because it's never wise to turn down free xp, but honestly, I find the anti-fat slurs to be kind of offensive.

"Tub?" Really? Sigh.

The actual battle is a completely one-sided slaughter.

And it makes me wonder, why does Killian need proof? Who is he answering to? If all he was going to do was burst in on Gizmo and gun him down, why all the pageantry with "evidence?" And what would he have done if I hadn't been able to get the recording? It's easy to label Gizmo a loose-lipped idiot, but perhaps he knew that this was really just a conflict between two armed gangs, and regardless of what Killian knew or thought he knew, it would ultimately just come down to whoever had the bigger guns. Certainly, the town didn't have much of an objection to his well-known child sex slave ring, so he couldn't have been too concerned with any kind of conventional legal sanction.

Ah well, I get my treasure out of this, and that's all that really matters. Just for good measure, I return to the now abandoned casino.

And rummage around in the various containers, bookshelves, and dead bodies. In one of them, I find a valuable item.

A copy of Guns and Ammo magazine, that in theory should raise my Small Guns skill. Unfortunately, my skill is already too high, so it does me no good at all. I wish I'd known that before I used it, though. It might have been a worthwhile barter item.

It's not that big a deal, though. I can usually get some pretty good equipment from looting it off enemies. In particular, after I finish ransacking the casino, I go north, to the bar to enjoy a refreshing bit of side-quest.

As soon as I enter, there is a brawl. A member of the Skulz is harassing the waitress, and things got ugly, until Neal the bartender shot him dead. I then swoop in with all my characteristic concern and sensitivity.

Hey, sympathy towards the human condition is one thing. Leather armor is another (how big a fool would I have felt like if I'd taken the leather armor from Killian). I'm not completely heartless, though. I track down the Skulz and infiltrate their gang for the purposes of bringing them to justice.

It's ridiculously easy. I think the criminal culture in this town has a real problem with just randomly trusting outsiders with little-to-no vetting. In order to "prove myself" I have to steal Neal the bartender's urn, which proves to be completely trivial.

He keeps it right on the front counter, next to an unlocked door, at all hours of the day and night, even when the bar is empty and he's gone to bed. (Also, I can't help think that maybe he's somehow invited the attention of the Skulz, what with calling his bar the "Skum Pitt" and having it be the sort of place where dead bodies just lay around for days after someone is murdered there).

Despite being the world's easiest crime, it's enough to earn me the trust of the Skulz

And when the Skulz trust someone, they apparently trust them to a ridiculous degree. I'm able to use the fact that I have "shit to do" to slip out of Skulz headquarters and immediately squeal to the authorities about their planned orgy of violence.

That doesn't get the assault called off or anything.

But it does mean that even more people participate. Frankly, Neal is so handy with his gun that I'm not sure he needed my or anyone else's help here (I actually spent most of this fight sitting it out on the sidelines for fear of accidentally targeting a guard). When it was all said and done, I gave Neal back his wife's ashes (it seemed the right thing to do) and prepared to leave Junktown, none the wiser regarding my quest for a water chip, but richer in guns, armor, and bloody, bloody experience.

Fallout - Part 5: Rummaging Through Junktown

First things first, I owe Interplay an apology. I thought they included a super-perverted scene with Tandi, but that was just me jumping to conclusions. It turns out that, if you hit on her, she turns you down, so the dialogue option that gave me the heeby-jeebies was actually the character being creepy, rather than the game being creepy. If I were in the mood to quibble, I might be curious as to why anyone would think that a main character who ineffectually comes onto a sixteen-year-old would be compelling enough to bother writing in the option, but I am so mortified by my mistake that I'm just going to let this lie.

Instead, it is time to further explore the world of Fallout. Where we last left off, I'd failed to find the water chip in Vault 15. From there, I have precisely zero leads. All I know is the names of a couple of Wasteland towns - The Hub and Junktown. Neither has been singled out as more likely to have what I need than the other. So I go to the one that's closest.

I figure that the locations on the side of the navigation screen are arranged in the best order for visiting. This is shameless metagaming, I know, but I literally have nothing else (besides my memories of how to actually beat the game) to go off of.

Strangely, I manage to make this trip without encountering any random enemies. It's like my early death at the claws of mole rats has bought me some extra leeway. I should probably wander around in the wasteland grinding xp, but that feels a little like cheating to me (I couldn't say why, though, probably because this is a roleplaying game and "then the vault dweller spent two weeks wandering in circles hunting for radscorpions" doesn't feel like it's "in-character.")

Thus, in the shortest time possible, I arrive at scenic Junktown.

Once I get past Lars, the gate guard, I explore a little, to see if I can find a lead on the water chip. No one volunteers anything, and, of course, the "tell me about" button is basically useless.

Perhaps I was angered by his sarcastic non-answer, or perhaps I am simply an rpg protagonist, but I poke my nose into the hole behind him, climbing down into the basement to discover a gore-covered little person who is, perhaps, not the most sensitive portrayal in the world.

Because of my high Speech rating, I basically have magical mind control powers, so I'm able to wring from him a sordid tale of disgusting, disgusting deceit.

Iguana Bob, down in the Hub, is buying human body parts from Dr Morbid, and passing them off as Iguana Bits. How this makes sense from a business perspective is unclear, but I do know that if I ever run into this Iguana Bob, he's going to have a lot to answer for.

Sadly, I can do nothing to confront the good doctor himself. When I talk to him about his side business, he just denies everything.

I suspect there is some other event I have to trigger to get this situation to advance, but I can't quite figure out what it is. I do know you can start a fight by poking around in the basement too much, but because I wasn't sure whether that counted as aggression in the eyes of the local law, I declined to pursue that path.

Instead, I sought out the mayor (sheriff?) of this little town, Killian Darkwater.

He seemed like a decent enough fellow, though I never quite know how to navigate these gruff authority types (much like in real life). You can never tell when being sarcastic and causal will cause them to view you as a down-to-earth straight shooter and when it will make them see you as a smart-assed trouble-maker who needs to be rousted as soon as possible. I take the cautious road and be respectful.

It's hard to say whether it was a fruitful approach, because as soon as I exit the dialogue screen, fate intercedes to ensure my destiny is entwined with the town's.

An assassin tries to take out Killian (seen there, dead at my feet, because I forgot about the timing and was too surprised to get a screenshot). I was able to both loot the body (got a rifle out of it, cha-ching!) and get a job from Killian - bring him evidence of the local crime-lord's involvement in the attempt.

I will confess to not knowing how the law and justice system here in Junktown works. I guess it's some kind of constitutional . . . something. Killian needs evidence to deal with people he doesn't like, so he's not an autocrat, yet if there is some kind of popular rule, than it is kind of hard to understand how Gizmo can operate while Killian opposes him. Surely, if Gizmo's operation were popular among the locals, then Killian would not have the support to be a problem, whereas if it were unpopular, then antagonizing a well-loved (and well-armed) figure would hardly be in Gizmo's economic interest.

Maybe the two are carefully balanced political rivals, and it is the arrival of this mysterious newcomer that threatens to throw the status quo out of balance.

But enough of that intriguing stuff, I'm off to the hotel.

I meet a prostitute.

It's really weird, in a game ostensibly about choice (so much so that they give you the option to perv on Tandi), that you have no option but to ask Sinthia how much she charges. It's doubly weird that she then tells you that she's too expensive. I can't help but take that a little personally.

I have to find some place to sob myself to sleep, sadly unboned.

I am awoken from my slumber by a commotion in the other room. Sinthia has been taken hostage by a disgruntled john. Naturally, I am such an obvious choice for hostage negotiator (perhaps I have an aura of "ask me to do your dirty work" surrounding me), that the hotel's owner begs me to intercede.

I gab at that guy for a bit, and at first it looks like my magical speech abilities are doing the trick.

But I'm still only level 4, and so I haven't quite reached ultimate mastery. The guy manages to shake off my spell.

The results are kind of gruesome, and honestly more than a little disturbing.

Violence against women is not cool, Fallout. Also, why are you using the most graphic and gory animation for Sinthia's death? I can only imagine it's to punish me, the player, for not adequately saving her. And I don't even want to begin parsing the politics of that reasoning.

Because I don't want virtual blood on my hands, I reload my save and try a different approach. I go for the bribe. It works, and though it somewhat aggrieves my sense of justice to just let a hostage-taker stroll away, not only unpunished but 100 bottle caps richer, it is important not to lose sight of the real goal here - saving Sinthia's life.

And of course I have the option to immediately turn this beautiful moment of selfless heroism into something tawdry and gross. I'm just going to assume this is another Tandi situation and take it as read that the sleazy pick up line doesn't work.

Sinthia's job is being a prostitute. Earlier, she declined to have sex with me in exchange for money, and as much as I found it weird that I had no choice but to solicit her custom, it would not have bothered me if it was an option. However, having suddenly change her mind and be willing to  sleep with me as a reward for saving her life is just . . .

You know what, I have no proof that's how things would have gone down, so I'm going to choose to believe the best. Fallout is like, 95% a fun game. These uncomfortable moments where I'm faced with potentially very weird sexual politics are actually few and far between (only two in three hours, and one of them was not quite as bad as I initially thought).

Next post, I'll be able to deal with Gizmo. A straight-up, old-fashioned political murder. There's no way that can get exploitative and creepy . . .

Oh, for fucks' sake!