Fallout 3: Megaton

Welcome back to Fallout Week, where I tell you stories of how I dealt with the events of the video game Fallout 3 as though I was there.

Today we visit Megaton!

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

DISCLAIMER:  What follows is the account of how I dealt with the situation - to the best of my moral understanding, as though I was actually there.  Keep in mind that outside of how the people reacted to me, everything I said and did were entirely my choice.  It didn’t have to play out this way… at all…

VAULT 101

Let’s quickly catch you up to speed.  My character has lived his whole life inside a nuclear fallout shelter called Vault 101.  I don’t know what happened exactly.  All I know is that my father’s lab assistant was dead, the guards were after me, and my father (voiced by Liam Neeson) left the vault without explanation.  After escaping myself, I found myself standing in the middle of the Capital Wastelands outside Washington DC with no clue of what my next move is.

So, what would I do in that situation?  I decided to find my father.  He is the only connection to the world I knew inside the vault.  I need to understand why he left. 

After passing through an obliterated, single-street town called Springtown, I arrived at a place know as…

MEGATON

Megaton - because they thought it would be a good idea - is a small town built around a live nuclear bomb that failed to detonate.  The nuke sits in the bottom of the impact crater, while all the scrape-metal shanties cling to the sides of the bowl.  The people here are a bit strange, but cuddling with an A-bomb will do that to ya, I imagine. 

At any rate, it’s the closest civilization to the vault, so my father might have come here first.  Everyone I talked to pointed me to Moriarty, the Irish proprietor of the one-stop shop Bar/Brothel/Inn.  If that isn’t suspicious enough, isn’t Moriarty the villain responsible for the death of Sherlock Holmes?

I guess that doesn’t seem to bother anyone but me.

The bar has that musty, dirty, western feel.  Everyone is drab-looking.  The bartender’s face has essentially melted off from radiation.  He looks like a zombie.  They call him a “ghoul.”

But then, over in the corner is a man with a white suit, a fedora, and a pair of shades he doesn’t need to be wearing inside.  From here on I will refer to him as “the Matrix guy.”  As a salutation, he asks me if I had any interest in blowing up the town.

“Psssst….No.” And I walk away.  Man, what a creep.

I find Moriarty in his back office.  I’m in luck.  My father did pass through, and even talked to Moriarty for some time.

“However,” he cuts me off there, “knowledge is a commodity, and commodities cost money.  Nothing personal.  It’s just good business.  100 caps, please.”

I didn’t have 100 caps, so I came back the next day with 170. Moriarty looked at me then and said,

“Well, seeing how you came back, that means there’s demand.  And when there’s demand, prices must go up.  Cost is now 300 caps.”

“But wait, that’s not what we agreed on yesterday.”

“Yes, but that was yesterday.  This is today.  Today it’s 300, or no deal.”

I got mad.  I knew what he was doing.  If I collected 300 caps, he would bump it to 500, and the 700, and then higher.  He was using my desperation as a way to screw me out of my money and bend me under his will.  I didn’t have the time to play that game, and I had too much pride to become the unwilling henchman of that bastard.

I followed him outside onto the balcony and glared at him for a long time.  He was never going to tell me.  He only saw people as exploitable, and their hardships as potential business opportunities.   Kindness wasn’t shallow or corrupt enough of a concept for him.  Can’t turn a profit on that.

So I beat the information out of him.  Or rather, I knocked him to the ground, and when he got back up, he pulled out his pistol.  He didn’t live long.  I took his computer passwords and keys off his body, went back into the bar, into his office, and logged into his computer to find out my father’s whereabouts.

When I was done, I realized that the entire bar had rallied into a mob to beat me to death for my crime, which struck me as odd because no one liked the guy!  Only his prostitutes and the barkeep were thankful he was dead.

Sometime during the bloodbath I noticed that there was another person that wasn’t trying to blow my head off: the Matrix guy.

 “Would you have any interest in blowing up the city?” he asks me again.

“Yes.  Yes I would.  Screw this city!”

The sun was down by the time I had successfully planted the charges on the Megaton bomb and fought my way out of the city.  It was morning by the time I reached the rendezvous point at Tenpenny Tower. 

We detonated the bomb from the balcony of the penthouse suite and watched as a burning nuclear mushroom cloud rose from the horizon.  Megaton was gone.  Most of the city was dead before I left, anyways; I killed anyone who tried to kill me. The nuke took care of the rest.  There was no trail leading back to me now.  No evidence.  No witnesses. 

Despite what I have done, this was my chance to start anew...

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