Jump 188: Fallout

Jump 188: Fallout
>Ten of Cups (Satiety), reversed: Dissipation, debauchery, and stagnation. Taking one's good fortune for granted.
Sounds to me like we're going to Vegas!
>Age: 23
>Location: Free Choice
As I said. Vegas... among other places.
>Identity: Lone Wanderer
Well... 'lone' is kind of stretching it, but it fits. Warrior, on the other hand, would not... even if it would get me everything on the list cheaper.
>Drawbacks: Fast Metabolism (+100), Hated (+200), The Reunion (+300)
Pre-war snack foods are what I am ALL about. But no, seriously, if you have a group of people going from place to place and chaos follows in their wake, of COURSE whoever is in charge is going to go 'oh god, it's them' and try to do something about it. As far as whoever I run into because of The Reunion... well, that's a different thing to worry about, now isn't it?
>Fortune Finder (1550, Lone Wanderer)
I'm going to need somewhere to store all this stuff... maybe I should consider a part-time trading gig. Then again, I was wanting to drive around and explore all of the Vaults.
>Jury Rigging (1250)
Well, considering all the stuff that's out there in the wasteland, I'd be crazy NOT to have this.
>Cyborg (650)
The GRX implant seems not useful to have, but I don't have interest in it anyway. Other things, however...
>Physical Enhancement Implant: Luck (Free, Cyborg)
When we get to Vegas I'm getting the rest of the set here.
>Sub-Dermal Armor (550, Cyborg)
Useful, to say the very least.
>Monocyte Breeder (400, Cyborg)
This should help save on medical supplies, too. Stop the bleeding, and the rest will fix itself.
>Food Purifier (350)
Have you checked the food here with a geiger counter lately? Trust me, this is sorely needed.
>Robot Butler (300, Lone Wanderer)
Technically not so much a new companion as a reskin for the Holy Relic I got from the Halo: The Covenant jump. He goes by Steve now. And can trim a mean hedge.
>Highwayman (200, Lone Wanderer)
You know what they say: Nothing can stop a Highwayman. Not to mention that the trunk is so big we rate it in the number of bodies we can hide there. When we get through with up-armoring it, the next time we see a pack of deathclaws they'll be roadkill.
>Pip-Boy 3000 (0)
This is going to come in handy so much, you don't even know. I'm going to be using Cheat Mode from Minecraft on this thing monthly for half a year to make sure my companions all get pristine Pip-Boys.

Ah, what a world. I'm glad I took everyone with me. There are many things I could speak of when it comes to Fallout.

I could tell you about starting out in Vegas and being stalked by Mr. House's robots for nearly a year, and having to go to the outlying settlements to trade for anything except what I couldn't find elsewhere, and dealing with odd rumors of the Enclave having secret dealings.

I could tell you about the ordeal of machining replacement parts for the Highwayman before we left - after all was said and done, it moved faster and was more efficient on fuel. We all chipped in to do the body work - now it's a four door and we added a second back seat facing toward the rear. You can fit three people per seat comfortably or five if you really wanted to squeeze people in, and it was converted into a wagon so it could have more extra space for storage Ended up adding a second rear axle, though.

I could tell you about the trip we made to Big Mountain. Dodging robots that want to remove brains is more effective when you have the combined firepower to make them think twice, though the robotic scorpions were unexpected. Ended up leaving - not much of a difference was made there, sadly, despite my best efforts. But crazy scientists don't listen to humans, especially when they haven't been properly lobotomized yet.

I could tell you about our trip to the Four States Commonwealth, but... eh. We ran afoul of the Legion in Albuquerque, and having seen their practices we all took offense to that. The Legion's back was broken, their leadership eradicated, and in the end they splintered off into settlements and Roman-themed raiders were popular until pipe rifle designs were distributed widely and used to pretty much wipe them out by the locals.

I could tell you about our trip to the NCR, but honestly... the less said about that, the better, that was just a disaster. Or the trip east after all was said and done (because apparently Ceci got it in her head to capture Nuka-World for kayoss) where we had our dealings with the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel while driving through Illinois.

But no.

Let me tell you about Frank Horrigan.

Horrigan was a monster of a man who was making his way east from California, and the cause of the aforementioned disaster that was our visit to the NCR. He knew that we all were smart enough that the Brotherhood of Steel would have been happy to take us on if we weren't such troublemakers, and that we had training that would rival the pre-war army's special ops. He knew entirely too much, and while we didn't see him directly for years, apparently he was the man behind the scenes pulling strings to keep us persona-non-grata in many places.

Was he a smart man? Well... not until he started eating mentats like candy. And he was durable enough to survive what happened to him at the Enclave's oil rig nearly forty years earlier, though he was never able to find the Enclave's remnants since they pulled out and went east. Troublemakers like us, though, we were a threat to the Enclave - after all, we broken the Legion, even if they were overglorified raiders, and we'd done the same to a few others. It was only a matter of time until we went far enough that we'd be a threat to the already-weakened Enclave, and that, he could not abide.

The confrontations with him were usually not direct. Not even always violent. But he had come across many raiders in the intervening years, had whipped them into shape (for a certain definition of shape) as what he dubbed the Enclave Reserve Army, or more properly Horrigan's Hellions, though often they operated as raiders to deny the Enclave blame for their activities. We tangled with them uncomfortably often, and it was easy to tell the difference between them and the usual chem-addicted idiots looking for one last score. The problem with this, of course, is that because of Horrigan doing this and having his brain working on overdrive on Mentats... he made enough of a difference that the Enclave remnant that were left in the NCR never integrated with the NCR itself, though they did still go east. Some went to the Capital Wasteland. Most... they went to Vegas, and tried to blend in while they plotted.

The problem came to a head when Horrigan came to Vegas at last, after we'd gone through the NCR and met his Hellions on the way out. They were in proper Enclave uniform... with proper weaponry. Full-auto plasma rifles, gauss rifles and gatling lasers. We made it out, and thank goodness we up-armored the Highwayman, but it took a lot to repair it afterward. And while we were busy trying to get everything back in working order and get everyone back to health, Horrigan and the Enclave made their move.

New Vegas.

You see, with their work in the NCR, it never got quite together enough to come try for Vegas itself. And without the Legion, there was nothing to stop them but New Vegas' own. And to be fair, the New Vegas militias banded together and worked pretty well to blunt their attack, if not stop it entirely. Against just the Enclave, it would have worked, too. But with the added force of Horrigan's Hellions on the way, prospects were grim.

And so, we all got everything together as best we could. Steve was the eye in the sky, giving us intel. The rest of us got outfitted with the best armor we had, as much ammo as we could carry, a blade, a sidearm, and a minigun apiece. And when the attack happened... we sprung our trap. A half-dozen well placed miniguns tearing into a small army had a very predictable effect: the Hellions were mowed down, and the subsequent counterattack from the Vegas militia meant the Enclave forces, who had been thrown into chaos, were eradicated almost to a man.

And then... Horrigan.

In the exchange between the six of us and him, we found that while our miniguns and sidearms did almost nothing to his armor, his gun could be damaged perfectly fine, and he didn't have anywhere to retreat. Shuttling him somewhere that mines were laid helped to rob him of his mobility, at least. And then we descended on him with the rippers.

As we carved open his armor, we had a long exchange about life, the futility of fighting fate, and the Enclave being the only hope for humanity to go back to what it was before the war. And when I pointed out all the insanity of everything from before the war... I told him that maybe the US deserved to be nuked. But going back to the same insanity that existed before the war would just result in the same results.

And then I cut off his head, burned the body, and smelted his armor into a pool of slag, because I was taking no chances with him coming back.