Day 77

Level 36 (2 perk points floating)

S-3 Armorer 2,

P-(+)12 Awareness 2, Locksmith 3, Rifleman 4

E-2

C-(+7) Lady Killer 1, Local Leader 2

I-9 Chemist 1, Gun Nut 1, Hacker 3, Science 2

A-(+)6 Action Boy 2, Gunslinger 4

L-3

(Astoundingly Awesome 3, 4, 7, 8, and 14, Barbarian 6, Covert Operations 2, Gift of Gab, Guns and Bullets, Junktown Vendor 2, Live & Love 1, Massachusetts Surgery 2, Tesla Science 2, Tumblers Today 2, United We Stand, Wasteland Survival 7 and 9)

To start out with, I take stock of my abilities and potential perks, deciding to spend my new perk point to add even more perception. I also notice that at some point my equipment changed so my effective stats are different, and have updated the table appropriately.

It’s early in the morning, and heading to Goodneighbor to repair relations with Hancock is the main agenda for today, though I do want to return to the area around Diamond City soon.

I step back into my partial suit of power armor with the intent of taking it back to Goodneighbor and leaving it there for me. “Unless the next bloke we run into is armed with a can opener, I’d say we’re ok,” Cait remarks.

I head back to the main road and turn east, the sound of gunfire in the distance already filling my ears. I could just fast-travel, but there are a couple of places on the map that don’t say cleared so I want to make sure.

The area outside the Mass Pike Tunnel East exit has been refortified with raiders, so I pull out my sniper rifle and Cait and I make quick work of them. I don’t even bother heading around to loot all the bodies.

The journey is uneventful for awhile as I pass familiar surroundings, before turning and seeing a turret. I destroy it at range, but strangely no one seems to respond to the noise. There’s an automated searchlight scanning around as well. Seems worth investigating.

I destroy the searchlights and then creep forward to snipe a supermutant on the balcony of a nearby building. Whatever this area is, it’s a gruesome place, with bodies hanging from nearby signs and buildings. I hear a nearby voice alert to the shots and then say, “Well, there’s nothing there now,” in typical raider fashion, so this must be an area where supermutant and raider territories come together.

I turn and spot the raider, killing him before noticing the sign. This is Layton Towers, and I’m not sure whether I have been here before. Behind the building near where I shot the last raider, there’s a basketball court between the buildings and the whole area has been fortified. A raider turns and says “Oh, you are so dead!” I gun her down before she has a chance to draw her weapon, then destroy a nearby turret. I no longer think much of killing raiders. The game has trained those moral compunctions out of me in most normal situations. Only when either their behavior or their surroundings strike me as unusual do I consider them as anything but a nuisance to be eliminated. The ingrained, stereotypical interactions with these raiders does have a kind of numbing effect, but on the other hand it does in some sense work to make instances of difference stand out even more when they occur. This is not such a case so far.
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At the other entrance to this little bandit hideout is a loading area with a truck. I leave the entrance to the main building be for now and head out that direction. The truck itself contains a small crate of loot. There are other exits in the area. One is a booby-trapped concrete stairwell that leads to the highway. I disarm the traps but have no interest heading down the open road at this point. Another leads to an outlying layer of fortifications, and I can see this bandit group is very likely the one the bandits I killed earlier belonged to.

In between, I notice they’ve set up a shooting range, with mannequins and one grizzly decapitated corpse as targets. These raiders are brutal and well-organized, and they have a great location established here. I decide to investigate their outlying fortifications a bit more.

As I do, I stumble onto the Dartmouth Professional Building standing within the outermost line of their defenses. It has a ghoul in it, though, so I don’t think the raiders hold it. I step around the building, which has interesting architecture and decoration to it, to discover a dead Brotherhood scribe surrounded by ghoul and feral dog corpses. In the lobby, some Brotherhood initiates lay dead. If they were after the place, it must contain something valuable. Better stop to check it out more thoroughly. There’s no indication of what might have killed a Brotherhood scouting squad (surely some ghouls and a couple of feral dogs wouldn’t be a threat to them). Hopefully there will be more answers inside.

What I find when I head inside is initially disappointing. There is a reception area with some sleeping bags and a radroach. The elevator up is blockaded with desks and filing cabinets, and an “Out of Order” sign hangs there, dashing my hopes of a full building to explore (at least from this entrance). There’s some glowing fungus, a stimpak behind the desk, and not much other loot. Perhaps the Brotherhood were using this as a base of operations and it wasn’t a target of their search?

One thing piques my interest here—chalk. I find a piece of chalk on the desk, and then I notice that there’s a line drawn with chalk separating the two sleeping bags. Some sort of falling out, perhaps? It seems very unlike the Brotherhood of Steel, and doesn’t fit with finding them outside, however. Besides, there are only two sleeping bags. My new conclusion is that the Brotherhood hadn’t reached this place here and everything here belongs to these two skeletons. One, a skeleton in a dress lays on the larger side of the line, with a bottle of whiskey and three cans of Cram (a canned meat like Spam). The other, poor fellow, only has two packages of Fancy Lads snack cakes (not a very nutritious meal certainly), although he does have more comfortable digs with a nice leather couch in addition to his sleeping bag. 

Fallout often displays environmental storytelling like this with no real purpose beyond evoking a certain atmosphere and inviting players to complete a story in their heads. I try to imagine what unfolded here, most likely after the bombs. Trapped, with radiation outside, these two must have fought. It’s unclear how the lines were enforced except by agreement, and it’s odd the man did not protest his unfairly allotted food and position. No weapons are to be found. To complicate the situation, on closer inspection, I spot a package of rat poison tucked under the woman’s leg. The story I’m choosing in my head is that through some agreement they divided the room, the man died due to malnutrition from his poorer food options, and the woman, distraught at being finally, completely alone (the only one in the world as far as she knew), killed herself.

It’s storming when I exit the strange building and head back towards the Raider stronghold proper. I wanted to investigate the other direction from the truck before heading inside. The other route is blocked off with frag mines, signaling the end of their territory, but there is an electric lift (presumable initially for construction or window washing). I generally prefer to take the least expected entrances into buildings, so Cait and I climb aboard.

There’s a raider at the top, huddled over a fire and cooking. I shoot him dead instinctively, though I do feel slightly bad this time. Largely about shooting a man in the back while he’s huddled over a fire in miserable weather. Next to the man there’s a crate filled with lots of ammo and weapons. Perhaps he was a somewhat high-ranking raider in this operation, actually.

The sun comes out again as I scout the rest of the rooftop. All is quiet, but I spot a supermutant sitting down resting on the rooftop below. I take aim with my sniper rifle and kill him. I’ll need to check out that supermutant lair after this. There’s a shack down in a crater to the truck-side of the building that also might be worth checking out. There are quite a few insects down there so I snipe the couple I can draw a good bead on.

I step out of my power armor and cook some of the food I have on me, including preparing a Mirelurk Cake, which will apparently let me breathe underwater for 30 minutes! That should be interesting. I also check out the nearby weapon crafting bench, as I haven’t done much weapon improvement lately. I see I can add night vision to my rifle if I had the Gun Nut rank 3 perk, as well as some other great modifications. I spend both my perk points and level it up. This kind of situation is one of the reasons I leave two perk points floating. After fully upgrading my sniper rifle, I’m out of the necessary screws to make further improvements, so I’ll have to kit out my other guns at a future date.

It’s evening as I turn to make my way into Layton Towers. Cait is nowhere to be found, but hopefully she’ll catch up. I duck into some fancy apartments and find some raiders to shoot up (you can tell the apartments were fancy by the automated kitchen appliances. Any compunction I could have had about killing the raiders is quickly put to rest by the trash can full of severed heads in the kitchen.

I move down the dark corridors until I find the next group of raiders I hear talking amongst themselves about how the drugs are making them jittery, then I kill them and wait for the others alerted by the shots to give up looking for me. There’s a chemistry station here, but I’m not going to get out of my power armor and craft anything right now.

A sword-wielding raider coming out of an elevator surprises me and actually gets a hit on me because I forgot to reload. Then raiders are shooting me through holes in the floorboard, and I’m faced with carefully aiming at and shooting them while also keeping alert for any coming at me from the nearby stairwell. Quite a few bodies are piled up before the next lull in combat.

I head upstairs first and there on the roof I find Cait. I don’t know how she got there, but she’s sitting on the ground and seems kind of glitchy. I give her a stimpak but that doesn’t seem to help. I tell her to move and she doesn’t. I head back inside and now she’s inside, but still on the ground. Hopefully this glitch will get fixed the next time I fast travel or reload my game. 

In an apartment on the next floor, I face a raiders, leveling up in the process, then get attacked by a Legendary Raider that comes the closest to killing me any raider has come in this game for quite some time. It takes a couple of stimpaks to get me back to full health and then I continue looking around the apartment. These raiders had some serious ammunition, including a Nuke Mine, whatever that is. I move through the crumbling walls from apartment to apartment, making my way down to the next level through a caved-in floor. The raiders are all dead, so it’s just a matter of looting now: mostly chems and weapons/ammo. The final prize is a fusion core.

A full day of exploration and looting at a close, in the early hours of the morning I park my power armor and sit down on a chair in the laundry room to wait out the remainder of the night. Hopefully after waiting Cait will appear and no longer be glitching out.