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.

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.

Amalthea the Assassin

It’s a nice day to start again.

It’s a nice day for a…beheading.

Kicking ass in Solstheim

For your viewing pleasure, here is a lovely gallery in which Amalthea is heroically awesome and Eola is helpful and eloquent.

The Altar of Thrond

Currently, our fearless heroine is mucking about on Solstheim. A few mornings ago, she was meandering aimlessly around the barren island when she spotted a splash of red against the endless white. The sight of blood in the distance always excites Amalthea, because it means that there is possibly a nice corpse to be looted (and/or eaten), so of course she jogged over to investigate.
“Empty.”

The ever-present voices in Amalthea’s psychotic head told her that this was the Altar of Thrond. The voice did not, however, explain who Thrond was, or what Thrond wanted with the hearts and femoral arteries of shapely young women. (Whoever Thrond is, he/she/it has not figured out that there are far more fun parts of shapely young women.)

Being an Adventurer, and therefore cursed with both high levels of curiosity and a low sense of self-preservation, Amalthea set off into the nearby cave. Maybe someone in there would know who Thrond was.

Eola attempted to be helpful by using her Super Cannibal Senses.
Sweetheart, a microsmatic dolphin could smell this much blood. You’re not exactly a scenthound.

While there was no book called Thrond: Who the Fuck Is He? within the cave, there were three of Amalthea’s favorite enemies – Hagravens! Unusually enough, these fair ladies had names. Amalthea made sure to write them down in her Little Black Book of Death and Dismemberment.
Just don’t ask her to try to tell them apart. All hideous bird-woman hybrids look the same to her.

Amalthea left the cave with some sweet loot, but she lacked her usual sense of accomplishment after a bloody battle. If only she could have found out who Thrond was. Because that guy has a lot to learn about chicks.

Diplomatic Immunity

Amalthea has been slowly meandering through the Main Questline. She’s been holding off on Diplomatic Immunity for quite a few levels, because quests that require stealth are the only things in Nirn that truly scare her. Recently, she succumbed to her Dragonborn destiny and finally agreed to help Delphine with her plan to sneak into the Thalmor Embassy.

The last of the Blades believed that the Thalmor might have something to do with the return of the dragons, and needed Amalthea to go undercover to a reception at the Thalmor Embassy and search for evidence.
“But can I get fingered as a non-spy?”

And so, like a porn-star Cinderella wearing grotesquely ugly shoes, Amalthea clambored up into a carriage and went to the ball.

And almost immediately ran into some cooze wearing her outfit – right down to the fucking clogs.

Shaking off the indignity, Amalthea focused on her mission. She needed to create a distraction so that she could sneak into the depths of the embassy. After considering a few possibilities, Amalthea decided to rely on the old adage that crazy women stick together, and convinced Jarl Idgrod Ravencrone to help her.

Distraction achieved, Amalthea ditched the party and recovered her stealth gear. It really just served as pretty decoration, since this is how Amalthea does subterfuge.

Amalthea’s search led her into the embassy’s dungeon. She was immediately enchanted by this lovely torture rack. Mmmm, and the lighting is just perrrrfect…sigh… It’s unfortunate that Amalthea will never get the chance to use it.

Sadly, this was the only available dialogue choice.

Having recovered proof that the Thalmor knew absolutely nothing about the Dragon Crisis, Amalthea went back to Riverwood to thank Delphine for wasting her time and almost getting her killed. Fucking factions and their conspiracy theories.

Miscellaneous moments

Eola relaxes with a good book.

Amalthea preens in Whiterun.

Amalthea poses with a sexy boat.

Amalthea kicks some ass.

Rorikstead randomness

Rorikstead and its surrounding area is just lovely.

Also lovely? Decapitation of one’s enemies.

Also lovely, but irritating? When Eola resurrects a dead enemy whom I’ve looted to nudity.

Pieces of the Past

When Amalthea received an invitation to a museum in Dawnstar, she should have known that it would turn into her playing gofer for yet another lazy and/or cowardly Skyrim citizen. (Back home in Hammerfell, people fetch their own damn Daedric artifacts.)

Silus, the overenthusiastic Mystic Dawn scholar, initially couched his request as a simple clear-some-ruins-and-recover-some-items mission – specifically, recover the dissembled and scattered pieces of Mehrunes’ Razor, a dagger that once belonged to Silus’s family. Silus’s family, by the way, was involved in that whole nasty Uriel Septim assassination business to set off the Oblivion Crisis. Yes, he comes from a long line of cultists who carried out the will of Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of destruction, change, and revolution.

Amalthea’s all about destruction and change, but revolution requires too much planning and (worst of all) working with other people. And while, yes, she does love the Daedric Princes, she loves them best like one loves one’s family – from a distance. She’s a firm believer in the separation between Nirn and Oblivion. So, already not predisposed to look upon Mythic Dawn fanatics fondly, Amalthea was further irritated when Silus revealed that he’d been holding out on her.
Goddammit. Is anyone in Skyrim on the level?

Apparently Silus needed someone to hold his hand on the way to the Shrine of Mehrunes Dagon, where he repaired the dagger and attempted to speak to the Daedric Prince. Hilariously, Mehrunes refused to answer the bookish Imperial.

Silus then made the last big mistake of his life by telling Amalthea to try speaking to Mehrunes Dagon.

Sure thing, Mr. Dagon. Yeah, but Amalthea is Frank Sinatra, bitch. She does it her way.

Mehrunes was appreciative, and he encouraged Amalthea to go forth and…well, pretty much continue doing what she’d been doing. Nothing makes a girl hotter than being called “a worthy tool.” Purrrrr…

Nothing, that is, except for shiny gifts! Especially of the pointy stabby variety!