Posts tagged Fallout

by Aaron Thayer

“Ghouls and Boys”

Ghouls don’t tend to make conversation with Bob. Most of the time they’d rather tear humans’ insides out like sheets of paper from a spiral notebook. But at the entrance to an abandoned REPCONN rocket factory, a distressed ghoul used an intercom to bark a series of orders at Bob. The courier thought that was a wacky turn of events.

Bob was startled by the detached voice, which told him he had to come upstairs right away and to watch out for danger. He listened to the ghoul’s raspy smoker’s voice; his survival instincts had already kicked in.

The REPCONN factory looked like any other abandoned building from the years before the nuclear holocaust. Bob thought those old Americans must have been really big on their accomplishments because REPCONN and other companies’ headquarters always had some sort of massive statue in their parking lots. Bob calculated in the time it took to walk around the long-defunct company’s space rocket monument that all the metal wasted on that thing could have built lots of armor suits. What a shame.

A dead civilization’s hubris notwithstanding, the halls of the dilapidated REPCONN building would teach Bob that appearances, and even voices, can be deceiving.

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by Aaron Thayer

“Chupacabras with Automatic Weapons”

Computers and science stuff never came easy to Bob. He didn’t grow up in one of those pre-war Vaults, where kids got real education. Bob was raised to think not with his mind but with his hands. He could fix a computer just as easily as he could arm wrestle a Super Mutant — that is to say, not very well.

So Bob was pretty damn surprised when, in the middle of going to recruit an incarcerated former sheriff for the town of Primm, he discovered a heap of broken robot on the desk of a vacant general store. Though Bob the Courier distrusted most machines since he could remember, he always indulged his natural curiosity when it came to anything that might help him blow more shit up.

Bob expected this round, odd thing to be a Powder Gang trap which would blow up in his face. If that didn’t happen, Bob assumed it would at least pluck his eyes out with some kind of evil robo-claw.

But what Bob actually got from this chance encounter in the Wasteland was something he didn’t anticipate: companionship.

Together Bob and his new automaton accomplice would soon save the livelihood of a small settler town called Novac. Yet before this odd-couple of the Mojave could go on their first adventure, Bob would have to figure out how to fix a robot with his hands, and a brain that vaguely remembered what the “on” button of a computer looked like.

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“Off to a Bloody Start”

Bob is a courier. Bob was shot in the head by a few New Vegas thugs just for doing his job. Bob, a simple man (but by no means dumb — he knows a thing or two about mechanics and survival techniques), was rescued by a cowboy robot and fixed up by a small town doctor in the Mojave Wasteland. This doctor even asked Bob what some inkblots looked like, just to make sure Bob’s brain hadn’t been fried during surgery. One of those inky stains looked a lot like a vagina, but Bob, the last modest soul in a cruel world, was too embarrassed to say so. One did remind him of a mushroom cloud, though.

And that’s how Fallout: New Vegas began for my avatar, Bob the Courier. While every character has to go through the psychological evaluations and distribute their S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points using a machine that resembles a 1920s arcade game, each character’s life will be unique after leaving Doc Mitchell’s house in Goodsprings. Significant decisions and paths open up in the first hour alone. Some might track down the men who shot them while others will begin looting — or “prospecting” — throughout the Mojave Wasteland. Bob didn’t do either. Instead, I decided that Bob needed to find some sunglasses. See, Bob’s a four-eyes, a trait I tacked on when creating his character. Without glasses Bob has a minus one point to his perception skill; with them his perception increases by one.

On his humble quest for eye-wear Bob became the patron savior of Goodsprings, declared war on the Powder Gang, saved a deputy and stormed into a prison compound controlled by inmates in revolt. Bob also broke his legs four times, nearly died from dehydration twice and ran away from the same raging pack of radscorpions on a dozen separate occasions.

Such is life in Fallout: New Vegas’ Hardcore mode.

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