Journal entry 1: Pip pip, cheerio!

We began with baby's first quest.  We also begin by learning that dad actually has a name and that name is James.  I mean honestly, you try to build up a narrative, get a little involved in your character development and you find out you've been getting it all wrong.

My relationship with my virtual dad is already off to a bad start and I've not even learned to speak.

Learning to walk is a quest.  This is fabulous.  I'm glad it wasn't the kind of quest you can fail 'cause that'd be embarrassing.  It didn't give me any experience but tutorial quests don't have to.  No big deal.  I was hoping for a gun but then I remembered that this isn't Borderlands and so it wouldn't be okay for a baby to have a gun.

Everything in here is very gray.  I'm not really one for bright colours or anything but all I'm saying is a bit of something wouldn't go amiss.  Blue is nice.  It's a nice colour for babies.

I'm glad I'm too young to really be able to read complex things because this is a pretty heavy thing to have as the only decoration in the room.  Still, Catherine liked it so I guess it's a sentimental thing.  That's okay.  It's still a lot to deal with.

Yeah, you're damn right I am!  This looks like an appropriate level of reading material for me (and for Dragonbjorn, oddly) so let's get stuck in.

Well, I'm smart enough to read a book unaided.  Even though it has cardboard pages, that's still no small feat for a 1 year old.  A bit of intelligence seems fine.

Watch out, ladies!

At 8 charisma, I figure that I'm the Fonz.  Except not 30 years old and hanging around with teenagers.  Or maybe I will be, you never know how these things will turn out and apparently I'm locked in here for life so I guess it'll happen if any of us have kids of our own.

Everybody threw me a lovely party.  I tried to be polite.  It didn't result in me getting more presents but that's okay because I felt good about making other people feel good.  You'll notice that the birthday banner has some colours.  Apparently primary colours are only liberally used during special occasions and maybe times of national celebration.  The 4th of July is going to be a real challenge to celebrate underground, though.  I'm no expert but I think that explosions and enclosed spaces aren't often friends.

I disliked this guy immensely even though I wasn't sure why.  I think I had some bad memories of him.  He handed over my PIP boy and told me I'd be on work assignment tomorrow.  That makes the device seem less like a privilege and more like a shackle.

Notably, Vaulter won't change his clothes unless he looks at what he wants to wear through the PIP boy, so I can only assume that until now, James dressed him every day.  8 charisma can really make people eager to please, I suppose.

And here's a young Vaulter now.  He... looks really ill.  I'm not sure I'm okay with this.  He did just see a robot cut his birthday cake with a buzzsaw but as a 10 year old boy (or a boy of any age up until death), that should be pretty awesome.

"For some reason"?  Wow.  I realise I should respect my elders but as a leader, you should be setting a better example.  You're seriously going to start smack talking a 10 year old?  Sir, you're a conversational gladiator.  I can see why you're so well regarded.

VATS.  I don't understand VATS.

So it seems to be a thing you turn on when you want people to die.  If you turn it on, you enter Sherlock Holmes Analysis-Vision and see your odds of hitting people's body parts.  Without VATS, hitting things is very tricky.  VATS therefore feels like a "win combat" button and if I don't have enough AP, I'm supposed to take cover.

Well okay, I can deal with that.

However, what really bothers me is that I'm quite apparently looking intently at my wristband while trying to pick my targets, then firing a gun unnaturally fast.  I know I could be squeezing the trigger really quickly but the BB gun I have doesn't fire nearly as quickly as when I'm in VATS.  Being just a BB gun, I refuse to believe that VATS is actually interfacing with the gun because nobody in their right mind would create a children's toy gun which could connect to a sophisticated portable targeting computer.  Disregarding how VATS makes my gun fire faster, if I'm not looking at my wrist during each use of VATS, that means my PIP boy is connecting straight into my brain and providing me with a augmented reality experience created for the express purpose of highlighting my opponents' most easily struck locations.

Someone sat down and thought "Yes, all citizens need a targeting computer from age 10.  It's a hostile world after all".

Except it wasn't a hostile world.  The PIP boys aren't made down here, there's no factory, which means that they have to have come from before the big one hit.  That means they were supplied as part of the pack provided to each overseer and therefore, someone at VaultTec really thought that during the apocalypse, the world would be a terrible enough place that 10 year olds would be taking up arms and having to shoot things to death.  Not only that, these things are advanced enough to be able to identify the head analogues of species which didn't even exist until after the world was irradiated!

SO MANY QUESTIONS!

Wow, happy... birthday.  Is 10 old enough to drink in the vault?  I could do with one.

I've got a goat to take?  Well, it's an unorthodox birthday present but... well, if I can have some privacy then sure, I guess.  Being 16 is a socially awkward time, after all. 

Being married to a scientist and being (technically) a scientist myself, I'm come to regard a series of interestingly shaped glassware in a working environment as one of two things:

1. We're trying to convey "science"
2. Someone has just broken bad

So maybe dad's cooking meth.  Hey, why not?  What else is there to do here?

Ah, it's Butch.  He's trying to forcefully take the honour of this fair maiden and so it is up to I, Sir Vaulter Raleigh, to deal with the vagabond.  Fisticuffs dear boy, Queensbury rules, put up your dukes and let us have at it like gentlemen!

Butch told me his gang rule the vault.  The gang he created when he was 10.  If I were still doing the things I did when I was 10, I'd still secretly want to be a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger but maybe some of us are better at moving on than others.

Maybe some of us grew up, Butch.

NOW HOLD ON SIR.  I thought this was exactly the kind of thing that the overseer was trying to warn us about?  That we can never leave the vault!  So he tells us we can't leave while simultaneously saying "but there's nothing to worry about out there".  The guy's just being a control freak for the sake of it!

You know what this place needs?  A monopoly board.  Give these guys something to do.

Sir Vaulter naturally specialises in speech but he's also interested in science.  I picked small guns too.  I didn't want him to really be much good with a gun but since this is an RTRPGFPS (or something like that), it seemed suicidal to send him out there being unsure of how to disengage the safety.  Nobody wants to diplomacise with someone who can't identify the operational end of a firearm 9 times out of 10.

Some time later, a strapping 19 year old is awoken by the only similarly aged woman in the vault.  Now, I feel sorry for Amata.  Being the only woman in a vault full of hormone ravaged teens can not have been a fun time.  I've read "I have no mouth and I must scream".  That kind of thing was used as psychological torture.  Fun story, that.

So yeah, I'm woken up, apparently there's been a roach infestation and now everybody wants me dead.  I still, after completing the quest, don't completely understand the reasoning for this but sure, I'll run with it.

You can strip corpses?

10/10 GAME OF THE YEAR

I used VATS to kill this guy with a BB gun.  I shot him so hard he flew backwards, spun a somersault in the air and landed on his back.

I'll just repeat the key point in the above.  I shot him with a BB gun so hard he was propelled several feet backwards and spun in the air.

A BB gun.

What even is VATS!

The Overseer got a little shirty.  I tried to resolve this in a gentlemanly fashion by essentially telling him that I didn't want to fight and that we could resolve this all peacefully if he'd just let me go.  Then he pulled a baton on me and so I brained him.

Seemed my only option.

Amata pops out at this point yelling about how I killed him, how could I etc, etc.  Having no option to defend my actions, I reloaded my save and tried to ignore him.  He then, unprovoked, tried to smash my dome with the baton again.  I sought out his daughter, hoping to show her that I wasn't actually fighting her dad but that he was chasing me with a night stick and trying to expose my precious head meats but she was nowhere to be found until I killed him again.  So this time I let him stay dead and she yelled a me a lot as I left.  That really hurt my feelings.  You try to do the right thing and what do you get?  Nothing.

I looked it up on a wiki.  Apparently the diplomatic non-aggressive way to handle this is to threaten his daughter with physical violence.  He was just in the middle of having an enforcer interrogate her and it was looking like a torture scenario might have started.  I didn't think that her welfare was more important to him than apprehending me and I also didn't think that threatening a vulnerable and emotionally fragile friend was the kind of thing that a good person would do.

I guess I was wrong!

After Amata told me to leave, I opened the magic door and popped out for a stroll.

Wow.  It's really, really brown.

Thought for the day
My baseball bat seems to be much more effective in combat than my pistol, despite my small arms proficiency and despite how a gun fills people with pieces of metal with a bat kind of just breaks bones and causes concussions.  Even when applied directly to the head or torso.

Odd.

Also, enemies in this game are very good at fighting me when their head is crippled.  If I shoot you in the face so many times that your head is crippled, I don't expect you to be in any condition to fight.  This also raises some questions.  I suspect this is going to be a strange blog.