Journal entry 6: Why we can't have nice things

Alrighty, everything's going well!  We're about to get clean water to the world, gonna become heroes, my game dad is back and he's proud of me, I'm saving all kinds of people from all kinds of other people... yeah!  This is great!

I noticed that by the time I'd got dad to the memorial where Project Purity was installed, I'd killed all the monsters inside so all the little missions he sent me on were just like little errands.  I felt like daddy's little helper for a while.  Honestly, after all the killing I've been doing it was really nice and dad either doesn't know about the killing or doesn't care.

Come to think, what even is morality?  Who decides that?  Clearly my actions are known around the wider DC area because assassins are coming for me because I'm too good of a person, but then a different kind of assassin comes for you if you're an evil guy.  Someone's got to be watching me.  I mean, morality can hardly be a measure of how moral I think my own actions are, otherwise I'd be calling the assassins to kill myself.

I don't have any kind of multiple personality disorder.  Dragonbjorn did.  There were at least 5 different people vying for control of Dragonbjorn's goat-bearded head at any given time and I wasn't always one of them.  Sir Vaulter is quite, quite well adjusted and mentally well.

The realisation that I have to assure myself that the actions of my avatar in a 7 year old video game are rational is not one with which I am comfortable.  I'm projecting a lot of myself into these people and all I do is break into shit and steal people's trousers.  I think that's seriously what I'd do in a world without repercussions.

 Within 10 minutes of me doing all the dad quests, a bunch of people arrived and decided that all this technology belonged to them.  They were the Enclave or as I will known them, Team America.  I need to point out that I was initially very much on their side.  They have nice little laser robots which deal with my angry wild animal problems.  They play reassuring messages on the radio about how everything will be okay, the government is going to fix everything, don't you worry.  They promise me things like baseball and hot dogs.  Hell, there might even be Budweiser if the Enclave have their way.  I don't care what people will think of me for saying this, Budweiser is kind of okay!  It doesn't taste of anything but it's a nice session kind of beer for a barbecue.

Anyways, a man confronts game dad and tells him that this technology belongs to Team America.  I'm actually okay with this.  It immediately seems foolish for game dad to try to build this magic water engine all by himself.  Partially because one man doesn't have the necessary resources to save the world unless he's Jesus or something, partially because game dad was dumb enough to get inside a life support pod because a scientist might be in a magic video game world but mostly because game dad still hasn't had the thought that it might be bad to leave super mutant corpses inside the fucking water purifier.  I think this is how you infect the entire world with FEV.  Seriously man, speaking as a relatively dense gentleman, that's just stupid.

Who cares if the Enclave take credit for the research?  I really think they could accelerate this whole process a lot!

Game dad died of radiation poisoning.  So... yeah, there's that.  I'm not sure why all my companions have to die.  I think I just have a hard time relating to people.

After some time and a lot of running through tunnels, killing Team America (who are decidedly on my shit list now) and curing heart problems in other NPC followers, I hit some kind of Brotherhood of Steel base.  The Brotherhood will henceforth collectively be known as Big Daddies because I'm not sure how much human is inside some of their suits but they're kind of okay if you get on the right side of them.  My science friend (and I use "friend" loosely here.  She hasn't tried to kill me but she was kind of confrontational) demanded a chat with the Biggest of the Daddies.  I decided that, since game dad was dead, it was probably a good time to ignore this quest because now there were half the people working on Project Purity and it sure as Hell wasn't going very well when we had two scientists working on it.  One scientist isn't going to do well, especially when there's now enough radiation in the chamber to give Hulk leukemia.  Also, just going to point out, now the water purifier is full of corpses and it's radiated.  All dirty water in the wasteland is only dirty because it's irradiated!

 I found Team America power armour.  It was surprisingly crappy!

I'm also too dumb to work out how to put on a powered helmet.  I can understand the armour.  I figure that it's effectively a little mech that you need to learn to pilot like a gundam or something but a helmet?  Do I need training to learn to turn on the HUD?  I already have a HUD, we can ignore that part of the magic science hat, so why can't I just cram it onto my head?

Also, why... do I have a HUD constantly in my field of vision when all my personal computing power is on my wrist?  And why can I see VATS in the same colours and fonts?  Is my pip-boy wired into my brain?  God damn, I've seen how this kind of thing ends.

 Found my first gore bag.  It contains items with no value and no actual use.  Maybe I can eat these if I get the cannibalism perk but I don't want to get that because that's not what good people do and I'm a good person, I swear to God I'm a good person.  I'm not even on trial here.

I don't know why Sir Vaulter even entertained the idea of picking this stuff up.  Dragonbjorn would have thrown them at children.  Sir Vaulter is a gentleman.

POWER FIST.

Now you know it's a bad idea to give me something like this to play with!

I find it strange that I'm not smart enough to use a powered helmet without training but the power fist is totally okay.  I feel like inappropriate use of what's essentially an engine-driven piston attached to my wrist could lead to my arm being torn off.  I've shot people apart with nothing more than a pistol so it should be more than possible with something like this.  Apparently it's fine though.

Shame I can't equip two at once.  I guess once you got the second one on, you'd have to have someone take it off for you which would mean I wouldn't be able to use stimpacks to heal any more because I wouldn't be able to use my magic watch.  You see, I can't use my first aid kit unless I look at my wrist computer.  I suppose I poured all the drugs in the stimpacks into the pip boy and now it just administers a controlled dosage when I press the button.  How this uncripples my head is anybody's guess, but when you get down to it, how an injection of stimulants causes me to heal a bullet wound to the noggin that's so bad I'm literally concussed and possibly brain damaged...

Future medicine is amazing.

Hey, look ma, I'm Wheatley!

Doctor Li looking unbelievably sinister as she conducts a conversation in the shadow of a man suffering from a heart murmur or whatever.  A stimpack can cure a brain wound but this guy needed maybe 3 or 5 of them to temporarily cure his heart condition.

Really.

You're just selling these things, right?

Blah, blah, science.  Blah, blah, politics.  Blah, blah, quest.

Yep, eff this, Sir Vaulter is out.

I got nerd rage because that seemed like a min-maxxy thing to do.  Then I noticed that it only works when you're about to die.  It's cool though, the damage resistance is pretty good in a pinch, it sometimes lets me carry more stuff when I need to fast travel and it's sort of cool from a narrative perspective.  Besides, the rest of the mid level perks were a bit naff.

BUSINESS.  All we need now is a picture of a black guy shaking hands with a white guy and we've got a corporate advertising strategy!  Very dynamic, very inspiring.

I don't call people Mister President Daddy.  This isn't that kind of game, kid.

I decided that the best thing to do would be to travel across the world.  Start from the top right, work to the top left, go down a bit, work right, go down, work left until we've seen the whole map.  This will achieve a few things:

• I'll be one radical son of a bitch by the time I take on the real quest
• I'll have see all of the game's content
• Maybe by the time I go on the real quest, all the monsters will be dead because I'll have shot everything with a pulse

So I took Sir Vaulter to the Republic of Dave.  It's a real knob to get to.  The people were generally okay except for Dave Jr. who was kind of a violent, angsty douchebag.  Well, who am I to criticise?  I kill all my problems.

I had a nice chat to this kid while he was literally sat on the toilet.  He appeared to give only the very slightest of fucks about this situation.  There isn't any paper in there and he didn't pull his trousers down.  Not that I was looking or anything, but I'm not sure what I just witnessed.  Maybe he was waiting for me to leave so he could pay a visit to Mister Handy.

I rigged the election to make Dave leave so I could take his gun because the wiki said it was pretty sweet.  Dave's wife told me to help myself.  I did and his daughter started screaming and shooting at me.  I mean really, I had full and express consent from your highest authority figure, what's the problem?

The election bothered me a bit.  Dave ultimately seemed to be kind of okay.  I was a little worried that he'd make his kids breed to further advance his dwindling population but everyone seemed basically okay with being run by him and he didn't seem like a terrible person, just a little egotistical.  I can relate to that.  But that's democracy for you.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON.

Next stop on my tour of DC was Old Olney.  First thing, right off the bat, I just need to get a little something off my chest.

Fuck Old Olney.  Fuck it sideways.  Fuck it with a God damned cactus.

20 feet tall, made of horns and claws, looking like one of those imps from Doom but like it's actually kind of capable, faster than me, able to absorb 4 full clips and more and utterly, utterly unwilling to forget that I took a shot at it and ran away.  I tried to blow away its legs.  Nothing.  I tried laying land mines.  It just ignored the fact that its balls had exploded and kept coming.

Fuck Old Olney.

CAN I GET AN AMEN, CHILDREN?  PRAAAAISE BEAR JESUS, PRAISE BEAR GOD, PRAISE BE UNTO ALL OF YA WHO BASK IN HIS DIVINE RADIUS!

PRAISE THE LORD!

After killing deathclaw #1, I thought I might stand a chance.  I didn't realise that deathclaw #1 started at 25% health.  I hope I never meet what it met before me.  I lead deathclaw #2 into a Team America camp where they filled it full of lasers.  It kept going.  It ate all of those heavily armoured, heavily armed fuckers and then turned its little piggy eyes upon my succulent meats.

Time to reload, then.

A flamerthrower?  I can't be trusted to be responsible with a BB gun and you're giving me this?

Time to enter a new vault.  This one looked a bit crappy but there was a lot of useful stuff in the entrance.

The password is deathclaws.  This wasn't the terminal of somebody that important.  It was probably just to open a safe to get to someone's emergency gun.  The government were making deathclaws before the war started but for someone to use it as a password must mean that at least a few members of the public knew about them.  Surely you'd have culled them?  They're misery incarnate.

Hundreds of years later, after all the people in the vault had been killed/eaten/turned into mirelurks/driven mad by a social experiment involving white noise and Manchurian Agents, the water still runs and the power is still on.  What an age to live in.

It's hard to get excited about a minigun.  I don't know how to use it properly without spraying it in every direction at once.  Perhaps that's the point of a gun which is designed to spit as many bullets as possible in as short a time as possible.

I found a nice place where people worshipped a tree.  You can poke fun but these guys had a nice setup.  Plenty of plants around, nice and quiet, no monsters, happy family life... so far these are the only guys in the wasteland who don't seem to have any problems with internal conflict and who seem genuinely happy and optimistic for the future.

Well done, religion!

I have to undergo the ceremony of purification, huh?

This is sounding less promising.

Oh shitty bollocks.

Drug induced vision loss and then a suicidal talking tree.  This day just got a lot more interesting in a big, big way.

I love this guy.  I love this guy so much.  Since every time I learn to love somebody, they end up becoming a random encounter or dying I can only assume that this guy is going to change allegiances and become the final boss but I'll enjoy him while I can.

I enjoy his habit of unloading his entire gun no matter how dead his target is.  Always double tap.

My word, Sir Vaulter Raleigh, the boy who lived...

After I fixed their tree problem, the people in Oasis told me that they couldn't believe that anybody could feel the way they did about me now.  They definitely maybe weren't going to look back in anger at my defiance of their god's suicide wish and once he'd stopped crying his heart out and had learned to roll with it and be a leader for his people, celebrations rang out throughout the forest like champagne supernovas.

I'm irrationally proud of that previous paragraph.  Seriously, go back and read that magnificent bastard again.  Really drink it in.

People in Oasis aren't affected by radioactive filth water.  I'm really thinking that Sir Vaulter is making up rads.

Considering that the cleanest water source in the game is from a reservoir which has a dead man nailed to it, I may have been wrong about my complaint that we shouldn't leave super mutant corpses in the purifier.  Apparently that's a-okay.

I went into a radar station.  Apparently the previous operators had abandoned their work and decided to get crunk instead.  This must have been the party dish.

I wanted to see if it was possible to climb on top of the very top of the dish.  It was, I nearly broke a leg doing it and the view wasn't worth it because I didn't have the sense to wait until morning and take my picture then.

I'm considerate like that.

Nothing says "good idea" like a radar station filled to the brim with whiskey, a decided lack of handrails, a lot of stairs and one tricycle.  I won't bother linking you to Highway to the Danger Zone here because I don't have to.  It's already in your head.

On the one hand, "commencing launch" isn't a good sentence.

On the other, if I wipe out the world with something called Highwater Trousers, at least I can die laughing.

Oh, you just know I'm going to get blamed for this bullshit.  I don't care if I was responsible or not, you can't reasonably blame me for it.

A little further west, mirelurks assumed the kind of offensive formation normally associated with Power Rangers monsters.  The kind of monsters they'd have to fight before the real monster of the world started getting busy.  You know the ones, the monsters where they didn't even need the dinosaur robots to beat them.  Those ones, yeah.

I shot them.

We have fun.

Oh God, I want to sell my robot butler and buy one of these bastards!  Look at him!  He's searing my eyeballs and I'm loving it!

Here we have a furnace, lit and well stoked, next to a stack of human corpses...

There isn't any firewood in the wasteland...

I've just put two and two together and come up with four big stacks of not asking any fucking questions about what's transpired here.

And to finish, I found a bookcase full of organs.  I'd expect this from super mutants but this was a raider house.  Those guys are kind of crazy but they're not "IKEA suite full of kidneys" crazy.

Thought for the day:
For someone who carries so many rockets and miniature nukes, I'm very good at surviving grenade and rocket attacks.  If I get anywhere near an explosion, by all rights you should be able to see my death from space.  I shouldn't even be able to jog without jostling my ammo into misfiring at this point, not now that I'm carrying a shishkebab.