Radioactive Grace part 4: Megaton

Radioactive Grace is a Let’s Play epistolary narrative of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. You can find the index here or go back to part 3.

 

The sun might be hot, but the Outside is a cold, cold place.

I caught sight of Megaton, and I could scarecely believe my eyes. It looked like a fortress made out of trash, a castle of junk. Something right out of the Grognak the Barbarian comics.

Crazy, right?

As I get closer I see this old man on the ground, just sitting there. First Outsider I’ve seen.

I ask him if he’s okay, and he tells me he needs water. Pure water. He’s so weak from the irradiated stuff, that it just makes him sick.

Guess the Overseer was right about that. Can’t drink the water. But he’s alive out here. People are alive out here. They survive somehow. That means that, maybe, I can survive too.

I tell him I don’t have any water and he just gets this resigned look on his face, like he’s accepted that he’s going to die.

I move on. A little ways past him I see this thing.

It’s huge. Way bigger than a RadRoach. Bigger than me. A giant mutant ant.

Nobody said there’d be monsters. This thing freaks me out and it’s dead, I’d hate to see it when it was alive. And ol’ Thirsty didn’t kill it. What did?

This guy. Some kind of greeter robot standing guard out front. Played a recorded message, then opened the junk-gates so I could go inside. Has some kind of energy weapon on its arm. Makes me think of the pistol at my hip. Wonder if I could kill one of those giant ants with it.

So I go inside this place that has robot guards and is letting a man die of thirst on their doorstep.

Look at this place. A whole town, made of junk. It’s amazing, what people can do. What people will do, to survive. They’ve been out here with the radiation and the giant ants and everything for two centuries while we’ve been cooped up in that vault, safe. What kind of people does a place like this make?

I’m standing and staring and suddenly realize that someone’s talking to me.

A goddamn cowboy tin-star sheriff. Lucas Simms.

He recognized the vault jumpsuit. Apparently they’ve had visitors before. So much for the Overseers “no one ever leaves” garbage. I asked him about dad, and he said that the owner of the Saloon, Moriarity, might know about him. He points it out, I thank him, and take a walk through town.

Halfway there I run into this:

Yes, that’s a bomb. Atomic, I think. I run back up to the Sheriff and ask him about it.

Simms says it’s safe, that it’s been there since the town was founded, that they built up around it. Apparently there’s some cult that worships the thing. I don’t know. I’d ask if anyone has thought about disarming it, but how would they know how?

Dad taught me a lot about science, but even I wouldn’t know how to disarm a nuclear device. I might have some schematics in my PipBoy, but… yeah. Not going to risk that. I figure I’ll just find dad and get out.

So I go back around the long way to the saloon.

Again, amazed at what they’ve managed to build out of garbage and posterboard. They even have a working radio. Semi working. But hold up, the guy banging on it?

Yeah. The corpse looking guy. Gob. Apparently he’s what’s called a ghoul. I admit I freaked out a little because I had no idea that that was a thing, but apparently it’s a fairly common mutation. They look like zombies and age really slow… he said some ghouls had been around since before the War, but I don’t know if I believe that.

Anyway, Gob freaked me out but I was trying to keep my cool, and that impressed him… apparently mostly we “smoothskins” treat his kind like shit. I can understand finding them unsettling, but that’s no reason to be a bitch. Just talking to him without being insulting… he was almost pathetically grateful.

I don’t think I like it Outside. And when I met Moriarity, it got even worse.

So.

First off, yeah he remembers Dad. From before. From when he brought me to Vault 101. According to this guy, I wasn’t born in the Vault. Dad wasn’t. We came from Outside, somewhere.

I don’t want to believe him, because why would Dad lie? The Overseer? Agnes? Jonas? Everyone old enough to have been around would have to maintain this lie. And they’d have to know it was possible to survive outside.

They killed Jonas because dad left, and I can’t forgive that, but I can understand it if the Overseer thought the Outside was a deadly wasteland… but if we came from Outside, then he’d know that people live out here.

And he killed Jonas and tried to kill me for no reason.

Makes me angry just thinking about it.

But I got bigger problems. Moriarity said dad had come and gone, and he knew where… but it’d cost me. 100 “caps.” (They use bottle caps for money.) I have zero caps. Guy wouldn’t budge, but said I could track down some junkie outside and get the money he owed her.

How the hell am I supposed to do that?

So now I’m sitting here, writing in my diary, in the bar. No money. No friends. In a place where they’ll walk around you while you lie dying of thirst on their doorstep.

What am I going to do?

 

Technical Notes:

Big obstacle here is the Bomb quest. Grace doesn’t have the technical know-how to disarm the bomb, and doesn’t have a strong motivation to do so because she doesn’t plan on staying. That means no house.

I anticipate missing out on a lot of the best quest rewards. I know what to do as a player, but it’s not in Grace’s character to do those things. Should make for a nice challenge.

I’ve also started using the Fellout mod, because I was getting bored of the green tint.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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