Fallout Chapter 10: The Wheels of Justice

So, last time on Balls Out Fallout, we let you folks make a few choices. We’re hear to see the results of them today.

First up, comes good old Iguana Bob. Hub street food vendor.  Runs a ‘family’ eating place in the most literal sense. As you may recall, we ran into one of his suppliers in Doc Morbid’s morgue back in Junktown, and found that not all of his ingredients are entirely kosher, and you guys decided that we need to shut his operation down. But there’s a bit of a problem here. The city is very well patrolled, and we’re in a rather public area. If we were to start anything with him, the guards would be on us in a flash. It’s pretty simple to piss Bob off to the point where he starts the fight himself, so we can just proactively defend ourselves against him which wouldn’t draw any of the po-pos here, but I promised to show you guys a neat trick involving a sack today.

Before we get into that, though, I want to make sure that Bob knows why he has this coming. Athena walks over and starts chatting him up.

We start on what would be a really cool Soylent Green bit, but Bob shuts us up. Then he tries to justify it. He’s not the one killing people! They’re already dead! It’s environmentally friendly! Doesn’t Athena like the environment?

Athena does not in fact like the environment. This environment never stops trying to kill her and has not had the good graces to invent Dragon Age yet to make up for it. She tells him so. He stoops to threats, but does not draw his weapon yet. Athena ends the conversation.

I told you before that the burlap sack is the ultimate assassination tool. I was a little hyperbolic in that. The sack is not the ultimate assassination tool. It is half of the ultimate assassination tool. When we get the other half assembled, we are going to kill Iguana Bob in broad daylight, right in front of the police, with nobody having any idea of what happened.

Going Downtown in Fallout Chapter 9

Last time, on Aether cruises through Fallout, we… I don’t even remember. Something about going home again. You can read it. We’re not concerned about past. We only look towards the future. And the future, for us, is the Hub.

We embark from Vault 13 and make the long trip south. A long way. It takes a couple of days to reach it. We only know where the Hub is because of Ian; he told us where to find it, a while ago. It’s about half a day south of Junktown, and since we went back to the beginning to visit the Vault, we have to travel everything we’ve done all over again.

The only real obstacle we run into on the way there is a single Radscorpion. Which by this point is not an obstacle at all. I only include it to commemorate the fact that it manages to poison Athena. It’s true! It manages to get the drop on us, and the only attack it makes before Athena and crew blow it away manages to both get past Athena’s defenses and actually poison her! This is exciting! I rarely ever see this happen! Entire games will go by, and I don’t have to think about poison. Of course, we’re carrying around 10 antidotes because I haven’t bothered selling them off yet, so it’s no matter for us to cure it, but still! It’s like winning the lottery. Of discomfort. Yeah. We don’t even loot the scorpion’s corpse, we just leave it there as a monument to this unique moment.

Oh, and also, it’s been 50 days since we left the Vault, I think. Our Pipboy gives us a helpful reminder that everyone we’ve ever known and loved will soon die unless we find some way to rescue them by tracking down a lonely little water chip in this awful, awful wasteland. You know, in case we forgot.

Which we didn’t, for your information.

And then, we’re at the Hub! The thriving metropolis, largest city in the Pacific Wasteland, headquarters of nearly all organized traders in the wastes. They control the economy of the region, most commerce flows through here at some point, and this is the closest thing the wasteland has to a pre-war style city.

We walk in there, and it’s surrounded by farms. Two headed cows and weird mutated corn as far as the eye can see. I gotta say, I really love that Fallout thought about agriculture. Most games only give it a passing sidequest where you have to save the odd bumpkin from some ghost of his daughter’s uncle or some thing, but you see agriculture all over the place here.

We also bump into a caravan that’s in the process of leaving town, hitching their wagons made from the scavenged flatbeds of pre-war vehicles up to their brahmin, the two-headed cows that serve as the livestock out here. We chat up the security guard, and get some deets on the place. Apparently, we can buy pretty much anything here. Including water. You know, if they can get fresh water here, mayhaps they’d have an idea of where we can pick up a water chip.

After that we break into some random guy’s house in the middle of the night and start quizzing him about the layout of town. He’s a surprisingly good sport about it. He tells us were to find all the necessities in town, such as the police station, the general store, and most important of all, the local bar. He also tells us that we passed by someone from the sheriff’s office who would have filled us in on all that, but we didn’t because it’s 10:00 p.m. And all the sensible people are in bed and not breaking and entering in order to ask for directions.

Athena’s a night person, remember. You guys all picked it and everything. This is what she do.