OOC: Heads up to those who are interested!

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

A Falloutverse plot prospect that I would like to run by people. Provoked by watching a friend play Fallout 4, and only just now, after ploughing through a great deal of other stuff, encounter the 2287 version of the Brotherhood of Steel.



Okay, so. Before Fallout 4 came out I took Ellen post-canon by several years and used the opportunity to clean up what I saw as a bunch of loose plot ends. Fawkes and Theresa of the Faint Smile destroyed Vault 87, ending the production of supermutants in the Capital Wasteland forever. Little Lamplight was inadvertently destroyed in the process because wrecking the Vault brought down the Lamplight caverns. Elder Lyons established a series of agreements with communities across the Capital Wasteland, linking Brotherhood of Steel water deliveries to community taxes paid in agricultural produce and Brotherhood recruiting rights. The Brotherhood Outcasts, who had split from the main Brotherhood over what they saw as Lyons' excessive interest in things other than the main mission, established a tentative peace with the main Brotherhood after the RobCo factory was revived and started producing, and the fact that Ellen's group beat the Outcasts to the punch in recovering Philadelphia's primary tech of the past meant that the Outcasts no longer had grounds to object to Lyons' policies in any way, and could/would/did fold back into the main Brotherhood.

Then 4 came out. According to 4's canon, Elder Lyons died within a year of Fallout 3's ending, succeeded briefly by his daughter and then a series of ineffectual leaders, and then by the sixteen-year-old Arthur Maxson, who only got the position because he was the last living descendant of the Brotherhood's founder. Maxson proceeded to wipe out Lyons' policies towards protecting Wastelanders and brought the Outcasts back into the fold and defeated the supermutant leader who supposedly rallied all the Vault 87 supermutants under one army banner and generally is presented as having been a Gary Stu of Destiny.

These two timelines can't really be reconciled and I don't much want to try, in no small part because Arthur Maxson was a cute and slightly gawky preteen in FO3 but a raving semi-messianic weirdo with delusions of royalty (his name is Arthur and he names his damn airship the Prydwen, it's a wonder his gun isn't named Caliburn!) in FO4. I would, however, like to make use of Fallout 4's setting and plot possibilities now that it exists. I haven't heard of anyone expressing an interest in playing the Sole Survivor, or any other characters from Fallout 4 for that matter. I would like to have the Brotherhood tell Ellen 'you did a great job in Philadelphia, so we're sending someone to take your place there and we're going to have you head up to Boston at the head of a whole new recon team, mm'kay?'. Fallout 4's timeline includes two small Brotherhood teams sent to Boston prior to the events of the game, one of which sent back a whole lot of discoveries and the other one of which met a Tragic End. I am going to go AU with FO4 and have Ellen head up to the Commonwealth so I can actually work with an area of the Fallout world I RL *know*. If we ever get a Sole Survivor app I'll be happy to work with the player or talk with them about timeline splits, but for now... they're not here, and I am, so.

Also if you know of anyone who's got a pup who wants to deal with medical experimentation horror BOY HOWDY HAVE I GOT SOME DLC PLOT FOR YOU.

Comments

[chanter1944]

OOC: Sariel would potentially be interested in some of this. She and Ellen really do need to meet up again in bar, which... yeah, that's on me for not being around! Argh. As for the horror end of things, if that comes to potential liberation or an assist to survivors of horribleness, Sariel is there. To be entirely honest, part of her has never completely gotten over not being able to free the prisoners/patients on Blazkowicz's world, all rational understanding of the situation aside.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

OOC: The medical experimentation doesn't really have a whole lot of survivors. It's, um.

Okay, in the Fallout games there are these robots called Robobrains. They're robots that use organic brains as processors. The background lore of the game up until Fallout 4 has always said that officially, all the brains used for these robots are on record as having come from chimpanzees, but that there were a good number of brains from condemned criminals and other prisoners used. All of them had their memories wiped and were reprogrammed to be combat robots.

Fallout 4's Automatron add-on involves going through a pre-War facility where these things were developed and made en masse, on a scale that left me arguing with the person playing the game at the time as to whether we were seeing something more Nazi (for numbers/mechanical efficiency) or Unit 731 (for utter callousness). Needless to say there are absolutely no chimpanzees anywhere. What there are, are a lot of brains in jars. A lot a lot. And functioning Robobrains with varying degrees of murderousness, and some feral ghouls, which is to say radiation zombies who want to rip your face off.

Not sure if that's something you're going to want Sariel in on, but if it is, we'll arrange something.

ETA: dammit, I almost forgot about the Institute's FEV lab. Not nearly as bad on-site as the FEV pits in Vault 87 back in FO3 but there's at least one survivor who managed to hold his brain together after being turned into a supermutant who winds up begging the main character for help; if I get Ellen to the point where she encounters him we'll see about getting Sariel in on that.

[cutting_edgex23]

X would be down! She is very hard to traumatize with certain things, which can be . . . useful. Um.

Diana would also be down, but I need to get back into playing her again before making any promises, so.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Well, aside from possibly someone with fire or plasma-based powers, it's hard to think of someone who'd be better suited to deal with a pre-War experimental facility full of disembodied and potentially still viable brains with a great deal of hostility towards the living. (When I say 'full' I mean that we counted something like at least a hundred and thirty-two brains in jars of various sizes, possibly more.)

[varadia]

WELP. Consider X volunteered for whenever.

(Are the brains in mason jars? *now has the Lovecraft in Brooklyn song stuck in my head*)

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

.... some of them? I mean, a lot of them are in what look like vertically oriented fish tanks (no gravel or bubblers and the brains don't swim or anything) but there's one room with a whole wall full of large jars in which the brains barely fit and those could be mason jars? you don't really get to take them down and examine them.

[sticktothemission]

Medical experimentation horror, you say? Reaper might be down for that.

Gabriel might be willing to help with the more normal stuff.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Forcibly disembodied brains with perfectly understandable hostility towards the living and a good chance of access to multiple forms of ranged weaponry okay? For Reaper, I mean. Gabriel would just be dealing with the rest of the whackadoodle weirdness of the Commonwealth.

... also there'd eventually be the supermutants and the FEV lab to deal with, I almost forgot about that.

[sticktothemission]

Reaper has single-handedly taken down twenty foot tall mech units and walked away from it with little more than a growl. It had lasers! As long as there are organics around to harvest he'll be fine but will she be okay with him leaving desiccated husks in his wake? The Robobrains aren't terribly similar to what happened to make him Reaper but it's close enough he'd be happy to help shut it down.

Gabriel and supermutants...well, that could've easily been what the SEP did to him. It's a sobering thought.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

I think she'd probably be able to handle it, as long as she gets the opportunity to commend the deceased to the afterlife afterwards. Ellen's made a point of doing some form of final-rites prayer for organic sentients that she's killed, on the grounds that she's pretty sure she'll wind up dead alone in the wastes one day and hopefully some stranger will offer the last rites for her when that time comes. The draining-lifeforce aspect is... well, she's worked with a whole community of people who used to be outright cannibals and who're currently living the lives of vampires in a desperate effort to keep from reverting to an overwhelming psychological compulsion to eat human flesh. Like, I'm pretty sure the Family is walking around with straws jammed into donor blood bags like really sticky CapriSun packages. And Fawkes, before he put his head back together after his FEV infection, is almost sure that he outright ate people, although he honestly doesn't remember much from that time. Ellen has probably dealt with worse than a mere lifeforce-drain kill or twelve.

[bjornwilde]

Scrapper could work for any of this. She'll do near anything for drinking money she can spend in Bar.

I also have a new pup I've apped who could join in with either, especially as medical horrors are coming to his future; though not Fall Out levels of medical horror.