Come Fly With Me

I have three stories I want to share.  This is the first, and it's regarding a specific quest in Fallout: New Vegas called "Come Fly With Me".  I really, really enjoyed the story of this quest chain, and it has prompted me to share it here.

If you've read my previous post about New Vegas, you'll remember that the main storyline revolves around tracking down the man in the bad suit who shot you in the head right as the game begins.  The "Come Fly With Me" quest begins as an off-shoot of that main quest line, as most of the side-quests do.  There's a sniper in the city of Novac who has information about the man you're chasing, but he will only divulge it once you do something for him.  Quid pro quo, Clarice.

His task for you is to send you to a RoboCo test facility nearby and clear out the infestation of ghouls there.  If you'll recall my previous, previous post with the video, I mention this briefly and that video is me inside the test facility.

The voice coming from the intercom (mentioned in the video) actually belonged to a human.  While I found it odd that a human was inhabiting a building full of feral ghouls, I was even more surprised to find that he was actually living with a bunch of intelligent ghouls.  What was even more surprising were the circumstances of their situation, which I discovered by speaking to the ghoul's leader -- a glowing, radioactive creature named Jason Bright.  (The humor in the fact that he glows and is named Bright was not lost on me.)

Through conversations with both the human (named Chris), and Bright, I discover that the ghouls are basically a religious cult.  They're working on repairing three test rockets inside the facility, which they plan on using to embark on their religious "Great Journey" to reach the "Far Beyond", where they will meet their creator.  It's so reminiscent of those cults who make their followers drink poison Kool-aid.  I was actually slightly unnerved.

Anyway, to make things even more interesting, I find out that Chris believes he is a ghoul, even though he is a perfectly normal looking human.  He believes this because he has gone bald.  That may seem utterly ridiculous to you, but you have to remember that it's been 200 years since the Great War, when the nukes destroyed everything.  Everyone has grown up in Vaults, and it's certainly possible that he was never taught that humans can go bald at middle-age.  He was horrified and believed he was exposed to some chemical that turned him into a ghoul.  He considers himself grotesque, just like the ghouls are.  So, he joined this cult of ghouls, thinking he was just like them.  It is *sort of* far fetched, but does make sense when you think about it.

Even worse, I discover that Bright *does* know that Chris is human, and does not plan on taking him on this "Great Journey".  Additionally, he views Chris as a sort of sacrificial lamb.  Chris has the knowledge to get the rockets working and launch them, but he will die in the process from the radiation he'd be exposed to during the launch.

This was a tricky situation for my character, as I typically don't play him as someone who feels it's right to judge others.  But, given my own distaste for organized religion, I was compelled to interfere in this scenario.

I started out by explaining to Chris that he was a human, and that the ghouls were using them for their own purposes and had no intentions of taking him with them.  This took a few lines of dialogue to achieve, but finally I got my point across and he was understandably miffed.  My preferred result here was to get him to survive the launch, but still send the ghouls on their "Great Journey".  Then everyone would be happy.

Sadly, the sadistic side of me kicked in as soon as Chris mentioned that he wanted to sabotage the launch.  I actually tried to convince him otherwise through two waves of dialogue, but the option to sabotage was still there after that, and the temptation was far too great.  I probably *could have* eventually changed his mind.  Oh well.

Anyway, I then had to collect three items for Chris.  Two of them were to get the rockets working, and the other, Sugar Bombs, were for the sabotage.

Now, either someone in QA screwed up, or no one imagined that someone would take this particular path.  After the launch of the rockets (where I got a nice bird's eye view of them all exploding gloriously), I went back to find Chris.  He was alive and well, but when I talked to him, he asked me what happened.

At first, I thought this was a clever ploy by the game developers -- giving Chris amnesia and not really remembering what happened.  But my dialogue choices suggest that it was just broken.  I had:

"There was a mechanical malfunction."
"I sabotaged the rockets."

Wait a second...*I* sabotaged the rockets?  Given there are always 20 different ways to do one thing in this game, I'm quite sure that it is possible to actually do the sabotaging yourself.  But I didn't choose that path.  So sadly, this sort of broke the immersion for me.  Still, it was a fantastic quest line.