Gun Running, Fallouting

Last time, on Athena Falls Out, we made it to Los Angeles. The glitz, the glamour, the broken dreams and general desperation, the foul creatures wandering the streets, it’s not all that different that modern day LA. Athena met the police and mayor of the village of Adytum, who all wanted her to kill the Blades, then she met the Blades, who are actually pretty cool people that everyone lies about.

So you guys decided to side with them, but didn’t specify how. I’m going to go with the means that does not lead to me fighting a whole town by myself, and that starts by us going somewhere else in LA.

First, we go to a library to the west. This doesn’t have anything to do with the quest, but there’s a few interesting and rewarding things here. This library is the headquarters of the Followers of the Apocalypse, a group dedicated to promoting peace and harmony throughout the wasteland. Haahaaaaaaaaa, good luck with that. But still, their mission is admirable. And it’s good to have someone working towards it. Even if they are doomed to failure forever.

Athena heads inside the library, and starts chatting with the first person she sees, a woman named Katja. Katja asks a lot of questions, and really doesn’t buy Athena’s insistence that she’s just a simple traveler, saying that nobody goes to the Boneyard of Los Angeles if they don’t have to. Eventually, Athena gives a bit more details, saying that she’s here to hunt down a water chip, even though she’s not anymore and the developers really should have put another option at this point in the game.

Katja does open up at that, at least, and starts providing some other information about the area. Apparently, the Followers of the Apocalypse are straight lousy combatants. Not surprising that the people who are most interested in peace are those who are most ill-suited for its alternative, eh? Still, Katja talks about them as if she wasn’t a member of their group and stationed right in their blasted library.

Yeah. Fallout wasn’t so much ‘completed’ as it was ‘finished’. There’s a lot of content that obviously needed another pass, and the Boneyard is probably the single area of the game most full of it.

Anyways, when Athena mentions that she doesn’t plan on staying around the Boneyard too long, Katja asks to come along. Athena accepts, and now our party’s grown by one.

So Katja is the final companion available to you in the game. So you’d probably think she’s the best, right? Nope. Not at all. Not by any means. She’s probably actually the least useful companion we could get. See, Fallout is a sprite based game. That means characters can only use the items and weapons that the creators gave them animations for. The player characters are the only characters in the game that have animations for all weapon types. The others are a bit more limited. In Katja’s case, she’s using a character sprite that only has the animations for knives and SMGs. Any sort of melee weapon is horrible. And remember, we’ve got our rule of not giving NPCs burst fire weapons. That’s the recipe for Athena dying a horrible and accidental death. There are single fire weapons that use the SMG animations that she can use, but they’re not that great. Moreover, Katja’s survivability isn’t the best.

Still, though, it’s another pair of hands and another ally in a fight. It’s hard to say no to that. She’s not the best, but she is adding to our party’s prowess.

Fallout: Talking Time

Last time on Athena’s Quest for the Best, we hit the climax of the game when we collected our sick power armor. I would say it’s all downhill from here, but the rest of the game is when we get to use our sick power armor, so can’t complain about that. Anyways, yes, there’s the vault to save, mutants to kill, all that. There’s a lot of lives that are riding on our dear Athena! The Vault wants us to slay the mutants so they don’t hunt down and kill everyone we know and love. The Brotherhood is aware of them mustering an army to take over the rest of the wasteland, are possibly the only force around with the power to stop them, but need us to find out more about the mutants before they’ll be able to act. Athena is the crux of so many destinies right now. We should go take care of them.

Instead, we just head off to the Hub. Our pockets are full of loot, and we’ve got a need for cash.

On the way there, we come across someone. Patrick the Celt. A wanderer. He roams the wastes collecting Gaelic remnants, songs, stories, and histories, as a way of keeping his old family heritage alive. Athena chats with him for a bit, and he sings us an old Celtic song. She passes some time with him in that, then the two groups make their separate ways.

Then we continue on to the Hub, and start hitting up the stores there. Which introduces us to a weird facet of the Fallout economy. Namely, that the currency of the land, bottlecaps? Not necessarily the most efficient means of trading now. After our adventures in the Glow, we are full of equipment that we can sell for thousands of caps a piece. But we can only select caps in groups of a maximum of 999 at a time, making trying to move tons of caps between inventories while selling an onerous process. Also, none of the merchants carry more than two thousand in caps, meaning we’re not able to sell our heavy equipment outright. Most players, by this point in the game, trade in guns rather than in caps. So like breaking a twenty with a store, except you’re breaking a sniper rifle for like eight shotguns. I’m more a fan of using drugs as a replacement for currency because they don’t weigh anything, but either way, in a lot of situations, it’s more efficient to just trade for either the stuff you need or at least stuff you can trade for other stuff later than it is to actually make cash.

Not in this case though. The Brotherhood doctors need caps for their services, and won’t take anything else in trade. So we sell off a fraction of our inventory and completely wipe out all the caps from all the merchants in the Hub, and pick up a few lesser guns and drugs while we’re at it.

But then Athena’s pockets get completely full while we’re picking up miscellaneous guns and goods for selling later. We need to clear out some space. Athena chows down on the eleven pounds of fruit I’ve been holding onto for whatever reason, then washes that down by drinking seven bottles of Nuka-Cola in a row. Now we can fit more guns in her pockets. Priorities.

This has adverse reactions on her health, as you might expect. She’s now addicted to Nuka-Cola. She’ll experience a negative impact to her stats until she drinks another Nuka-Cola. This could be an irritation, but Athena proceeds to quit Nuka-Cola cold turkey until her body stops craving it.

On our way back to the Brotherhood, a particularly sneaky Radscorpion attempts to stealth its way up on us.

This doesn’t go very well for it.

Anyways, we make it back to the Brotherhood, and head down to the doctor. After our little reverse shopping spree, we’ve got enough caps for all the surgeries we haven’t taken yet. The recovery time for this takes weeks upon weeks. During which, once again, the mutant menace advances. The more in-game time we take, the deeper they come into human civilization, the more people they capture for their sick purposes, the more damage they do. Many lives probably ended in the time it’s taken us to recover from our completely elective surgeries.