~The Scarlet Plus-Fours Fallout: New Vegas Picture Diary~

Starring Gracie Cutesman-Pieworthy

Fallout: New Vegas is one of the Fallout games, set in and around a city called New Vegas, which developed from Las Vegas after much of the surrounding America was destroyed in a nuclear war. It's a special game to a lot of Fallout fans, with characters and stories that feel human, different paths you can take through the main storyline, and a powerful, melancholy, yet beautiful atmosphere.

Since taking screenshots is such fun, I've started a new SSLP, which should eventually cover a whole game of Fallout: New Vegas and some of the expansion packs. I'm playing as a certified Charming Young Lady, complete with silver tongue, plasma weaponry, spiked knuckledusters and many bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla. I hope you like it.

Chapter 6: Let's Make a Trip Around the Strip

The city of New Vegas was by far the greatest city made of recycled Las Vegas, but it was a city of vast contradictions. Its crumbling outskirts, "Outer Vegas", were home to outlaws and scavengers barely scraping together a living. Its walled northern district, Freeside, had guilds, shops and some reclaimed buildings, but the people there still struggled, and crime was commonplace. The Strip, however, was a neighbourhood you wouldn't see the likes of which for miles around, a mecca for tourists and gamblers, where you weren't even allowed through the gate unless you were rich enough.

Gracie had saved up the requisite two thousand caps, and Cass managed to get past the Securitrons by posing as her novelty lamp. With the very lifelike woman-shaped lamp trying hard not to burst out laughing, Gracie wandered onto the Strip, where hopefully she'd find the man who shot her.

He turned out not to be that hard to track. There was only one man in New Vegas who wore a chessboard-coloured suit, and most of the locals knew he lived in that flashy, bowl-shaped casino, the Tops. Gracie and Cass headed there for a visit.

The Tops's bouncer waylaid our heroines for their weapons. After Gracie showed him the lighter and some cigarettes found lying near her grave, Swank agreed that they could keep their weapons until they'd straightened things out with Benny, his chessboard-coloured boss, whom he sincerely hoped was just the victim of a big misunderstanding.

"Please, there's no need for such vulgarity! What I gave you was an arse-kicking, dear fellow." --Gracie

Benny had fallen, and tucked away in his sock, Gracie found the Platinum Chip. It looked so small and unassuming in the palm of her hand, cold and slightly heavy, engraved with a spade and the words "Lucky 38". How one little novelty chip could be worth killing over, Gracie would never be able to understand... but Benny had started it, so she didn't feel sorry for him.

"Wow, Gracie, remind me never to mess with you!" Cass cried, watching Gracie wipe the blood off her spiked knuckledusters with a frilly embroidered handkerchief. "Now that you've got your poker chip, who's it for?"

"Mr House, apparently. He lives in, er..." Gracie examined her notes. "Er, the, um..." She flicked through a long, long list of jobs to do, jobs to potentially do, people and places of interest and jobs not do do. "Ah! The Lucky 38, that tall casino across the road. Which I suppose explains the logo on the Platinum Chip..."

So saying, Gracie gave Swank and the janitors a large tip, and headed out to make her delivery at long last.

"I wouldn't say it was easy being green, but the world could hardly be changed without sacrificing anything." --Mr House

Mr House turned out to be a strange fellow. He was green, and seemed to have turned into a screensaver for a giant computer at some point. Gracie wasn't one to judge, though, and Cass was waiting on the ground floor, so the meeting went fine. Gracie handed over the Platinum Chip, at which point Mr House promptly gave it back to her, and asked her to use it in the bunker over on Fortification Hill.

"It was an odd meeting, but he does pay handsomely, so I suppose I shall oblige..." sighed Gracie, stepping back out of the lift.

"After you went through so much to get it for him!" Cass sighed. "Rich guys, they never ask if it's a good idea. They just ask 'how much?'. So where is this Fortification Hill place?"

"I've forgotten," said Gracie. "Should we go somewhere a bit less fancy for lunch?"

Cass blinked a couple of times. "Well, yeah... If you want."

"We can hardly fault their taste in dresses, can we?" --Gracie

Gracie took Cass back to Freeside for lunch. It was a lovely day out, except when they were ambushed by a gang of elderly women wielding rolling pins. They dined on iguana kebabs and aged Sunset Sarsaparilla, before visiting an old Mormon fort known as "The Old Mormon Fort".

"You don't say." --Rose of Sharon Cassidy

Julie represented a group, or perhaps movement, called the Followers of the Apocalypse, a loose collective of well-meaning people who tried to help those who were in need. They didn't ask for payment or adulation, because who could say "Please give me five adulations!" with a straight face? No, their goal was to make the world a bit less post-apocalytpic, whichever way they could.

Julie went on to explain how New Vegas was beset by social problems, such as a treaty with the NCR which mostly benefitted the Strip's casinos and left the working-class people of Freeside out in the cold, and severe lag spikes caused by a mod called "Visuals Improved Content Expanded". Gracie was aghast, and wanted to help as best she could.

So, to Cass's great amusement and threefold face-palming, Gracie went to wake up a sex robot for Freeside's premiere bar, hotel, bordello and casino, the Atomic Wrangler.

Don't be ashamed of who you are, James.