Reflections on feral ghouls

One of my thrills in playing the Fallout series is the random shit that sub-human characters like feral ghouls, trogs, and lobotomites are usually carrying around. Like a lot of things in Fallout, it’s funny until you think about it, and then it’s a sobering reminder of both the persistence and fragility of humanity.

Feral ghouls were human once…and then they were human-like ghouls…and then their very humanness deteriorated. Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially philosophical, I imagine that the random objects in their inventories were whatever made them feel most human, most themselves, as they experienced the gradual decay of everything that made them “them.” The ghoul carrying a baby rattle might have been a new mother in 2077, and for 210 years has carried her baby’s rattle in an attempt to stay connected to her very self.

Of all the junk in the Wasteland, what would you carry around to represent your humanity?

(I’d have to go with the coffee cup, myself. Or a pillow. I do love to nap.)

A good clean kill soothes a broken heart

When we last left Marilyn, she was being forced into building a settlement for a bunch of weak-ass busters in the post-apocalyptic ruins of her former neighborhood. All this, and no one’s given her any information on her son yet. Marilyn is beginning to fear that this is going to be a long and arduous quest.

She wanders into her half-destroyed house. She stands in the bathroom for a few minutes, overwhelmed with memories that are far too fresh and raw. For Marilyn, it feels like only days ago that she stood in this room as her husband humped the sink.

She finally makes her way into Shaun’s bedroom, and the sight of his somehow-still-very-intact crib breaks her heart anew. All she can think of is revenge. Revenge via turret.

Does it make her a bad mother if she scraps the crib for spare parts?

Sturges tries to comfort the grieving widow and mother, by being sort of pervy.

I just bet it is. Keep it in your pants, robot boy.

In search of something to take her mind off her confusion and pain, Marilyn decides to venture out into the unknown, taking Dogmeat for company (and backup). It isn’t long until she comes across the most adorable dystopian diner she’s ever seen. It’s also the only dystopian diner she’s ever seen, but that doesn’t make it any less adorable.

It’s so quaint! Except for the skeletal remains inside. And the radioactivity.

Apparently there’s some drama up in the Drumlin Diner. The de facto owner, Trudy, has a drug-addicted son who owes money to a chem dealer named Wolfgang. Wolfgang asks Marilyn to persuade Trudy into paying up. Trudy, like Bartleby, would prefer not to. Instead, she offers Marilyn 100 caps to take out Wolfgang. Ammunition is expensive in the wasteland, and Marilyn sorely needs the caps. Also, she has empathy for a woman who wants to save her son.

So she blows Wolfgang’s head off…with empathy.

Concord tries to kill me.

Codsworth told Marilyn to seek assistance in Concord, and so off to Concord she went, trusting that her faithful robot slave wouldn’t send her into a hostile environment.

It’s a peaceful little town…for about 5 seconds.

Almost immediately, Marilyn spies the first person she’s seen in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. He’s even running towards her in excitement!

Oh, wait.

So Marilyn, a law-school graduate who’s never before attacked a fellow human being, does what any peaceful law-school graduate with a gun would do in this situation.

She paints the fucking town red with the blood of her enemies.

Some people yell down from a balcony, asking for help against a gang of Raiders, who are apparently crawling all over this unpleasant town like flies on a headless corpse. Marilyn does not yell back asking how the fuck these people think one woman with a crappy gun and basically no armor can wipe out a town full of heavily-armed sociopaths.

The trapped people are holed up in the decaying Museum of Freedom. Marilyn blasts her way through the place, killing Raiders and looting everything that isn’t nailed down. After getting lost for what seems like goddamn hours, Marilyn finally (FINALLY) finds her way upstairs to a group of people who don’t want to kill her. Even though one of them is holding an awfully big gun.

‘Scuse me while I whip this out.

It turns out that this ragtag, beat-down little group contains the last five surviving members of the Minutemen, a post-war organization dedicated to protecting small communities within the Commonwealth. Their de facto leader is Preston Garvey, who I’m sure is not overcompensating for anything.

Preston turns Marilyn over to a guy named Sturges, who starts talking about needing a fusion core for some power armor that’s apparently just hanging out on the roof of the museum. Marilyn, who only came to Concord to find out what happened to her kidnapped son, sighs as she realizes that she’s going to have to run errands for incompetent people in order to get any information. Despite the fact that Marilyn single-handedly cleared the museum of all Raiders, Sturges and Preston are scared to go down to the basement to retrieve a fusion core.

Marilyn dutifully trudges down to the depths of the museum, grabs the fusion core, and then promptly gets lost as fuck on her way up to the roof. The next time I see a museum, I’m going to punch it in the face.

She finally (FINALLY) reaches the roof. She puts the fusion core into the power armor and climbs inside. It’s ugly as hell, awkward and clunky, but she feels much safer encased within its steel womb.

Now, since I played over 100 hours of this game half a year ago, I do have some random, vague memories of it. As soon as Marilyn stepped into the power armor, I remembered that saving at this point was critical. I didn’t remember why it was critical, but I knew that I would hate myself if I didn’t do so. If only I could remember why…

OH MY HOLY FUCK THAT’S WHY!! JESUS CHRIST OMG IT’S COMING RIGHT AT ME!!!

So, I died. I don’t want to say that Marilyn died, because she lives on through the magic of reloading saved games. But I died big-time. I’ve gotten to level 19 with Belladonna in Skyrim without dying once, and now my poor little level 3 Marilyn gets disemboweled by a goddamn deathclaw. Fuck you, Fallout.

Seriously, though, I’m starting to remember that this game is just hard. It’s not Dark Souls hard or anything, but I’ve gotten used to the expansive, sort of lazy feel of Skyrim, where I don’t have to be on constant alert. In Fallout 4, there are lightning-fast ghouls who hide and lay in wait like crocodiles in a river, and mole rats who burst out of the ground, and deathclaws who are even deadlier and claw-ier than their predecessors.

After reloading, I decide to attack from a different angle.

Unfortunately, the Legendary Deathclaw refuses to wander within range of the museum roof. Marilyn dispatches all of the Raiders from the relative safety of higher altitude, and then (after desperately wandering around to see if there’s a less-confrontational way to confront the beast) decides to lure the deathclaw out by blowing up the cars around it. The explosions and fire do enough damage to get the deathclaw within a manageable health range, and Marilyn dispatches it by heroically running backwards at full speed until her AP charges up enough to use VATS.

I didn’t take any pictures, because it was a terrifying experience that I’d prefer not to relive.

Now that Marilyn’s done all the hard work, Preston decides to move himself and his four friends into Marilyn’s old neighborhood.

“I’m just so happy to be here in the ruins of my former life. Thanks for the memories, Preston!”

And so the settlement of Sanctuary is born.

Marilyn has to admit that it isn’t so bad, having a safe little enclave filled with fellow humans (of the friendly variety).

Home is where the drugged-out grandma is.

210 years later…

Marilyn, her family, and the other survivors are given some sweet blue jumpsuits and then herded into rooms holding what the Vault-Tec personnel call “decontamination pods.” If there’s one thing that history should have taught us, it’s to not trust people in uniforms who are this insistent upon decontamination and cleanliness.

Marilyn obediently climbs into her pod, which is directly across from Nate and Shaun. The pod door closes and frost begins to form on the glass. Before Marilyn can even say, “How the fuck does ice decontaminate anything?,” she slips into cryogenic slumber.

At some point, she’s awakened from hibernation, although she can’t open her pod. She can’t do anything but watch as two masked figures bust up into Nate’s pod, shoot him dead, and kidnap Shaun.

You woke me up for this? Gee fucking thanks.

Marilyn’s pod ices up again, and she goes back into stasis. An unknown amount of time passes before she’s rudely jolted back into existence by a shutdown of Vault 111’s life support system. The first thing she does is wrest Nate’s wedding ring off of his cold dead body, less for sentimental reasons and more because gold is hopefully still valuable in whatever world she’s woken up in.

Marilyn roams around the vault, desperately looking for the exit. This is a good time to mention that Marilyn has an abysmal sense of direction (as all of my characters do, strangely enough…). So don’t be surprised if it takes her a really long time and a lot of profanity before she finds her goal. On the plus side, wandering obliviously into every possible room means more loot.

After encountering nothing but skeletons and gigantic roaches, Marilyn is beginning to fear the worst. She used to joke about roaches surviving the apocalypse when humans wouldn’t. She wonders what else has survived. She only hopes that there isn’t anything too horrifying out there, like gigantic bipedal raptor-crocodiles.

She uses her sweet science skillz to hack into various computers in the vault. On one, she finds documents revealing the true purpose of Vault 111 — it was Vault-Tec’s sociobiological experiment, on unsuspecting people, to research the effects of suspended animation. I mean, that’s not the worst fucking experiment to unknowingly be a part of, you know? Marilyn should count herself lucky that she didn’t wind up in the Effects-of-Ass-Rape Vault.

Wait, so I can’t trust the American military industrial complex? It’s like everything I thought I knew is wrong…

After Marilyn finally (FINALLY) makes it to the vault exit, she finds an unexpected but welcome gift. It’s a skeletal hand — just what she’s always wanted!

Now if she can just get this useless Pip-Boy off of it.

With great trepidation, Marilyn activates the vault door. She has no idea what to expect. She has no idea what the world outside is like.

The world outside is, apparently, full of junk.

Is it post-apocalyptic Boston, or is it Fred Sanford’s yard?

After rummaging around for random things that somehow Marilyn intuitively knows will be useful, she finally faces the inevitable: her walk back to her old home.

She decides to take the scenic route.

I never said it was pleasant scenery.

After a short but depressing walk, Marilyn finds herself in the ruins of Sanctuary Hills. She runs to her old home, where she encounters a friendly, uh, face.

Codsworth isn’t doing so well. In fact, he appears to have gone mildly psychotic. Marilyn is able to calm him down and extract some useful information from him. She learns that the year is 2287…a full 210 years after the Great War that ended human civilization as she knew it, the war that drove her and her family into Vault 111. She processes this pretty well, I must say. If it were me, I’d just be gibbering “what the fuck” over and over again until 2288.

Unfortunately, Codsworth hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Shaun. He recommends that Marilyn go to Concord and ask some human people who live there. Marilyn is immensely grateful that it’s not just her, a batshit-crazy robot, and giant roaches left in this world. Codsworth chooses to hang out in Sanctuary Hills while Marilyn makes her way to Concord.

While stopping to loot everything that isn’t nailed down at the Red Rocket truck stop, halfway between Sanctuary Hills and Concord, Marilyn encounters a welcome sight — a fellow mammal. It’s a friendly German shepherd, who seems to want nothing more than to follow Marilyn around.

Who’s a good boy? You’re a good boy! Es oo are!

Now that Marilyn has a warm-blooded companion, she feels slightly more optimistic about the long, scary journey ahead of her. She’ll walk right into Concord, talk to the people there, and hopefully find information about her missing son.

She’s already been through hell. It’s not like anything waiting for her in Concord could possibly be any worse…

Meet Marilyn from Vault 111

So I updated Nexus Mod Manager, which uninstalled and then reinstalled all my Fallout and Elder Scrolls mods, and now I’m leery of running Skyrim in case everything got fucked up, and I don’t feel like being irritated right now.

I decided instead to use this opportunity to mod the hell out of Fallout 4 and start a new game. Enough time has passed that I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything I learned when I played 130 hours of it last fall.

Without further ado, let’s travel to Sanctuary Hills, a lovely suburban neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. The year is 2077, and the day is October 23. Here we visit the home of a happy, successful couple, Nate and Marilyn. Nate is retired from the Army, and Marilyn is a stay-at-home mom with a law degree. The couple has an infant son named Shaun and a robot butler named Codsworth. Life is good…for now.

Meet Nate and Marilyn.

Marilyn is so bootylicious that Nate is compelled to hump the sink.

Obviously Nate doesn’t just make love to bathroom fixtures, because he and Marilyn made a burrito together. I mean, a baby. A baby that looks like a burrito. His name is Shaun, and here he is being entertained by a mobile of toy rockets. I think Shaun knows something’s up and he’s giggling at the irony. He’s a very observant baby, OK?

Marilyn and Nate are getting ready for a veterans’ ceremony when the doorbell rings. Marilyn opens the door to a pesky representative from the Vault-Tec corporation.

Apparently this guy has been bugging the couple harder than a Jehovah’s Witness pitbull selling Mary Kay. But he’s offering something for free, so Marilyn takes it. Why not? It’s not like she’s ever going to need to evacuate herself and her family to a vault to escape nuclear annihilation.

Well, shit.

As Marilyn hauls ass to the fallout shelter, she thinks about how fortuitous it was that the Vault-Tec representative just happened to stop by and register her family for Vault 111 mere minutes before the bombs hit.

Some people just live right.

What will happen to Marilyn? Will she be reunited with her family after the fallout clears? Will she be trapped forever in the vault? Will she change into lower-waisted pants?

All these questions and more will be answered in time…

Really Cute Lydia

I just love DonPIZI’s Really Cute Lydia mod.

How to dispatch a dragon sexily

Have you ever had someone take pictures of you doing something…

…and you think you look super-hot and super-competent…

…and then later you look at the pictures and you’re just like, Goddammit.

Mean girls and catfights

I shouldn’t have implied that Belladonna does nothing, because she actually does a shitload of stuff. It’s just not, you know, Dragonborn stuff or Civil War stuff. She has absolutely no direction in her life. At level 18, she has yet to meet the Greybeards, and despite being an Imperial, she has literally no interest in the war. (She is, however, a level 60 blacksmith. Priorities, yo.)

I like to imagine her as the adventuresome daughter of a wealthy cheesemaker in Skingrad, who bade farewell to the easy life of a sheltered socialite and went searching for excitement in Skyrim. She doesn’t really understand the strange Old Kingdom, or the idea of a province fighting within itself, and she’s overwhelmed by everyone’s insistence that she’s part dragon. At the same time, she’s delighted by the opportunity to explore and meet people and make her own living and, also, kill things.

Sometimes, in her quest for new friends, Belladonna runs into some real bastards and bitches. At the Bannered Mare in Whiterun, she made the acquaintance of a Nord broad named Uthgerd the Unbroken, who immediately challenged her to a fistfight.

Belladonna may be a cheesemaker’s daughter, but she knows how to throw a punch. After all, you can’t be a hot young socialite in Cyrodil without learning how to defend yourself against amorous Imperial soldiers.

Apparently Uthgerd is a good sport about losing (or maybe she just likes getting beaten up), because she quickly tried to become besties with Bella. What can you say? Bitches be crazy.

Before Bella could shake off the mean-girl Nord, Uthgerd the Formerly-Unbroken imparted a little wisdom.

Words to live by.

Introducing – Belladonna

After finishing my Skyrim playthrough with the lovely and psychotic Amalthea, I took a break from Tamriel for a bit. I played some Fallout 4 and enjoyed it, but I got annoyed about something and quit and haven’t opened it since because I know I’ll have no fucking clue what I was doing after this long. One day I’ll try again.

But until then, I decided to open up Skyrim again and create a new badass chick.

Meet Belladonna. She’s an Imperial who really has no purpose in the world, except to wander about and occasionally complete a side quest. So…this should be exciting, right?

At least she’s pretty!

Amalthea the Assassin

It’s a nice day to start again.

It’s a nice day for a…beheading.