Part 16: Gifted, You Say?

Update 16: Gifted, You Say?



On our way out of Gecko I stopped by to tell Harold that his plant was fixed and I talked to his assistant, Lenny. When I mentioned the Vault Dweller, he claimed to have actually met him at some time in the past… well, more like seen him once. From a distance.



"It was a city. Didn't you see a lot of people running?"

"Boy, Necropolis was a ghoul city and if you ain't caught on yet we ghouls don't run so good. So when he came through running like that, I knew he was an outsider. Came by so close that I could have touched him… I wish I'd joined him then."

"Wait, you wanted to join my great grandfather?"

"Yes. I h'had the chance of a lifetime and I blew it."



"My tribe keeps the memory of his adventures alive… the story of Necropolis is part of that legend."

"Later, I heard that the Vault Dweller destroyed the source of the m'mutant army. The Vault Dweller saved all of us, Human and Ghoul alike… I could have been a part of that, but I lacked the c'courage. I've never forgiven m'myself."

"Well, I'm sure the work you do here with the ghouls is meaningful… what do you do here, again?"

"I'm a doctor. Have been since before the the War."

"Before the.. before the War? That must have been 160 years ago!"

"Yep. All the radiation gave us Ghouls a longer lifespan… of course, it took damn near everything else away."

"Long life is not the same as good life, Grampy Bone say. And him would know."



"That's pretty rough, Lenny. Good luck with that."

For the curious, you can actually recruit Lenny as a helper. The problem is that he kind of sucks. He's got a ton of HP, but he can't use any weapons other than sub machine guns and his contribution is Doctor skill which we have plenty of. I'll cover his stats in another supplementary update for the curious.



I was really eager to go get that car fixed since it would probably beat walking, but there was one more placed I wanted to visit in the Vault. I started by pumping the medical assistant for information, although it wasn't exactly a deep well.



"It seems a shame that a beautiful young woman such as yourself can't find SOMETHING to do in Vault City."

"Smooth kid, real smooth."

"I don't think I want to see this."

"Pardon me?"

"I couldn't help but notice you're an attractive young woman who could stand to get out once in a while. How about you and I have dinner?"

"Oh boy. We and I gonna go with we and them and be at bar while you have dinner."

In hindsight, I think maybe I should have gone with them to the bar and let Phyllis have dinner on her own. We both would have enjoyed ourselves more, and I'd have been drunk for what happened next.



"Dull? You don't say?"

"I mean, have you noticed how similar everyone is? And OLD? Most of the seminars and extracurricular activities are geared toward octogenarians. I'm barely twenty-five, and this city makes me feel like I'm fifty."

"Ya, we saw you playing shuffleboard."

"That's true…you know, I didn't notice any children in the city. Do you keep them locked up until they're fit to be dealt with like civilized people?"



"…a pregnancy cycle? The hell is a pregnancy cycle?"

"Well, pregnancies are only permitted during certain years established by the Council."

"What if you get pregnant anyway?"

"How would that happen?"

"I think I know why your date didn't go well, Luke."

"He be talking about the beast with two backs making another back."



"I don't want to ask. But I will anyway."

"Male Citizens 'donate' to the Auto-Doc here in the Vault and the most favorable matches are chosen by the computer. Then the appropriate female Citizen is seeded by the Auto-Doc."

"The word seeded just makes it all worse. Don't people still get pregnant from intercourse? What about accidental pregnancies?"



"You know, background radiation might be resulting in sterility or even worse, chromosomal damage. Might be worth checking out."

"You know, I was thinking the same thing. Maybe I should mention it to Dr. Troy. He's been too busy to look into it recently, but the next pregnancy cycle is coming up, so…"

"Hey, didn't you say something about donating? I'm a citizen now, so…"



"Can I get a hand here? Or maybe a magazine or something?"



And that's why there might be a lot of kids who look like me running around the Vault City area these days. I've got to say that whatever your own personal opinion of your masculinity is, it always helps to have a medical professional confirm it for you.



After that the conversation died for some unimaginable reason, and I tried to make it less awkward by getting absorbed in the computer. It had nothing to say about GECKs or Vaults, but their medical technology was extensive enough that I could have spent hours sifting through it. They left it accessible right out there in the open, assuming that anybody who could understand the information would be entitled to it anyway.



Deep in the database I found some combat enhancement operation schematics which looked interesting, so I copied the data into my Pip Boy. It was a little bit creepy to think about, but becoming some kind of mechanically enhanced superman didn't sound like it would hurt my chances of getting home alive.



The actual doctor who ran the clinic was fairly friendly, and was more than willing to discuss medical techniques and training with me. I learned a good bit from him, although I could tell he was less impressed with some of the remedies I'd picked up from Hakunin.

This conversation actually results in a perk, Vault City Medical Training, which is a straight up increase to our Doctor skill. We could have gotten this earlier, but it's actually a straight up 10% bonus so it's worth waiting until skills get more expensive: Raising skills from 1-100 is a 1/1 ratio (doubled with Tagged skills) and the cost increases in stepped increments as your skill increases. At the highest end you have to spend 6 skill points to raise a skill 1%.



Those stories did lead him, in a roundabout way, to asking a number of inane questions about where I was from in order to do a poor job of concealing his interest in someone from outside the city, who could likewise get him things from outside the city.



I don't think the poor bastard realized how common Jet is, or he'd never have paid $1000 for a sample. Hell, I couldn't take off my boots and shake them out without having a couple doses of Jet fall out. Still, I wasn't about to say no to what was quite realistically free money… especially since getting the car fixed was going to cost several thousand dollars.



I shook his hand after he paid me and we set out for the Den again. It wasn't exactly an uninterrupted trip, but it could have been that nobody trying to chew my leg off on the way out to Vault City made me a bit nostalgic.



Although the robbers were certainly a familiar experience. Having another person on hand with a shotgun made the whole thing a lot easier to deal with, but all the guns we were carrying around were starting to get burdensome.



Once we hit the Den I made a little side trip, since I'd promised I would look around for Percy's narcoleptic and hard-sleeping friend. There was only about one building in the city I hadn't bothered to visit, and I couldn't think of a better place to look for a ghoul than a freak show.



Sure enough they had Woody taking an early nap in a coffin. He woke up when I called his name, though, and with a little bit of encouragement started gimping off toward Gecko.



The weirdest thing to me was trying to figure out where he'd gotten ahold of toilet paper for the mummy wrappings. They don't exactly produce that stuff anymore, and a box of pre-war toilet paper or a book with nice thin pages are rare and valuable objects. The Great Ananias was left without his prime exhibit, muttering something ridiculous about a single-headed brahmin for his next show. Like anyone would believe that.



After making sure Woody got a big enough head start, I went to find Smitty and see about that car. He was as good as his word about only charging $2000 to fix the fuel cell controller, but he wanted another $750 to install the cell regulator. It was worth the extra money for some fuel efficiency, though, and I was very glad I'd slipped the Doc in Vault City that Jet.



And just like that, I had a set of wheels and the wasteland opened up to me. If Woody had waited a few more minutes, I might even have given him a ride…although now that I think about it, I wasn't exactly sure I wanted to go back to Gecko right away. In fact, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go at all.



We started heading generally east, since everything was kind of in that direction anyway, and pretty soon we ran across a herd of dead cattle out on the plains. I… I guess I probably shouldn't have let all of those cattle out from the pens in Modoc. Staring at the reminder of my folly, I decided that I really had to figure out where I was going.

And yes, this encounter can only be found if you let the Brahmin free in Modoc. The wastes do not play nice.



Looking through my Pip Boy for help, I found something I hadn't noticed before… somehow I'd gotten a travel log downloaded onto the system, probably when I reformatted it in the Vault City computer. I opened it up and started to read.





Vault 15 was far south and I'd need to stop somewhere along the way. Redding wasn't far enough south to be worthwhile, New Reno sounded like a hell-hole, and NCR was right next to the Vault.



I settled on Broken Hills. Any place that a resident of Vault City hated that much sounded alright by me, and as a mining town it might be an interesting change. I'd had better experiences in towns run by ghouls than with most of the human communities I'd visited.



Naturally, it wasn't the smoothest trip.

"Get back in the car!"

"We and I be trying, Vic in da way!"

"I'm trying! The door's stuck!"

"Why the hell did we even get out of the car in the first place? Go through the windows, and step on it!"